Back when I was just starting graduate school, hiring foreign professors must've been the thing to do.  It only made sense, one professor told me, that if you're going to teach far eastern politics, then get some guy from there to come in and teach the class.  The problem with that was that these foreign professors might've known their stuff when it came to international or comparative politics, but they didn't know much about the English language.  I had one good foreign professor.  The rest were a waste of time.  

But there were other motives behind hiring the foreign guys.  My boss once told me they came for less money than he would've had to pay some guy packing a degree from a well known American university.  But he also admitted that we were overstaffed at the time by about two professors, the exact number of foreign profs we had in the department.  Another thing I learned about importing professors is that they sometimes bring other undesirable things with them.  Our two foreign profs were both Indians, an old guy and a young guy.  The old guy was stuffy, boring, educated in England, and he wore a turban all the time.  The young guy was bright, interesting, and friendly . . . and the older Indian treated him like a slave.  In fact, he treated his entire family like slaves.

"Why don't you tell that rag-headed sonofabitch to kiss your ass," I told the younger Indian professor one day at coffee.  "You live  in America now.  We don't allow slavery here."  He looked shocked, even frightened, then told me that he could do nothing about it.  He came from a lower caste than the turban wearing jerk, and he could not defy him.  If he did, his kinfolks back in India might pay for it.  It dawned on me then and there that the shadow of privilege is sometimes a long one . . . very long, and often very dark.  Just a week ago, I read about a prominent family up north somewhere arrested and charged with slavery.  Their names were distinctively foreign, sounding like they were perhaps from Asia.  More privilege shadows falling, I thought.

I'm lucky.  There's never been a time in my life when I lived under the shadow of privilege . . . at least not directly.  My father was a minister, my mother an educator, and in the small communities I grew up in, nobody looked down on me or treated me with disrespect.  I don't remember being treated special either . . . just fairly, which is the way it should be.  But most people around the world and even in this country don't have such good fortune.  The shadows of privilege are sometimes hard to see, but they're everywhere in this country.  And it's not the long shadows of the mansions they live in, or the big cars they drive, or the enormous buildings they construct to do their business.  But it's in our social institutions, our courthouses and capitol buildings, and halls of Congress where they loom the darkest and longest. 

Shadows of privilege go far beyond the halls of government institutions.  They exist on Wall Street, in Corporate Offices, in Cathedrals of Religion, and other social institutions we've created.  And it is because of them that democracy, real democracy, has never really taken root in this country, or for that matter, any other country.  In a capitalist system, these long, dark shadows of privilege are unavoidable.  In autocratic systems, they are the system itself, not just shadows within the system.  It could be worse for us here in America . . . but we need to be ever mindful of them.  We could do better as a nation if we'd find ways to keep those in positions of power and privilege reminded of how they got there . . . and what their true purpose should be.

Yeah, we should always resist the shadows of privilege.  And what can we do about the shadow makers?   Voice your opinion, make your will known.  Do not remain silent . . . and for a start, you can vote.  If you vote for a candidate who supports senseless wars, you've just voted for a shadow maker.  If you vote for a candidate who favors big business over the interests of the individual, you just voted for a shadow maker.  Look for the candidates with a vision of peace, of fairness and equality, and with an agenda for saving the environment around us.  That way, we'll leave less shadows of our own . . . less cause for the shadows the privileged class wants to give us.

Speak out, be heard, and vote wisely. 

PMC, 1/30/08