Five MENA policy challenges that go beyond ISIS

The current US presidential campaign debate on Middle East policy has focused disproportionately on the US response to the Islamic State (ISIS or IS). This series will focus instead on five alternative Middle East policy challenges facing the next president. Each post below has been originally published at LobeLog.

1. Promised Democracy: The Future of Iraq

2. Tunisia: New Leaders, Old Challenges

3. Bilateral Complicity: The Next US President and Egypt

4. America’s Outdated Special Relationship with Saudi Arabia

5. Public Health as Foreign Policy: Trauma in the Arab World

Five issues ignored during the 2016 presidential election

Amid an election full of outlandish statements, Twitter spats and ad hominem accusations, many important problems facing America have failed to grace headlines. I address five of them in a series on Fair Observer:

1. The Harm of Judicial Elections in America

2. Suspicion in America: Creating a Problem for a Solution

3. Landscape of Inequality: How America Funds Public Schools

4. Continuing Opacity: Surveillance Under the Next Administration

5. The Fairytale of America and its Lost Civic Ideals

Kaepernick and American-ness

There are two major issues underlying the dialogue surrounding Colin Kaepernick’s decision to remain seated during the national anthem: 1. Race and 2. Symbolism.

1. Our society questions the American-ness of People of Color more readily than the American-ness of white people.

I can't count how many times I've heard Asian Americans asked, ‘OK, but where are you REALLY from?”, when their family has lived in the US longer than mine has. Or heard fans of Mexican soccer criticized for a lack of patriotism in a venomous way that fans of European soccer are not. Remember when even elected officials questioned the American-ness of a US-born black presidential candidate, but uttered nothing about his white opponent who was actually born abroad? Or perhaps when a former president suggested administering loyalty tests to Muslim Americans.

In our society, if you aren't an English-speaking white Christian, you have the burden of proof to show your American-ness.

2. Americans are fiercely protective over our symbols: the flag, the Constitution, the pledge of allegiance, the national anthem. Our Founders are held as not wealthy aristocrats who bright and ambitious, but prophets, bestowing upon us words and ideals beyond the tampering of mere mortals. We have been uniquely hesitant to modify our Highest Law, having only done so on 18 occasions since 1787. While others insult America and its military, like Donald Trump, they are careful to not deviate from reverence of national symbolism. When any public figure denies the sanctity of these symbols, they face quick reproach from many corners. 

Both of these issues are symptoms of the same sickness: insecurity. Americans are insecure about what it means to be American. Like a paranoid lover, we desire uncritical loyalty. Like a worried child we clench tight the words of our Founders as though they are the strands of our safety blanket.

This insecurity is at least partly caused by the many Americans who provide demographics as the identity of American-ness: Anglophone, white, Christian. And as those demographics dwindle, anxiety rises. Unfortunately for them, demographics are transient; human migration is the most stable truth of our short history.

As Americans continue to react to the contemporary model of globalization—which has temporally trailed reactions in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe—our collective identity must be more resilient than demographics and more flexible than worship of parchment from a horse and buggy generation. 

The man who talks most about winning is an expert in losing

Don’t be surprised that Trump has been peddling reasons for his eventual loss, stating that the election will be rigged against him. Don’t be surprised when he focuses more on maintaining an intense following rather than softening his message, only feigning attempts to gain wider appeal. And don’t be surprised that he’s cozy with ultra-right, and largely successful, media figures like Steve Bannon.

The man who has remained in the public eye through four bankruptcies knows how to lose. He’s not preparing his first 100 days as president, he’s preparing his next business, to be deployed on Wednesday, November 8^th. Will he start a media outlet? A new TV show? Or a consulting firm? Only time will tell, but this much is true: Trump is prepared to lose the election, and profit from it as much as possible.

This attitude is indicative of corporate America: blow smoke to inflate worth or value as much as possible and use leverage to negotiate/set-up a golden parachute, so that when you get exposed you land with more than you had originally. It’s bark with no bite, it’s style without substance, but in business and in politics, it seems to work far longer than it should. 

White America: how did we get here?

Since the time of honest racial segregation in America—when whites wrote down race-based rules of exclusion—we have been formulating modes of dishonest segregation: denials of equality and inclusion in areas such as housing, criminal justice, employment, interpersonal relationships, and private organizations.

Once institutionalized, this dishonest segregation becomes subconscious for us whites: we do not create race-based rules, we just live by the status quo. We are not racist, after all, we just call balls and strikes. We're objective when pressing charges, citing criminal statistics, administering standardized tests, drawing political districts, or selecting the best candidate.

Many whites were born into this dishonest America: told that ours is a diverse country, only to be raised in all-white neighborhoods and sent to local property tax-supported, largely white schools, with few opportunities placed in our laps to have black friends.

By the time Rodney King made the news, we had to learn of the goings on of our own country from strangers on the screen—we had no loved ones who experienced institutionally tolerated racial prejudice or violence. We knew no faces on which to see pain. We had no connections.

Twenty years later, and what has changed? Inequality remains. Informal segregation remains. This is still a dishonest America. Whites only know more because there are more cameras, not because of an increase in interracial neighborhoods, places of worship, or other voluntary activities or organizations.

This reality does not create people without tolerance, it creates people without empathy. It is difficult, and perhaps unnatural, to feel empathy for a group excluded from your childhood, education, community, and workplace—especially when you are simultaneously told they are not actually being excluded.

Our crisis today is not that us whites are any more racist than anyone else, it is that we do not engage in empathy. We see a country that functions reasonably well for us and fail to ask how well it works for others. Whites need to view #BlackLivesMatter not as implying other lives do not matter, but as a plea for empathy, a plea to help create a country that works just as well for others as it does for us.

Our crisis tomorrow is that any unrest—any threat to change the status quo, any risk of this country continuing to work as well for us as it did in our childhood—will push white people to increasingly blame others. In accepting the Republican nomination for president in 1968, Richard Nixon stated, “When a nation that has been known for a century for equality of opportunity is torn by unprecedented racial violence … then it's time for new leadership for the United States of America.” Nixon could not have possibly been talking to black America, fresh off the heels of a century of Jim Crow and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was talking to white people—the same people presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump excites by the promise of making America great again.

As we did in 1968, we risk looking to a presidential candidate who promises to restore order and, implicitly, ensure that America continues to work well for us whites.

We do not need to make America great again for us white people. We do not need to tell ourselves that police officers are increasingly targets of violence. We do not need more excuses to dig our heels into the status quo. We need to begin a social evolution in which our influence is real: we must listen to how America works for all minorities—Black, Latino, Muslim, LGBTQIA, Disabled, women, etc. Real understanding will foster empathy between communities, allowing for the creation and promotion of more inclusive spaces, institutions, and policies. Through listening to the voices, pain, and strife of our fellow Americas with whom we may not live, work, or pray, we can begin to create the nation we were raised to believe we already had.