An Other's Mind

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Contents

Introduction.........................................................viiForeword.............................................................ixReactions............................................................xiAcknowledgements.....................................................xiiiChapter 1 Twists of Fate............................................1Chapter 2 Reality Challenges Perceptions............................19Chapter 3 Mount Turns Nostalgic.....................................33Chapter 4 Where Was This Nation?....................................51Chapter 5 Century Framed For Civil Disobedience.....................73Chapter 6 Antidote..................................................89Chapter 7 Horrific Consequences and Decisions.......................107Chapter 8 Commitment to "An Other's Mind"...........................133Chapter 9 Globalization's Conscience................................163Chapter 10 History Written in the Present Tense......................189Chapter 11 Delivering Social Justice.................................215Epilogue.............................................................301

Chapter One

On July 2, 1997, when I was fired from a job I did well—and at which many failed—I became driven to find out why my lifelong "process of becoming" seemed to be filled with punishing consequences. I guess what I had not learned was the degree of difficulty in understanding and preventing a European mindset from defining and viewing me as Other and treated as excess population, without surrendering who I was.

So I retraced my life to find new knowledge that could help me predict when and where negative-based experiences might recur so I could avoid venting my frustration the wrong way. Without a different approach in dealing with my anger I was aware that I might find myself out on the street, alone, without resources and unable to defend Others also experiencing similar frustrations.

Strategies included reading and rereading English literature, history, philosophy, religious studies, sociology, law, and the work of community organizers, social workers, and mental health workers. Most important was speaking to Others from distant places and college students about "commonalities." As Others we often concluded that the start to our punishing consequences couldn't have been "what we did, didn't do, should, or could have done." We also agreed that our struggles caused by the barriers to equality must have some reciprocal effects upon the oppressors. Where there had been hidden culprits and false perceptions, we personally wanted to expose and hold people accountable whom had prevented us from giving tomorrow its appropriate attention and "often kept us thirsty before building our wells."

However, before I could expose and hold people accountable I had to learn to recognize and understand "power language," whose clever application upon Others distorts the truth. Without that, my aim—to expose the nation's passion for horrific social and historical myths, i.e., Western civilization is superior and Americans are European in origin— supported by billions of dollars of research on teaching methods only to arrive at suggestions that are malicious or so obvious, some even silly, attempts to compromise the fundamental right of Others' scholarship and empowerment. The lesson that became evident to me was that: "The purpose of education in class society is not to educate. It is to give 'the educated' a stake in thinking they are going to be different than [O]ther people who work all their lives."

Among those myths, the ones I despised the most were those that protected a one-size-fits-all mindset—a product of the melting-pot syndrome. The simplification of this complex modi operandi, modo de operar, or assumption that they were already aware of the many social issues being confronted by us had had its tenure with me. Though it took many years, concepts that you can produce equality while combating Otherism and propagandizing sameness became easily detectable to me as racist, stress-inducing, and traumatizing. No longer was I going to allow people to tell Others different from them to participate in a process that would reshape them to be as "civilized" and "moral" as they are.

For combating this one-size-fits-all myth I often retraced the power structure's profiling strategies. For example, by putting myself at risk (and knowingly committing an irresponsible and ignorant act), I equated White-collar crimes during the mid to late 1990s as a cultural problem inherent to the race that dominated its apparent successes—crimes by the men wearing suits. As men scammed millions—and billions—I waited for branding, stereotype, and authorship of the economic collapse of this nation as being White; and equal to the same military force used when they landed on the shores of this nation; and with the same social intensity that defined Black and Brown as unsophisticated, lazy, prone to crime, and welfare dependant.

This nation's strategy of ethnic profiling became one tool of many employing the "new racism"—not a color-conscience racism that relied on strict racial segregation such as "White only" signs—but the racism with moral arguments that promoted equal opportunity while undermining the use of racial and ethnic categories. Being colorblind is an example; lasting avenues for advancement are not provided, and in fact, use "logic" to avoid addressing the need for affirmative action, reparations, and even empathy.

The power behind this new racism carried its force by preserving some of the universally accepted and clever economic justification of the old racism. As, for example, "all things being equal" (condiciones estando igual) though the "things" (aunque las cosas) referred to, (de que estan hablando), had unequal access and harder for poor people to obtain, (nunca se puede conseguir en las misma condiciones que ellos tuvieron). The more recent and extremely complex dialogue to extract its racial component included the imagery or choreography of "leveled playing fields," (el lugar del juego de competicion esta igual). Here, we often learned after years of frustration and disappointments that the pursuit of happiness for people in the middle- and lower-class meant learning to be satisfied stuck playing in vulnerable fields—clever use of a word associated with leisure time. Worse yet, the fields—such as places of work and classrooms—were applied strategies to sustain difficult access to opportunities that would lead to more of life's choices and our autonomy.

I also spent time practicing how to exist in a more alert and intellectual state. I was figuring out that street smarts required "partnering" with scholarship, and scholarship required street smarts. Once I solidified scholarship and street smarts as partners, I understood why community organizing required a commitment to civil disobedient strategies. Fifty-eight years of age, thirty years after the violence that defined 1968, and two graduate degrees were not nearly enough to have learned to defend myself against the effects of "power language" and to make better choices. Race and class were so deeply rooted definitions of this nation...