On the plus side (responding to my own previous post)

Both Sonia Sotomayor and Miguel Diaz have been confirmed and now go out to their respective posts. The first Latina on the Supreme Court, and the first Latino Ambassador to the Vatican. President Obama's Latin@ Outreach moves have had some marked success.

Life in the Racialized United States of America

In case some of you out there still want to argue that we are somehow "post-race," I have found events of the last few weeks to be quite instructive on this front. Famously, of course, we have the beer summit attempting to resolve a conflict between a black academic and the white police officer who arrested him, a police officer who apparently survived a bunch of racial sensitivity training yet was unprepared to face an angry black academic. That Glenn Beck can then call Barack Obama "racist" for saying the Cambridge police acted "stupidly" (and by the way, there is no other way to describe Officer Crowley's arrest of Gates, aside from either "acting stupidly" or "acting on the basis of testosterone and ego," i.e. acting without consulting one's rational faculties, i.e. acting stupidly) is proof that we are a long way from the postracial utopia.

But nothing has galled me more than the "birther" controversy, in which a collection of idiotic conservatives appear intent on proving that racism is still a severe problem. It seems to me that they refuse to admit that someone who isn't white-enough-looking can be a natural-born citizen (to which I refer you to the Fourteenth Amendment or the 1898 Supreme Court decision regarding Chinese Americans or the 1917 law making Puerto Ricans into U.S. citizens for the purpose of the draft). So there can be absolutely no doubt as to where I stand on this, I have included a picture of Barack Obama's birth certificate, certifying his birth in Hawai'i (on U.S. soil) to a U.S. mother, both of which make him incontrovertibly a natural-born U.S. citizen (see the Los Angeles Times "Top of the Ticket" blog post from which I pulled the birth certificate if you don't believe me). And no, I do not think the state of Hawai'i, currently governed by a Republican, could be conspiring with Kenya to keep a non-U.S. citizen in the White House. I am writing because I am taking up Bill Maher's challenge to do what I can, in my small way, to fight this absolute inanity.

The question of whether Barack Hussein Obama, now president of the United States of America, is a "natural-born citizen" is possible only because of the racist and xenophobic history of this country. As much as I would never want Governor Schwarzenegger to be president, I do think it's plain xenophobia not to allow a naturalized citizen, someone who has probably had to express more commitment to this country and its ideals than your average "natural-born citizen," to be president. But the constitution says "natural-born citizen," so then who is naturally born a citizen? Well, U.S. legal history is complicated on this issue because of a history of racism, racism about whether formerly enslaved Africans were citizens, about whether Mexicans resident in territories stolen from them were citizens, about whether Native Americans were allowed to vote in a land wrested from their own ancestors as part of U.S. conquest, of whether people born to Chinese or Japanese parents on U.S. soil actually could consider themselves to have the same rights as U.S. citizens born on the same soil to European parents. These are all questions that laws or supreme court decisions have been issued to decide. So no wonder some crazy right-wing nutjobs feel the need to protest that Kenyans, in some long-term strategy reaching back to the era of Jim Crow, conceived a plan to hijack the U.S. presidency by impregnating a "white" U.S. citizen. The U.S. has had a long history of not recognizing anyone as a U.S. citizen who doesn't look like George Washington (and that means women too, who couldn't vote, and thus couldn't be president either before 1920).

That said, the facts are simple. Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawai'i in 1961, which is one of the 50 United States of America. And even if he wasn't, he is the son of a U.S. citizen and has lived his life as a U.S. citizen, receiving a U.S. passport because no one at the state department ever found reason to question his citizenship. He was never naturalized as a U.S. citizen because he was naturally born one. That "birthers" refuse to recognize that Barack Obama could possibly have been born a U.S. citizen is because, on some level, they are racist and xenophobic, and they are just sore losers. And I can't help but feel, as I have felt before, that we idealize different things about this country. I, for one, think it speaks well for the U.S. that the president can have a mixed ancestry and specifically does have relatives from a small town in Kansas and a village in Kenya.

Birthright Citizenship and White Paranoia

Writing in today's Los Angeles Times, Mitchell Young advocated the end of "birthright citizenship" in the United States, firmly established by the Supreme Court in 1898, a right the Irish voted to end in 2004. Young suggests that birthright citizenship is a product of feudal law, and is just untenable in a land of 11 million undocumented immigrants. What he is too educated and polite to say is what undergirds any problem with "birthright citizenship." Seeking to end "birthright citizenship" speaks, on one level, to a policy opposing state responsibilities to undocumented immigrant parents of U.S. citizens. I don't have much sympathy for that line of argument either, but at least it's a rational view from a policy standpoint.

The bigger issue is that Young and others are looking at the first president to have a father hailing from the 2/3 world, whose mother was an Anglo U.S. citizen, though a few conservatives have sought to prove that President is somehow not a citizen of the U.S. President Obama speaks symbolically to a larger truth. If birthright citizenship and current immigration trends continue, traditional "white" U.S. citizens will be a minority in a country they believe is theirs. The fear that this country will belong to people who no longer phenotypically resemble the "Founding Fathers" undergirds Young's real concern. Even if birthright citizenship originates in English feudal common law, it is practiced by most respectable countries in the world who attempt to be non-racist in their legislation from Costa Rica to Germany. Japan and Ireland, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are the places who would deny birthright citizenship, and most people understand that racism undergirds most of their reasoning. I would be pretty disgusted if the U.S. decided to join their ranks out of fear.

But Mr. Young, let's run with your point. I will support denying birthright citizenship if every single adult person (under 70) living in the U.S. is required to take the exact same citizenship test that those who become naturalized citizens are required to take. I'm not sure what poor country should be given the large swath of U.S. citizens who won't pass the test. Maybe they should just spend their life in detention facilities, dying of a heart attack without care and being erased from legal memory like Pakistani immigrant, Ahmad Tanveer.

Barack Obama has long thought about nuclear disarmament

A recent New York Times piece highlights how President Barack Obama thought about nuclear disarmament even in his youth, you know when he was a college student, the same age as those ASU students interviewed for The Daily Show. It's just nice to discover that a president has given long-term thought to these things, that he wrote about them in 1983 as a senior in college, that he even wrote a seminar paper on how to negotiate nuclear disarmament with Russia while a college student.

Obama's Latina/o Outreach Week

President Barack Obama not only named the first Latina nominee to the Supreme Court this week. He also just named Latino Catholic theologian, Miguel Díaz, as Ambassador to Vatican City. Díaz will be the first Latino to serve in that post since Ronald Reagan first started sending an ambassador there.

More Stupid Catholic Tricks for the Easter Season

So yes, after my last blog post, the Catholic church continued to produce confusing spectacles of itself, like the Pope weaving together a tricky explanation for how condemns worsen the spread of AIDS by protecting the sinful consciousness responsible. A Vatican official did come out in defense of the poor Brazilian mother who saved her daughter's life by taking her to get an abortion.

In the U.S., some conservative Catholics decided to make a political farce over Barack Obama and Notre Dame. The University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, once home to a great NCAA football legend, but always known as a Catholic university, has invited President Obama to speak at commencement and receive an honorary degree. As Notre Dame has done this to several presidents, including Ronald Reagan, surely there would be nothing odd about inviting Obama to Notre Dame and giving him an honorary degree?

Well apparently there is, if you think Notre Dame should act more like an arm of the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops than a university. Never mind that Notre Dame as a university should have some freedom from the stranglehold of Vatican teachings that do not mesh with academic discourse in non-Catholic institutions. Never mind that Notre Dame has a complex history and complex cast of alumnae, many of whom aren't even Catholic, and many of whom are pro-choice. Notre Dame alum and Reagan staffer, Richard Allen, sought a compromise in today's New York Times by saying that Obama should still serve as a commencement speaker while being denied an honorary degree.

I appreciate Allen's Reaganesque approach at a compromise emptied of all meaning or recognition. Allen even attempts to use the example of President Ronald Reagan, whom Notre Dame honored with a commencement address and honorary degree, supposedly in part because of his brave stance on Roe v. Wade. Why wasn't anyone up in arms about letting a remarried divorcee speak at Notre Dame's commencement? The Catholic Church has institutionally opposed divorce for a lot longer than it has opposed abortion (for your information: the institutional church has taught that divorce was a bad idea since the Gospel of Matthew was written some time in the late first century; Catholics have debated whether abortion was murder and at which point one could have an abortion until the late 19th century; St. Augustine did not belief a human soul could reside in an unformed body, and thus abortion was not murder if done in roughly the first trimester). So it would seem to me divorce should be a bigger issue. Just as I queried in my last post, what is so damn special about abortion, that the institutional church feels the need to fight against it over all other sins (like say repeated raping a girl between ages 6 and 9)? My only guess is that abortion prevents white Catholics from reproducing at the rate they would like, and that all birth control prevents women from getting pregnant thus allowing them to pursue other careers, like becoming an Episcopalian priest since the Catholics won't ordain them. My other guess is that Catholic bishops think they gain something from focusing on this one issue, but as far as I can tell, all they look like are automated tools for right-wing politics and pundits, many of whom aren't even Catholic. Try being independent for once and go protest capital punishment, something Catholicism has equally strong opposition to.

If Obama is receiving an honorary degree in Catholic ethics, then perhaps there would be some basis for denying him this degree or for denying him a speaking engagement at Notre Dame's commencement. But that's not the case. Notre Dame graduates many students whose ethical views diverge from that of the established church, and they support many speakers on campus with different views. That is how it should be. First of all, neither is Obama, nor are many of the other degree recipients or speakers, a Catholic, and no 21st century Catholic educational institution should have a theological litmus test for someone who is not Catholic (it would be better for them not to have them at all, but let's compromise for the moment). Second, the Catholic church would do well to remember that university institutions are spaces of free inquiry, and that such free inquiry is essential for the survival of religious minorities, as Catholics are in the U.S. Perhaps the bishops should think about one other thing. Their opposition to free inquiry may also explain why there has only ever been one Catholic president of the U.S.A., and he got there by promising he did not really listen to the Vatican.

President Obama - Please save the Persepolis Fortification Archive

Where is UNESCO when you need them? In the complex landscape surrounding the trade and museum storage of antiquities, another bizarre case has added its name. While scholars strive every where to fight black market dealings that sell global antiquities making it that much more difficult to study the past, while countries fight to have valuable national treasures like the Elgin Marbles returned to their homelands, a judge in Washington D.C. decides to distribute priceless Persian antiquities to survivors of a suicide-bombing in Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall.

Don't get me wrong. I am sure that surviving a suicide bombing is horrible and traumatic, especially when one has sustained lifelong and debilitating injuries, so traumatic that no price tag can be placed on recuperation. Yet a U.S. court has decided a pricetag can be placed on their suffering, and they have chosen a path (after the attorney for the victims, David Strachman, suggested it) that comes at great cost to world heritage, to scholars, and cultural critics, none of whom can be held responsible for the original victims' suffering. Because Hamas claimed responsibility, and the survivors believe Hamas did this with financial support from Iran, the survivors have sued Iran for reparations. Oddly enough to begin with, they were awarded, in Washington D.C. (thousands of miles from Jerusalem, Iran, or Hamas as far as I can tell, but that's another issue), a sum of $412 million. Since there is no way of collecting such money, their lawyer convinced a judge that antiquities on loan to the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute is how they will collect the money.

The tablets of the Persepolis Fortification Archive are just bureaucratic information, but they still require years of study in order to understand the Persian empire prior to Alexander the Great. Legally, the Persepolis Fortification Archive belongs to Iran, but the collection has been on loan to the University of Chicago for study since the 1930s. Technically, the Archive belongs to the government of Iran, a government under a shah in the 1930s, not even the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nonetheless, it is Iran's heritage specifically, but more than that, these tablets are world heritage and do not belong to anyone. They cannot and should not be sold to the highest bidder. It sets a dangerous precedent in already murky waters when it comes to antiquities dealings.

More than that, the people who feel punished are European and North American scholars, as well as Iranian scholars no doubt, but you know who doesn't feel punished by such actions? The Islamic Republic of Iran. So, while the victims have indeed suffered, how can their suffering be alleviated by profiting off tremendous sacrifices to the study of world heritage? Imagine if we had found newly discovered manuscripts from the Mayflower voyage, manuscripts for which there were no other copies, and we sent them for study at a school in Austria. Imagine that while there, Austrian citizens who had been victims of Pinochet's regime in Chile sued the U.S. government for the CIA's role in Pinochet's ascendancy to power, and they won reparations in an Austrian court that our government refused to pay. Would we find it acceptable that these victims, who no doubt suffered and survived horribly painful disfiguring torture, were allowed to sell off individual pages of these manuscripts to the highest bidder? Imagine how much worse it is when we are talking about the documents of an ancient nation who no longer exists, and when understanding that nation's history is about world heritage not just the heritage of the nation only tangentially responsible.

So please President Obama, keep the Archive in the hands of the Oriental Institute because Iran has no real rights to them; the scholarly world community does. World cultural heritage cannot and must not be sold piecemeal to the highest bidder.

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The European Iranologists' Society has a petition for President Obama requesting that he stop this crazy act, that Obama must not allow the U.S. to become involved in the sale of world cultural heritage. If you are an archaeologist, even remotely, please go to this link and sign.

The National Iranian American Council also is sending form letters to President Obama, which you can sign.

Information for this post was taken from the recent Associated Press piece published in the International Herald Tribune.

Litigious Ridiculous

In Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President." Well it seems pretty clear that you have to have been born a citizen of the U.S. to run for president. Too bad for Governor Schwarzenegger. But apparently there is some ambiguity in interpretation. I remember as a child reading this passage of the Constitution in elementary school and being taught that I could not ever run for President of the United States. I was born a U.S. citizen to a mother who was a natural-born citizen (though my father was not a U.S. citizen), but I was not born in the United States or on U.S. soil . But this is where the ambiguity of the passage seems to confuse some people; Senator John McCain was not born in the U.S., but he was born on U.S. soil in a section of Panama then controlled by the U.S. government. I wonder if he had won the presidency if people on the Left would be pursuing legal cases to bar his installment as President?

Well, two separate individuals have pursued legal cases to bar the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, though these cases appear, thankfully, to be getting very little traction as reported in today's Los Angeles Times. In one case, Leo C. Donofrio of East Brunskwick, N.J. did in fact sue against both McCain and Obama. In another case Philip J. Berg of Lafayette, Pa. sued against Obama specifically. Of interest to me is that, in my view, where McCain might occupy something of the muddy ground I occupy in my own birth location, Obama's birth certificate clearly locates him in Hawaii, when it was already a state in the United States. While both cases have been largely ignored because you can't just bring a suit unless you can prove personal harm, it still gives me pause: what did the founding authors mean by "natural born Citizen"? Surely, all historical legal precedents recognize Obama to be one because he was born on U.S. soil, which has always been enough to make someone a citizen. You add to that the fact that his mother was a natural-born citizen, and you would think his citizenship should be unassailable. That's the beauty of the U.S. as opposed to a country like Kuwait where you and your children could all have been born there, and you would still not be citizens. Why is it that people in this country need to persist in imagining U.S. citizens to be something they have never been (except in the case of the original Americans who predate Plymouth and Jamestown), people whose ancestors have all lived and died on this land? What does it mean to be a citizen of the U.S. now or ever?

I guess because of my own background, I think that being a U.S. citizen is an enforced choice. Most of us have no choice but to be here, but some of us do actively choose it. Putting aside the specific desires of some to make Obama an absolute other, a non-citizen, what is the deeper desire to disinherit those who think differently about being a U.S. citizen? Whose very ancestry may show up the complexity of calling oneself a citizen of the U.S.?

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Image of Article II, Section 1 taken from the U.S. National Archives website.

The Many Sides of Barack Obama vs. John McCain's One

I received my Time magazine special Republican Convention edition yesterday. The contrast with last week's Democratic Convention edition was clear. The second and third page of the main article on Barack Obama was populated with odd pictures of pieces of Obama. The article also implied that there were five ways people read Obama if not all those ways together. By contrast, the article on John McCain had one big word up top "hon-or." And the image montage of McCain on the article's third page was that of an "all-American" military son in classic black and white photographs.

I am not blaming Time solely for this. Obviously, we as a public are responsible for our inability to peg Obama down (while assuming first and foremost that he is "a black man," or at least that is what Time's list of Obama facets told me I assume) while we tend to place McCain in a one-stream narrative of honor. The managing editor's note introducing this issue of Time made an important point: McCain and all presidential candidates are more complex than we think. And maybe in some ways it's a privilege of Obama's liberal multiracial self that he gets to be more publicly complex. But Time's own editorial suggested that it is politically expedient to fit a simple singular narrative that eradicates complexity. And I can't shake the nasty feeling that the public inability to navigate complexity, perhaps even a public distaste for complexity, is somehow bound up with that albatross of "race." If it wasn't, why would "black man" be the first descriptor of Obama listed in the article lead?


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images are all of Time, September 1 and September 8, 2008 issues.