The literacy of sharing a world

NICSUN already gave us "Literacy in Politics." That put a new twist to a thought I've had for some time: that many people from majority or socially/politically/economically dominant groups have never learned to look at things from any other point of view, and have been educated to regard their own dominance as the right and natural order of the world. Any tipping of the balance, any leveling of the field that reduces the automatic supremacy of the dominant group is unfair, artificial, and part of an evil conspiracy.

Recently, I see this most glaringly from defenders of the Arizona immigration law, and the Tea Partiers. In the first case, many white "Conservative" Americans simply cannot believe there's an objection. "It's only against illegals!", they assure me, and can't imagine why anyone would think this law might impact legal immigrants, or even American citizens, who speak the same language or have the same skin color as those "illegals." I think we can say, with confidence, that Arizona would never have passed a law requiring white people to carry around documentation (documentation most Americans don't even possess) to produce any time a police officer demanded proof of citizenship. First of all, the majority of Arizona's voters would never subject themselves to harassment and humiliation like that. Second, well everyone just knows that white people are citizens, right?; it's non-whites who have to be individually scanned for alien status. Supporters, willfully or otherwise, blind themselves to the racial dynamic and the past and present reality of law enforcement's interaction with minority communities and claim that latinos who are here legally have nothing to fear from the law.

My second example, the one tied to the image above (or any of thousands of egregious signs that proliferate at Tea Party rallies), is the astonishing conviction held by some members of traditionally privileged groups in this country that they are getting a bad deal, that they are victims, that minorities are getting special advantages and taking over the country. This is an old, old refrain in America, dating back at least to the Civil War and white fears of "Negro Rule," as if weakening the institution of slavery or any advances toward basic citizenship and equality for African Americans meant that they'd grind whites in the dust. You see this today, with white conservatives (and, in 2008, Gloria Steinem!) denouncing Affirmative Action and the election of Barack Obama as proof that black Americans have things too easy and white people just can't catch a break anymore. Realistically, whatever disadvantages whites might suffer from Affirmative Action don't begin to override the benefits whites have received (for most of us unwillingly, unwittingly, without intent or understanding of the structural forces pushing us towards the top and others down) from our nation's racial caste system. Certainly, the election of the first non-white president can hardly spell the end of white success in America, especially when Congress, the media, the electorate, the business community, and the president's staff (from Joe Biden on down) are overwhelmingly white. Similarly, every year like clockwork Fox News warns us about a War On Christmas because some retailers have seen fit to ask their employees (who are not all Christian) to wish their customers (who are not all Christian) Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. To those who are accustomed to ignoring the existence of other religions it seems like a huge affront to be asked to share the holiday shopping season in this tiny way. As my final example, the "Defense of Marriage" campaign, which peaked in 2004 with a series of amendments to state constitutions and an attempt to amend the United States Constitution to "defend marriage" from gay participation. How utterly baffling that so many Americans have taken "heterosexual" as a political and cultural identity, and think that marriage would be devalued and destroyed if a small excluded section of the population were allowed to join in. What on earth gays marrying is supposed to do to marriage as it exists between straight couples remains vague, but the very fact that same sex marriages were performed would utterly devalue the concept. It seems very clear to me that the point in retaining exclusive ownership of marriage is to have someone to look down at; whatever else is going wrong in my life, at least I'm better than them. In a world where diversity is increasing in all fields and classes, this isn't a viable attitude in the long term. We have to learn to share both economic resources and social capital.

Update: As if to prove my point the Tea Party's flagship candidate, GOP Senate nominee Rand Paul, puts the "government mandate" to share space in this country with non-whites in terms of the death of freedom.

Literacy in Medicine

Literacy, both in the traditional sense of being able to read and our expanded sense encompassing virtually all technical skills and knowledge, plays a vital role in receiving medical care. At the most basic level, knowing about anatomy and basic health maintenance is crucial. For most of us, getting our teeth cleaned periodically and making at least a gesture towards exercise and eating healthy are ingrained, but they are learned behaviors. Once one enters the clutches of the medical system, both literal and expanded literacy are essential because of the reams of highly technical, both medically and legally, paperwork one must handle to receive, authorize, understand and pay for care. If one lacks the medical literacy to understand one's body and conditions, the literal literacy to understand the forms and paperwork, and the computer and research literacy to investigate, one is at the mercy of what information one overworked doctor can convey in brief, expensive face-to-face meetings.

Although I wasn't thinking in terms of Literacy per se, I witnessed the importance of medical and standard literacy last year when I was teaching in Namibia. Namibia is a new and impoverished country, having only won independence from Apartheid South Africa 20 years ago. It is also ground zero, along with neighboring Botswana, of the AIDS Crisis. AIDS medications are finally becoming available in the developing world, but taking AIDS "cocktails" properly and effectively is a very complicated and time-sensitive business, with a myriad of pills required at very specific times of day. How does this work in a country virtually without clocks, where time is vague to the point of near meaninglessness, and where people aren't accustomed to working with precision measuring and details? Where most people can't read in any language, much less the English formal instructions are almost always printed in? In rural Namibia (everywhere but the capital Windhoek), pill dosage instructions aren't given by the numerical clock (take two pills at 6am, and another two at 6pm) but with pictures: Take two pills when the sun is low in the sky! For some medication this may work, but for complicated and highly precise regimens it poses a huge obstacle.

Writing the First Draft of History - Literacy in Observing Events

In 2004, I lived, worked and studied in Ecuador with an excellent program called HECUA. It was a very volatile time, though Ecuador like much of Latin America is in a nearly perpetual state of crisis with only brief rests when catastrophe and revolution seem to fade momentarily into the background. Ecuador is a very divided country, with the traditional lighter skinned, Spanish and now often English speaking descendants of the colonial ruling class still holding onto economic and political power, and, despite representing a tiny minority, being hugely overrepresented in culture and media.

In recent decades there has been a revival of indigenous pride and culture, as people and communities and philosophies which have been ground under foot since Columbus and the conquistadores have awoken and demanded autonomy and respect. In Ecuador, this movement is called Pachacuti, the Quechua name of an Inca king. In 2002, the newly mobilized indigenous voters allied with urban leftists and students to elect President Lucio Gutierrez. However, Gutierrez quickly betrayed his supporters and embraced the traditional elites and foreign business interests he had won power by denouncing. He instituted World Bank ordained austerity measures and converted the Ecuadorian currency from the patriotic Sucre to the American dollar. He cracked down, hard, on the student protesters and indigenous marchers who had brought him to office. In the first week of November I witnessed, photographed and was caught up in a war on the capital city of Quito's streets between the Grupo de Operaciones Especiales with their riot gear, guns and armored cars, and students with red banners and rocks and Molotov cocktails. I came home at the end of the 2004; by April 2005 President Gutierrez had been overthrown.

Making sense of this complicated and foreign scenario required many kinds of literacy. Most obviously, my ability to read and understand Spanish (much degraded since then) allowed me to understand the slogans being shouted. I knew that "Lucio sucio" meant "Dirty Lucio" and that "Quito no fue fundada por Espanoles!" is a cry of indigenous pride from the descendants of the people who were there for thousands of years before the new ruling class. Having read Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina by Eduardo Galeano, I was able to understand some of the economic history from the underclass' perspective, and why they hated Gutierrez for bowing to American interests. I was able to speak to the president of the Federación de Estudiantes Universitarios del Ecuador, the militant student union FEUE, who explained why his members where out in the street with red banners, Marxist slogans and rocks. I was able to understand the police's threats to jail, rape, murder or deport me when I was briefly kidnapped and held in an armored car during the fighting. Had I not been literate to some degree in history, in Spanish, in politics, and in basic international and domestic economics, I would have thought hell had suddenly erupted in front of the Universidad Central in Quito, and that everyone had suddenly gone mad and started fighting. It occurs to me that this is what most Americans do think when they read about third world or even inner city violence.