All Mixed Up

Further Thoughts on Racism

The best ideas are at the edge of reason, always pushing at accepted practice, redefining the unspoken hypotheses by which we live. Definitions should be of the moment, often unsettled because new ideas push out old and explain life in more precise, more realistic ways. In a recent post on racism I upheld the Wikipedia definition as the best we would get, given that it encompassed race and discrimination in a manner that reflected us, humankind, in all our bitterness and complexity. But I’ve been thinking more about this stain on our self-consciousness lately and there could well be definition still to add. Not incidentally, the many editors working on the Wikipeda article think so too, but they’ve confused detail with explanation in a retreat from the way things are.

First, let’s consider the changes made to the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article, which is the touchstone for the ideas contained therein. The original paragraph read as follows:

Racism has many definitions, the most common being that members of one racial group consider themselves intrinsically superior to members of other racial groups. Racism inherently starts with the assumption that there are taxonomic differences between different groups of people. Without this assumption, prejudices against different peoples would be categorized as being prejudices related to national or regional origin, religion, occupation, social status or some other distinction.

As I mentioned in my initial post, this is by no means a precise definition, but it settles on racism not as a matter of fact but as a matter of opinion. In other words, racism is a contestable act of judgement.

Yet the new definition struggles to remove the inherent choice in such a position. It claims that:

Racism, by its simplest definition, is discrimination based on the racial groups people belong to. People with racist beliefs might hate certain groups of people according to their racial groups, or in the case of institutional racism, certain racial groups may be denied rights or benefits. Racism typically points out taxonomic differences between different groups of people, even though anybody can be racialised, independently of their somatic differences. According to the United Nations conventions, there is no distinction between the term racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination.

The first sentence is clearly just a clumsy re-write, seeking to add ‘discrimination’ where it really isn’t needed, which allows ‘hate’ to slip into the sentence that follows. Clearly this is a more emotional definition, and it offers examples such as institutional racism and the United Nations definition to limit the scope of what people might imagine racism could be. But most interesting is the third sentence, which has been shifted from a discussion of presumed taxonomic difference (a difference of type underlying racist beliefs) to merely ‘pointing out’ inherent somatic differences, whether or not those differences in physical appearance make any difference at all.

What these changes obscure is that the new definition staggers towards indecision – what once described complexity is now ruled by equivocation. The anonymous ‘217.44.210.7’ points out similar problems with the definition in the discussion page attached to the article. I’m left with the feeling that someone has wanted, but not quite managed, to write that all observation of difference between people of varying physical appearance is racist. That would be as ludicrous as claiming races are strictly definable when inter-relations between ethnic groups have been inherent in the very expansion of humanity.

Of Culture and Callousness

An Important Account of Domestic Helpers in Hong Kong

Speak of culture and others will immediately imagine depth, profundity, an underlying explanation of the way things are. But culture is a notoriously slippery term, often promising more than it delivers. It literally means ‘to grow’, whence comes ‘cultivated’, which we tend to associate with being civilised. That’s hardly a guide to living. But as Clifford Geertz so persuasively argued in his Interpretation of Cultures, the term more properly denotes the way in which meaning is transmitted symbolically through human communication – we speak and act our cultures rather than experience them dumbly. And we do so across time, with cultural change at the epicentre of our lives. So when someone works for 10 years on a doctoral dissertation entitled ‘Culture of Indifference’ and describes the trials and abuse of Filipina domestic helpers in Hong Kong, it’s more than worth listening to the new, counter-cultural voice.

Estelle Kennelly’s ‘Culture of Indifference: Dilemmas of the Filipina Domestic Helpers in Hong Kong’ is available free for download through a Creative Commons licence. Kennelly completed the dissertation in 2007 while a graduate student of social anthropology at St Andrew’s University in Scotland, having conducted extensive fieldwork in Hong Kong from mid-1999 to early 2001, including at migrant women’s shelters. Released online this week, her findings shout what others only whisper – that engrained into Hong Kong society, at the individual, social and judicial levels, is a culture of indifference towards foreign domestic helpers that fosters abuse.

That abuse – and there is no other word for it – ranges from exploitation through extraordinarily long working hours to verbal, physical and sexual violence, drawing in underpayment, deliberate isolation and the deprivation of freedom. But the situation remains an elephant in the room of Hong Kong life seven years after Kennelly completed her fieldwork because a climate of fear suppresses the capacity of helpers to adequately defend themselves.

Getting Organised for Good

After the Limits of Web 2.0

Some people can never really get organised, but others do it with natural ease. At the group level much the same occurs, with everything possible from loose yet effective organisation to downright chaotic failure. But in blogs, social networking platforms like Friendster and photo sharing sites like Flickr, Web 2.0 is a great leveller, offering forums for spontaneous activity, flexible boundaries that allow groups to form, function and disperse with minimal effort.

In Here Comes Everybody, Cay Shirky calls this “organising without organisations” and the sense of freestyle coordination plays out most often in protest movements. The other blog I maintain, A Death in Hong Kong, is a classic case of that, or at least seems to be. But ask yourself what more could be achieved if this sort of temporary organising became permanent, if Web 2.0 could be a decisive factor in social change.

That notion has been a constant concern lately as the group behind a Death in Hong Kong has started to manoeuvre it away from a focus on one disappearance and death to the broader social, economic and legal problems faced by migrant workers in Hong Kong. So when reading Dave Wallace’s brief Lifekludger post on Clay Shirky and the limits of Web 2.0 yesterday I encountered a few simple but serious issues very much worthy of further consideration.

Dave specialises in workarounds, and he needs to because he’s quadriplegic. Lifekludger is an attempt to draft a community of like-minded people, those willing to look beyond the way things are to how they might yet be, with a nudge or two. Workarounds are ways of getting by and getting better with limited opportunities. I mentioned Dave in a previous post, and his observations tend to make me stop and think, then think again.

This time around Dave simply mentions that the social networks created on Web 2.0 tend to be used for STOP actions when GO actions, or forms of positive change, are needed to give his concept of a “collaborative ecosystem” more traction. He does so while introducing a recent Clay Shirky interview that breaks open the whole idea of network limits to poke at how they function.

Shirky mentions that continuity and a density of trust are crucial in moving towards more permanent Web 2.0 networks, but that conversation and a shared mission easily break down. We have a protest culture, he says, but “we don’t yet have a constructive culture”. He also mentions, at the prompting of the interviewer, that third generation mobile phones are starting to proliferate in developing countries, which will rapidly narrow the ‘digital divide’ in telephony.

Speaking in Tongues

Michael Erard’s Flawed Take on the Future of English

History has a habit of playing tricks on those who claim to see the future. Hindsight – that underrated ability to reflect rather than forget – makes easy mock of unquestioned presumptions as they fade into undignified obscurity. It’s common now to speak of English as the coming ‘global’ language, pointing to the multitudes who use it as their second tongue, but it’s impossible to predict what will happen next. Perhaps that’s why Michael Erard has a different take on the matter in the July issue of Wired.

Erard’s argument is that English, with a tightening grip on intercultural communication given the sheer diversity of its non-native speakers, will change rapidly to suit new circumstances. ‘Panglish’, or a global form of English with many linguistic influences, will emerge soon. This isn’t an original position – it’s been floating around the English-language media lately, with the Telegraph in the UK somewhat vaguely reporting a study mentioned in Scientific American last March. But Erard gives the Panglish line a little more substance, creating an important place for Chinese speakers of English in the change.

Writing first of English in the near future, Erard makes the unsupported claim that “by 2020 native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language.” You could well ask why that particular year and not any other – futurists do like nice round numbers.

And by what calculation did Erard reach the figure of 2 billion people? He gives no answer but the inclusion of those only learning the language is a clue. It’s a guess, nicely rounded up. To include learners, who might never have a fully practical use for the language, as bona fide non-native speakers is a little like including passengers as train drivers. Well, you could argue, they’re both using the same vehicle.

Sleep, Damn It!

On the Perils of Work-Related Fatigue

Spending time around someone who constantly lacks sleep is not a pleasant experience. My family could tell a few tales about me recently – irritability, weight gain, poor decision making and an immune system that seems to invite every small illness that’s floating around. This week has been particularly difficult for them, with work dragging me ever further away from the fabled land of Nod. But at least I have time to rest and reflect on the weekend, time to change my ways. What about people don’t?

As I’ve mentioned before, there are many tens of thousands of migrant workers here in Hong Kong who work around 18 hours a day, 6 days a week. Or, to put it another way, they sleep 6 hours or less a night. How does that affect their work and their health? And what are the long-term consequences of contract-inspired sleep loss? First, allow me to set the scene with a story I know well.

My sister-in-law is the domestic helper to a wealthy family who quite frankly don’t need to be waited on hand and foot. But such is their acquired dependence on children woken, breakfast made and late-night snacks prepared by someone else that she rarely sleeps before midnight and rises by six. On Sunday she visits my family and me, sleeping a few hours until she leaves at 6 pm to beat a draconian curfew. At dinner she’s back at work, and won’t rest again until late at night. Each week her fatigue combined with hard work becomes a little more difficult to endure. But ask if she’s coping and she’ll tell you she is.

Clearly the need to sleep during the day on Sunday suggests she’s wrong.

They Can Have My Support . . .

But I’m Keeping My Mind

Time plays terrible tricks on rhetoric. A statement that might once have seemed self-evident or deeply insightful can, with passing years and changing circumstances, become stale, then dated and eventually ludicrous. The slogans of the seventies and the formulas of the fifties don’t always work in the here and now. They retreat from understanding, with social cues and passing references no longer able to carry the intended meaning. But they persist in a kind of Twilight Zone, uttered by those who want change yet don’t really know how to achieve it, or are relatively powerless to do so in one way or another.

If you think the rhetoric of revolution is dead in the developed world, you’ll need to think again. It’s alive, though barely, in some migrant worker organisations, and it surfaced here in Hong Kong recently.

Attending the opening session of an international migrant worker conference on the weekend I was in turn bewildered, amused, annoyed and finally, almost inevitably in hindsight, stunned by a barrage of rhetoric that I thought no longer had a place in political discourse. Raised voices, thumping on the lectern, fingers stabbing at the air, all these things shouted indignity at the capitalist world system, the ‘imperialist’ agenda of multinational business, the sins of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the relentless ‘toil’ of comrades in struggle.

Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I’m very much supportive of migrant worker groups, and write often about the virtual commodification of domestic helpers here in Hong Kong. An image that will never leave me is my wife, crouched on the floor at 4 o’clock the Monday morning after we married, crying because she had to be back at work in an hour. That, and worse, is the constant outlook for the domestic helper in Hong Kong – few escape it and most are items to be used, and discarded when no longer needed.

Such is the exploitation inherent in the wage differentials between developed areas and those like my wife’s native Philippines, which is in the chronic grip of underdevelopment, mismanagement and the sheer avarice of massive corruption. When you move from the glare of poverty to the shadow of wealth your situation obviously improves, but we should never under-estimate the capacity of employers to sense vulnerability and exploit it.

The Presumptions of Experience

Reading as Antidote

Experience is often considered the ultimate form of learning, the ne plus ultra of education. What we do and how we act is taken as the full measure of what we know, and what we might yet know. The past is at a premium, with knowledge as a synonym for memory carrying with it the presumption that we don’t forget, misunderstand or misinterpret. Also implied is that experience can be transferred between people, regardless of background, inclination and aptitude. So we speak of ‘experience sharing’, as though actions can be lifted out of context and passed around, instantly relevant to anyone who grasps at them.

The problem with this somewhat stylised scenario is that it tends towards the non-literary. There are many situations in which practical, hands-on learning combines very well with reading and more interpretive activities. The current trend towards service-learning in universities is a perfect example of that. Students are given the chance to apply what they’ve learned – through instruction and their own reading – to community service projects that they organise and manage with minimal oversight from lecturers.

But what about community organisations themselves? Moving away from established, funded NGOs, many grass-roots groups draw together volunteers from lower socio-economic backgrounds who work too long or too hard every day to have much of a chance to read. In situations like these, learning from other people’s experience becomes an attractive, easy option.

I recently attended a meeting that began the long process of organising a self-help society for migrant workers in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong. These people, mainly women, are extremely hard working for very low wages. The idea behind the group is to help domestic helpers in times of crisis, and to educate members about educating themselves. The sorts of areas we’re dealing with range from the more obvious need for familiarity with legal rights – both in the workplace and within society at large – to less obvious lack of information about where and when to seek medical help for potentially embarrassing conditions.

As the meeting progressed a friend mentioned that one of the primary measures of self-education should always be to read, and to read as often as possible. Given that many of these people work up to 18 hours a day, that could be a very limited exposure to the written word, but it seemed important nevertheless.

Unfortunately, the reaction was negative – not from the main group members, but from the seasoned and unusually insightful people who were coordinating the meeting. One said that she would fall asleep if she had to read a book, and the other spoke at length of networking and the difference between book learning and ‘relevant’ experience as the basis of transferring important information.

Until that moment I’d though of reading as a supplement to experience, but now I realise it could well be an antidote.

Wrong Arm of the Law

Remedial Reading for a Would-Be Sleuth

Justice is a complex issue, covered over with perceptions and shot through with assumptions – many of which are surprisingly wide of the mark. In the move from being just, or morally right, to dispensing justice, an elite intercedes and begins to make decisions on what is usual, what is fair, what seems out of place. Like any apparatus of power, the legal system is a step aside from society, with its own, often fragmented, understanding of how people live, prosper, decline and die.

The new micoreviews in the toolbar at the right are part of my reaction to that disassociation – the hesitant beginning of an inquiry into what makes justice just, and the ways in which it can err.

A crucial element in that inquiry is the disappearance and death of Vicky Flores here in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong. The police inquiry into the case is currently plodding towards a conclusion that the dead woman was irrational, prone to dabbling in the occult and by implication – though never explicitly stated – a likely candidate for suicide. But gathering together the scant documentary evidence of police conduct so far, and keeping in mind what they have said publicly, the investigation seems strangely curtailed. Why focus on the possible activities of a dead woman when her home and work life (she was a live-in domestic helper) are by and large ignored?

With that sort of oversight in mind I began reading about police investigation and the English legal system, which is the basis for Hong Kong’s own. And where else to turn for a soft introduction but to that perennial super-sleuth Sherlock Holmes?

That decision was a little less whimsical than it might seem, because E. J. Wagner has written an eminently readable history of forensic investigation using Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous character as a foil. Wagner’s Science of Sherlock Holmes picks out episodes in Conan Doyle’s tales of mystery to trace the history of forensic investigation as it emerged in Victorian England, all the while highlighting the benefits and limits of precision detective work.

Needless to Say

Eviatar Zerubavel on Silence and Denial

Words are powerful, words change lives. Spoken or unspoken they shape and focus perceptions, permit or deny action. Even the absence of talk isn’t devoid of words. In our least articulate moments silence speaks to us, urging thought in a specific direction, demanding that we describe life in certain ways when the conversation starts again. Eviatar Zerubavel knows this, and pries open silence to reveal the babble of repression in things best left unsaid.

Zerubavel’s Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life is a brief but utterly perceptive guide to the undiscussable. In only eighty seven pages of argument it outlines the social collusion that culminates in conspiracies of silence, tracking through examples ranging from survivor silence about the holocaust to the unwillingness of families harbouring alcoholics to speak their self-imposed sentence.

Central to Zerubavel’s thesis is the proverbial elephant in the room, that overwhelming presence of denial we confirm with an absence of speech. The point is not that no-one knows about an untoward event or a pervasive social ill. Rather, they fail to acknowledge the obvious, acting as though it doesn’t exist, and through their actions might yet not exist. By failing to speak we skirt the awkward truths grown abundantly throughout life, hoping irrationally that the family, the group or the society will benefit from our constant evasion.

And this is not a haphazard process. Zerubavel shows that we’re “socialized to focus only on certain parts or aspects of situations while systematically ignoring others”. We don’t ignore by chance or inclination, but through social pressures that turn us one way and then another, unspoken censures that ensure achievement, satisfaction and happiness are not forthcoming for those who greet any situation with a cry of ‘this is wrong! Things must change!’

So it should be obvious that conspiracies of silence are counterproductive – they cripple lives, and through that harsh, grinding process they retard society. Look around you and ask, what is obvious but unspoken? What proverbial elephant passes by, too close for comfort but not close enough for shouts of alarm? And, more to the point, who actively denies the elephant when it’s exposed?

Pain Stops Play

On Dizziness and Dualism

Vertigo is a curious phenomenon – something like the split-second at which stability becomes movement, repeated once, twice and again, always spinning around. In its mild state the condition is relatively common, but given that it’s rarely spoken about there must be quite a few silently worried people walking one cautious step at a time. The very realisation that the brain is misinterpreting its physical surrounds is not a pleasant experience. An effect for which we might pay substantial amounts of money on a Friday night – and alcohol is seldom more than vertigo in a bottle – is not welcome when it arrives unannounced, uninvited. So the feeling that things are slipping away brings with it anxiety, which increases the sense that the brain has taken on a life of its own.

But, of course, the brain is not independent of the thinker. Vertigo seems to highlight the distinction between the mind – our conscious thoughts, our perceptions – and the brain, the organ that makes all thought possible. To perceive uncontrollable movement when you know that nothing is happening suggests a clear division between the physical processes of the brain and the purely mental way in which those processes are understood. Yet even that description highlights how the very popular notion of a mind-brain dualism fails to notice the brain generating the thoughts that the ethereal mind uses to doubt its own dependence on the brain.

So much for a philosophical cure.

In Civitas, Servitude

On the Implications of Citizenship

Who wants to be a citizen? That’s an important question because most people are never asked. They’re born into the role and it could well mean very little to them in their daily lives. Sure, many people apply for citizenship, even hold dual citizenship and are expected to walk away from something to prove their complete or provisional loyalty. But most of us simply think of citizenship as an ideal and the citizen as someone lodged between a role model and a relic, depending on the point of view. Still, we keep talking about responsibility to this country or that, and the dubious ‘fact’ that rights bring with them duties. These are traces of citizenship buried within our perceptions of the world. But do we want them, and – even more importantly – do we need them?

My answer is no.

In a previous post I made clear my position on citizenship. With its links to civility, in its attachment to the status quo at some level or another, the very notion is a curb on dissent. You could counter that the idea of ‘social citizenship’ actively encourages change with its focus on equal rights and opportunities. But even if that focus leads to activism, it is a form of activism that carries with it an implicit allegiance to equality as a new status quo, another way of dressing up the body politic.

Throughout its history the seemingly natural concept of the ‘citizen’ has always shifted attention away from the implications of citizenship. The English word derives from the Latin ‘civitas’, which denotes place of residence and political affiliation together. A citizen was originally a product of a city-state – Rome principally, but also the Greek city states before it. The city created the citizen, gave him rights above others and responsibilities in government. In the shift to democracy and other modern forms of governance the word has never lost that dual designation of person-place.

So can we ever be citizens of the world, as some people like to declare themselves? Yes, of course, but there will always be a tension between the place of origin and the place of domicile. Those who hold citizenship in one country and live in another generally lack rights of some kind. I’ve met Filipinos who have lived in Hong Kong for more than 20 years but have no legal right to reside here longer than the term of their current labour contract.

Conventionally Speaking

How We Listen to Nothing

Who speaks in the silence between words? In his masterly essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell wrote of hackneyed phrases, terms that enter the popular imagination deprived of their original meaning, devoid of context and “ready to think your thoughts for you”. They appeal to the emotions rather than the rational mind, and use silence as a shield, as a way to stop true understanding. Their intent is negative – by excluding something they allow someone or something else to speak quietly to you, urging you to ignore what you already know.

Some of these phrases are deliberate manipulations, others are unfortunate cultural lapses. All are dangerous.

Consider first a term that I often see in my professional capacity as an editor in Hong Kong – the ‘Tiananmen Incident’. Now regardless of the dubious capitalization, what does this describe? An event that took place in Tiananmen presumably, and anyone with a little curiosity could easily find that the site is a plaza in Beijing, a famous meeting place and home to Mao Zedong’s tomb. But what does the term refuse to say? That 19 years and two days ago the Chinese military, at the instructions of the government, massacred hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators, mainly students.

That’s common knowledge, right? Yes, but in China it’s not commonly spoken. And in Hong Kong, that little part of China which really isn’t China at all, academics tend not to use the term ‘massacre’. They sanitise the situation with ‘incident’. That’s the official government line, and as Hong Kong academic Carsten Holz argued in the April print edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review last year, those who don’t listen to the voice in the silence soon find that their research in China generates few useful results. Data are not forthcoming and the mandatory local research partner is unlikely to be found.