The Hip Humanitarians: Why we cannot have our double chocolate fudge cake and donate it, too.

If you’ve ever been annoyed with the throngs of invitations by Facebook friends to add applications or to join groups, you probably know that there is a loyal resistance against those superfluous invites and that you are not alone. I myself feel only annoyance with most of the invitations, yet there are some that I feel are extremely vain and problematic. I’m not talking about the ones that show how fast you can type, or the ones that allow you to share favorite ethnic foods, or the ones that allow you to arbitrarily put a price tag on your friends and buy them with electronic money. Being vain without shame is not a problem, because those applications work just as they intend to, and there is nothing that I need to say about them. The ones that I find are the most vain and problematic are the invitations to worthwhile causes.

A couple of months ago I had lunch with an old college friend, who is quite the outspoken environmentalist. So much so that he is in the middle of finishing a book being published by InterVarsity Press and scheduled to be released in January of next year. I asked him what he felt about the growing trends in consumerism to ‘go green’. He responded by saying that while it is good that the word is getting out to consumers about the need to preserve the environment, it ultimately does not help the causes of environmentalists in the long run because it is not a sustainable commodity in a capitalist system.

And that is what this blog is about. A clash of ideologies. Humanitarianism is not a sustainable commodity in a system where the bottom line is money. And just so it is clear: it’s nothing personal. There is nothing wrong with environmentalism. As a matter of fact, it is an entirely good thing to preserve the environment and create conscious consumers. But in a matter of time, this particular trend will disappear with its utility. It is just the way that capitalism works and we accept it. Yet capitalism works in our society almost entirely for the ego.

Consider the throngs of Facebook groups and applications that were created in the past couple of years. They were dedicated to helping the poor and suffering in countries overseas, in places like North Korea and Sudan. Dedicated to preserving the environment, saving rain forests and gas. They were groups that took donations from college students with little disposable income after a college education.

There were other groups that became spoofs of these humanitarian groups, along the lines of “If 5000 people Join this group I will legally change my name to Optimus“, and “If 1000 People Join this Group I Will Have a Sex Change Operation“. That, by the way, is how you can tell that something has become a movement in our society: there are homages paid to it. This movement has apparent made it hip to be a humanitarian.

I myself joined a group that donated money to North Korean Refugees. There were a number of donors who pledged to donate money according to the number of people that joined the group. It was, for all intents and purposes, to get the word out about the humanitarian crisis in North Korea, to inform as well as raise up an albeit small amount of money to make a small difference.

I have since left the Facebook group, but check back every now and then since the donation period ended. There appears to be no news with regards to whether the donation was even made or not by the donors. None on the official Facebook group, nor the website that sponsored it. I had even e-mailed the contacts of the group regarding donations, and they have yet to respond back to me.

This is not necessarily the fault of the organization. I know the organization and have worked with it before, and believe it to be one of sincerity and integrity. I do not intend to write this blog at the expense of Facebook, either. The issue is that there is no accountability with a networking tool that is intended for personal use. A tool that is for the ego cannot effectively communicate humanitarianism or environmentalism, because those are inherently messages that are selfless. To try to do so is vain and problematic.

I can anticipate a response by the optimists, who may say something along the lines of: “Well, I’m not entirely too sold on the idea of bringing in words like capitalism, ego, and contrasting them to humanitarian and environmental. Regardless of whether there is any merit in your argument or not, wouldn’t you concede that there is perhaps some good that is being done by such organizations and the attempts to reach people through Facebook? Even if only a handful of people donated money or became enthusiasts, wouldn’t it be worth the effort?” To which I would respond yes, perhaps there is some good being done through making humanitarianism hip. And the thing that I love about being a naysayer sometimes is that I can point out a problem and hope sincerely that I am wrong. This is one of those instances.

In addition to a lack of accountability that comes from using a personal networking tool, being what I like to call a “Hip Humanitarian” comes with its own set of problems. For one thing, being hip, by virtue of its nature, is a fickle thing. Who can remember Pogs, those seashell necklaces worn by the suburban high schoolers, and the fact that most people used to find Jim Carrey hilarious? For another, being hip is the outgrowth of a socially constructed set of parameters in order to be accepted, on the most basic level. Surely social justice and environmental needs deserve more than a passing fancy for the sake of wearing the proud badge that says “I support this worthwhile cause” (I do not mean to demean those who are hip or want to be hip. It is a natural tendency that we as people in society have. Even those who purport to ‘go against the grain’ are trying to find a niche in our social context). Because being hip is tied together with a social goal, being a humanitarian does not mesh well with it. It is a conflict of interests.

Finally, I want to say one last thing in response to the optimists who believe in the small differences idea: I wholly agree with the attitude with which these measures are taken. However, when it really comes down to it, appealing to social networking tools devoted to the self is not a very efficient way of going about spurring young, vibrant, resourceful individuals to give time and effort to worthwhile causes. After all, feeding a child with just a click is truly the least that we can do.

The Phantom Racist

For these seeds to give birth to life: first they must die.

On August 30, 2005, there were two pictures on the front page of Yahoo! news that featured a couple in one picture holding some supplies while wading through water, and a young man in the other picture, also shoulder-deep in water, holding a large black garbage bag. Captions under each of the pictures infamously described what was going on: the couple supposedly found some bread and soda at a local grocery store, while the young man supposedly looted a grocery store.

In 2006, the NBA imposed an age limit on potential draftees. The age limit was set at 19 years old and also required high school students to spend a year playing at the collegiate level for the NCAA. Jermaine O’Neal, Forward for the Indiana Pacers and one of the former NBA draftees who made the jump from high school directly to the NBA, said the age limit was racist against black high school students.

Danny Glover, a Northern California native, was unable to hail a cab in New York while visiting his daughter. Oprah was unable to get into an exclusive French handbag shop afterhours, despite her star power. The Asian American community displayed outraged at Rosie O’Donnell’s incredulous imitation of generic Chinese on The View. They also called for the dismissal of Miss Jones and DJ Envy of New York’s Hot97 radio station after the hosts aired a song that parodied the tragedies of the tsunami in southeast Asia.

Most recently, former vice presidential nominee and member of the Hilary Clinton campaign, Geraldine Ferraro, cried ‘reverse racism’ when she claimed that Barack Obama’s success in the primaries up until that point was due to the fact that he was black. Insinuated in this statement was that she and the Clinton campaign were at a disadvantage because they were white.

What do Katrina victims, NBA stars, actors and talk show hosts, former vice presidential candidates, black people, white people, and Asian people all have in common?

All have claimed to be victims of racism.

And much of the outrage is warranted. Perhaps some, not so much. Today, to talk about racism is to denounce that it is absolutely wrong. But it also means that the very people who denounce it claim absolutely no responsibility or intention of perpetuating racism. Let’s face it, when the topic of race comes up, almost everybody that you know personally will most likely preface whatever they may say next with “I’m not a racist”. They say the problem is with those other people, those intolerant bigots. They cannot imagine how we live in the society where people still think like that. In other words, we seem to live in a society today where everybody is a victim of racism, and nobody is a racist. There are fingers being pointing every which direction, but nobody wants to claim responsibility for perpetuating the problem. Do we really live in such a country, where people would disguise their true intentions because it is fashionable and lawful to be accommodating, understanding, and color blind?

The answer is in part, yes. Our values as a society are formed partly by political correctness, and enforced by legislation. It is taboo to be a racist. Discrimination in itself is not illegal, but discrimination based upon race is. So while we may have the tendency to be bigots, because of social norms and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we need to be careful what we say. However, on the flip side of it, we become better people as reflections of those same social norms and legislation. Children are taught growing up that it is not right to discriminate based upon race. And that is a powerful tool in eliminating the prejudice that leads to racism.

The question still remains, however. Why are there so many people who claim to be victims of racism in a society where the vast majority of people deny being racists? And why do these victims come from all walks of life? Why are they not only black or Asian or Latino, but also white? Why are they not only poor, but privileged?

I think that there are two reason for this, neither of which mandate us to point fingers and further create racial divides. The first has to do with our inability as a society to consistently define ‘racism’. Racism, according to our society, is anything from saying Asians are good at math to the neo-Nazi movement. But the first is not racism. The first is what is called prejudice. Asian are generally known to be good at math, but of course we know that not all Asians are good at it. But that generalization is learned by society, and we approach most of our encounters with Asian Americans with that prejudice. Based upon our understanding of Asian Americans in general, this particular Asian American may also be good at math. That is not racism. That is prejudice, which is something that we cannot escape.

And prejudice, just like discrimination, is not racism. Discrimination becomes wrong when we discriminate based upon race. Much in the same way, if our prejudice leads to a negative judgment on a particular race, then it becomes racism. Prejudice is something that we cannot deny as being a part of human interaction. Avenue Q, the Broadway musical, seems to be of the opinion that “everyone’s a little bit racist”. Perhaps the more accurate description of society is that “everyone’s a little bit prejudiced”. We come to our encounters with people with certain assumptions based upon what we’ve been taught, and our previous experiences. This is simply good social skills that can sometimes lead to bad encounters.

But we as victims may sometimes confuse prejudice with racism. When I was growing up, there was a white kid who lived in my neighborhood, and my brother and I would occasionally play basketball with him. One time, our friend (who is Korean) came over to play with us. The kid from my neighborhood began to make martial art sounds while we were playing basketball. My Korean friend got fed up with it after a while and kneed him in the head. The kid started crying, and my Korean friend began to feign apologizing, pretending that it was an accident. Being probably about ten years old, I couldn’t tell for sure if the white kid was taunting us or if he just happened to be making those noises because he was in the company of Asians. Were we victims of racisms? It’s hard to tell, because I’m not entirely sure if the kid was taunting us. Were we victims of prejudice? Probably. After all, we were Korean, not Bruce Lee’s children, and I quit Taekwondo when I was nine years old.

Still, should we feel hurt or victimized because an ignorant kid didn’t know any better? I don’t use ignorant as an insult. I use it to mean simply, that the kid probably didn’t know. And here’s where all the confusion happens. We are generous with the term ‘racist’ when we are the victims, yet we are stingy when we are accused of being racist. After all, who knows better than me if I am a racist or not? How dare they accuse me of being a racist, when they don’t even know me? I have black friends, you know. I have more Asian friends than you do, so don’t even accuse me of being a racist. When we are the so called perpetrators, we look at things objectively. But when we are the victims, we tend to look at things more subjectively. It’s because when we are the victims, we know what is supposed to offend us, even if there is no rationale behind it. But when we say something or do something that may offend other people, we simply do not have the experience and context to understand why such a thing should be offensive. In effect, when a person is deeply offended and you do not claim to be the offender, you are imposing your will and refusing to admit that you hurt someone. And this is terrible social skill, because there is no dialogue. There is only a soliloquoy.

I believe wholeheartedly that many of our racial confrontations turn sour because we confuse prejudice with racism. Prejudice may be a matter of ignorance and can certainly lead to offense. But we can defeat negative prejudices by being consistent in our use of terms. This is accomplished first through treating others as you would like to be treated and using standards you would apply to yourself in dealing with others. Sometimes, this means that there needs to be benefit of the doubt, and perhaps a measure of grace. Secondly, it comes from dialogue. Prejudice can be fixed with words and dialogue, because words can inform the ignorant. They have that power. But words can also close the door to dialogue, and perpetuate a state of mutual misunderstanding and suspicion. It can lead to generalizations of oversensitivity and bigotry.

The other reason why racism is rampant in a society with fewer and fewer racists has to do with the residue, both social and economic, left by our fathers. Richard Thompson Ford, a law professor at Stanford University and author of The Race Card, says we are eager to identify bigots in a society where individual racism is becoming less common. Rather, there is collective racism, perpetrated communally. And this collective racism is the byproduct of socio-economic factors and the legacy of the separatist generations that have come before us. Kanye West infamously said on national television that George Bush doesn’t care about black people. Yet black people suffered disproportionately in Hurricane Katrina because they were the ones without the resources to evacuate the city. It would be irrational to assume that President Bush doesn’t care about black people because they were at a disadvantage in income and resources. But it would be rational to claim that more black people were not able to evacuate New Orleans because of social, economic, and historic factors. Blacks have been disadvantaged in all three regards. And these issues cannot be fixed by placing the blame upon a single scapegoat. It is structural discrimination that leads to structural racism.

Take another example: Danny Glover is probably among the throngs of minorities who complain about cabdrivers because they discriminate based upon race when choosing their clients. What we fail to take into account in accusations of discrimination based upon race is that it is close in proxy to discrimination based upon socio-economic status. Cabdrivers are not allowed to discriminate against clients based upon their destination. But they tend to, because there are often neighborhoods that pose a danger to them. The people who suffer for this unfortunate fact are usually black. The discrimination is not justifiable, but it should also be treated by taking into account additional factors, particularly the relationship between socio-economic status and race.

My first day of kindergarten I had a hard time understanding what anybody was saying. The teacher had apparently asked a fellow student to help me put my backpack to the side of the room where the other kids had already placed their backpacks. I thought the kid was trying to take my backpack from me. So I resisted at first, but finally relented after I opened my backpack and took out all my belongings. Fast forward to eighth grade: I’ve been in the American Public School System for nine years. For some reason, the school had decided to moniter my English skills that year, and sent me to take an exam on two separate occasions to evaluate my English skills, even though I was proficient at that time. The proctor acknowledged that I probably didn’t need to take this exam, but asked me to do so anyway. While I was probably a victim of discrimination based upon race, in retrospect there was no one person to blame for this. The school administration probably orchestrated this evaluation with good intentions, hoping to moniter the progress of students for which English is not the primary language. I just happened to be someone who became slightly inconvenienced by this.

There are a host of different kinds of social and economic residue which negatively affect people of different races, whether they be as serious as losing livelihoods, homes, and even family members, or having to sit through a pointless test of language aptitude. In either instance, race relations can become constructive if we realize that sometimes, perhaps, the racist that we thought existed is only a figment of our desire for vindication, and the real enemy becomes our prejudice and the race relations arena that we had a hand in creating.

Of the complaints of racism by politicians, professional athletes, celebrities, and people from all races and socio-economic standing, is there a way to tell which of them is warranted? Is there a way to smoke out the real racists? Perhaps the best way to find out the answers to those questions is first to dialogue with one another in full realization that we are responsible for race relations, whether we be bigots or not. Dialogue creates common understanding of words and cultures. We must also realize that perhaps there is a phantom racist we all want to chase, but we’d better use our energies to speak and work towards a more just society.

Hey, baptize my mind.
Hey, baptize my eyes.
Hey, baptize my mind.
For these seeds to give birth to life: first they must die.

Religion is alive and well, and killing itself.

There is an extremely unsettling commercial that I see on television every now and then. It is a car commercial in which there is a very disjointed family: a teenage girl talking on her cell phone, one boy playing some kind of handheld video game, paying no attention his younger brother, who wants to throw the football around. Their mother pulls up in the advertised car and invites the entire family to go for a ride. The children apparently relent, followed by their begrudging father, who was looking at an ESPN-esque website.

Cue the music and voiceover explaining the features of the car, which apparently brings the entire family together. At the end of the commercial, the teenage sister says to her younger brother, “you know, you’re not so bad Bobby”, at which point the boy replies, “It’s Billy” (or vice versa – I can’t really remember which was the boy’s real name).

The commercial got a knee jerk reaction from me the first time that I saw it: I chuckled because it’s an outlandish dialogue that is supposed to make us laugh. Yet the reason why it makes us laugh is because the heart of the dialogue points to something less exaggerated (as humor usually does) but we are all semi-aware of and concede as being at the least a minor dilemma in America.

Neil Postman, the late cultural critic, cites the importance of the American culture to have some type of grand narrative that drives its people. In his book, The End of Education, he lists these grand narratives as gods that serve people; gods that give their people a meaning and a purpose or end to which to strive. Postman lists one particular god that does have not the adequate ability to serve. A false god, if you will. That god’s name is the god of consumerism.

Ah, yes. We’ve heard this sermon before. The indictment of consumerism, and how it ultimately never follows through on its promise, and leaves us discontent, a little unhappy and perhaps, even dissatisfied. But the preachers who preach that we must be in and not of the world have very few places to direct their listeners besides the havens we call church and retreat centers, and in many of them we end up huddling around the gospel hoping that it keeps us warm in the middle of the night.

It is strange for the proponents of the light of the world to find an ally in a so called secular, cultural critic. Yet Postman offers a shrewd observation that helps us in discovering why consumerism’s masquerade as a false god should be so unsettling.

For Postman, religion is alive and well, even outside of the religious communities. Perhaps this is the first thing that we need to realize: Religious people do not have a monopoly on religion. After all, what is consumerism if not the promise to deliver something that improves your life? And how does it convince us that we need, except to first point out that we are lacking? It is here that consumerism uses its cousin, advertising, to accomplish this. Advertising tries to scare us. It addresses a problem in our lives, perhaps something that we’ve never thought of before. Or, maybe it is something that has always been in the corner of our minds that we hardly thought was a problem at all. But the problem is drawn to the forefront of our minds, and the goal is to convince us that we are living in a state of fallenness. Yes, there is an almost divine problem that cannot be solved, whether it has to do with transportation, information, an empty stomach or a dirty kitchen. The problem begins to loom at large. It has never been this big before. Our minds are then zeroed in on the problem, and we cannot ignore it. Sure, we can take a risk and try, but what if those millions of tiny bacteria end up harming my child, or my failure to upgrade to a better insurance provider leaves me with the regret at missing out on saving money?

Enter the hero. The almost divine savior, to tackle the almost divine problem. Interesting, the savior introduced happens to be able to save us from all of the problems that were drawn to our attention. But of course, we can’t forget the aftermath. The happy healthy baby, the shrewd customer who ends up saving hundreds, and the reunited family.

Admittedly, it sounds a bit over the top when it’s said like that. And of course, I’m fooling no one with that embellished version of the consumerism story. At some point in that train of thought I began to think to myself, “wow, this actually sounds pretty bogus. I’ve heightened commercial advertising to gospel status. Even if it really is like that, people have got to be smart enough not to be duped so easily.” And I hope that I am right. Of course we all know the naysayers will blow the problem up to cosmic proportions. It’s just always been that way.

However, I still believe that the correlary addressed by Postman serves as a useful insight, and I would be remiss if I didn’t say that there was truth to that depiction of consumerism, just as the car commercial had depicted the problem of the estranged family in exaggerated and comedic fashion. But therein lies a nuance that we don’t see, and it is not necessarily the problem that promises ultimate satisfaction. Postman addressed the fact that consumerism mirrors the religious story, but it has evolved beyond a mere duplication. We all know that the god of consumerism has an agenda that is unashamedly intentional and biased towards itself. But what we may not know is the fact that consumerism is now making fun of itself, and getting away with it.

The great irony in the car commercial is that it knows full well why the family is estranged in the first place: their collective attention is drawn to cellphones, hand held video game consoles, and the internet. Yet, lo and behold, there is another attention getter: the car that supposedly is the fix to all the problems of the family. But shouldn’t it be strange that while the car promises to be the savior that these other products are not, it too is using the same medium through which to proclaim its divinity? The sad answer is apparently not. Truth is, commercials like this can be run, and we chuckle and move on. There is no shrewd observation that there is some sort of problem here when we collectively admit that there’s a problem, but simply shrug our shoulders and move on with our lives, all the while being bombarded by false saviors sent by the god of consumerism.

And it is at this point that perhaps religious communities should condemn the trivialization of our bread and butter, our old story. Sure, we kind of need a new vacuum or car, but it can wait. And of course, we kind of need solutions to our problems of injustice, of greed, of family breakdowns, of addictions, of helplessness, of utter sin. The bastardizing of the gospel story for the purposes of that false god make our religious story as tame as the suggestion that we get fries and a coke with that burger. Religion is alive and well, and is killing itself. And it turns out that those preachers are right. Consumerism does not satisfy, but leave us in sort of a strange limbo stage in which we are accustomed to being drawn to temporary solutions for temporary problems. Yet, what does it mean to be in and not of the world, and does the gospel have implications for the here and now only? Or does it have implications for only those huddled around the fire? What can a religious community do to make sure our story is not hijacked and decontextualized, duplicated and trivialized? We do well to point out that consumerism cannot serve well as a god. Yet perhaps we would do well to put our energies to what would serve well as a god, and not only for the benefit of those who are in and not of the world, but the world at large, and do it in an unapologetic manner. And let us hope that we perhaps have an answer for those who are shortchanged by the god of consumerism, and our huddled masses do not block the light of the gospel.