The UK’s The Herald offers a non-divisive view of the upcoming, controversial Olympic Games in Beijing. Regardless of the politicizing of the competition, regardless of the much speculated pollution problems and much debated human rights ramifications, The Herald encourages the world audience to embrace the spectacle of amicable competition. After all, “The ancient Olympics were marked first and foremost by a truce. For the 17 days of the games, that should apply also to anti-China sniping. Instead, it should be an opportunity for China and the rest of the world to start understanding each other better.”
The Christian Science Monitor has started a four-part special report on the peace process in Kenya, tracing the causes of this year’s conflict and how, in just a few months time, one of Africa’s most stable democracies was saved. Kofi Annan, integral in bringing rival groups to the table, recalls both the difficulty and necessity of getting the perceived enemies “to come together, and getting them to begin to think of coming together, and … thinking in terms that we are all Kenyans and we are one Kenya.”
Will the House’s apology for slavery make a difference?
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution officially apologizing for the heinous practice of slavery in America and its lingering repercussions on race relations and equality of opportunity. Such a federal mea culpa is not unprecedented; in 1988 Congress voted strongly to apologize for Japanese-American internment and to compensate survivors and heirs, and in 1993 came an apology for the cultural destruction of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
However, few issues in American society are as persistent, divisive, and sensitive as race and the legacy of slavery. Since the House’s apology passed, many in the media have decried this mainly “symbolic resolution.” Lola Adesioye of UK’s The Guardian remarks that “while this long-overdue apology is an important step, it does not go far enough.” There is no specific plan for rectifying the ripple effects of slavery in the United States, she argues correctly; the resolution is particularly futile in its avoidance of the issue of reparations. NPR’s Keith Josef Adkins is “just not convinced that a federal apology has any weight.” It is the efforts of the African-American community alone, he posits, that must clean up the ills remaining today from slavery and Jim Crow.
In all likelihood, there will not be an outpouring of legislation from Congress aimed at righting the social wrongs sowed by slavery. We should not expect any groundbreaking reparations laws, any quick fix to the inequalities in healthcare, any swell in funding for the public school system. This does not mean, though, that the slavery apology was useless. As Susan K. Smith writes in the Washington Post, “for the vast majority, an honest and intentional apology goes a long way.” To assume that our society is somehow beyond such an apology, that a frank dialogue on race is not still terribly relevant, is naïve. At the same time, institutional solutions – revisions to education and healthcare, for example – will do little to alleviate our “race problem” if there is no change in our personal, day-to-day interactions.
Just talking about America’s often dirty past will not ultimately help, critics of this resolution say. Such dialogue certainly cannot hurt, though, and may breed the understanding necessary to pass effective legislation later on.
The blog Crossroads Arabia calls attention to a Transatlantic Institute interview with Dr. Jean Francois Seznec of Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Dr. Seznec proclaims King Abdullah’s Madrid Interfaith Conference a success – and not because it has breached some new, profound level of understanding between the religions. Instead, King Abdullah is the first Saudi leader to go “on the line to promote understanding between faiths.” Therefore, the gains of this specific conference are less important than the fact that more dialogue is to come, the King having stood up to the most conservative of Wahhabi elements.
I’ve posted numerous times about high-level, formal interfaith dialogues initiated by figures as influential as King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and institutions as renowned as Yale University. There is certainly merit in these meetings of some of the world religions’ foremost authorities, and no doubt the discussions themselves mark progress.
However, there is something particularly refreshing about Helena’s Voyage, a children’s book written in English, Hebrew, and Arabic that features a young girl exploring the rather similar teachings of the three Abrahamic faiths. Her conclusion: “all religions promote the same values, though clothed in different traditions.” Rooted in each religion’s holy texts, the book promotes the idea that “we are not alone, or exclusive, in our quest to know God.”
In Colorado, reconciliation for a displaced tribe
The Christian Science Monitor reports that the White River Utes, a Native American tribe displaced from their ancestral homeland more than one hundred years ago, are making amends with the ranching community of Meeker responsible for their historical exile at gunpoint and the 1879 “Meeker Massacre.” While for now the two communities are increasing bonds over cultural exchanges, the intend to find common ground on grave and difficult questions – whether the Utes have a right to return to, hunt on, and harvest their former homeland – soon. The Ute spiritual advisor to the exchange invoked his predecessors in the spirit of renewal: “We did not forget you. Ancestors, the sound you will hear today is not of a gun – it is from a drum.”
