Authors listed by last name A-H
Lost Is the Name
Lost in a silent land
or swept up by a cloud of whispers.
Entire worlds left in deep space, abandoned
to their savage winters, their burning
stretches of ice over mountains
and empty valleys.
~~~
Continue reading Lost Is the Name by Alexander Etheridge
Diversity language seems to wander through a series of predictable phases. First, someone comes up with a new term like micro-aggressions, or retrofits an old dictionary word like violence. A few terms catch on and become diversity specialist standard fare, then enter public lingo, sometimes celebrated, sometimes mocked. Finally, after the heat dies down and new verbal fads replace them, those formerly-hot terms settle in for the long (or short) haul, during which people tend to mouth them in a relatively mindless, sometimes authoritarian fashion.
Unfortunately, such has been the trajectory of the term privilege. Beginning with its entrance into diversity world in the 1980’s, privilege has passed through several stages, ultimately becoming corrupted into little more than a simplistic, polarizing accusation. This is a real loss, because as formulated by Peggy McIntosh, privilege provides a valuable lens for examining the world around us. It does so by calling upon people to recognize and reflect on the unearned advantages that have been handed to them.
Continue reading Diversity and Speech Part 34: Revisiting Privilege – by Carlos E. Cortés
“Education is a passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those, who prepare for it today”, as proclaimed by eminent civil rights activist, Malcolm X, bears a deeper intellectual connotation. It brings out the very holistic foundation of education as an instrument of social awareness and development, with a subtle mention of its contemporary beneficiaries, “the Youth”. Yes, it is the young people who through their rational interpretation of core educational principles, harness the progressive socio-political development of the world.
The recent phenomenon of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shift to the digital mode of learning, have accentuated the need for increased efforts towards larger educational accessibility, quality and affordability, central to the role of global development in complete coherence with the recently initiated in the “Education for All” under the broader purview of the “Millennium Development Goals”, laid out by the United Nations, thereby demanding more nuanced responsibility of the young blood in spearheading a meaningful atmosphere of social inclusion , cohesion and stability.
Stanford University in December of 2022 issued the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) to eliminate potentially harmful terms used in the United States within the technology community. Most of the recommendations are trying to avoid trivializing people’s experiences and avoid devaluing others. Other recommendations, from this reader’s experience, are a stretch and assume that we are not able to distinguish the context in which a word or phrase is used.
The EHLI is a courageous and noble endeavor. I would also argue it is US-centric, Anglophilia, and elitist! And may or may not be transferrable to the larger society.
The following is a sampling of the terms/phrases in the EHLI’s thirteen pages of terms and my reaction to them.
Continue reading EHLI: Inclusive or Elitism – by Dr. Deborah Ashton
Symbiosis
Outside my mind, his breath is shallow;
I see him gasping for air,
his emaciated chest rising and falling.
Some days—no, many— I let him in.
I feed him, clothe him, let him soak in the bath.
I would not want him to suffer.
And yes, some days—no, many—
I let him spend the night.
You might think this would satisfy him,
rekindle his desire for independence,
and sometimes, it does.
Then, I am satisfied, my good deed committed.
I have saved a life.
I owe you this black silence
as darkness turns
changing pain
like the razor’s edge
Careful now
she sets in quick under a bright sky
when I want them to fade quickly
Not to play the victim
or take one little fall
between spaces where
human traits reveal themselves
where pride falls to the floor
nothing to separate us
from the weak
___________________________________________________________________________
Image Credit: [wallpaperaccess.com/silence]
View From the Hot Rock
The sun is crackling
now on granite boulders
piled in disarray
as frozen in mid-shift
as molten immobility
and heat is oozing up
to drive the cave bears
rumbling out
from fiery crevices
to claw at stones
and scorch their paws
then roar in helpless rage
at the inescapable
They slice the air
to swipe at me
and miss
me seated on the flat
and only mossy stone
out of reach
for only now
Snakes are seething
on their bellies
pissed and breathing
spit from hell
fangs bared
for taste of flesh
dripping honey-venom
they look at me
with threatening eyes
a hint of death
trembles in my spine
There is no turning back
Wish what I will
there’s nothing for it
but to bear the heat
thread the needle up
up the path serpentine
and trust in possibility
of blue-skyed Golden Sun
Only the dragon
rousing underneath the rocks
cocks his ear in pleasure
at the mounting fire
knowing
(brother to his sister Phoenix)
flame is fuel
to wings that would be spread
And as I remember Icarus
the dragon tells me
fire put to proper ore
with heavenly alchemy
creates the glowing crucible
kindles rising pressure
tempers diamond
from the coal
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Greg Bell writes because he must. A critical illness finally roused him to publish in 2013. He’s since placed work in literary journals & anthologies and was the 2019 recipient of the Kowit Poetry Prize. He’s the author of the hybrid poetry collection Looking for Will: My Bardic Quest with Shakespeare (Ion Drive, 2015) and two award-winning plays: [1] Says he, ‘We are the witnesses, the Jiminy Crickets, the agents of change’; [2] let’s go!
Image Credit: Diamond-cut wallpaper abstract [itl.cat] spanning colors to symbolize the red hot stress of adversity to the cool blue of hope
There is much confusion today between affirmative action, which is under threat by lawsuits in the U.S. Supreme Court, and Diversity, Equity Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA), which is under no such threat, as long as practitioners stay away from race-based quotas and preferences. How can we educate the field about this?
The Supreme Court cases involve allegations by some Asian-American groups that their applicants should be admitted to prestigious colleges like Harvard at a higher rate because other applicants like African-Americans are given a preference. One should bear in mind that Asian-American students are already enrolled in such colleges at a rate far exceeding their presence in the American population, so these cases are not about proportional representation, or a “student body that looks like America.” In some cases, such as the University of California at Berkeley, the undergraduate enrollment is about 48% Asian-American. So these cases involve an extreme form of a desire for merit-based judgments by gate holders.
Continue reading Threats to Affirmative Action and DEIA – by Marc Brenman
A co-authored Interview
Carlos: Last year I wrote a column about the tribulations of Growing up Bi-Religious in our religiously-mixed household in Kansas City, Missouri: Dad a Catholic with a Mexican immigrant father – Mom, a Reform Jew with a Ukrainian immigrant father and an Austrian immigrant mother. I had to deal with family conflict and I avoided mentioning my religious background to parents when I picked up my dates. But your experience was so different.
Continue reading Diversity and Speech #33: Bi-Religious – by Carlos Cortés, Gary Cortés
Here’s my question to the men who are about to read this piece:
Based on what you know for sure, or have been fed by the media about her, if you were to find yourself seated next to Nancy Pelosi on a five-hour cross country plane ride and initiated the conversation, what would you talk about, avoid talking about and why?
So how about I give you, say, one minute to absorb and craft your answer to that question. Go ahead. No, wait, on second thought hold off on your answer until the end of this narrative.
