“Huddled Masses”

Dave Weissbard

UU Rockford

9/25/2016

THE READING

“Justice and the Outsider” by David Cole

from Keeping Out the Other

David Brotherton and Philip Kretsedemas

Solon, the great Athenian jurist once predicted that “justice will not come until those who are not hurt feel just as indignant as those who are.” Nowhere is that maxim more true than with respect to the immigrant. Foreign nationals, at least until they become citizens, occupy a necessarily compromised position in our community. They live and work among us. They are our friends, neighbors, colleagues, and fellow students and teachers. They pay taxes, provide expertise we lack, often take jobs that others will not take and contribute immeasurably to the diversity of our local and national communities. But, at the same time, immigrants are denied a political voice in the federal system; they may not vote or run for federal elective office. Their very presence here is qualified by the sovereign prerogative to send them “home” – even when for all practical purposes their true home has become the United States and they have not been back to their country of birth since infancy. And immigrants are very often convenient scapegoats for Americans’ fears – the ones first targeted in times of crisis as “the enemy.” As such, immigrants experience a vulnerability that many of those of us who are citizens do not. Their experiences are not our experiences, in the main, to understand their situation requires an empathic leap. But as Solon’s remark suggests, it is in the possibility of that empathic leap that justice lies. Hermann Cohen,, an eighteenth century Jewish philosopher, put it similarly in a commentary on the Bible: “The alien was to be protected, not because he was a member of one’s family, clan, or religious community, but because he was a human being. In the alien, therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity.”’

THE SERMON

[differentiation]

Sociologists tell us that we come to an understanding of whom we are by deciding whom we aren’t - a process of differentiating. Some of the categories that seem to apply include:

Male or Female

Smart or ignorant

liberal or conservative

agnostic or believer

American or foreigner

flexible or rigid

popular or outsider

bigoted or open

tall or short

fat or thin

a success or a failure, and, most importantly

♦those who divide people into two kinds - or not.

The reality, of course, is that there are some qualities about which we have no choice. Some would suggest that we actually have no choices: between genetics and environment, we are dealt a hand of cards which we must play. We don’t get to choose male or female, for instance, although now we are recognizing the validity of reassignment for people whose genitalia do not match who they perceive themselves to be. In fact, most of those criteria are not either/or’s, but a matter of where we fall along continua.

[choices are value laden]

It is also true that some of those categories have more impact than others. Zygmunt Bauman asserts that identities are set up as dichotomies. He writes:

Woman is the other of man, animal is the other of human, stranger is the other of native, abnormality the other of norm, deviation the other of law-abiding, illness the other of health, insanity the other of reason, lay public the other of the expert, foreigner the other of state subject, enemy the other of friend.

Bauman asserts that social order is based on the fact that in each pair, one side is considered the standard and the other is considered just that: “The Other” - an inferior - that is, “not like us.”

Simone de Beauvoir wrote:

Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself.

The One, the standard is considered superior and “The Other,” inferior. Religions, the law, media, and education, the tools of culture generally reinforce those values.

[woman as “other”]

It is certainly clear that in our culture, males, as de Beauvoir points out, have been considered the standard and women were secondary and therefore inferior. Thus the book of Genesis has the male created first and the female created to care for them. Judaism and Christianity have, for centuries, depicted the female as inferior: the Other. Women have had a circumscribed role, and it has not been the one with the most power. A woman who considered herself as equal or, heaven forbid, superior, to a male had to be restrained. The language has been clear: How has homo sapiens been referred to? “Man-kind.” With rare exceptions, women have been denied leadership roles, have been considered intellectually inferior, and even to this day, often paid less than men for the same work. There have been some countries that have been ahead of the United States in recognizing the equality of women, but conservative forces in this country continue to insist that the world would be better if women knew and accepted an inferior place.

[skin color matters]

Another “us-them,” majority-minority, relationship which has also been fraught with tons of superior-inferior baggage and has been very resistant to change is the category which revolves around skin color. We know people with dark skins were brought to this country from Africa to serve as slaves, to do the work no one else wanted to do, and certainly not so cheaply. It is hard to imagine placing human beings in such an inferior role, and treating them so inhumanely, and so it was decided that they, like the natives who lived here before the Europeans arrived, were not truly human.

While a war was fought a hundred and fifty years ago to bring an end to slavery, that war accomplished far less than some thought it should have. There were modest improvements in some parts of the country over the years, but the mind-set that people of color were less human than those with white skin has hung on for an appalling percentage of the American population. Major legal advances were finally made during the Civil Rights era, but that did not put an end to the pernicious racism. The election, twice, of a President with African ancestors certainly has not put an end to it, but, on the contrary has elicited racism for which they blame him! He is, in the eyes of millions of Americans, the ultimate “other” – an alien and a heathen.

[refugees]

The problem of racism has not diminished, but another example of “Us and Them” is very immediate today, and it also is not a new one. We do not have the luxury of addressing only one challenge at a time. It is, in part, a function of the current political campaigns and it raises very real questions about the nature of whom we are as Americans and the gap between our image of ourselves and the reality of our practice.

We know ours is a nation of immigrants. Even those to whom we refer as “Native Americans,” are entitled to the designation “Immigrants” although their ancestors were the first human occupants to arrive here. Some of us speak proudly of our nation as a “melting pot” because we have done somewhat better than many more traditional societies at integrating many of the more recent arrivals.

That is not to suggest that integration has been a smooth or painless process. We have little to brag about in terms of the inclusion of the first peoples, nor, obviously the descendants of slaves. But our history also includes hostility to French and Irish Catholics, Jews, the Chinese, Hispanics, the Japanese, and Russians. Members of those groups have been deemed as less than fully human, have been seen as lawless, as deadbeats who would be burdens on the economy, and as threats to national security.

[Know Nothings]

In the 1850's, the nativist Know Nothing Party tried to bring about laws that would blatantly discriminate against Catholics and Jews. [I was interested to learn that the name “Know Nothing” was not based solely on their stupidity – the fact that they knew so little – but on the fact that the party was based on secret organizations which trained their members, when challenged about their membership, to say, like Sargent Schultz, “I know nothing” about that.]

Abraham Lincoln, when asked about his relationship to the Know Nothings, responded:

I am not a Know Nothing – that is certain. How could I be? How could anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our process of degenerating seems rapid. As a nation we began by declaring all men are created equal. We now practically read it, “All men are created equal except Negroes.” When the Know Nothings get control it will be, “All men are created equal except Negroes, foreigners and Catholics.” When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia for instance where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

[continued fear of refugees]

As the Third Reich emerged, the American people, according to polls at the time, were opposed 2-1 to allowing German Jews to come here. Jews as “the other” were described as potential spies. Even a proposal to permit Jewish children to come to America was strongly opposed. Anne Frank's father, Otto, was a college friend of Nathan Strauss, Jr., the head of the Federal Housing Authority, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and son of the co-owner of Macy's. Strauss' efforts to help get permission for Frank's children to come here were to no avail. Anne would now be 78, had her father been able to get her out of the Netherlands.

The Jewish refugees aboard the ship St. Louis, which tried to land in Florida, were turned away, and most of them died in the concentration camps.

Speaking of concentration camps, one of the darkest periods in American history was when 120,000 Japanese Americans were taken from their homes and businesses and relocated in concentration camps for the crime of physically resembling the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. There was not one single case of people with Japanese heritage committing sabotage or being disloyal to the United States. Just Japanese ancestry was all it took. Citizenship was no protection.

Out of ignorance, or by some nefarious design, some so-called social scientists have made up or distorted numbers to suggest that immigrants result in an elevated crime rate or have a negative impact on the economy. The actual numbers demonstrate just the opposite impact. Studies show that in a short time, immigrants result in reductions in crime and economic benefit to the communities in which they settle.

This week, the mayors of New York, Paris and London signed a joint letter telling world leaders at the UN, “Investing in the integration of refugees and immigrants is not only the right thing to do, it is also the smart thing to do. Refugees and other foreign-born residents bring needed skills and enhance the vitality and growth of local economies, and their presence has long benefitted our three cities.”

[Syrians]

One of the major cases at hand, of course, is the question of Syrian Refugees. There is, of course, the question of why more than four million Syrians, who bear no resemblance to Skittles, are fleeing their homes. A despotic ruler bears some of the responsibility – but millions of people live under such leaders, and our nation even supports some of those leaders. There was no armed resistance to the dictatorship, no civil war, in Syria before the CIA and American money empowered the conflict that is wreaking havoc in the Syrian homeland.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr points out:

[Bashar] Assad . . . enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic Pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. . . . In 2009 . . . soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qtar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.

Gareth Porter, whose mother, Avis, was a member of this congregation, is an American historian, investigative journalist, author and policy analyst. He writes:

It took a remarkable degree of denial and of self-deception for the Obama administration to believe that it was somehow acting to rescue the Syrian people from the bloodletting when it was doing precisely the opposite.

I challenge you to explain exactly who it is we are supporting. Supposedly moderate groups, to whom we have provided training and arms, have turned those arms on us.

What is undeniably clear is that more than 4 million people have fled the terror in Syria and don't know where to turn. Even if it could be shown that we Americans have no responsibility for the chaos, if we were the kind of people we claim to be, or formerly wanted to be, we could not turn our backs on this humanitarian crisis.

4.1 million refugees have registered with the United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees. Lebanon has taken more than a million registered refugees and uncounted unregistered ones. Jordan has 1.4 million. Turkey has almost 2 million. A quarter of a million are in Greece or are passing through. Italy has welcomed more than100,000. Germany is anticipating 800,000. President Obama was criticized for saying America would take 10,000 refugees, and that was even before the terrorist attacks in Paris. After the attacks in Paris, French President Francois Hollande announced that France would accept 30,000 more Syrian refugees over the next two years. Not one of the Paris terrorists was from Syria. A forged Syrian passport was found, but most analysts believe that was a plant because ISIS wants us to turn the refugees away: that would be a recruiting tool for them. None of the Paris terrorists was a refugee – most were residents of France or Belgium. But none of those facts is a deterrent to politicians who these days feel free to make up facts as they would prefer them to be. Followers ignore it when the so-called facts are shown to be false. It used to be said that you are free to have your own opinions, but not your own facts. That is now a quaint artifact from the past.

Canada met its goal of welcoming 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of February. But, our Congress and 31 Governors were frightened by President Obama’s goal of 10,000! It is, of course, a coincidence that all but one of the governors who have pledged to make Syrian refugees lives miserable should they settle in their states are from one political party. Shamefully, a bipartisan vote of the House of Representatives called for a delay in settlement of refugees until each one is personally certified by the Director of the FBI and the head of Homeland Security.

The process of certifying refugees for settlement has been taking 18 to 24 months including repeated investigations by the UN’s High Commission for Refugees and our government. President Obama’s goal of 10,000 was met this month.

Some people attack the president for his failure to label terrorists as Muslim. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world of whom the terrorists represent an insignificant minority statistically. To label the terrorists as Muslim would be – no has been – to invite unjustified discrimination and violence against Muslim Americans. It is estimated there were about 260 hate crimes against Muslims nationwide in 2015, and the rate has increased with the rhetoric of the presidential campaign.

[Christian terrorists]

It is a fact that most domestic terrorism in the United States is committed by Christians, who are almost never identified as such. That frees demagogic politicians to claim that Christians never commit terrorist acts. Abortion clinics are bombed and doctors killed by Christians who are celebrated as members of the Army of God. Ann Coulter approvingly referred to the murder of abortion doctor Dr. George Tiller as a “termination in the 203rd trimester.” Christian David Adkisson killed two and wounded seven at the Tennessee Valley UU Church because of his hatred of religious liberals. Timothy McVeigh, a Christian, killed 168 and injured more than 600 when he bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Or the Charleston Church massacre in June when Christian Byllan Roof killed nine other Christians in order to start a race war. Oh, I forgot, people who call themselves Christians don't do those things. In fact, this summer, a member of Congress insisted in a television interview, that people who call themselves Christians are not “real Christians” if they do violent things. He was unable to comprehend his hypocrisy when the interviewer pointed out that Muslims say the very same thing about ISIS - that its followers who commit terrorist acts are not true Muslims. If the occupiers of the federal nature preserve in Oregon had been Muslim or Black, would the media have referred to them as “Protestors” [as they did] or as “Terrorists”? How many of them do you believe would still be alive today?