Three Timely Books on the Impact of Refugees on the West

I recently read three novels with a similar theme: Chris Cleave, Little Bee; Mohsin Hamid, Exit West; and Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone. The three authors from England, Pakistan, and Germany, respectively, all write about refugees from the Middle East or Africa in the West.

Each of the novels makes the point that the boundaries we establish between nations and between the West and developing nations are arbitrary, often cruelly so, and that one of the often-overlooked casualties in creating these boundaries is the humanity of well-to-do westerners.

The authors made me think about how much energy that I and people like me put into obscuring and ignoring the profound and undeserved privileges that benefit us and the powerful economic and political forces devoted to maintaining these cruel advantages. Beginning to dismantle these privileges and cruelties is not the work of an afternoon. But profound benefits await those who start trying, not least of which are a much deeper sense of our common and vulnerable humanity.

Hamid puts it this way: "we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed [one of the novel's protagonists] felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world. . . ."

Sending Professors Back to High School

As I near my one-year anniversary of volunteering weekly at Reynolds High School, I am beginning to appreciate how much I have benefited from the experience.

Over a decade ago a participated in a program that worked the other way around: Teaching American History projects that entailed exposing elementary, middle, and high school teachers to academic historians. Some of them confided that there was often a big gap between what we wanted to teach them and what their students were interested in and capable of learning in the here and now, the world in which they operated.

Many high school students present challenges that university faculty are unaccustomed to. They may be actively hostile to learning, to being in school. Some are many years behind. Others are dealing with various types of trauma.

But these are often the students who are the most rewarding to work with, as their successes are so consequential. There are all these little awakenings that you get to help ignite or at least witness. As class sizes grow, schools need more of us to step up and provide the sort of attention that makes such awakenings more and more common.

I love working with high school teachers because they teach me so much about teaching. I have learned that engagement always comes first. University professors often expect our students to rise to whatever level we set. Teachers who are expected to help every student improve must instead find a topic or activity that engages them and then work from there. It doesn't always work, but it often does. I have also learned from high school teachers that students are much more likely to care about learning if they have reason to believe that their teacher cares about them, that there is a highly relational element to teaching and that if you can find part of a student's work to praise, she or he will usually work harder.

For many intellectual types, high school was a difficult, awkward time we were glad to put behind us. But going back has been very rewarding and a boon to my own teaching. find myself caring much more about my university students and much more engaged with my own classrooms, plus I get to get to be part of little miracles, moments when youth recognize their potential to be somebody.

Women are People

In the early 1970s it was routine for boys at Astoria Junior and Senior High Schools to snap or grab and pull women's bra straps. When I went to the University of Idaho in the fall of 1975, about half of the runners on the cross country team got in the habit of squeezing young women's bottoms when we ran past. It got to the point that women would back up against trees when they saw the University of Idaho cross country team coming. Then someone complained to someone at the university, and our coach said to knock it off. There was no punishment or lectures.

I didn't participate in the harassment, but neither did I confront anyone who did. My point is, the whole thing was viewed by we young men as routine.

Now the routine is being confronted, head on. Men across the political and cultural spectrum are at last being called out for behavior that leaves women feeling humiliated--or worse. We may be seeing hundreds if not thousands of resignations coming. Men have been getting a pass for this sort of behavior for a long time.

Perhaps the time has come when most men will accept this idea with all of its implications: women are people.

Narrative4 Story Sharing and Radical Empathy

About three weeks ago I took a workshop at Portland State on Narrative4 Story Sharing and then tried it out with my Freshman Inquiry class. What a blast!

Narrative4 is an organization that promotes shared story telling as a way of achieving deep empathy with others, particularly those with quite different experiences or beliefs.

The format is simple but profound. Participants after getting a brief introduction pair up and share a meaningful story with each other. The goal of the listener is to listen closely and to ask questions only if confused. Then the pairs return to a circle of a dozen or so people, and people share and listen to each others' stories. The tellers relate that they feel like they have stepped into someone else's life. Those whose stories are being told are able to examine the story from a different perspective. At the end, the members of each pair tell each other their hopes for each other.

I was paired with a friend whom I have long had great respect for, and her story took me much deeper into her life and how she views herself. In my class, we were blown away by the bravery and intensity of the stories, how people we thought we knew had such deep and powerful experiences.  It brought people from diverse ethnic and backgrounds together and radically deepened my regard for the class members, as I now have such a deeper appreciation for who they are and what they have been through.

Mark Reynolds at PopMatters, "an international magazine of cultural criticism and analysis," just did a long, thoughtful reflection on my book on American views of Africa from a Pan-African perspective. It is entitled "You May Be Black or You May Be White But in Africa You're an American First."

Like many liberal-minded white academics, I wrestle with the question of how to approach African-American history and life in my work. Growing up in rural Clatsop County did not exactly give me a working knowledge of black culture, and I was immersed in the racism, patent and latent, of that time and place. But not addressing the lives of African Americans in one's work hardly seems like a workable or helpful approach, either.

The more I learn about African-American culture, the more I am struck by how ignorant I remain, and how complex the subject often is. Certainly listening--whether it is to friends talking or writers writing--to many different people is a good start.

On Frank Bruni, White Men, and Listening

Frank Bruni's recent column in the New York Times, "I'm a White Man, Hear Me Out," generated a lot of discussion and made me reflect. Bruni takes issue with the point of view that white men are disqualified from participating in discussions on race and that we often receive mixed messages, such as (he is quoting Mark Lilla): "You must understand my experience, and you can't understand my experience."

I think Bruni well captures how many white males feel about the discussion around race these days, and that most white men are apt to vote for the person or party who is not asserting or implying that they are racist.

But I also think that it is perfectly understandable, even logical, for people who have been systematically harmed by systemic racism practiced over centuries to feel both that white people  must and cannot understand them. Moving between hope and despair and feeling both things at once about the current state of race and racism in America should be a common experience.

I have had the good fortune to be in many situations--not just in Africa but in Portland, too--in which I was the only white person in a room, and I have co-facilitated or sat in many multi-racial groups that discussed race and racism. I have found that the capacity to just listen with empathy to someone's experience of racism is very powerful for both the listener and the speaker. One of the more pervasive and often subtle privileges of white masculinity is the privilege of having the floor. All sorts of possibilities open up when that dynamic shifts.

Just listening won't fix the problem, and I believe that there is a time for everyone to be heard. But for white men to just listen might be a powerful and promising beginning.

Zed Books of the UK has just published a book by Yo Ghana! President and co-founder, David Peterson del Mar: African, American: From Tarzan to Dreams from My Father, Africa in the U.S. Imagination. The book is dedicated to the late Brando Akoto, one of our organization's visionaries.

Leslie James, a historian at Queen Mary, University of London, remarks that the book: "Demonstrates how Americans projected their own gender, class, and racial psychoses into their experiences and renderings of the African continent. Peterson del Mar seeks a critical approach not to what Africa is, but to how Americans have perceived it. With this comprehensive source, we might begin to understand the difference."

Kathryn Mathers, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University, states: "Through a comprehensive yet sensitive analytical reading of fiction, autobiography, and film, Peterson del Mar shows just how much Africa has and continues to shape what it means to be American." The book is summarized in a blog post on the Organization of American Historians website.

Contact us (yoghana.org@gmail.com) if you are interested in purchasing a copy for $20.00, and the profit will be donated to Yo Ghana!

"I Will Not Sit and Fold My Arms"

By the age of sixty, most academics have their courses worked out. But I taught a service-learning course for the first time this past term that was a blast.

The Portland State University students were from an Honor's College seminar class, and most of them volunteered as tutors with immigrant students at Reynolds High School under the direction of Debra Tavares. Two worked with middle school students taking an enrichment course on interviewing and research at St. Andrew Nativity School. One worked as a tutor at Africa House, part of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization.

The PSU students were delightful to work with. Some were immigrants themselves, most had been born in the U.S. Some were on the shy side, others very outgoing. Some had loved high school, some had hated it, and one had dropped out.

What they all shared in common was a passion for helping others and adapting to what students needed. And the younger students loved them.

I remember that about twenty years ago, when my life partner and I contemplated adoption across racial lines, I had a sense that having a son of color would entail leaving my cocoon of privilege, that I'd start to see the world at times from my dark-skinned child's perspective.

For me--and I think for the PSU students who had grown up in comfortable circumstances--tutoring vulnerable youth is a bit like that. You start to learn what sort of trauma refugees have witnessed, what sort of difficulties and prejudices that so many youth and their parents face. Like parenting a child of color, it becomes more difficult to assume and to assert that life is always good and easy and fair.

There is a lot of discussion these days among progressive-minded Americans about how to be in solidarity with refugees and other immigrants. I think what we found is that providing some concrete assistance (help in learning English) and a willingness to sit and listen to people's stories can be very powerful. Deep listening can provide youth with permission to start thinking about and sharing their remarkable, often painful, stories. And once you've heard those stories and witnessed the courage of the people telling them--well, your perspective on life is deepened and changed.

I'll give Joel, one of our courageous young students from Reynolds who lost her parents and siblings a day after her birth, the last word on this: ""I will not sit and fold my arms."

Why I'm Posting Less Here

I plan to keep posting blogs here every few weeks, but much of my blogging has been subsumed by Yo Ghana's website or Facebook page.

My Author Interview

The Beyond Footnotes series of KPSU radio station and the PSU History Department recently interviewed me about my forthcoming book: African, American: From Tarzan to Dreams from My Father--Africa in the US Imagination. 

Click here to listen to the forty-five minute interview. The folks at Beyond Footnotes do a great job of preparing and asking questions, and there are many other interviews in the series.

The book will appear in mid-July and is dedicated to Mr. Brando Akoto, a Yo Ghana! board member who passed away late in 2015.

​For more information about the book, consult the Zed Books website.

Three Evening Scenes

• Tuesday night had already been a full day when I arrived at the Troutdale City Hall. I was there to talk a little bit about Yo Ghana!'s partnership with Reynolds High School, but mainly I was there to support two of our students. One of them was Rando, a small, ebullient Muslim girl from East Africa who has been interviewing family elders to relate their journey through civil war and refugee camps to America. Her voice started very faint, then became stronger and stronger as she shared the remarkable story, and the council members' eyes filled with respect and wonder.
  
  About two hours later I boarded a transit train and heard the voice of Diana calling to me, another one of our students, a girl from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who in the rainy night was in charge of her little brother and wheel-chair bound mother, all of them struggling to understand a new language and new skills such as how to negotiate the transit system in a wheelchair. But they seemed much more resolute than frail and not at all deterred by missing a stop.
  
  ​Then I joined an apartment full of Ghanaians full of joyful expectation. The wife and children of a leading volunteer were about to arrive, ending a separation of nearly five years. When they stepped into their new home it exploded with noise and joy. The eyes of the three young children were wide. So much to take in. Twenty years from now they'll still remember that night, and by then they'll be doing great things.
  
  ​Americans often ponder going to Africa and helping Africans. But Africa is also coming to us, and Africans' resilience, warmth, and determination are helping all of us, now and far into the future.

Making Sense of Each Other

​Kwame Anthony Appiah, the distinguished philosopher born to an English mother and a Ghanaian father, remarks in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers: "when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, sharing a human social life, you may like or dislike him, you may agree or disagree; but, if it is what you both want, you can make sense of each other in the end."

His words came to Wednesday morning during the Yo Ghana! Student Showcase at St. Andrew Church's Community Center in Northeast Portland. Students of Deb Tavares (shown above) who are learning English shared their work. A boy from the Democratic Republic of the Congo related how his father survived and escaped war; a Muslim girl from East Africa spoke of how she has come to love wearing her hijab; and a student from Mexico showed a photograph of the truck his father uses for his landscape business, a job that leaves him exhausted, but "this is how we make a life."

Yo Ghana Board member Dr. Labissiere shared the delights and fears of growing up in Haiti and how coming to the U.S. brought new challenges of racial and personal identity. Yo Ghana Project Coordinator Ibrahim Ibrahim emceed, young Maddie from Fowler Middle School read some fine letters on overcoming hardship from Ghana, and a bunch of students received awards. Students and teachers from Reynolds High School, Vernon School, St. Andrew Nativity School, Fowler Middle School, George Middle School, Campfire Columbia, and Judson School--all the way from Salem!--attended.

We are often urged to exercise tolerance toward others. Appiah urges us to "make sense of each other." I hope that tolerance and understanding can lead to deeper exchanges in which we learn from and move forward together.

Chance to Support Resilient Youth

Over the past ten weeks I've had the honor of working with some truly inspiring students who have immigrated to Portland from SE Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, West Africa, Eastern Europe, Mexico, and Central America. Next Wednesday, March 29, they'll be sharing from the interviews they've done of their parents and their photographs illustrating the rich range of cultures they are living out.

The event is 10:00 a.m. at the Community Center behind St. Andrew at NE Alberta and 7th in Portland. Admission is free.

Other students will read from their letters and letters from Ghana on the theme of adversity, stories of overcoming poverty, loss of parents, and abuse, among other challenges.

So please forward this to anyone who might be interested in learning from and supporting diverse, determined, and resilient young people.

Resilience: "There's Nothing More"

I'm one of those people who spent much of his life wondering what I should do when I grow up. I think I believed that there was one shining path that I was meant to walk, and all would be lost and wasted if I didn't find it. The poet Sylvia Plath wrote of watching figs ripen on a tree and being so afraid that she wouldn't pick the right one that they all grew rotten and fell to the ground. That image resonates for me.

A piece of advice I heard somewhere that made an impression on me was that one shouldn't try to do everything. Find a passion, something you are reasonably good at and care about, find others who feel the same, and work with them and stick to it. Christians often refer to this as one's "calling." But you don't need to be a Christian to be devoted to a particular cause, even in the face of apparent failure.

One problem that people like me, an American who has had a pretty comfortable life, commonly run into, is what to do when problems arise while pursuing one's calling. Many Americans are raised to expect happy endings, even if we are working with vulnerable people. As the humanitarian Paul Farmer puts it, we often assume that "all of the world problems can be fixed without any cost" to ourselves. Caring about other people inevitably leads to disappointment and suffering.

But if you truly believe in what you are doing and are collaborating with good people, you can decide that giving up simply isn't an option. One of my favorite fictional characters is the Nigerian headmaster in Helon Habila's Measuring Time, a man who is determined, against what seem to be impossible odds, to maintain a school for vulnerable children. "This is life," he explains. "There's nothing more." And that's more than enough.

Immigrants, Cosmopolitanism, and Conservatism

I've been spending a lot of time around immigrant students, lately, teenagers from all over the world. Some have been exposed to extreme trauma, fled violence, lived in refugee camps. Some have had much more ordinary lives. All find themselves in the U.S. trying to sort out how to reconcile or blend their traditions, the lives of their parents, with the American youth culture they encounter at middle and high school.

The children are diverse in ways that extend beyond their point of origin or their varied cultures. Some are shy. Others are anything but. Some love school, others, well, not so much.

I've long studied immigration, but much in the same way that I studied West Africa. It wasn't until I went there and experienced for myself that I was deeply affected by it.

And so I find myself deeply affected by these young people, by their ready gifts of friendship, their openness, their determination and optimism.

In today's polarized and often poisoned political culture, liberals and conservatives often divide over immigration, with conservatives fearing that such people might dilute American culture. Yet immigrants are often deeply conservative. Most have strong religious beliefs, a ferocious work ethic, and a deep commitment to their families. The other day in one class we discussed the tension between commitment to family and pursuing one's dreams. Students strongly asserted that they would not live apart from their parents to pursue any dream, not after the sacrifices their parents had made for them. Some had tears in their eyes as they spoke about how much their families meant to them.

It makes a person think about what life is for, in the end, which I think is a great benefit of cosmopolitanism, of seeking contact with a variety of cultures. Cosmopolitanism may seem like a liberal idea, but it often leads to more conservative (if "conservative" is defined in a traditional sort of way rather than as whatever the Republican Party currently favors) points of view.

The Gift of Turning 60

The most obvious blessing of being sixty years old is that it beats the alternative.

But I've noticed a lot of other benefits, too.

One of the historical anomalies of modern life is that we live a long time. Paired with the great comfort--again, relatively speaking--that most of us in the West enjoy, this understandably leads to a sort of assumption that we have all the time in the world. And that can become a sort of burden. "What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?" wonders a character in The Great Gatsby.

Old age has a way of reminding you that time is short. People your age--or younger--that you care about start passing away, sometimes with scant notice. One's energy level and memory are not what they used to be. Weight is easier to put on, harder to lose. Ailments start creeping in--or sometimes rushing in.

Life becomes more of a gift, less of a burden. One hopes for many more years, especially productive and healthy ones. But clearly most of life is in the rear-view mirror, and the road ahead may be much shorter and more difficult than we hope for. And that is a good thing to ponder.