Hi Friends:
This is a piece I wrote recently for an application to this program I am interested in. I thought I'd share it as it is also what I have been recently thinking about. . . any thoughts?
W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk described, “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” The potency of Du Bois’ prose is understood wholly even in its subtly. The ferocious spirit he engages is nothing less then prophetic. The call disarms our normative notions of human tribulation: war, poverty, hunger, oppression and injustice as it asserts a far less obvious and much more intimate human problem.
In today’s globalized world the scope of Du Bois’ ‘problem’ widens, yet its nature is essentially unchanged. Geoffrey O’Connor, an environmental journalist, made a documentary in the 1990’s linking interviews with indigenous peoples in the Amazonian Basin to western environmental campaigns aimed at saving the Brazilian Rain Forest. His documentary, Amazon Journal: Dispatches from a Vanishing Frontier illustrates what he learned over eight years in the Brazilian Amazon. What I find most compelling concerning O’Connor’s documentary is the way in which it provokes discussions on racism, global economy, tokenization, and intentionality by ‘complicating the questions’.
O’Connor and Du Bois confront simplistic explanations of human mechanism by anchoring themselves in the characteristics of the prophetic tradition: critique and hope. Du Bois’ writing exquisitely resists and dismantles the dominant consciousness, while energizing hope in the possibility of social transformation.
Chicago based anti-sanctions campaign, Voices in the Wilderness, began a statement about why they were chosing to remain in Iraq despite the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing by declaring, “Where you stand determines what you see, and how you live.” Similarly, choosing the most urgent contemporary human problem is a reflection of who we are and where we come from. In other words, it is largely a question of perspective.
Determining what is the most urgent contemporary human problem is, in my opinion, as arduous as solving that problem. What is far more compelling is how students may use historical moments as a lens to invite robust questions about who we are, where we come from, and to whom we are responsible. A professor of mine once asked me to write a history of Lebanese-Israeli relations that no one would contest. The process of forming such a narrative was probably the most challenging and rewarding of my intellectual life. I was asked to perform the impossible and the process stretched my soul. That is the very kind of cultivating process I long to have more of in my academic, intellectual life.
However, in my experience, academia, 'for all of its rituals of collegiality, generates very little intimacy and collaborative work'. I believe the Friends World Program (WFP) is different because it is interested in intimate, collaborative learning environments. WFP appears to be interested in ‘complicating the questions’. WFP takes seriously the proposition of the Voices members, and posits that praxis and environment is essential to a critical, inclusive learning process. For these reasons I believe a Friends World education will be an invaluable community where I may both glean and meaningfully contribute. It is the kind of community where the prophetic tradition is most alive.
