At a training for trainers I recently co-led, an African-American woman, the only one in the entire group (another African-American was there for only three days), initiated and volunteered to lead an evening program about racial identity. With the support of another person, and within the space of less than an hour, she facilitated a discussion that surfaced a number of issues and questions for several people in the room.

In my experience, which is neither vast nor tiny, any time the question of how we relate to our own and other people’s race is raised, complexity and pain come to the room – before, during, or after the event. I myself have been in a major quandary about how to find useful ways of supporting these conversations, and am doing less than I used to in this area, because I have rarely seen the pain that arises, both for people of color and for white people, be engaged with in ways that supported significant transformation. I am grateful to a few colleagues of mine that are continuing to engage in the inquiry year after year, in the NVC and Diversity retreat, where I believe they are breaking ground in creating a space where radical honesty, complete care and respect for everyone in the room, and deep learning for all happen regularly. Slowly, I have some hope that their lessons will support others, as well as me, in conducting race dialogues that are truly fruitful.

Until then, I applaud any of us who tries, who engages, who says what we truly believe, who shares and invites others to share what we are afraid to say of our experience. However little I know, I am confident that not talking about race is not going to get us anywhere new.

After the end of the retreat, one person approached me in writing and asked a couple of pointed questions. These questions, and the topic as a whole, are so significant to me, that I chose, with that person’s permission, to answer them publicly. This is what today’s blog is about. I will call the person who initiated the evening Cassandra, and the person who asked the questions Julie.

I first got wind of it in Linda Essig’s post on Facebook (Linda, who writes the blog “Creative Infrastructure,” was also kind enough to post a “love letter” to The Culture of Possibility last week). Then I got a note from my friend David Francis in Edinburgh, a wonderful musician (he and Mairi Campbell make up “The Cast”) and leader of the Traditional Music Forum there.

David wrote that a recent speech by Fiona Hyslop, Scottish Culture Secretary, “seems to prefigure a change in cultural policy in Scotland and maybe the kind of paradigm shift you write about” in my new books.

He is right, and it is thrilling.

As a white, Jewish schlump who grew up in Atlanta and now lives in Pittsburgh, I’ve never been stopped by police based upon the blackness of my skin, never been bent over the hood of a sedan and detained based on my dark curls.

While many of my educated, more-sophisticated-than-me black friends have suffered such indignities, I’ve never been profiled, despite being a minority.

And so when I claim that the NSA’s apparent reach into the private lives of Americans is stop-and-frisk on the national level, I do so understanding a key distinction: while the former is being done invisibly, the latter is being done in broad daylight, often with force and harassment.

That said, the NSA’s vacuuming up of phone meta data for all Americans, as well PRISM’s infiltration into every major internet company’s servers, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, share an important characteristic with stop-and-frisk: the potential violation of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, which protect against unlawful searches and seizures.

As challenging as saying “no” is to anyone in our lives, a topic I addressed a few weeks ago, it becomes exponentially more difficult when there is a power difference involved. The reason for it is that, by virtue of having power, the other person can deliver unpleasant consequences if we say “no.” A parent may do anything from frowning, removing privileges, sending a child to their room or grounding them, all the way to hitting the child or shaming them in significant ways. A boss may reprimand, put a note in an employee’s file, overlook the person when a promotion is coming up, all the way to firing the person. These consequences are far from trivial.

This is precisely the reason why people in power rarely hear a “no” unless they set up explicit structures of support for people to say “no” to them. The cost of having power, when not attended to, means that people in power don’t receive all the information they need to make decisions, because people are afraid to tell them the truth; it means they don’t have access to the full wisdom of the people who work with them, because people hold back; it also means operating in an environment of little trust. All of these can sometimes lead to compromised performance.

Courtesy Facebook

In continuation of my series on First Amendment rights as they impact religious minority groups, I address current controversy over social media posts maligning religious groups. My previous post in this series entitled Does Freedom of Speech Allow Stereotyping discussed a greeting card that stereotyped Muslims as terrorists in an unusually offensive and glaringly inaccurate way. This week I have chosen another unfortunate event, a Facebook post that ignited debate over the possible classification of certain types of content as threats instead of free speech. Tennessee County Commissioner Barry West posted a picture on his Facebook page showing a cowboy aiming a shotgun at the camera with the caption “How to Wink at a Muslim”.

Tankman

There came a startling moment when everything shifted. A man carrying two plastic bags, one in each hand, stood directly in the path of a column of armored tanks, effectively preventing them from proceeding down the avenue toward Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

The day before, on June 4, 1989, hundreds of pro-democracy students and workers had been gunned down in and near the square. The image of “Tank Man,” as he’s now called, stays indelibly in the mind. Some have said his name is Wang Weilin, a 19-year-old student, whereabouts unknown. There is speculation that he either was executed or is living in exile in Taiwan. Whoever he is, wherever he is now, dead or alive, it is certain that for a brief moment he managed to stop the machines with just his body. This unknown rebel, unarmed, stood up against the awesome power of the state and, as the world watched, gained something priceless in return: He liberated his body from the collective, from being subservient to the ideological machine, and opened the floodgates to a next world.

Although direct political confrontation failed, a new sideways rebellion began in the cultural and economic sphere, one that has succeeded. If Mao launched the cultural revolution in 1966 to be rid of “liberal bourgeois” and to continue the revolutionary class struggle, the bourgeois liberals have struck back. The real cultural revolution, stoked by individual desires and ambitions, is happening now. “The level of societal openness and individual freedom now enjoyed by the people in China was unthinkable to the protesters at the Tiananmen Square,” says Ling-chi Wang, professor emeritus of Asian American Studies at Berkeley.

I woke this morning, happy to greet summer and looking forward to planting seeds.

Before, there was no time. No time. Never enough time.

This morning. I would make time.

I opened my door to greet the semi-quiet morning. Birds. Lots of birds. The humming of insects. The far away hum of cars.

First, I made coffee and planned to sit on my porch and read Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.

It’s interesting to have opportunities to give advice to young artists. Each time, I learn something about myself, something about the way I may appear in others’ eyes – and something about the gap between them too.

I suppose the easiest way to explain that gap is that to those several decades my junior, my life – or at least its trail in print and online – evidently appears to follow a “career path.” They want to know who mentored me, or how I crafted my ambitions and what helped me actualize them. But it’s been more of a stumble than a blueprint. If you’re close to my age cohort, you know what I mean, because your life has already taught you the truth of that old saying: “We plan and God laughs.”

The thing is, I get asked variations on that question a lot: What needs doing now? What is most important, most effective? I want to do X but my (parent, professor, pastor, etc.) says I should do Y; what do you think?

Students at a FSM rally at UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza on Dec. 9, 1964. Credit: Creative Commons/ Sam Churchill.

I walked into Sproul Hall in my fluffy pink sweater embroidered with flowers, and my blue corduroy jeans. In my ears were gold loop earrings, also decorated with flowers. My long dark hair was pulled back in a pony tail. That outfit seems to me now to be a symbol of my innocence, even naiveté.

The Free Speech Movement grew on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in the fall of 1964, culminating in the sit-in at Sproul Hall, the campus’s administration building, and the arrest of participating students on December 4th of that year. It was the first major student demonstration, and is generally regarded as the beginning of the Student Movement, which spread throughout the United States and even to other parts of the world.

I remember walking around campus with my blue canvas book bag in early December, as the tension grew. I bumped into friends who, like me, supported the movement, but for a variety of reasons were not willing or able to take part in the sit-in.

My sweetheart loves to fly fish. He never keeps the fish, just tenderly tips them back into the sea. So he’s plugged into various fishing networks, some devoted to survival of species that are imperiled by human impact. He’s the one who turned me onto Twyla Roscovich’s quite remarkable film, Salmon Confidential. The film painstakingly lays out the way those who are supposed to protect Canada’s health and commonwealth have allowed fish farms – feed lots for fish – to contaminate wild salmon habitat with gruesome and terrible diseases, creating health risks for fish and other species, destroying a traditional source of food and culture for First Nations people, and affecting the livelihood of commercial fishers too. The massive decline in Fraser River salmon coincides with the licensing of fish farms directly along salmon migration routes; the species of salmon that have flourished and even expanded have no fish farms on their migratory paths.

Ecojustice Canada (joined by the Union of BC Indian Chiefs) filed a lawsuit against the Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans a few weeks ago, challenging them with allowing Marine Harvest (the world’s largest producer of farmed salmon, licensed by governments) to introduce diseased fish into Canadian waters.