American Apartheid Denied?

The last time I saw Anna Quindlen interviewed by Charlie Rose, it was 2006, and she was urging every American to read Out of Iraq by George McGovern and William Polk.

I did as Anna urged, and even got my copy of the book signed by McGovern through the good graces of my friends Mary and Jack in Mitchell, S.D.

Tonight, as Quindlen talked with Rose about her new novel, Rose alluded to a remark about race and class in America, from a commencement speach Quindlen gave at Wesleyan in 2009. She asserted there that, for too long, America has had "apartheid denied."

I quickly went online to check the quotation and found Quindlen's entire speech on the Wesleyan website. Here's the quotation in question:

"We need you to make this a fairer place, a more unified nation, a country that wipes out the bright lines of class and race that have created an apartheid, an apartheid too long denied."

"Apartheid" is of course a word fraught with history, inevitably associated with the white seperatist regime in South Africa that imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Former President Jimmy Carter can testify to that, after his provocative use of the word in a book on Israel and the Palestinians prompted a fusilade of criticism a few years ago.

Though Charlie Rose did not ask her why she used the word "apartheid," Anna Quindlen's motive may have been akin to Carter's: to get Americans to pay attention to hard realities that are all too easy to ignore.

How about this one? In the wake of the Great Recession, there six million people, disproportionately members of racial minorities, who must get by on food stamps alone, with no cash income.

God Grows Tired - of Same Old Same Old Christmas

Nearly fifteen years after fleeing Sudan in a harrowing exodus of biblical proportions, a number of the Lost Boys made their way to America. A deeply moving documentary film, God Grew Tired Us, follows three of their stories in particular: John Bul Pai, who settled in Syracuse, New York, and two others, Daniel and Panther, who went to Pittsburgh.



Of all the memorable scenes, I’ll focus here on only one. Spending his first Christmas in America, only two months removed from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, where he spent ten years, John Bul seeks to understand the role of Santa in the American celebration of the holiday.

Santa doesn’t make sense to John Bul on any level. Quite rightly, he asks what a kitschy photo op prop for sales in the shopping mall has to do with the birth of Christ. After all, there is no Santa in the Bible. John Bul contrasts the preoccupation with the bulbous, bearded caricature of our commercial imagination with the experience of Christmas Eve at Kakuma, where the whole camp pulsed with dancing expectation of the imminent birth of Christ in each person’s heart.

And they really did dance at Kakuma − in a joyous, vibrant way that broke down the separation between people, what some philosophers call the principium individuationis.

In America, our experience of Christmas is highly privatized. Even those who venture out for worship do so for little more (or even less) than an hour before returning to the exclusivity of their private presents and expected foods of feasting.

At Kakuma, by contrast, the shared experience seemed to be more than the sum of the individual parts. Surely we have much to learn from our African brothers and sisters in this regard. Wouldn’t it be something, this Christmas Eve, if we not only reenacted the ageless story of the birth in the stable, but also linked arms in a more systematic way than we’re used to doing? Yes, we’re dealing with H1N1, but still . . . .

A place to start might be by recalling that St. Nicholas of Myra, the primary inspiration for Santa Claus, was a 4th-century bishop in what is now Turkey who was known for his generous gifts to the poor. What are we doing, for our part, for the many people struggling in this tough economy?