God help me…discuss…
From MSNBC:
For the past several years, Tibetan nannies have been all the rage in New York City. On message boards and playgrounds, some parents claimed Tibetan nannies were “very balanced and Zen” and aided in children’s “spiritual development,” whereas in areas such as Dallas, for example, Latino nannies have been more in demand for their Spanish-speaking abilities.
At the Diki Daycare Center in Astoria, N.Y., demand for Tibetan nannies became so great that the preschool began offering a Tibetan nanny referral service.
“Tibetan women are well known for being caring and loving nannies,” reads the promotional literature. “They are recognized for becoming ‘one of the family’ and offer the same compassion and quality of care for their charges as they do their own children.” Furthermore, it says, “Cleanliness, organization & dedication to education are values of Tibetan culture.” Read more…
Jezebel’s take on the MSNBC piece.
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I don’t think it’s racism so much as seeing nannies as more fashion accessories than human beings.
And the whole Western love affair and idealization of Tibet does kind of bug me. People want Tibet to be free enough to install its own theocracy?
dersk,
But seeing other human beings not as human beings but accessories or resources is exactly one way that race bias plays out. Note how a commenter to the Jezebel article mentions that when she was nannying, a mother told her to “warn” people that she was white and educated, because potential employers might feel “uncomfortable” making the demands of her that they might make of a brown nanny. It is not as easy to dehumanize someone who looks like you.
Tami,
I’d noticed that comment – one thing that struck me was that it was white *and educated*. That’s actually one of the things that makes me diagnose it as more of an attitude towards, oh, call it the service class?
In extreme cases, I don’t think some of these people even recognize their employees / service providers as a person, let along a person of any particular race (thinking here about Naomi ? the super model who has a habit of throwing phones at assistants).
Who comes up with this stuff? I mean, really, who?
And, yes, racist as all get-out. Ugh.
ugh, this whole article makes my tummy hurt.
Who thought writing this and then posting it on MSNBC would be a good idea?
@Dersk a) its par for the course for a culture resisting conquest to be labeled either theocratic or feudal and b) even if it were does that mean Tibetans don’t have the right not to be colonized by China?
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The line about mothers wanting to hire Filipina nannies because “they will do anything” just kills me!
This Filipina would love to show those mothers exactly what I’m willing to do.
@Moth – I didn’t say a word about the justice of China’s takeover. How can you describe a country as anything other than a theocracy where a bunch of high priests pick the next ruler of the country by secret tests to figure out which little kid is the reincarnated leader?
Ummm. I don’t want this to come off wrong, but this is a case where some more enlightened white mothers need to come and get their cousins. This is racist/class privilege behavior/thinking without a doubt.
This article is so grotesque and bloated with its own privilege that it makes me physically ill.
I live in the NYC Metro area and I’ve seen these moms and interacted with them. I’m about to become a mother and these are the moms I want to avoid. These are the moms who will only see you as “the help” if you’re out with your own child.
These are the moms that make me feel icky about trying to find childcare for my little one.
Someone needs to check them on their attitudes.
Not to derail — as I derail (but I think you should challenge prejudice on an anti-racist website) but I wasn’t so much reacting to you calling Tibet a theocracy but denigrating it as a theocracy.
@ meeshtastic — this quote is interesting “These are the moms that make me feel icky about trying to find childcare for my little one. ” How do you plan to resolve that icky feeling? Is race a factor in who you’ll hire?
While it *might* be that the woman was thinking “oh you’re educated, you might not be the type they want to order around that presupposes two things:
1) That class bias exists totally separately from race bias…when they are very intertwined.
2) That the nannies of color are not educated–or that the educations they might have had in their home countries is not valuable enough to be respected. And presuming that they are uneducated seems to me to reek a bit of race bias.
I don’t think that we can underestimate the race bias in this. After all, the prospective employers and some nanny agencies are attributing personal and moral characteristics to entire groups of people who may have nothing in common but their country of origin. Ethnic bias, prejudice, racism, whatever you want to call it–its wrong.
@moth: How can anyone think that a theocracy is a fair or just form of government? How can you have anything approaching a free society if you don’t have freedom of belief and conscience?
Yeah, theocracies are bad. So’s monarchy, dictatorships and fascism. Communism and (real) socialism, too, though that’s more because they make naive and unrealistic assumptions about human nature.
Dersk, I suggest you read Haunani Kay-Trask and Dr. Ifi Amadiume who discusses how traditional governments get mis-viewed and then condemned through Western lenses. I know people from non-Western societies such as the ones you describe who are quite comfortable with and proud of their governments, and quite critical of ours– where do you get the authority, from the outside, to say they’re wrong?
@dersk: so should I take this to mean that you think the only type of acceptable government is a representative democracy? Isn’t that a little ethnocentric of you? Do you think that maybe people growing up with a different type of government might feel that their government is the best or only acceptable government as well?
It’s got nothing to do with ethnocentrism! Freedom of conscience isn’t a western value – it’s a human value.
Forcing someone to believe something or to act as if they did (in other words, establishing a theocracy or even a state religion) is a bad thing. Full stop. Elevating one person to rule based on bloodline or how strong the person is is intrinsically less fair and just than letting the people select their own leader.
@moth – have you got any URLs for those two writers? Their wikipedia pages are fairly scant. It seems that Trask is of ‘royal blood’, so she’s probably not entirely unbiased in her opinions of monarchy. Oh, and I see Amadiume is a professor of religion. Ditto.
You’re the one who decided that the governments you mention violate freedom of conscience, use force, and are unjust — using a Western lens — as I just said, I know people who are governed in the ways you condemn who totally disagree. So again, why are you the authority and not them? Mongolia was once a theocracy — ruled by the Bogd Khan — there was also religious freedom so there were mosques and Nestorian Christian churches next to Buddhist temples — no one was forced to believe something or forced to act as though they did. I suggest you do some research before slurring other cultures. Amadiume is a professor of religions — and an atheist. You can find her and Trask’s stuff quite easily, and on your own, on amazon.
@ dersk, but you didn’t answer my questions. Do you believe that a representative democracy is the only acceptable form of government? And do you think that maybe that has something to do with how and where you grew up? Do you think that Tibet is better off without autonomy and under the control of China? And are you claiming that the Dalai Lama forces his beliefs on others? To my knowledge, the Muslims and Christians in Tibet have not been forced to renounce their religion. To my mind, there is a difference between forcing someone to act as if they believed something and a culture that is based around spirituality and religion.
@moth, cosign. It stinks of paternalism when someone proclaims his or her government as the only acceptable form of government.
@moth: Theocracy and religious freedom are intrinsically oxymoronic; people clearly have different legal rights (like being the ruler) based on their religion.
@Montclair – the only acceptable form? No, but I do think a representative democracy with some socialist structures and an economy based on the free market is the best suited to the way human beings work, and produces the best results in terms of individual freedom, societal justice, and effective use of resources.
Obviously my point of view is influenced by where I grew up, but I’ve also thought about it and read a heck of a lot of history.
Is Tibet better off now than they were before China re-invaded? Of course not. Does that mean all was truth and light before? Of course not.
Am I claiming that the Dalia Lama forces his beliefs on others? Of course not. I’m saying that picking out an infant who you think is a reincarted spiritual leader is a pretty bad way to pick a political leader.
And lastly, there’s a HUGE distinction to me between “a culture based around spirituality and religion” and a GOVERNMENT based on spirituality and religion.
Perhaps this is a better way to phrase the question: do you two see any ethical absolutes, or is everything relative to the cultural values? And to turn your attacks on me around, who are you to say that (for example) murder or racism are bad in any culture, but that freedom of conscience must be seen in the context of the culture?
i live in jerusalem, and here, people actually sometimes refer to their household help, or eldercare help as ‘my filipina’ or she has ‘a filipina’ . it makes me cringe, and i try to correct it, but it has really become part of the slang. ugh.
on another note, my house is a mess because of the uncomfortable class and race issues that come with hiring help to clean, and i refuse to get involved with that, but also hate cleaning!
By the way, most of the planet agrees with me: freedom of conscience and religion are a part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Dersk, as scholar Munir Fasheh pointed out, most people on the planet had no say on the UDHR, and you have yet to prove that theocracy violates either of those freedoms. You also seem to have a pretty poor grasp of Tibetan history. No one has argued that freedom of conscience is contextual. You haven’t shown that citizens of theocracies are bothered by theocracies. Why do you know more than they? You haven’t defended your argument – you just reiterated your ethnocentric biases.
Moth, are we discussing all theocracies or only Tibet. Would Afghanistan fall under the heading of a theocracy?
If disagreeing with a theocracy is an ethnocentric belief then theocracies are perfectly within their rights to keep the UN from imposing human rights issues to their laws on the Human Rights Council. Namely their treatment of women. As such, judging mistreatment of women then becomes ethnocentric. (my arguement is only if we are discussing all theocracies and not just Tibet).
Hi Ann,
Afghanistan is actually an Islamic republic, so I don’t know if you consider republics to be theocracies. In any case, Afghanistan’s failings are just that — the failings of a particular country, not a form of government. Judging all theocracies by Afghanistan would be like juding all democracies by slave-era America. Disagreeing with theocracy is not automatically ethnocentric – dersk’s reasons, however, are. And no, judging mistreatment of women is not ethnocentric — however deciding what constitutes mistreatment may indeed be arrived at in an ethnocentric manner i.e. http://www.racialicious.com/2009/07/15/saving-muslim-women-from-the-oppression-of-the-headscarf-by-killing-them/
I’m not discussing theocracies so much as the ethnocentric reasoning people use to condemn them.
Well, I’d say Afghanistan is actually an anarchy right now, or at best a thugocracy (sorry for the long delay in posting – was away in Belgium for a long weekend).
Moth, if you really can’t see that a theocracy is intrinsically incompatible with religious freedom, we may as well stop now. To me, it’s blindingly obvious that if a society is ruled by one particular religion, that if the ruler or the ruling class must be a member of a particular religion – because that’s what a theocracy is – that that society does not have religious freedom. There’s nothing ethnocentric about that – it’s just true. Unless you think, like Snowball, that some animals are more equal than others.
That goes for the Vatican City, Italy (where a portion of income tax goes to the Catholic Church), Iran and Tibet.
BTW – I was hoping for links from those writers you mentioned, since Amazon’s too expensive to ship out here…
Oh, and also BTW – which aspect of Tibetan history do you think I haven’t grasped? I know they’ve been semi-autonomous for about a millenium and before that were alternatively more or less under the control of China. I know the story about the competing Dalai Lamas; I know the history of the Dalai Lama’s brother. While I haven’t been to Tibet, I’ve had two long trips to places where Tibetan Buddhism is the dominant religion and am familiar with how it’s a flavor of Buddhism that got integrated with an older, more animistic religion.
@dersk – Ok, let’s take your post point by point.
Well, I’d say Afghanistan is actually an anarchy right now, or at best a thugocracy (sorry for the long delay in posting – was away in Belgium for a long weekend).
Moth, if you really can’t see that a theocracy is intrinsically incompatible with religious freedom, we may as well stop now.
Me – Ok, so you’re continuing to ignore religious freedom in societies such as Tibet and theocratic Mongolia.
To me, it’s blindingly obvious that if a society is ruled by one particular religion, that if the ruler or the ruling class must be a member of a particular religion – because that’s what a theocracy is – that that society does not have religious freedom. There’s nothing ethnocentric about that – it’s just true.
Me -Montclair and I, using our examples, have demonstrated that it isn’t true that theocracies lack religious freedom. I have also mentioned that I know citizens of theocracies who don’t find them problematic. So it is ethnocentric, that you, being from outside a theocratic culture, think your voice carries more weight than theirs.
Unless you think, like Snowball, that some animals are more equal than others.
That goes for the Vatican City, Italy (where a portion of income tax goes to the Catholic Church), Iran and Tibet.
BTW – I was hoping for links from those writers you mentioned, since Amazon’s too expensive to ship out here…
Me- This is anti-racism 101: non-white people aren’t responsible for doing your work for you. I gave you the names — you look them up.
Oh, and also BTW – which aspect of Tibetan history do you think I haven’t grasped? I know they’ve been semi-autonomous for about a millenium and before that were alternatively more or less under the control of China. I know the story about the competing Dalai Lamas; I know the history of the Dalai Lama’s brother. While I haven’t been to Tibet, I’ve had two long trips to places where Tibetan Buddhism is the dominant religion and am familiar with how it’s a flavor of Buddhism that got integrated with an older, more animistic religion.
Me: You seem to be unfamiliar with Tibet’s religious freedom. Have you studied the Khache?
Moth, I think we’re coming down to one basic disagreement, which I’d describe as the difference between tolerance and freedom.
Would you agree to this statement: “In a theocracy, political power is limited to members of a particular reliigion, and laws that govern that society are drawn from that religion”?
And this: “In a society that’s got religious freedom, people are neither granted nor denied rights based on their religion”?
Those are pretty much my working definitions, and by those definitions religious freedom (as opposed to tolerance) is intrinsically impossible in a theocracy.
And geez. I looked up those writers on Wikipedia and checked their Web sites but didn’t find anything at all relevant to what you were talking about. Thought you might have some links handy, and my books to read shelf is already over a meter long. If you’d rather stick your fingers in your ears and shout LA LA LA LA ETHNOCENTRIC rather than actually discussing ideas, fine.
I think this discussion veered in an interesting direction but I hope we can continue the discussion about childcare issues some time soon.
That said, I’m not trying to start anything but I was just struck reading dersk’s last comment that the US is a de facto theocracy by those definitions. The same is probably true of many European countries.
@dersk – There’s no one particular model theocracies follow nor for societies that grant religious freedom. I.e. In theocratic Tibet Tibetan Muslims don’t have to follow all the same laws Tibetan Buddhist do which complicates your claim that, “laws that govern that society are drawn from that religion.” Furthermore, if we posit that the US is not a theocracy, some people are still denied rights based on their religion. For example, even if you are an adult old enough to consent the practice, snake handling Christians don’t have the right to practice that faith. And because your first two claims aren’t accurate, neither is your conclusion. Your last comment is disrespectful and is simply a version of this: http://www.derailingfordummies.com/If You Won’t Educate Me How Can I Learn
Whilst seemingly simple on the surface, there is some intertwining subtext embedded within this one.
First of all, you’re placing responsibility for your education back onto the Marginalised Person™. As they are obviously engaged with these issues, and care about them, they are hopeful that Privileged People® may one day start listening and taking onboard what they have to say. By placing responsibility to educate in their hands, you tug at this yearning. You may even successfully make many question themselves and their selfish expectations that you utilise the hundreds upon hundreds of resources on the subject available to you as a Privileged Person®! After all, anyone who expects you to be able to research a topic by yourself also clearly expects you to be far more of a functioning adult than you’re acting!
By insisting you can only learn if they right then and there sacrifice further hours of time going over the same ground they have so often in the past, you may also make them give up and go away altogether, enabling you to win by default.
But further, you give the impression that you really want to learn, but they’re holding you back! That’s right, using this tactic you can suggest that full understanding is what you crave – you want to be a better, more connected and compassionate person – but it’s not your fault! Nobody ever gave you the education! And now that someone is here who is so obviously qualified, they’re denying you your Privilege® given right to have everything you want handed to you on a platter!
Which brings us to another key component of this argument – it is very important, in conversations with Marginalised People™, to constantly remind them that you are, indeed, Privileged®. By demonstrating your belief that Marginalised People™ should immediately gratify your every whim, you remind them of their place in society. After all, they’re not there to live lives free of discrimination and in happy, independent and fulfilling ways! Please! Marginalised People™ exist for your curiosity and to make you generally feel better about your place in society and don’t let them forget it!
@Karma – I would like to cont. the childcare discussion, but I don’t want to let ethnocentric comments stand unchallenged either.
@Moth: No, I was trying to get you to speak specifically. If you reject those definitions – not claims – of theocracy and religion freedom, then please provide your own.
It’s got nothing to do with who’s marginalized and who’s marginalizing, for Pete’s sake. I was simply trying to get you to define the terms you were using so that we could figure out where we disagree, and it appears to be at the definition of terms level.
And please don’t take such a patronizing attitude with all that registered trademark crap. I have zero idea about your gender, background, wealth or skin tone. Personally, I’m an immigrant where I live and a member of the most disliked minority in America. If you want to cast yourself into the role of marginalized person, feel free, but realize that in our relationship you’re choosing that role.
Remind me never to ask you for actual facts or pointers to info that might easily be available again.
Sheesh.
Dersk, I didn’t merely reject your definitions, I gave examples that showed why they were wrong. And as I’ve been saying, there are so many types of theocracies and models of religious freedom one simple answer won’t do. I also suggested that people from outside theocracies are perhaps not the best equipped to define them — that’s why I gave you examples of scholars from theocratic societies so you could explore their differing explanations.
As for my argument about derailing — that was in response to your refusal to do your own work – placing that burden on me. You tried to marginalize me by making me your employee or personal tutor. And because I won’t play that role you’re thowing a temper tantrum. You began derailing in post 26 before I disagreed with your definitions in post 28 because I wouldn’t do your work for you. Now you want to claim that your derailing was because of my post 28 when I disagreed with your definitions.
Moth: look, where I’m coming from is that you need to define terms before you can talk about them. If you really don’t get the difference between a definition and an opinion (if you do, let me know what definition of theocracy, religious tolerance, and religious freedom you’re using), then we may as well just stop.
I’m not really sure how many ways I can say this — theocratic societies define themselves differently and it is my belief that they are best defined from within. That’s why I suggested you read the works written by scholars from such societies to see how they define their governments. I don’t think there’s any blanket way to describe a theocratic gov’t. I think religious tolerance is respect for other religions and I think religious freedom is the freedom to practice a religion, even though societies interpret that last one differently. I.e. the U.S. has religious freedom but snake handlers aren’t free to practice.