I’m different

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:59:49 -0500

As cliché as it sounds, i seem to be finding out something new about myself. That i really LOVE people...but that sometimes people don’t like me.
This is somewhat of a conundrum for una persona quien strives to amar el mundo. I guess i just feel like maybe my personality for some reason or another doesn’t mesh with most women...and few men for that matter. I guess i speak of women because in recent years its much more salient for me the amount of difficulty i find in seeing someone who’s on the same.. or even a freaking similar level.
Today the conversations I had were very beneficial. With Leo, siempre hablando de la vida es una aventura, he’s so philosophical that we could make mud pies seem like something amazing. The thing that his friend Pascual told me today i think i’m going to remember for a long time:
*Caballería and cortesía are two different things.
*we need regular people in order to keep society running. Not everyone can have the time to philosophize or think about the things we do, some people must first and foremost work.
*we shouldnt create a division or superiority between regular people and los con sus imaginaciones.
*we, speaking of those with change-minded heads, must not fall into the temptation of always thinking that we are right...even if it seems so.
It is in this point that most folks make their fundamental mistakes, being that they negate to realize what isn’t right still with what they think.

So theres my thoughts for the day. One full day in the DR, and I’m reaching new thoughtful/philosophical levels. I appreciate the convo’s, even the ones where people think I’m racist for my insight on black america vs. mainstream... i.e. me saying i prefer “Black music” because its better. O ya, and those where i question men’s sexuality...those always end up fun!

My Speech

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:13:33 -0400

On Saturday i gave a speech at the frosh welcoming reception. It wasin front of over 1000 people..definitely nerve racking,,,especially when you try and tell the truth!!

Read it n tell me what you think..

Going to College is Hard.

Whats up, I’m Ryan your student body president.
I’m going to talk to you this afternoon about one of my personal favorite topics, LOVE.
Now I know it may be difficult for many of you parents to believe, but there is a whole lotta love making that goes down in college.

But, don’t fear, that’s not the kind of love that I speak about today.

Some of the words I use may not fit within what you have in the past defined as love…but, being a college setting, I want to encourage you to expand your mind and think critically about what the following entails…

Occidental is what they said it is in your brochures. It is a challenging institution. Oxy will challenge you to think outside of yourself.
Thinking outside of ourselves has an enormous impact on our vision of a community. This challenge is significant because part of this community has privilege over other parts. That leads to conflict.
First of I want to make this point to you very clear…I, your student body president am not asking for you to tolerate each other. In fact I don’t even want you to try to tolerate each other.

The book you were supposed to read this summer, “Choosing Civility” – the premise was the concepts of civility, which in some aspects are good and all..however, I challenge you there is no need to tolerate oppression masked with good manners.

Many of us have heard the saying that “well-behaved women rarely make history”
Well the same goes for others as well behaved latinos and blacks rarely make history, and well behaved poor people rarely make history, and honestly well-behaved students over the past century haven’t made history.

3 years ago there was a student movement on campus, it ended right here where you’re sitting in Thorne Hall where the entire campus came together in a town hall meeting with then president Ted Mitchell to talk how Oxy was failing to uphold it’s commitment from the mission statement to diversity and fostering an equitable community.
You see, to live up to a goal of equity means to provide a supportive space for all students, to seek solutions to historical injustices.

I believe we are still in the same place today, I honestly wouldn’t have ran if it there had been a significant change. And now… THREE YEARS later in this same place that we are sitting here today I am upset. I am upset because administrators, faculty and students around you and before you have NOT lived up to those goals that we were striving towards.

I could tell you history. But we made history. The things that happened at oxy that were meaningful to the class of 2004, I don’t know what those are. I just knew we came here to fight for our reason to be here.
WE have our history, what history are you going to be a part of here?

There is always justice to be fought for. There is always injustice going on around you, if its people being called out for being gay, or lack of access to the disabled. There are hardly any wheelchair ramps at oxy! Or how about 3 weeks ago when someone called me a monkey?!
You see, I know that I’m black. And by now, you know that I’m black as well. But let me tell you something. Some of you may think that having a black man as president shows signs of progress. But please understand that the shallow liberalism within that thought will not save you. The truth is that we are NOT there yet.

That is not to say that there are not students, faculty and staff passionately working to take us there.
Let me tell me about what gives me hope at Oxy.

There is a class here called INTERGROUP DIALOGUE. This past week I went on a retreat with other student leaders where we talked a lot about talking. This happens a lot at oxy. We talk.

Now this class is something different. Let me tell you what we talk about.

While many of us struggle with effects how I see community, interacts with community, who I am, the person I am, because the class focuses on self reflection and identity. It formed a asNot just changed, but saved my life. The class is called intergroup dialogue. I want to connect it to students and connect it to a vision to reshape the vision of the community.
America is a divided country. Occidental college, on many levels, is a divided college. There are areas on this campus that provide a means for students to engage.

The class I am talked about gives us a language to speak to the challenge and hurt and difficulty of our past pains, failures and weaknesses, to love each other. This class taught me that love isn’t passive. That love involves conflict, that love demands that we fundamentally re-examine who we are and how we oppress each other with our actions. What community at oxy means is that white students would allow students of color to live without questioning them. To be able to have their own groups in solidarity with eachother, that’s what community means. It’s a open space for groups to unite amongst themselves before they come into the whole. For white students, love involves evaluating the history of students of color being excluded to this college, and even while they are not excluded, admitted and oppressed.

I want you to understand that your equality at Occidental College goes so far as to say that you are all students at Occidental College. As for our common equity, we don’t have one. Many students have privilege. We are oppressing each other. The fact that your identities lead to privileges leads to the oppression that goes on in our community. Often times this work is hard. It’s hard to come together. The Mission at times seems impossible or even Hopeless. To love each other is tiring. And many of my peers are worn out. But the fact is, that we don’t have time to become tired of these issues. We don’t have time to tire. Love doesn’t mean that we are coming together and giving each other hugs, nor standing in a circle singing “we are the world”.
To love is soooo hard!

Love means that you shouldn’t sympathize with someone who shit happened to. You should ACT as if it happened to you.

So for you students, I CHALLENGE YOU TO COME INTO THIS NEW SPACE AND CHANGE IT. Yourselves, the space around you. To denounce the oppression that my fellow peers have permitted to go on. Denounce the oppressive institutions that may have benefited you in the past.

Find out heteronormativity, whiteness, and patriarchy mean to your life. By the time you leave Oxy I want you to know the complexities of it, the historical implications of it.

My Original plan in this speech was to tell you about your heritage. I want everyone to know that the college that they go to is significant because they have a multicultural mission and history behind it.

However I decided that what would be more important is to tell you a story about three black presidents at Oxy.
The first is named John Slaughter, and he was here in 1988.
He revolutionized the mission statement and strove to bring equity and excellence to life at the school.
The college was so sensitive of a black man here that they named the administrative building after him… Coons. Nope just joking, that’s Arthur G. Coons, but sometimes love involves changing the ways we do things around here. I personally haven’t enjoyed the premise of paying my financial aid in a building commonly referred to as “Coons”.

Without president slaughter we would have no idea of our identity as an institution. And while I don’t believe that we’ve the point of total amnesia, I do think that we are having an identity crisis.

This point leads me to the second black president of Oxy, (me). I ran because I felt like our school was losing our identity. That sometimes purposefully, other times unintentionally we were losing touch with our goals.
I believe that oxy has deteriorated to such an extent that we’ve tried to substitute respect and love with civility. While civility has its points, I say that we choose the higher road.
I chose love when I dedicated my first year to the movement, my second year to educating the campus…

This year by trying to lead by example and by service to this college, and by speaking with courageous honesty about who we were, who we are, and who we can still become as an institution.

The third black president is an alumni from the 80’s,
When he was here he challenged the institution about its divestment from apartheid in south Africa, and while I stand here I challenge the school to its divestment from oppression, from racism, homophobia, sexism, and a reinvestment in equity.

And so to you the class of 2011, its on you. I’m leaving after this year along with my peers, and its on you from here on out. But I promise that as an alumni that I wont stop until this love is realized. I challenge you to fulfill our mission until true diversity is present at Occidental College. To the point that diversity equity, multiculturalism is how that love is expressed across the institution.

So go out and love each other this year…
Thank you.

To give or not to give

Mon, 21 May 2007 14:57:20 -0400

THAT..is my question:
Some say that poverty has existed since the beginning of civilization. It’s such a constant that all of the major religions have something to say about it. Take Buddhist asceticism or Jesus’ sermon on the mount, and you find similar spiritual callings to correct the injustice of economic stratification. While this concept of helping the poor can seem so firm, founded, historical, and unchanging, my awakening has been that the poverty I deal with is based on momentary interactions, most of which last for only an instant. Often I take one breath… and the experience has been determined.
When living and studying in a developing world, poverty often strikes us in an instant. We have the opportunity in that instant to acknowledge the injustice going on to walk away, go on with our comfortable, privileged lives and attempt to forget or justify our inaction: Oh well, you know many of them are hoaxes…. They aren’t really needy. Some of those people make more begging than others do at a fulltime job….I worked hard for my money; they should too!
When we, as human beings, reduce our interactions to mere economic exchanges, something very dear is lost. Life in a developing world has its share of challenges. Navigating a daily existence rife with complicated socioeconomic problems often causes us to narrow our perspective--we focus on numero uno, thus turning ourselves into a self-centered mess of nerves, always fearful that someone is out to get us and our money.
My CIEE experience reawakened my sincere goals to change the world for the better, to help out the less fortunate, the other 80% of the planet’s inhabitants who don’t have access to the riches I have--be it a seven-year-old boy cleaning a car’s windshield, a Haitian man selling maní on the side of the road, or somebody with a deformed arm asking for spare change near El Monumento. Suddenly, however, in one of these moments when poverty rears its head, all of the dynamics that one could analyze in a university setting, read about in a book, or study in scripture come down to that decisive moment when we choose how to act. While we are all hypocrites at times, I find moments like these to be the ones that most frequently result in actions that are contrary to our beliefs. But así es la vida. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in my stay in la República Dominicana, it’s that even momentary interactions can be extremely complex

Gay. Jesus. Outrage

Wed, 4 Apr 2007 00:23:48 -0400

Last Wednesday i had one of the most ridiculous things ever to happen to me in a classroom setting. A professor, also ordained priest or padre, in my class “La Persona de Jesus” raised a point about the history of prophets throughout the Bible. One such point was that in every age, prophets called people to a godly standard of values and solid morality. This, according to Padre Diego, is extraordinarily difficult nowadays due to the fact that “nuestro sociedad es uno antivaloroso” our society one of backwards or anti-values.
To raise this point the professor suggested that society has sunken to such levels as teaching youth nowadays that there are more than 2 genders (which technically due to those 1/1000+ who are transgendered or hermaphrodite is true). Being that the gender concept didnt seem to rise up enough shock, he turned to humor to prove the point saying, verbatim:
“un pajaro en inglés es un “gay”; pero, es lo mismo pajaro!”.
(For those of you reading this who do not speak dominican spanish i am going to clear up what was just said: A fairy in english is called a gay person; but he is still the same ol’ fairy!)

Now, by the time i had translated the significance of the phrase in my head, the entire class had burst into laughter, the padre himself included. As i tried to get my bearings straight i looked around to see all of the men in the class raising their hands and looking around , chuckling to one another. I looked forward to see the profesor instructing all the men in the classroom that “si le gustaron las mujeres, levanten la mano” ( if we liked women, raise our hands)
Shocked at the blatant disregard for others sexual preferences, i refused to raise my hand at the gesture, only to hear “tu no te gustas las mujeres?!” (You dont like women?!). Replying in as sensible way as I could, as i was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the oppressive dynamic of this classroom, i replied “Whats it matter to y’all what my business is?!” (en espanol of course).

Amazed at what had just gone on, basically the aggressive heterosexism and blatant homophobic atmosphere in a university environment, i went on to tell a few people and decided to translate an essay on Homosexuality and the Bible to bring to the class today. Read away if you will.. its very interesting, and the least that I--a heterosexual striving to be an ally, and a progressive believer in Christ’s message of love towards all creation--CAN DO.

click here

GOOD NEWS

Tue, 3 Apr 2007 00:13:41 -0400

IN case anyone out there is wondering or confused by the current news about the current presidential campaign...Barack’s--(**not mine quite yet, campus campaigning doesnt start til April 6th)...I’d suggest to read this article.. its concise and informative and provides an interesting way to look at the numbers. Also, for more Barack information.. i’d suggest signing up on the link below!

http://www.barackobama.com/peoplecount
http://my.barackobama.com

04.03.2007
Leveraging Strength: Comparing Obama and Clinton's Donor Numbers

As Arianna Huffington ably documents, the story of the first quarter Democratic presidential numbers is not one of dominance by Hillary Clinton, but the extremely strong showing by Barack Obama. Almost 30% of Clinton's reported money for the quarter was transfered from her Senate account, which means that it was raised before she was officially a candidate (no one should have deluded themselves that donations to her 2006 Senate reelection campaign were really about the need to save HRC from Jeanine Pirro).
And as Arianna notes, the Clinton camp is delaying the release of information about how much of Clintons 1st quarter totals is earmarked for the general elections. Without doubt, Clinton's $26 million raised this quarter is going to shrink further in terms of what she can actually use in the primary, which should be the only thing candidates are worrying about now.

Obama has not yet released his official numbers yet, but the word is that it's going to be somewhere in the $20-23 million dollar range. At minimum he has kept pace with Clinton and it's conceivable that once Clinton's general election donations are purged from her number that Obama will have exceeded her fundraising for the quarter. I'll leave aside how remarkable that is for a moment, though.

Both Obama and Clinton are hyping the number of people who have donated to them. Obama had 83,531 donors and Clinton received money from 50,000 people. John Edwards, who I'm going to otherwise ignore in this post, had 40,000 contributors. Given the close proximity between Obama and Clinton's total fundraising numbers for the quarter, the fact that Obama had two-thirds more contributors shows a far greater reliance on donors who didn't max out this quarter. That is, his supporters are more likely to be able to donate repeatedly at smaller levels. Obama's baseline donor support is more likely to be sustainable than Clinton's based on this quarter's evidence (and assuming neither candidates' donors decide to switch their support elsewhere).

But what most interests me is the relative success Obama and Clinton had activating their personal donor databases -- people that alreadywere a known part of their campaigns' fundraising universes. The New York Times recently reported that Clinton has over 250,000 people in her database and Obama has 78,000. Without knowing the breakdown of how many of the contributors were known to each candidate, we can still get a sense of how their campaign is churning out donors with the help of their list. The difference is stark. Obama had 7% more donors than he had in his donor universe, while Clinton's total contributors for this quarter is dwarfed by the size of her fundraising database.

Despite the incompleteness of the data pertaining to new versus old donors for each campaign, there are three things that I can take away from this.

First, Conventional Wisdom says that one of Hillary Clinton's largest advantages in this race is the fundraising institution that is Brand Clinton. 250,000 names, spurred on by Bill Clinton, was supposed to be the catalyst to annihilate the Democratic field. That didn't happen. At minimum Obama kept pace with the volume of donations and was at no institutional disadvantage this quarter with regards to the size of his fundraising database. Quite the opposite -- he had more contributors than names in his universe.

Second, either Clinton's fundraising strategy involves spacing out how they tap their database or the donors in the database simply are not there for her in overwhelming numbers. Since Clinton's strategy stretching back to her 2006 Senate campaign has been to find victory through shock and awe with the volume of her war-chest, I find it unlikely that the Clinton campaign's aim was to space out their 250,000 donors over the course of the primary. That's not to say that they went to every single person on their list and asked them to max out, but I'd wager they've gotten more "nays" from donors than they expected (and still walked away with either the number one or two quarterly total for Democratic presidential candidates ever). An early ask reflects a valuation of importance of a donor and Clinton wants her donors to be in love with her now before they get wooed by anyone else.

Third, Obama's smaller database has proved far more fecund than Clinton's. Clinton leveraged around $100 per name in her fundraising database, though that's based on the primary and general election number, so with regard to the primary the effectiveness is further diminished. If we assume Obama is in the $20-23 million range, then he leveraged $250-300 per donor in his database. Now that's not to suggest that Clinton had more small donors than Obama -- we know that he outpaced her by thousands of donors in that category. What this really tells us is that Obama's success was not dependent on his database. While a campaign wants to have a grassroots base that lowers its average donation, it wants to have its total universe produce high numbers (i.e. if someone can give up to $2300, how much of it are they giving?). Lower numbers in the dollar per database entry ratio is bad - it means that a campaign's knowing who people are is not being transitioned into those people giving the candidate money.

Matt Stoller thinks Clinton's vaunted database of donors isn't what it's cracked up to be. "That she didn't release those numbers may actually suggest real weakness because it means that her network is tapped out." I buy Stoller's logic, but we'll find out if he's right in less than two weeks.

Obama did something truly remarkable this quarter -- keep pace with the Clinton machine and in many respects outperformed her. The lack of a fundraising institution didn't hurt Obama this quarter and he'll be better prepared to leverage his growing database in the next one. But that's the key, this analysis only holds for this quarter and is by no means indicative of what will happen next. The Clinton donor database remains large and could still be leveraged to smite any opposition that comes its way. One quarter is not nearly enough time to declare the Clinton fundraising operation weak with regards to turning institutional strength into dollars earned.

At some point soon the conversation may have to shift from being about how Obama kept up with the Clinton behemoth to how the Clinton institutional machine kept pace with the Obama phenomenon. As the Clinton campaign moves forward, though, they must be worried about next quarter as well. Traditionally big donor fundraising drops off after the first quarter as that's when most people max out their contribution. The story for second quarter fundraising may well be about the rise of the Obama machine and the fall of Clinton.

Matt Browner Hamlin regularly blogs at The Right's Field, Emboldened, and My Left Nutmeg.

Taken from www.huffingtonpost.com
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-browner-hamlin/leveraging-strength-comp_b_44861.html

Language/Linguistics: Nigger/a(s) vs. Negro/a(s)

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:09:16 -0400

Been reading about identity in the Caribbean tryin to understand where exactly i fit in here (in the DR). I thought it odd the first couple couple times i heard my family or other folks refer to others as a “negra”, which our profe told us is a term of endearment here.
Funny because they questioned why on earth i identified as mixed but negro here... i got a response that seemed to ring no honey dont call yourself negro, your a nice person!
haha..well heres an excerpt that could shine some light on the situation here...

The nouns negro and négre then underwent further development. They acquired a neutral meaning in the Hispanic and French Caribbean and are used to express the idea of “fellow” (that is, without regard to race or color): un negro delgado, un négre mince “a thin fellow”. In Martinique and Puerto Rico, négre and negro are used as forms of address and are now applied irrespective of race of the addressee, somewhat like English “mate”. This evolution went further and resulted in an interesting affective amelioration of the terms. They are used to mean “friend, “sweetheart”, “darling”, and the like. It has also been attested in another French-influenced territory, Mauritius, where mon noir is equivalent to mon ami (my friend.)
…
the existence of two forms (black and negro, or noir and négre) as a result of the borrowing of Iberian negro, allowing the splitting of meanings. One term could be used for neutral reference as a colour term and the other for affective (pejorative) reference: French noir (neutral) and négre (affective, pejorative); English black (neutral) and negro (in its particular vernacular forms: American nigger, Jamaican niega, both from 16th century English negger, nigger, itself a borrowing of French négre). In Spanish, prieto was used for the colour black, while negro expresses race or ethnicity.

...
In PR and the DR, negroes are considered not to exist as a national category, the category being reserved for migrant Haitians in the case of the Dominican Republic, and, ironically, for migrant Dominicans in the case of Puerto Rico.

From The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World
by Mervyn C. Alleyne © 2005 University of the West Indies Press

BLACK Power

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 22:31:29 -0400

Africa and la República Dominicana have an intricately woven history. This weekend i saw ruins from the first ingenios on the island. Dating to the early 1500s, just a few years after Colón came to the island and named it Hispañola, these were the substance of the “New World” economical structure.
It was a somewhat haunting experience to see the very remnants for the genocide of indigenous cultures and the impetus for the trans-atlantic slave trade. Along with this I learned about the history of slave rebellions and resistance to the oppression they faced. Some things that have been neglected in many of our history books.

One of the locations that we visited was Boca de Nigua, the site of the largest slave uprising in the DR in the 16th century. It is the same site Toussant L’Overture stood at and declared the slaves on the entire island free.

Check for some more pictures of the plantation structures to be up in the next week or so.

My life

Tue, 6 Mar 2007 22:02:14 -0500

I been meaning to get around to this/these themes for a while now.. but just havent. I suppose i’m just trying to take it all in at this point and while my mind is constantly analyzing, i often don’t have the brain power to follow that up with writing down whats going through it.
Been thinking about other people lately... and my interactions with them. On a spiritual level i believe that i must break through the desire to turn others away. In many instances i find myself fighting the urge to reject and turn away rather than accept and invite in.

OBAMANIA

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 22:31:46 -0500

This valentines day i have one love on my mind, and he’s quite the hot ticket these days. I was lucky enough to stay in a hotel with cable by the beach last weekend where i saw his announcing speech on CNN. Ever since then i think my saratonin levels have been exceedingly up, and i’ve had a natural high for the last three days. I know it sounds kinda weird

i could go on for days, i’ve read Dreams from my Father, and am currently reading Audacity of Hope.. both well written, insightful and i’d consider amazing, candidate status or not. but one other thing thats interesting.. is that (in the Y.O.B.* no less) Barack’s BLACKNESS is one of the biggest things that people are questioning. WOW!
Check out these links, keep informed, and please help me stay informed on what things are like back in Los Estados.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1584736,00.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/wheres-the-beef-ii-t_b_41054.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/logan-nakyanzi-pollard/blacks-fine-thanks-wri_b_41050.html

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60F12FF395B0C718CDDAB0894DF404482

http://www.barackobama.com/about/

http://my.barackobama.com/page/socialnet/myfriends

*Year of Blackness- as designated by the K.O.A.B.**
**King of All Black, a.k.a. Kenjus T. Watson_

Black men

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 16:21:55 -0500

"I mean, I don't know what the fuss is about. I mean, everything in the world loves you. White men love you. They spend so much time worrying about your penis they forget their own...And white women? They chase you all to every corner of the earth, feel for you under every bed. Colored women worry themselves into bad health just trying to hang on to your cuffs. Even little children--white and black, boys and girls--spend all their childhood eating their hearts out `cause they think you don't love them. And if that ain't enough, you love yourselves. Nothing in the world loves a black man more than another black man. It looks to me like you the envy of the world."
from Shula-Toni Morrison
http://www.elliscose.com