Racism & Xenophobia

It seems that xenophobia is currently a rising issue. Countries in parts of south east Europe have erected barriers to stop foreigners from the Middle east war zone entering their countries as refugees. Britain has voted for 'Brexit' and it seems that fear of foreigners was a significant motivating factor. In the USA Donald Trump has received substantial support for his proposal to build a wall to keep Mexicans out.

At the same time, there is another side to all this. It is heartening that younger people substantially voted against Brexit, apparently because they are not afraid of foreigners and like to have the opportunity to travel and mix with people of diverse cultures. While the USA is toying with the idea of keeping Mexicans out, Canada is deciding to make it easier for Mexicans to enter the country, making one wonder if Trump will want a wall on the northern border as well as the southern one. Of course, I mean this remarks loosely. Not all young people are open minded and not all older ones re the opposite. We are talking here about broad trends.

It is not clear to me that the world is actually becoming more racist and xenophobic, but it does seem to be the case that recent events - especially the current turn in the Middle East war - have brought this question to a new pitch with some people strongly on one side and others equally strongly on the other. In this respect the little film DNA Journey is relevant. There are not so many humans left who can claim to be single race.

It all seems to be part of the big question of how we get on with one another on this 'shrinking' planet. The planet may literally still be the same size, but in the human experience of it it is getting smaller and smaller. This is good in some ways and threatening in others. Perhaps, before too long, we shall branch out into space travel and things will change again, but for the rest of my lifetime, the shrinking planet phenomenon seems likely to be the dominant trend.

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  • This thread started with concern about racism and xenophobia in UK as a factor in Brexit. Now the focus has crossed the Atlantic and the racial tensions of the USA have come to the fore. 54% of prison inmates in USA are black or Latino. Non-white citizens are more likely to be shot by police, imprisoned, or exploited in a wide variety of ways. America is also a country where a large proportion of the population are armed with firearms. It is amazing that the situation is not a lot worse than it is.

    America is changing. 47% of under-5s are black or Latino. If we add other ethic minorities - Asians, Native Americans, then more than 50%. These are just official figures - there are a lot of 'illegals' not included. This is the background to Trump and all that. It is a hot summer.

  • 'A place of arrival' or a temporary haven. Each is on their particular journey. Along the way we meet and part. The gods and Buddha's watch and help when we let them.

  • People like Jimena and myself have some degree of cosmopolitan background and have travelled, and not just as tourists. A great many people have not done so. Much is a question of one's 'safety zone'. People surround themselves with things that they like, including things that make them feel secure. When these might change or be taken away they feel frightened. I am the same, but perhaps my safety zone is bigger than that of some people because my experience is wider. Experience broadens the mind and faith deepens it. A deeper mind is less easily capsized, so even when one goes out of one's safety zone one can cope. Faith is like a keel on a boat. Some people have a strong direct faith in an ultimate refuge - Buddha, God, Tao - some find it much more human and real if that faith is mediated by a relationship with somebody else who has such faith. If one has a little boat, it can be safer to hook it onto a big boat that has a deep keel. However, if one does so, one has to go where the big boat goes and trust that it is going to be alright.

  • My opinion is that there is currently a huge lack of empathy. Lack of empathy is what makes people to go blind, to stop caring about the “suffering” of others.

    When we see people different somehow from us (due religion, race, sex) sometimes we “switch off” the empathy button, the problem with this is that we no longer see beyond ourselves and our own beliefs. Even if what we think is really not true or it’s true but just for us (like some races feeling more intelligent that others).

    I think that one of the main issues is that more and more people become dehumanized, they stop caring about others feelings as well as wellbeing. When this happens, we see other people as something completely different and we forget that they also feel, they also breathe like us and have a heart just like ours. We can see them so different from us that they become a threat, “something strange”. I also think that some people will see them as “threats”, people that want to steal their jobs, their houses, people that will put their believes in doubt, and who knows… might even “convert them to what ever they believe, do, dress and think.

    When I lived in Afghanistan-Kabul, I was questioned so many times, being a 30 year old woman, from a western country and Buddhist!!! Still, I never had any doubt about who was I and what did I believed in (including personal believes that had nothing to do with religion).

    For me was important to understand the people who I was working with and who also were working for me, this made the difference in how they treated me.

    I remember they complained so much about people going to their countries and not even learning how to say “Hello” in Dari, because they were considered to be a “different race”. When people treated them as their equals (sorry for the cliché), they felt really included, cared and looked after.

    From my perspective, xenophobia is just a serious lack of empathy, a lack of capacity for seeing others as also human beings (and this go both ways in war), a lack of being able to identify their needs and their cause of pain. Because of all this, what happens is people simply don’t care and are really not interested in trying to see beyond, even a little.

    I think that a very important step to take if we really want xenophobia to disappear as much as it can, is to educate people, teach them that at least in the core, we are really not that different from each other. Common! We are not even that different from a mosquito or even a cucumber! (at least our DNA is not that different).

    Education, empathy and compassion, I think, are they key.

  • Shinran's 'bound for hell' passage is actually about him trusting his teacher. It is interesting that many people emphasise the out of context statement by Shinran that he himself had no disciples (totally misleading as he had many) as indicating that Shinshu disapproves of the teacher-disciple bond (quite untrue) when in fact Shinran talked of having complete faith in Honen - "I only believe what my teacher told me."

    I do not take it that the situation is fundamentally worsening nor fundamentally improving. Karma goes on and we go on making more of it, or not as the case may be. To make less of it requires faith. Faith manifests at many levels. At the highest level, we take refuge in the eternal Buddhas, which is to say, in love, compassion, peace and wisdom. At lower levels we have the faith to live in a civilised way beside other people who are unlike ourselves in varying degrees. When we fail to do so, things get worse until war breaks out. Then there is a great blood letting and eventually peace and hope are restored and the whole thing starts again. I had the good or bad fortune to be born at one of those points of hope just after a great conflict had ended.

    Trusting one's teacher, if the teacher is any good, should mean having increasing faith such as averts such conflicts. Otherwise, yes, we are all on the path to hell anyway.

  • Thanks, Massimo - important point about the effects of shrinking the space. Can we adapt? Wisdom and compassion needed.

  • experiments on rats within a cage of variable dimensions show that reciprocal aggressiveness rises up when the cage is shrunk.

    our planet is shrinking fast, in relative terms: i.e. the number of humans is increasing at an unbearable pace.  the demographic bomb has already exploded in parallel with the ecological one. Nobody can control such phenomena. Human stupidity is going to sink everything/everybody. The anti-immigrants walls are of course to be condemned, bur what about  the macroscopic case of the Catholic Church that could exert some kind of moral suasion on Africans' prolificity and yet it's totally silent, putting first the ideology of "life"!!. 

    no spaceship ahead. Let's do what is to be done: taming the mind, enacting compassion, developing knowledge, living an examined life. Who knows...

     

  • Very well said. As Gandhi said, there is enough for everyone's need but not greed. The refugee crisis and migration to Europe has opened all the issues related to xenophobia. To add on Canada, they are apparently doing some good job - several Canadian families or even single Canadians are adopting refugees and they are setting up many form of employment for refugees. Hope that their positive experience may enlighten others. 

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