borderlines

there is no justice in line-drawing.

i am thinking about the differences between crossing lines
and being crossed by lines and lines getting crossed.
to make it easier to think about, to blow it up, i think of
borders crossing people, people crossing borders
and people forced to cross; nations themselves arbitrary
constructs, but with real consequence...

today in the nytimes, an article: 'race gap: crime vs.
punishment' in which it states statistics and then
quotes angela davis out of context, but importantly,
saying that she doesn't just blame the intent of justice-bringers,
but somethings [like racism] are unconscious.

this reminds me of something merton writes about the collective
guilt and the need “for a man who wants to be in good faith
to cease identifying himself with actions that are causing the evil
in question, and to disclaim any intention of further participating
in these acts, while also doing whatever he can to restore
the balance of justice and of violated rights. The problem is of
course that in deep and complex problems of this nature,
the responsibility goes far into the area of the unconscious attitudes
and prejudices we all have, and in that area we cannot control
all our reactions at will. That is what makes the whole thing
so terribly hard. But we must as least desire to have a lucid,
honest and non-mythical view of the hard realities, in order to
try to deal with them.”

what the line-drawing mayor seems to wish, is for the dialogue
to disappear; this need to silence voices must come from an
extreme uncomfortability he has, a need to pretend that such
problems don't exist, rather than the desire to understand where
such problems originate and what to try to do to resolve them
or at least to find an opening for the airing of the uncomfortability...

the other thing in the nytimes today was the number of women
who have been violently raped by ex-rwandan genocidaires in the
dr congo just in the last year alone: 27,000
i feel that such a figure, such a number, and the lack of
dialogue and effort surrounding these staggering events
(not to mention the killing of more than 3 million in the dr congo
in the last war) is something that must be (here is the rant)
addressed. part of my rwandan application was toward this
addressing, but obviously there needs to be ways through
the morass of political correctness, postcolonial critique
(dangerous, albeit somewhat well-intentioned and door-opening,
in the same way that we were speaking of postmodernism being
double-edged in that it brings voices to the fore that were not
previously privileged in one particular mass public, while simultaneously
dangerously subscribing narratives for writers of color, etc...).

okay, the rant is, well, a place, an opening?, a hope of a beyond
the red ground of strange fruit, without betraying the meaning
of such ground, but rather paying homage to an underground history...

s