anonymous cowgirl

A number of kids at the Tahirih Peace Institute, an English Language program at the Boston Baha’i Center, have chronic asthma. Negin and I teach there during the school year, and I’ve often wondered why our students suffer from increased rates of asthma compared to white and/or middle-class children we work with in other settings.

Today, the New York Times website gave me the answer:

Children in poor inner-city communities are disproportionately exposed to both indoor and outdoor allergens — cockroaches, mice, mold, dust, cigarette smoke, automobile exhaust, soot — that can trigger breathing problems.

As Phillipe has frequently made clear at Baha’i Thought, this is proof that race still matters in America. Lower-income neighborhoods, frequently neighborhoods of color, face higher levels of asthma triggers.

This understanding also shed light on a pearl from the Writings of Baha’u'llah:

Be ye the very essence of cleanliness amongst mankind. This, truly, is what your Lord, the Incomparable, the All-Wise, desireth for you.

Cleanliness is a concept discussed at some length in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book of the Baha’i Faith. (Linguiphiles take note: Aqdas comes from the same root as Quddus and, in Hebrew, Kadosh and Kadesh — “Holy.”) I always thought Baha’u'llah was only referring to bodily cleanliness, but perhaps the idea has a wider significance. By allowing our communities to become dirty - with allergens, mold, soot and car exhaust - we’ve committed injustice and imperiled our children and youth.

Links:

• “For Minority Kids - No Room to Breath” - Asthma in Children (from the New York Times)
• Unnatural Causes, a documentary on health disparities and racism (from PBS)

Originally uploaded by andropolis

This is my brother. Our moms were pregnant at the same time, in the same town. I stand in awe of his immense heart, and creative genius.

Thanks to Andrew’s camera for taking this picture, apparently of its own accord?

In high school, our U.S. history classes were organized around wars. We learned about each war in the history of the U.S., and the years in between seemed like filler; peace, an anomaly. (In college I learned this is essentially the point of view of the “realist” political theorists.) World history was not much better - focusing mainly on the succession of European kings and queens in the latter half of the last millennium.

If I were to teach my dream class on world history, my curriculum would be laid out through the history of religion (since most human progress takes place in the spring and summertime of every religious dispensation). Not only would it give us a chance to talk about the maajor issues facing every age, but also provide some much needed information to the students who are about to enter a world intensely focused on yet ignorant about religion. Best of all, it would provide great insights into progressive revelation.

Today it just occurred to me that a fun thing to do, if I were a U.S. history teacher, would be to discuss it all through the lens of justice and injustice. We could move through the major events in this history and ask ourselves at the end of every class period - was this an victory for justice or injustice? I’d have a bulletin board on the wall that would stay up all year and keep a tally. Smallpox-infested blankets distributed to Native Americans? Injustice. Internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII? Injustice. The Mexican-American War? Flat out ridiculous. Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction? Justice! The backlash following Reconstruction? Scratch that progress. And so on.

Students would have to be engaged in discussing what is just and what is not. It would require them to look at both sides of every situation. If one side is treated unjustly, can we be satisfied with the outcome? Furthermore, and this is the important part - I’d have to place agency in their hands. No matter what the outcome at the end of the semester, I’d tell them they are the best generation yet, ever, with more power and smarts and capacity than anyone before them. And they have to make sure their generation leaves a mark for justice.

http://news.bahai.org/story/632

I was not yet born in 1980, when the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran was arrested under similar circumstances, and disappeared. Assuredly those dear friends were executed. If history is any indication, the Baha’is who were arrested on Wednesday, May 14th 2008 will be imprisoned, threatened, told that if they would only recant their faith in Baha’u'llah as the Promised One of all ages all of the abuse would stop, and then either imprisoned indefinitely or executed. Either way, these women and men are heroes who have placed their lives in danger for upholding a remarkable belief in the absolute unity of humankind.

In their radiance, their detachment and courage, they call to mind those early heroes of the Baha’i Faith recounted in Nabil’s Narrative: The Dawnbreakers.

This is the text of a referendum about torture being passed around for members of the American Psychological Association to sign. I’m not yet a member of APA, but I thought I’d provide this glimpse of what controversies are gripping the field of psychology, and encourage you to think about this topic.

What’s really driving me to post this is the feeling that I’ve been complicit. The UN Commission on Human Rights is saying that treatment equivalent to torture is taking place at Guantanamo Bay. And yet I haven’t contacted my congressperson, written any letters, done anything to raise my voice and “champion the cause of justice,” as Baha’is are asked to do. Baha’u'llah says “O Son of Being! Bring thyself to account each day ere thou art summoned to a reckoning; for death, unheralded, shall come upon thee, and thou shalt be called to give account for thy deeds.” It’s not ok to let this slide. I feel I have a responsibility. What should I do?

Here’s the text:

We the undersigned APA members in good standing, pursuant to article IV.5 of the APA bylaws, do hereby petition that the following motion be submitted to APA members for their approval or disapproval, by referendum, with all urgency:

Whereas torture is an abhorrent practice in every way contrary to the APA’s stated mission of advancing psychology as a science, as a profession, and as a means of promoting human welfare.

Whereas the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Mental Health and the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture have determined that treatment equivalent to torture has been taking place at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. [1]

Whereas this torture took place in the context of interrogations under the direction and supervision of Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs) that included psychologists. [2, 3]

Read the rest of this entry »

1a. Grad school is like running a marathon. At some point it’s as much about determination as it is about talent.
1b. I am tired of grad school.

2. On the bright side, I have found a new way to be productive in terms of writing! I just look at the clock and say, I’m not going to move from this chair or work on anything else for the next hour. And it’s worked wonderfully today! Granted, I missed a doctor’s appointment because I forgot to look at my calendar before I started, but it’s all ok.

3. I have seen these pictures of ravaged countries where people are walking through mounds of garbage. Is there a way to clean up this garbage? My mind keeps thinking that if we could just a. get some garbage compactors there, b. make little cubes out of the discarded plastic bottles, scraps of cloth, etc, c. paint them with plaster, and then d. use them as bricks, covered with more plaster, like adobe straw-bale homes. We could build community centers. Is this feasible or just crazy talk?

Negin

Tufts University, 6pm

You can’t understand what’s happening right now in America. We are living in a country that is only 4% of world’s population yet produces 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas, has 25% of the world’s prisons. Some think we have a disposable planet, disposable people.
A green economy must be strong enough to lift millions of people out of poverty.
We don’t have any disposable species, resources, people, children, neighborhoods. It’s all precious. The Creator didn’t make any junk.

We have to refashion our economy. It takes a series of intellectual breakthroughs. My journey started with an emotional breakdown, a spiritual exhaustion. Read the rest of this entry »

In February and March, two articles were published in two of the top psychology journals. They were both about interracial interactions, and each, by itself, made sense. Put side by side, however, there’s something else going on…and frankly, I need help figuring it out. So I call on you, dear readers, to let me know your thoughts on this.

I’ve put the full text of the abstracts at the bottom for your reference, copyright owned by the journals, mind you. I’ll summarize them here in my terms first:

1. “Expect the unexpected”: Robyn Mallett and colleagues found that White people tend to expect that interactions with Black people will go much worse than they actually do. (This is a forecasting error.) This happens because White people, preparing for an interracial interaction, focus on the differences between them and Black people, and if they are just told to focus on the similarities, then they expect (accurately) more pleasant interactions. (I don’t think they show data about expectations for Black participants.)

2. “Beyond Contact”: Tamar Seguy and colleagues (including Jack Dovidio - he’s good people) look at power and conversation topic preferences in interracial interactions: White people want to talk about similarities, Black people want to talk about differences. Actually, Black people also want to talk about similarities just as much as White people do, but they want to talk about power disparities way more than White people do. This is driven by motivation for change in group-based power. In fact, those who most wanted to talk about power disparities are: highly identified Black folks, and the race-conscious White folks (compared to others of their racial background). The ones who most wanted to talk about commonalities are highly identified White folks.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am married to a Master.

If you water house plants daily, regularly, (unnaturally, considering rain fall patterns), they tend to develop roots that are close to the surface, superficial. If you let the soil dry out just a bit, the plants are challenged; the roots have to go deeper to find sustenance, to grow in ways that provide more stability for the health of the entire organism.
When we, as humans, detach ourselves from our regular physical intake of food/ water/ sex/ material needs… we spend just a few precious hours, a few precious days of the year, trying to grow our roots deeper into the soil, to reach out for a stability that does not come from the material and superficial.