Ms. Maya Soetoro-Ng, President Obama’s half sister was in Los Angeles, hosting a photographic exhibition about mixed race children at the Japanese American National Museum in Japan Town. Ms. Soetoro-Ng had the same mother as President Obama but with an Indonesian father.
Ms. Soetoro-Ng stated::”We can do much to help our communities loosen their boundaries and begin to welcome a multitude of ways of being … to make sure that individuals of mixed race, religion or ethnicities don’t feel the need to choose one or the other but see their layers as a gift, something that adds beauty,” she said.
The program was pegged to the museum’s current exhibit, “Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids,” which runs through Sept. 26. The photo exhibit of 80 children ages 12 and younger, along with a companion book, was created by Kip Fulbeck, a Santa Barbara photographer, filmmaker, athlete and art professor of Chinese, Irish, Welsh and English descent.
The photos feature children making funny faces and scowling ones, carrying basketballs and guitars, blankets and stuffed bears. They are Filipina, Puerto Rican, Korean, Hawaiian, Irish, Italian, Cambodian — you name it.
Asked who they are, the children don’t necessarily identify themselves by their race. Or if they do, they claim multiple identities in what Fulbeck and Soetoro-Ng say reflects wide-open, flexible minds that adults should learn from.
“I am me. I am an animal lover. I am also a dream but I am real,” wrote Jada, an 8-year-old girl of African American, Puerto Rican, Dominican and Italian ancestry shown in her photo with a guitar and wide grin.
Keyan, a smiling boy of African American, Indian and Irish descent, scrawled on his page: “I am Brown like Barack Obama. One Day I will Be a Pro foot Ball Player and the President.”
Nationwide, 7.3 million Americans identified as mixed race in 2000, the first year the U.S. Census allowed people to check two or more racial categories. The number is expected to rise in the 2010 census.
But Fulbeck told the 200 audience members that race is more of a cultural construct than a biological one because all people are descended from a common ancestor in Africa.
Soetoro-Ng and her husband, Konrad Ng, have two daughters of Malay, Indonesian, Scottish, Irish, Hakka and Cantonese descent. Already, 6-year-old Suhaila has begun to claim multiple identities, both ethnic and religious — embracing both Christ and Buddha with no compulsion to choose, Soetoro-Ng said.
“We do a much better job today making kids feel fine just as they are and welcoming different traits,” she said. (Los Angeles Times)
It was an interesting program, part SESAME STREET, part Globalization, part Multiculturalism part Kumbaya, part Tiger Woods Festival.
The hallmark of the event and the book was optimism, that humanity had turned a corner on racism, and was now headed onto a broad, uplifted highland of multiculturalism.
I once met a man named Hawkins, a weird wiry little man,(good for slithering down into tombs). I met him on a river boat, going up the Nile in Egypt; he was a character out of a Joseph Conrad novel. He is dead now; he died a nasty little death by dengue fever. His vocation was Egyptology, especially the Nubian conquest of Egypt.
His pet theory was that racism was an invention of the British; specifically invented by the British East India Company in 1702. Hawkins believed that there was no racism before the British East India Company, hell the Nubians had conquered Egypt, and had become Pharoahs, no racism. Hell the great poet, Alexander Pushkin, was a noble person with black blood, living without Racism,” Pushkin’s great-grandfather, was Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–1781), a black page raised by Peter the Great who was born a prince of Lagon, an African tribal sultanate”
Hawkins was convinced that the British East India Company had invented Racism. Now, the Reader is asking, why would the British East India Company invent Racism?
English women.
Indian women were hot, and they knew the Kama Sutra, and the British East India Company was sending tons of British lads, between 18 and 32, to India to serve from seven to ten years.
The British East India Company had a problem, how to make sure all those British men would not marry hot Indian women, leaving the English women spinsters?
Their answer, according to the late great Hawkins, was Racism.
Makes sense to me.
Hawkins even had a death date for Racism, April,1915 thru January,1916, the Gallipoli Campaign. When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk stopped the brilliant Churchill strategy, it insured that World War I would last two more years, insuring that the flower of British manhood would be wasted on the battlefields of Europe, insuring the end of Racism.
For though Racism still had the wit, will and genius of Churchill, after World War I, racism just did not have enough manpower to make it work.
Makes sense to me.
Incidentally, Mustafa Kemal was blue eyed; a blue eyed Turk ended Racism.
With the end of Racism; we should be very close to the Eternal Brotherhood of Man.
Yet.
In the midst of this multicultural triumphalism , all one can think about is a staggeringly insighful STAR TREK episode, LET THAT BE YOUR FINAL BATTLEFIELD, which starred the late,great Frank Gorshin. In it, two races fight to annihilation because of a minor difference between them.
That’s it, war because of a minor difference, hatred because of a minor difference. This is what is happening in our multicultural world of mixed races; in Northern Ireland, the same race kill each other over religion; in Belgium, people of the same race and same religion fight each other over language(Walloons versus the Flemish).
In a world without Racism we get war from tribalism, religion, potpourri. In Rwanda the same race kill each other because one tribe is Tutsi whereas the other is Hutu. As I write this, in Osh, people of the same religion and same race are killing each other, Kyrgyzs killing Uzbeks.
In Kenya, land of our President’s father, the land in which Jomo Kenyatta(Burning Spear) exhausted British Racism wih the Mau Mau, Racism has been replaced by Tribalism, the Luo and Kikuyu tribes prepare for Civil War.
In modern Italy, people of the same race, nationality and religion are thinking about breaking up the nation into a Northern League country and a Southern country based merely on work habits.
Among Muslims, Sunnis kill Shites; Shites kill Sunnis, and they both kill Ahmadis.
What the STAR TREK episode seems to understand and the people at the Exhibition do not, is that Man, by his nature, likes enemies, in fact, may desire enemies, in fact may NEED enemies.
America has built a bubble against the Nature of Man; the Question is, how long can this fragile bubble last against the Nature of Man? This Blog is merely suggesting that though Love for your fellow man in 2010 America is intoxicating, it also may be the height of naivete. It may be dangerously naive to think the mixing of bloods can stem Man’s need for enemies.
It is nice to see Racism die in a flurry of love but during the Rwanda Genocide, mixed race Hutus(mixed Hutu/Tutsi) were slaughtered by the militia of Hutu killers, the Interahamwe (Kinyarwanda meaning “those who stand/work/fight/attack together”).
Let us hope that the loving smiles of those mixed race kids can change the hearts of future Interahamwe. We can only hope.
Maya Soetoro-Ng
Frank Gorshin in that epic STAR TREK episode,
“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”
The two warring races in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”; Reader, please note the striking and telling difference between them. (Hint, Check the faces carefully)
Abram Petrovich Gannibal
Mustafa Kamal Ataturk
SIDEBAR
At Gallipoli, the Brits, Aussies and Kiwis had broken the Turkish lines. The Brits,prolific in their use of the bayonet, were killing Turks by the droves. The Turks broke and ran. A rout was on.
As the Turkish soldiers ran away, their paths led them to one Turkish officer, standing firm. The fleeing soldiers stopped, wavering in their fear.
Mustafa Kamal stood astride their way home and said, “Go back.”
Among the fleeing army, a rational soldier spoke up,”You cannot order us back to fight.”
To which Mustafa Kamal answered,”I am not ordering you to fight, I am ordering you to die.”
At which point, the rational Turkish soldiers became irrational, and returned to the battle, to die in more droves. But the British were stopped.
Since the majority of our leaders now come out of Harvard Law School, may I humbly suggest that the Law School start teaching Mustafa Kamal Ataturk to understand leadership.
ARNOLD STANG, the real Governor of California.
“Henry John “Harry” Patch (17 June 1898 – 25 July 2009) — known as “the Last 
