Brown Eyes Blue Eyes, Lula and MS. Dowd

October 2009

Brown Eyes Blue Eyes, Lula
and MS. Dowd
Michael T. McPhearson, October 2, 2009

I bought a Kindle from Amazon a few months ago and now I read more of the New York Times than ever before. A March 30, 2009 Op-Ed by Maureen Dowd caught my eye and keeps hanging around in my thoughts. Her piece addressed remarks by Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also known simply as Lula. Below is an excerpt from Ms. Dowd’s editorial including the comments by Lula. Lula’s thoughts about the world financial crisis were made during a press conference with Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

I commend her attempt to challenge a basic prejudice and myth that blue-eyed people are more intelligent and desirable than brown-eyed people. Yet, while I do not want to diminish the negative impact this fallacy can have, and has had on brown-eyed people, it is clear Ms. Dowd does not fully appreciate Lula’s point. In fact she makes light of it when to begins her editorial with, “As international lunacy goes, it was hard to beat the Pope saying that condoms spread AIDS. But Brazil’s president, known simply as Lula, gave it his best shot.”

I think her opinion editorial is sticking in my mind because it is a prefect example of how many well meaning White people do not see that White Supremacy is deeply entrenched in the world economic system and that it plays a major role in international politics and impacts the domestic politics of nations around the world.

There is not lunacy in Lula’s words when it is understood that his comments are squarely rooted in pushing back the concepts of race and White Supremacy, and not simply brown-eyes vs blue-eyes as Ms. Dowd decided to focus her attention. I do not fault her for not fully understanding Lula’s observations. Her cultural experience may not have a window into his worldview. Blue vs. brown or blond vs. brunette has been a strong and deadly stereotype between people of European descent. Perhaps the strongest and most relevant example of this inter-White stereotyping and, yes racism, is Hitler and his ideas about a “master race” that was predominately blue-eyed and fair-haired. He believed that this master race should dominate all others and had to eliminate the Jew from earth as Jews were the most parasitic of all sub races. We know this worldview led to killing millions of “White” people with Jews being the overwhelming victim. This is White Supremacy at its most extreme as it defines White in a very narrow way. With Hitler’s defeat, his philosophy was disavowed by most everyone. However, the foundation of his ideology; the idea of race, and the narrative he imitated to explain his worldview; White Supremacy, was not dismantled and both continue with great harm today.

I do not write this to say there has not been a decline in the absolute power of White Supremacy. Make no mistake, there has been and continues to be a decline. A river of human struggle has always flowed to erode White Supremacists’ arguments and repression. Some of the major events that undermined White supremacy were the 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution, 1794 French National Convention emancipation of all enslaved people in the French colonies, 1807 British and 1808 U.S. ban on the Atlantic slave trade, the 1864 end of U.S. slavery, the 1947 end of colonial rule in India, followed by revolutions around the world including the end of Apartheid in South Africa, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and most recently the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. Each one of these major events and millions of small and not so small acts by courageous people of all the human colors has and continues to deal blows to the edifice of White supremacy. Nonetheless, the construct still exist. If we do not discuss it and call it out when teachable moments arise, we miss important opportunities to help render it toothless. Especially in a time like today, when many claim racism is dead. I believe Ms. Dowd missed such an opportunity.

On April 5, 1968 in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr’s death, Jane Elliott, a Riceville Iowa 3^rd grade school teacher decided to use the tragic event as a teachable moment. She embarked on an exercise to help her students understand what it was like to be a “negro.” She divided her all White class according to eye color; brown and blue. She told the class that blue-eyed students were superior to the brown-eyed students. There was resistance to this idea, so she backed it up with a scientific sounding explanation. She did not tell the students to treat each other differently, but this new framing of eye color resulted in the blue-eyed students performing better in academic task and treating the brown-eyed students as inferior. The brown-eyed students’ academic performance dropped and they became timid and subservient. The next day she reversed the roles and the same thing happened with the brown-eyes taking on the role of superior and the blue-eyes as inferior. But this time the interaction was less intense. When she ended the exercise the students cried and hugged each other.

Ms. Elliott got it. As an American with White privilege, she took a prejudice packed with its own legacy in White culture, but in the United States made nearly impotent by pale skin solidarity, as a tool to teach a lesson about the devastating impact of White supremacy. This is in fact what Lula was trying to communicate, albeit perhaps a bit awkwardly. He is not alone in his assessment of Western arrogance. In a 1948 essay about race relations in the U.S., Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, a giant intellectual and great American who struggled to end racism, challenged the West, in particular the United States and Great Britain, to embrace cultural democracy or an understanding that other cultures’ approaches to problems facing humanity are valid.

“There is a determination in America and Great Britain, shared to a less extent by Western Europe, that only one type of cultural organization can be allowed because it is the only true and successful type.”

“There is, on the other hand, on the part of the overwhelming majority of people in the world, a feeling that the Anglo-Saxon type of cultural organization has failed and that new cultural patterns should be tried, and that for the trial of these new cultural patterns there is demand for cultural democracy and intercultural tolerance. That without this, civilization in its present form is doomed.”

Twenty years later another great American, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his Beyond Vietnam Speech, echoed Dubois’ when he wrote,

“Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination...”

“The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”

I see no lunacy here in either of these men’s words. For me Lula speaks with great clarity. He invokes the truth of centuries of economic and sociopolitical structures built on the backs of poor people no matter their culture and color; with the keystone of these oppressive structures being White Supremacy. This silent premise that White people and culture are superior, underpins Western ethnocentric pride and makes acceptable total war on non-White people across the globe, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also allows for Black and Hispanic poverty, murder and incarceration rates here in the U.S.

My critique is not meant to devalue the amazing contributions made by the West to the human story. I do mean to question the horrors visited upon the people of the world in the wake of Western actions. I concede to Western apologist who would cite non-Western atrocities and cruelty such as the Turk’s Armenian genocide, the Chinese Cultural Revolution killing millions of people and the Japanese killing and torture of Chinese during World War II. It is true Western powers do not have a monopoly on repression and cruelty. However, since the Age of Discovery, the West has been the dominate exporter of violence on earth.

Lula’s comments speak directly to a world socioeconomic structure that exploits and oppresses the poor who are predominately non-White and brown. A pillar of this structure is White Supremacy. To move forward the cause of peace and justice activist must integrate dismantling White Supremacy in our work or the pillar will impede progress in all other struggles.

The peoples of the world have an unprecedented opportunity to challenge the meaning of race. The human conscience via science, philosophy, religion and human interaction is fast coming to the realization in more than a rhetorical way that we are all human and must be treated with dignity. Technology and media provide unparalleled opportunities to listen to each other and find inspiration and understanding from each other. The election of Barrack Obama to a position that makes him one of the most powerful persons in the world has given non-White people a new plateau to aspire towards and challenges White Supremacists assumptions to the core. This allows for friction that can produce movement forward in dismantling White Supremacy and deal a serious blow to human oppression.

A great opportunity is before us, but it will not happen on its own. The legacy structures built by the institution of slavery are enormous. To succeed in disassembling these political, economic and social arrangements we must take up the challenge in our personal lives and it must show up in our politics for this change to occur. We must listen with open minds and thick skins. It would do us all good to listen a little closer to what a person is trying to share, even though we may feel offended, uncomfortable or defensive. We must try to understand from the other person’s vantage point. To have positive change across the full spectrum of social and economic justice concerns, we must all challenge ourselves. Men must listen to women and work to end unchecked patriarchy. Heterosexuals must listen to homosexuals and work to gain full equal status for the gay community. Middleclass women must find ways to leverage their status to empower women who are blocked from opportunity. I will not go on about all the different types of group privilege that must be addressed. But I will say that White people have a special challenge to face the history and ongoing legacy of White Supremacy. They must discern how it is playing out in their personal and public lives and then act to change it.

To adequately address the enormous problems facing humanity, we must challenge ourselves to see the world and each other with new eyes. We must look at how we as individuals and collectively gain from any type of privilege and then act to use that privilege to create positive change. If we do not act in this conscious and intentional way, we may find ourselves forced to see our world fall apart before our, brown and blue eyes.