Monday, 08/20/2001

conference on racism

Then what would the administration achieve by staying away? Perhaps the United States would prefer to forgo an opportunity to clarify its performance on racism, addressed rather negatively last week by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in a review of the U.S. government's six-year-overdue report to the UN on racism in this country.

Well, DUH. (Apparently, this is the DUH update today.)

My, this World Conference on Racism does seem to have people all fired up, doesn't it?

• The US and Israel threaten to walk over the issues of reparations for slavery and "Zionism as racism", respectively; Israel doesn't even want Palestinian policy on the agenda (understandably, especially given recent developments).


• Considering its recent dissection at the hands of the UN on the issue of racism (although it didn't seem all that bad to me, frankly, given that it proceeds from a firmly mistaken notion of the US' governmental structure and power), the US' reluctance to attend is also understandable, if entirely pitiable. All sorts of people want Colin Powell to attend -- assuming that the US attends officially -- as a marker of the distance that the US has come in overcoming racism. Of course, as the highest ranking US government official of color ever, this argument has some point; more telling, however, should be the issue that as the Secretary of State, with the exception of certain aspects of immigration policy, he has no domestic brief whatsoever. Attendance as an official of the US government with, quite explicitly, no power whatsoever to affect domestic policy would be wildly inappropriate.


• The Black Leadership Forum is sending its own unofficial delegation, with so many members of Congress that other countries attending may be justifiably confused as to whether or not the US is officially attending or not; the constant refrain from the BLF representatives' lips will need to be "What we say is not the official policy or position of the United States." Which, one somehow suspects, will not be a phrase that, in any way, ever crosses their lips.

Mind, I do believe there is some justification for the (unstated) position that the US would have little "opportunity to clarify its performance on racism". Given the ideological slant of a conference that put Zionism as racism and Reparations on its preliminary agenda in a relatively inflammatory way, there is reason to believe that it would be an opportunity for continuous public verbal assault instead.

Of course, staying away, and citing those grounds as reason, pretty much guarantees the continuous public verbal assault in any event. I suppose the issue is, as long as you have to take the medicine, where would you rather take it? And not attending is a magnificent dodge in and of itself; it deflects the attack from the policies, where it belongs, onto the attendance, which is really a non-issue in any meaningful way.

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the last ten ...

12/19/2001: vive la france

12/19/2001: princess, redux

12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld

12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now

12/18/2001: interesting donation

12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed

12/18/2001: saudi princess

12/17/2001: new resolve

12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right

12/17/2001: polluters ho!