07-01-2008, 04:41 AM
quote:
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I spent a long time at Berkeley involved with multicultural and multiethnic groups, listening to people tell their stories, working on understanding what it's like to experience racism, studying it ...
(Disclaimer: KathyH, just using your quote / no reflection on you!)
Racism is just one form of discrimination. In Berkeley, I was not treated nicely - but in the very polite your are not our type kinda way - simply because I was from So Cal, I didnt wear the right "uniform" i.e style of dress, I drove a sports car then, ate meat, etc....
I found this and though it was quite profond:
In Hawaii I received a new name, one that defined me in ways I did not want to accept. I came to be known as a haole, a term that
Hawaiians have applied to white-skinned foreigners since the arrival of the British sea captain James Cook in 1778. At first they welcomed Cook as a god and believed his ships came to the islands
on the winds of Lono, but his incessant and arrogant demands for provisions soon made him appear considerably less than divine.
His men took the women they wanted and shot anyone who got in their way. The following year Cook was bludgeoned to death on a beach
on the big island of Hawaii.
To be haole, therefore, is to participate in a less than proud heritage of cultural arrogance, racial prejudice and sexism dating back to the early European explorers and traders, the sugar planters, even some of the missionaries, and the large businesses
that would eventually join to form the Big Five.
The word haole, perhaps not inappropriately, means "without breath, wind or spirit"; a colorless, paste-white absence of spirit and feeling, an inability to appreciate the land and the dignity
of its people.
This name challenges the presumed superiority of white Western thinking, with its tendency to objectify and oppress. Yet to be able to recognize oneself as haole is also to be open to repentance,
and subsequently to anew wholeness.
To accept a new name, especially from those whom one may have oppressed, is also to entertain a new way of being.” --
Belden C. Lane is professor of
Theological Studies and American Studies
at Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri