And still more on Egypt

Coverage is continuing much to the dismay of the Egyptian government:

In the second day of defiance of a military curfew, more than 150,000 protesters packed into Tahrir Square Sunday to call on President Hosni Mubarak to step down. The mood was celebratory and victorious. For most, it was not a question of if, but when, Mubarak would leave.

Military tanks have been stationed at entrance points around the square with soldiers forming barricades across streets and alleyways. In another departure from ordinary Cairo life, people quickly formed orderly queues to get through the army checkpoints. Soldiers frisked people and checked their identification cards. One soldier said they were making sure no one with police or state security credentials could enter.

Reports are widespread that many of the looters in Cairo are, in fact, remnants of the police and state security forces that were forced into a full retreat during Friday’s mass street revolt. In addition, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of prisoners were released from prisons in Fayyoum and Tora. Many believe it’s all part of an organized campaign by the regime to create lawlessness in the city in a last gasp attempt to maintain its grip on power. The headline of Al-Masry Al-Youm today blared: "Conspiracy by Interior Ministry to Foment Chaos."

More here.

Routine

You might have lost track of some important events over the past few months that were barely covered on televised media:

December 9, 2010 - Washington Congressman receives death threats.
January 20, 2011 - Aryan Nations attempts to bomb MLK parade in Spokane.
January 25, 2011 - Trial begins for Northern Idaho militiamen who plotted to blow up local infrastructure.
January 27, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh critic receives death threats.
January 28, 2011 - Arizonan neo-Nazi's trial for an attempted bombing begins

These are no longer exceptional incidents. This has become background noise.

More on Egypt

Anyone in the world who wants to protest American sales of tear gas to Mubarak's regime in Egypt, can sign this petition.

Egypt today, where tomorrow?

The seemingly populist revolution in Tunisia appears to have touched a nerve in Egypt, where it's brought out an entirely different political culture than most Americans see depicted. "Western" perception of Egypt seems rooted in the Six Days War and the Nasr Presidency - with Egypt as a nation trapped in a religiously-imbued nationalist fury, typified by extremists like the Muslim Brotherhood. The existence of several notable Egyptians within contemporary international islamist organizations hasn't helped this.

But as some have pointed out, the basis of this populist uprising, at least in Egypt, is avowedly secular and what little involvement there has been by organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood has come after decades of negotiations which have largely resulted in them abandoning violent tactics. Likewise, others have suggested that recent anti-Islamist events have played an instrumental role in creating a secularized Egyptian identity. In all, I think we can be emphatic that this is not an Islamist event, at least not currently.

You'll have to weigh your conscience on this, but I signed this petition urging the US to at least get nominally involved against the government. I think there's valid concern that the US actually getting involved might damage the credibility of protesters (like in Iran), but I'm not convinced that it's quite the same situation - Iran is well known for perceiving itself as highly unique and highly victimized by American interests, in ways that I don't think Egypt can compare. Still, a gamble.

(EDIT: Live coverage from Egypt, here)

Forgotten Guatemala (WOF)

Something that's been bugging me since we dove into the analysis of Chua's section on Latin America is how focused it has been on only some examples - namely Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru - in spite of her explanation that Bolivia and Peru are only two of the four Latin American countries with a majority indigenous population (what degree of indigenous ancestry that constitutes was unmentioned, just like Haiti and Brazil for being primarily non-white as well). More conspicuous than the lacking analysis of Ecuador is the omission of Guatemala - this is a state removed from the presidential campaigns in the harsh valleys of the Andes or the favelas of Brazil. It's an example in a completely different part of Latin America, which should be included and analyzed if Chua's ostensibly universal observations are in fact universal.

For reasons unrelated to this project, I started reading a collection of ethnographies, Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation which included a piece by Debra H. Rodman entitled Forgotten Guatemala which explored Guatemalans reactions to decades of massacres, civil war, and violence. Strikingly, the analysis of the conflict calls into question the supremacy of Chua's observations about the racial and economic hierarchy in Latin America. As Rodman describes it, during the nineteenth century, the Guatemalan hero Raphael Carreva "[a] Ladino [a person of mixed ancestry] from the Eastern Highlands, [...] led a conservative counter-revolution that was crucial to Guatemala's nation-building and that secured Ladino power from the white elites of Guatemala City" (Hinton, 196*). In other words, Chua is not describing a new phenomenon of various Latinos of color contesting white dominance, at least in the case of Guatemala. Instead, Ladinos, those with highly intermixed racial ancestries, have long dominated Guatemalan society. As Rodman explains, military recruitment during the Civil War followed general "policies, which included the recruitment of elite Ladinos as military officers" (Hinton, 194). In some ways, Ladinos disprove Chua's assertion that Whites constitute the market-dominant elite throughout the whole of Latin America.

In others, however, they challenge the very idea of a simple dichotomy between an elite, "market-dominant" minority (Whites, Ladinos) and a ethnically-dissimilar and impoverished majority (Indios, Mulattos, etc). In short, non-elite Ladinos exist and form an integral part of the social system. During the same periods of willing recruitment of privileged Ladinos into officer positions, Rodman catalogues "the coerced conscription of indigenous and poor Ladinos as foot soldiers" (Hinton, 194). The decades of violence in Guatemala reflect various dynamics - elite Ladino paranoia regarding potential lower class Ladino revolutionaries, anti-Maya sentiments, and at times fusions of the two. Chua's point rests on the assumption that ethnic groups throughout the world (including Latin America, and therefore Guatemala) frequently if not inherently constitute economic classes. The in-fighting within the Ladino community in Guatemala emphatically contradicts any belief that a fused economic and ethnic identity is more common, more natural, or more likely.

In light of this, you have to wonder why Chua's largely skipped over Guatemala.

(*All citations are to Forgotten Guatemala as reproduced in Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation)

Nuances (WOF)

Before delving directly into a more theoretical discussion of the class and ethnic dynamics at work in both Southeast Asia and Latin America, Chua takes one last brief look at Brazil. She writes-

This [Brazilian rap] movement is openly 'un-Brazilian' in its relentless attacks on the country's racial inequality [...] Almost overnight, the hot group Racionais - which recently won a number of prestigious Brazilian MTV awards - has popularized expressions like '4P' 'poder para o povo preto' ('power for the black people') and 'preto tipo a' - literally 'class A black' but referring to blacks who are proud and fight for their rights. (Chua, 74)

Chua almost seems to suggest that criticism of racial inequality is fundamentally traitorous, although the scare quotes around the term 'un-Brazilian' lend her an air of secondhand information, that she's merely referencing how others view them. Yet, a paragraph later she again seems to imply that it's strange that a group promoting racial equality would view 'class A blacks' as those who believe that they're humans with a right to be proud. She nearly implies that it's unusual for any one to think of the best blacks are those with pride, almost as if blacks should be ashamed, of some mysterious something. Again, it's unclear who Chua is suggesting is surprised by or unaware of these developments. Does she mean that she thinks it's surprising? Or Brazilians? Which Brazilians?

Chua later notes that "A recent poll revealed that a startling 93 percent of those surveyed in Rio de Janeiro now believe that racism exists in Brazil" (Chua, 75). Why is this startling, given, as Chua herself says,

In songs like 'The Periphery Continues Bleeding,' 'Just Another Wake,' and 'Surviving in Hell,' rappers aggressively expose social injustice against blacks, emphasizing that only 2 percent of Brazil's university students are black, that three out of four people killed by the police are black, and that every four hours a black man dies violently in São Paulo. (Chua, 74)

And yet, a paragraph later, she claims that "the reality so far is that racial consciousness remains surprisingly muted in Brazil" (Chua, 75). It seems as though Chua is attempting something nuanced, but has only produced something contradictory. Part of that complexity, which Chua didn't address, was class. As she argues, "the myth of Brazilian democracy [is] still broadly defended by many Brazilians spanning different social class" (Chua, 75). Yet all of the dissenting voices claiming that a racial hierarchy pervasively controls their lives in Brazil, at least that Chua quotes, are either favela-dwelling poor or 'black' individuals born into the lower class. All of the individuals mentioned by Chua asserting that the myth, even if fractured, remains true, alternatively had some hallmark of higher class status. She mentions a graduate student (after citing how few black Brazilians are present in higher education) who argued that the popularity of these same hiphop artists with white university students suggests a more open and democratic society with regards to race. There was also the case of a dark-skinned upper class woman who refused to identify as black, largely because of her class status.

Ultimately, Chua seems very ready to push for defining this disagreement over what Brazil is and what it means to be Brazilian into racial terms, when the reality seems more nuanced. High class status clearly plays a large role, just like how race is de-emphasized in importance in upper class circles in many countries. Yet, even Chua seems to admit that racial status in Brazil often influences economic standing. This disagreement about racial hierarchy relates to placement within that hierarchy, but also seems largely mediated through class status. Honestly, Chua seems to hurry through this brief section, trying to get to the more strictly theoretical discussion, skimping on these nuances.

All at once (WOF)

These past three weeks I've written about three separate problems with Amy Chua's analysis of Latin America - her personal entanglement in the conflicts, her uneven attention and detail to various groups, and her ambiguity about how present these dynamics actually are. Before we move on, I want to hammer in how interconnected these issues really are.

She identifies as coming from a wealthy ethnic minority, and has a lot of difficulty looking beyond that. Because of this her writing pushes their comparatively poor majorities into something defined primarily in opposition to those market-dominant minorities. They become a shapeless, nameless mass. In this instance, the indigenous population, the imported slaves of African descent, and the various interracial groups constitute a supposed homogeneous ethnic population defined by their either impurely European or non-white ancestry. How different indigenous groups or non-white immigrants (most notably the African-indigenous slaves) regard hardly enters the description.

This narrow viewpoint then makes it difficult for her to think of the conflicts she does analyze in terms of class, making it much more preferable to talk about ethnicity. She can't look beyond her own viewpoint, so the Marxist and New Left Latin Americans who don't seem to consider ethnicity nearly as important as class, or other political groups that don't seem to buy (either at all or as rigidly) the equation that Amy Chua does (between higher class and more "white" ancestry). She will acknowledge that her points are actively contested by many of the people she's writing about, but she won't respond and assert her view with evidence.

In short, she hasn't written an adequately detached report which has influenced her characterization of different groups, to a degree that she doesn't seem to even register their opinions or the facts when contrary to her own. Nowhere in her book is this as clear as at this point, where she transitions from background history of Latin America to contemporary analysis. Her first great example of this emerging social dynamic is Alejandro Toledo:

Peru's Amerindian Alejandro Toledo, who swept to landslide victory in the 2001 presidential elections, offers the best of examples [of a majoritarian populist politician]. 'You're one of us - win for us!' shouted thousands of wrinkled Amerindian women in bowler hats, weeping as Toledo campaigned through the streets in a truck emblazoned with the ancient Inca symbol of the sun. Reversing five hundred years of ethnic degradation, Toledo - who many insist resembles Pachacutic, the Incas' greatest ruler - highlighted his indigenous origins, wearing Indian garb, calling himself el cholo, and appealing explicitly to Peru's dark-skinned majority 'who look like I do'. [...] Alejandro Toledo's approval ratings have plummeted to 32 percent, as it has become increasingly clear that his pro-market policies will not immediately improve the lives of Peru's impoverished majority. (72-73)

Chua describes Toledo and his supporters as being "Amerindian" a term that's both (largely) out of date and highly unspecific. Chua does give us a light description of the cultures supposedly in conflict - Inca-identifying indigenous groups as symbolized by the sun symbol and the comparison to Pachacutic, but she skimps on the really important information. Where are these rallies, even one of these rallies, being held? The whole of Ecuador serves as backdrop for generic indigenous cultural rebellion, with no villages, no individuals, no quotes from these weary indigenous supporters.

Unlike the wealthy and predominately white Bolivians and Uruguayans mentioned, sometimes very briefly, by Chua, these supporters are given absolutely no identifying features that don't relate to their ethnicity - their bowler hats, their political allegiance. The only one unconnected to that, their wrinkles, seems to imply class status as much as age. The others were given hair colors (the blond millionaire from Uruguay) or professions (the lawyer from Bolivia) or even names.

This lack of detail seems to suggest some distance between Chua and these subjects. Unlike the economic elites she personally interacted with, she appears to have not actually been at these rallies, or have attended but with little interaction. There's no attributed quotes or biographical details, just brief and impersonal description.

This potent mixture of ignorance and confusion seems fertile ground for nebulous conclusions. On page 72, Chua treats Toledo as the epitome of the trend she sees developing in Latin America (and throughout the world) but a mere page later, on 73, she mentions him as a counterexample, without comment on how her argument still stands. She admits that in spite of his populist rhetoric with regards to ethnicity, she catered to the economic elite, against his base's economic interests. There seem to be multiple problems with the raw description Chua uses, but furthermore her use of the description to develop an argument frankly doesn't convincingly work.

Contraindications (WOF)

As previously hinted at, Amy Chua doesn’t deny that Latin Americans have historically intermingled across racial and ethnic boundaries to an unusual extent. In fact, she mentions one Bolivian who stated “everyone [in Bolivia] is mestizo, everyone has some Indian blood” (71). Her first real case study of the market-dominant minority that she brings up has such serious holes in it, that she can’t help but quote people claiming that the very dynamics she sees are unfounded, impossible, and dependent on a different social reality than the one in Latin America.

Even Chua herself draws conclusions contradicting her bold claims, like:

Political, even populist movements have been organized around class, almost never ethnic, lines. And because in election after election, despite coup after coup, political and economic power always remained in the same light-skinned, ‘illustrious-blooded’ hands, ‘apathy and fatalism’ among the indigenous populations spread and deepened (72).

Chua can reasonably analyze contradictory evidence, and especially if she wants to make claims about global facts, she needs to do so. Yet, she makes these statements without explaining how her arguments stand in spite of these antithetical testimonies about reality. Initially, the various colonists had superior weaponry to compensate for their smaller numbers. They had better technology for organizing conquests and mass enslavement. Soon, however, they had shifted to using social institutions, most notably the Catholic Church, as an agent of control. Now, however, class seems to be their only remaining weapon against the indigenous populations, who have revolutionized the Church and redressed technological inequalities. The endless question is how, how have these large majorities of indigenous, mulatto, mestizo, or otherwise non-white ethnic groups failed to threaten these colonial or neo-colonial powers until now?

Instead of looking into that, she attempts to claim her arguments are predictive, hinting at a shift only beginning now. She blames the decline of class-centered Marxist thinking with the end of the Cold War (failing to predict the surge of the New Left in Latin America a few years later) and the new information age media (and increasingly access to televised broadcasts) for reducing class consciousness. In its place, an ethnic consciousness has arisen, according to Chua. She says-

Latin America’s poor masses are being ethnicized, increasingly through radio, television, and most recently the Web. They are being reminded […] that they are Aymaras, pardos, Indians, cholos, whatever identity best mobilizes great numbers of frustrated, long degraded, dark-skinned masses (72).

Aside from the weird equivalency given to indigenous identities, whatever indigenous identities, (that came up last week) there’s an admission there that even the social groups in conflict are defined by ethnicity, their clashing is defined by class. This may be Chua’s point, but she doesn’t really address why anyone should care about a shift that seems mainly rhetorical.

Fully human (WOF)

One of the first things you learn about humanity is that we’re not equal. Or, rather, that we’re not treated like we’re equal. The supposedly more desirable positions in the hierarchy are called many things – expressions of privilege, dominance, power – but they’re all fundamentally inegalitarian and undemocratic. This inequality forms a social system (again that goes by many names, hegemony, kyriarchy, patriarchy) which infects almost every corner of life, even the smallest most meaningless minutia.

There’s a variety of ways people get sorted into acceptable or unacceptable camps, more than I can really list, but it’s important to remember that these constructed categories of “good people” and “bad” are forced definitions. They’re not reality, but a social system that has contorted our perceptions, and ultimately even ourselves. That’s one of the most essential parts of these seemingly ubiquitous systems, they majorly impact perceptions. They determine which groups of people are perceived as having individualities, having identities, having a claim to humanity.

Many discussions fall victim to this thinking, inside and outside of academia. This is visible in evangelical discussions about how evangelicals won’t be raptured because they have the unifying trait of being saved, but that those left behind are a single, cohesive category – those outside, beneath, below them. Chua, unfortunately, seems to have similar difficulties fully characterizing one group (at least in this chapter), and surprise, it’s the poor!

Having argued that class categories are excellent predictors for ethnic categories, Chua seems to then spend a great amount of time in this Latin American section detailing the complexities of which specific ethnicities get included in the larger, almost racial category of “white”. She stresses that even in colonial times the colonial forces had various ethnic old world origins:

That the Spaniards were supposed to be ‘pure-blooded’ is, to say the least, ironic. Among the numerous groups that, by the Middle Ages, had inhabited and commingled with each other on Iberian soil were Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Jews, Arabs, Berbers, and Gypsies (58).

Furthermore, there’s family history’s influence on how securely “white” a particular lineage was considered. In effect, within a few centuries of colonization, pure-blood Spaniards were distinguished based on whether they had been born to white Latin Americans or white Europeans:

And throughout Latin America, landowners preferred their daughters to marry penniless peninsulares (arrivals from new Spain) rather than wealthy criollos (American-born Spaniards). The fact of being born in the Old World was supposedly good proof of being ‘pure white’ (59).

As Chua describes it, later immigrants from various locations (not just Spain) profited from their lack of Native American ancestry, and managed to install themselves securely within the “white” category. She uses the example of Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico:

Needless to say, Slim has no Amerindian ancestors. As elsewhere in the world, the Lebanese community in Mexico is very tight: Slim’s late wife was also Christian Lebanese, and, reportedly, most members of Slim’s extended family have married other Christian Lebanese; virtually all are extremely wealthy (63).

In short, Chua describes in detail the intricate facets of several white communities in Latin America, providing specific immigration histories and detailed genealogical descriptions. She gives them specific, historical identities. She makes them people. Her writing on the various other racial categories in Latin America could not be more different – they are an amorphous, non-descript mass. She describes perceived white intellectual and cultural superiority in opposition to various, briefly undefined others:

In Mexico, mixed-blooded mestizos were for years prohibited from owning land or joining the army or clergy. In Peru, even intellectuals believed that ‘the Indian is not now, nor can he ever be, anything but a machine.’ […] In Argentina, a popular writer wrote in 1903 that mestizos and mulattos were both ‘impure, atavistically anti-Christian; they are like the two heads of a fabulous hydra that surrounds, constricts and strangles with its giant spiral a beautiful, pale virgin, Spanish America’ (58-59).

Intermediary categories like mestizo and mulatto are equated with pure-blood Native Americans, to say nothing about how an entire category of (unwilling) immigrants – slaves of African origin and their descendents, mulatto and “negro” alike – are outside of the category of ‘white’ while quite clearly not indigenous inhabitants to the region. It’s perfectly reasonable to define them as a broad social category of those that survived white rule rather than lived under it, but that doesn’t warrant writing virtually nothing of their internal identities. The few cases where Chua does this always reflect another facet of white dominance, rather than actual issues of identity negotiated between these two groups. She writes-

Not surprisingly, according to Mexican writer Enrique Krauze, Indian women desire to have children with mestizos – ‘not to betray their race but out of a desire to spare their progeny a bleak future’ (59-60).

Essentially the only time that relations between two non-white groups are discussed, it naturally relates in total to the white hegemony. In this book, there’s little description of what these groups think or how they see things, and the little we see overwhelmingly concerns the white hegemony, white categorization. Her writing denies them a self.

At the bare minimum, she outlines three separate groupings (mestizo, mulatto, and indigenous) but seldom draws the kind of sharp distinctions between them that she described within the white community. Instead, as per her previous quoting of Krauze, she highlights how these groups converged, even as she stresses the diversity within the “white” community. Even more damning, in my opinion, is how Chua extremely rarely mentions any indigenous group by name:

Mexico’s roughly 9 to 10 million indigenous peoples, about one-tenth of the population, have the highest rates of illiteracy and disease in the country. In the states of Chiapas, just thirty-five years ago, Amerindians were forbidden to walk on sidewalks or look lighter-skinned Mexicans in the eye (59).

Or, more blatantly,

The psychological effects of the Spanish Conquest were crushing and lasting. ‘The death of the sun – the strangulation of the Inca,’ writes sociologist Magnus Mörner, was a ‘profound shock, reinforced later on by the beheading of Tupac Amaru.’ Contemporary indigenous dances still reflect the profound ‘Trauma of Conquest’ (64).

The few specifics are quotation, and introduced without context. The effect that this has on this section is incredible. It’s as if indigenous peoples were before European contact unbelievably monolithic, and to a large extent remain so, according to Chua. They don’t have specific identities, competing languages and ideological conceptions of reality. There aren’t Quechua-speaking Incas and Aymara-speaking Carangas who have battled and negotiated and co-operated and conflicted for centuries (and to some extent, continue to do so). There’s only a drab, generic, grey mass of indigenous peoples who exist below the colonial government, beyond the social category of white. She seems to buy into this narrative that they’re unknowable, anti-Christian, shadows of humans defined merely by what they aren’t – white.

Personal Boundaries (WOF)

When we last heard from Amy Chua (so long ago, so long ago), she had just jumped headfirst into description of the socio-economic hierarchy that dominates in most of Latin America. This was a sudden turn from previous emphasis of more commonplace examples of ethnic conflict – the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland – and Chua’s personal experiences as a member of the “market minority” in the Philippines.

Chua pretty quickly establishes Bolivia as the focus of this section, as the last couple pages of analysis showed. She abruptly pulls away from Bolivia after a scant five and half pages of analysis, replacing it with more general description of Latin America. Reasonably, the section on Bolivia sets up a transition to broader statements, explaining “Bolivia is one of only four countries – the others are Peru, Guatemala, and Ecuador – in which Amerindians still constitute a majority or near-majority of the population” (56). In the next section, she applies a similar framework elsewhere though. She moves the focus to conflicts between large populations of mestizos (or similar groups of mixed ethnic background) and white Latinos, specifically dealing with dynamics in Mexico.

This starts another movement into the “biting off more than you can chew” territory that Chua seems just unable to avoid. Considering Chua has already equated the basic dynamics at play in the Philippines today, the former Yugoslavia during the early 1990s, and Northern Ireland during the Troubles, her adding ethnic-tinged economic conflicts in Bolivia and Mexico at the same time is just a small part of the bigger problem. There’s an element of reductionism here that seems outright dangerous – claiming that ethnic conflict is so predictable seems foolish and hubristic. The price for failing to accurately or even completely describe ethnic conflict, when you’ve made such claims and have been widely accepted as correct, is that warning signs get missed. Preparations, negotiations, and so on begin late. People unnecessarily die, because the conditions were judged as not likely to produce conflict, at least of this nature.

In any case, what honestly seems to motivate Chua’s movement of the focus away from Bolivia and towards Mexico, is her personal experiences. Nearly every social science around has trouble with the issue of working out the proper roles for the scientific observers in the mechanics they analyze, and there’s something to be said for involving yourself in what you study. That said, Chua previously defended ethnic Chinese Filipinos, like herself, not just as people with a right to exist, but with a degree of ambiguity regarding criticism of their behavior towards less fortunate communities. Although she pointedly mentioned her discomfort with accepting the poverty of other ethnic groups, she doesn’t seem to clearly draw the line between ethnic cleansing and economic egalitarianism. After all, that seems to be the whole point of her book – that they’re difficult to untangle, but she seems to accept that, in spite of her reservations, rather than protest it. Instead she seems to condone the behavior, almost as if the book is more a rationalization of her own inaction than an academic or political argument.

Where before Chua largely defended her family, showing how invested she was in her own analysis, Chua now, with the case study of Latin America, doesn’t break out of that personal bubble. Most of her analysis concerns Mexican friends of hers, similar to how her description of Bolivia centered on her connections in the country. She introduces some of the white-dominated plutocracy, beginning with one, Alejandro Duclaud Gonzalez de Castilla, who she met while both worked at the privatized Mexican telephone company, Telmex. This all seems to indicate similar issues of conflict of interest, which Chua seems to confirm. She first presents the allegations of corruption against de Castilla (who she refers to by his first name) as dubious, then normalizes them, calling insider “profiteering” business as usual in the “developing world”. She admits that she and others are “viewing emerging market privatization through a rose-colored lens” but she continues to believe that this project, for which she worked, “was on balance a good thing for the Mexican people” (60). Clearly, she’s the best person to ask about these issues.

Next Time: the Latin American examples reveal yet another problem with Chua’s arguments.