Friends of Dialogue on
Diversity
Mini-Newsletter
– November 26th, 2008
The twelfth annual Holiday Fair and
Children's Gift Collection
marks the festive close of Dialogue
on Diversity's 2008 program year with the agenda set, as always, for the second
Saturday of December, this year the 13th of the month, at the Carlos Rosario
International Center. The Center is
situated at 1100 Harvard Street in North West Washington, some half dozen blocks
east of the Adams Morgan and Mount Pleasant districts of the city.
Park at the Center's lot just off Harvard Street .
The program begins at
11:00 a.m. with songs of the season and introductions of guests and the
children who represent the list of
participating community organizations. These organizations,
indispensable sources of aid and vitality in their respective neighborhoods,
will distribute to the client households they serve, throughout the holiday time
just ahead, the toys our Dialogue, along with generous friends and firms in the
metropolitan area, have managed to collect.
Lunch, song and dance performances by the
children, the arrival of Santa Claus, and the division of gifts among the
participating community groups follow, bringing the party to its conclusion near
3:00 p.m.
The Holiday Fair
site, being announced
this week, is the home of the remarkable Carlos Rosario International Charter
School, founded and nurtured over more than a score of years by Sonia Gutierrez
(who is, by the by, a Dialogue on Diversity director). Sonia
Gutierrez took on the new school's management from its inception and built the
resulting institution, now a model for adult education throughout the
country. Her unfailingly gentle manner cloaks steely
resolution and a tireless striving for the good of the communities the school
serves. The school, bearing the name of a Washington
businessman and civic leader who had aided in its founding, has been a beacon to
two generations of young adult arrivals in the bustling city of opportunity.
They come from around the globe, from places of origin in
Latin America, Ethiopia and other parts of Africa, the Pacific islands, the
Middle East , and elsewhere. The visitor, upon entering the
premises, is struck by the angular forms, in the luminous whites and bright
colors that highlight the design, which, thanks to Ms. Gutierrez's efforts, were
conceived and installed by a professional interior designer of no mean
capabilities. It is a fittingly elegant setting for the
hardworking newcomers to the country who constitute the bulk of its
students.
Friends who will attend at
the Holiday
Fair should bring along
a suitable toy, a book, artist's equipment, or other gift for the
children, wrapping and marking each for boy or girl, with a
hint of the target age – from four to fourteen. (Target price:
$10 or a shade more) A second, or third, gift will be
immensely appreciated, as will your contribution of cash for additional gifts
(send any contributions, marked: Children's Gifts, to Dialogue on Diversity,
1629 K St., N.W., Suite 300, Washington,
D.C. 20006), Our distributing organizations number the
children in their client households in the hundreds. Please
have a role in this year's Holiday Fair and, as always, consult the Dialogue's
Web-site (www.dialogueondiversity.org) for up-dates
and details.
House
Leadership Comes Close to Home
Two members of Dialogue on
Diversity's Congressional Advisory Board members have been elected leadership
posts in the House of Representatives apparatus. Rep. Xavier
Becerra of California , who has spoken at many of our Public Policy forums, is
the newly chosen Vice-Chair of the House Democratic Caucus.
The Democratic being the majority contingent in the House by a goodly
margin, the Caucus exercises a significant influence over the
form of legislation being shaped in the chamber, acting as the interface between
the sense of the membership on the one hand and initiatives of the house
leadership and executive branch on the other.
Rep. Barbara Lee, representing a
district in the Bay Area of northern California, and also a long-time part of
the Dialogue's Congressional Advisory Board, has been elected Chair of the Black
Caucus, a body both numerous and articulate in its critique
of legislative proposals and in its influence on the quality of the bills
emerging from the House. The Caucus members are of the
African American component of the national population, but its constituency
necessarily extends to the broader range of ethnic and mainstream elements that
are parts of their respective districts. The Caucus is at pains to burnish its
reputation in having historically acted as the "conscience of the
Congress".
Dialogue on Diversity has honored
both Rep. Becerra and Rep. Lee with its Diversity Awards, in both cases
approximately a decade ago, It is a matter of pride that
their excellences have now been duly recognized by their
colleagues.
Public
Policy Programs for 2009 – immigration concerns and an economic
hurricane
Again in 2009 the Rayburn Building 's
Gold Room on Capitol Hill hosts Dialogue on Diversity's Public Policy Forum
(courtesy of the office of Rep. Hilda Solis of California ).
The program is scheduled for March 5th, with the title:
Breezes of Change on the Potomac : the Bracing New Climate.
By Forum time the incoming Administration will be firmly enough ensconced
in its new digs about the capital city and will have gotten off to a brisk start
on its measures to cure the ills of the country's flagging commerce and
industry, the health care woes of an ever more populous
nation, the decay of the natural environment, the imploding infrastructure, and
a long list of other ills.
At least one policy question, though
-- immigration -- has been scarcely mentioned during the year just
past, except in non-English language advertisements aimed to
ethnic segments of the electorate. Immigration is surely,
however, a far from trivial concern: the U.S. , while it is
the world's top magnet for migrants, notoriously harbors a scheme of regulation
that does not cope. Curiously, for all that each of the
candidates upbraided the other on every point of policy, and both cast blame on
the sitting president for the whole, the three of them were essentially in
agreement on the contentious issue of immigration – favoring the "comprehensive"
approach -- and no one of the three found himself in accord with the "nativist"
strains in his own party. The larger number of Directors of
Dialogue on Diversity have concluded that in the matter of immigration – which,
after all, is ours as an organization, the proper, canonical issue, indeed
diversity's special legislative face – the rule that had taken shape in
the 2007 McCain-Kennedy bill was the preferred route to
reformation of the sputtering engine of today's immigration law.
The views of the majority Directors were summed up in the statement set
out here in full:
.
Ø
Dialogue
on Diversity, an organization bringing together women and men from the both the
mainstream population of America and, more particularly, from the country's
broad range of diverse ethnic and cultural communities, aims for a constructive
interchange among them of their knowledge and the special insights of
each. Our goal is to advance a fruitful conversation on many
diverse skills and outlooks, and to foster the myriad of useful interactions of
those faculties, held by each of us as our special ethnic and cultural
patrimony, as we confront the common concerns of the American economy and
society.
Ø
We have a
lively consciousness, therefore, of the presence of newcomers from every corner
of the world, all of them known to us as working, essential parts of our
economic and social mechanisms -- as our neighbors, as small businesspersons who
serve us, as our employees, and as our friends. We have an
acute awareness of the history of the arrival of these newcomers, generation
after generation; their arrival and flourishing has operated as a periodic
stimulus of innovation and as an infusion of fresh influences into our society,
tending to preserve it from any kind of social and civic inbreeding, imparting a
perpetually new face and vitality to the society's unchanging, but ever
refreshed, structure of representative government. The
migrants are a vigorous society's best friends.
Ø
We see and
hear with genuine pain, therefore, the expressions of fear and disdain uttered
by large swaths of American native-born for the migrants in our midst, often for
misguided or fanciful causes -- an alleged criminality, laziness, leanings to
corrupt moral practices, a supposed pernicious macroeconomic effect through an
undercutting of the country's commerce and industry, and on and on.
We believe that the policy of the U.S. ought to contain a presumption of
welcome for the peoples from elsewhere in the world, not only for persons of
wealth or high skill, but for the ordinary and poor – those whose immigration
throughout the national past has formed the backbone of a resilient and creative
society – persons exceptional only for their courage in pulling up stakes and
moving to a distant country for the sake of its liberties of thought, commerce,
manners, and morals.
Ø
We are
conscious of the favorable view expressed by the new president, and by his
opponent in the recent election, who remains an influential senator, of a new
and comprehensive immigration law replacing the accretion of essentially
non-working law that now purports to regulate immigration. A
new, reasonably conceived law would honor the arduous efforts of the persons who
to now, whether or not in accord with the prescribed legal forms, have made
their way by diligent work in a largely unwelcoming society;
it would design a sensible and tolerable means for these
persons and their households to attain a plenary status as members of American
society. It would provide for the admission of migrants, with
appropriate work permits, in numbers commensurate with the vigorous demand for
their labor in the pulsing energies of a growing national economy (a system of
commerce and creativity now standing at the ready for operation at full tilt
throughout the country, whether or not the distractions of a momentary financial
dyspepsia obscure the fact, and promising foreseeably so to operate in times
ahead).
Ø
It is to
be hoped that the new Administration and the new Congress,
given the priorities placed on other, perhaps more nearly immediate tasks, will
move to advance the cause of immigration law reform along these comprehensive
lines. We look forward to being part of those efforts during
the years ahead.
In addition to a segment on
immigration the coming Public Policy Forum is projected to take up questions of
telecommunications and internet regulation, the structure of the pharmaceutical
industry and the shape that any regulation of the industry should take, and the
job of education at all levels, or age points, in order to maintain an adequate
human capital infrastructure -- the prime source of wealth and the productive
resource par excellence, which must be totally replaced every seventy
years.
MPI's E
Pluribus Unum
Awards
E
Pluribus Unum: so
the ancient Vergil thought when he contemplated the order that his countrymen
had brought about in the inhabited world. So the founding
fathers of the American republic thought, as they emplaced the phase as an
element of the official emblem of the new nation. So Dialogue
on Diversity has thought, as it chose the phrase to be the title for a recent
Public Policy Forum. Which brings us to the Migration Policy
Institute of Washington, a nonprofit research body now instituting an array of
honors under the title: E Pluribus Unum Prizes. These tokens
of recognition, four in number annually, each bearing a stipend of $50.000,
are to be conferred upon persons, organizations, and
institutions distinguishing themselves for effective work in fostering the
integration of immigrants into the many converging streams of American society,
economy, and civic life – a project aptly summing up the sense of the old Latin
motto. Applications for the prizes are to be submitted by the
end of January, 2009. Details at www.integrationawards.org.
The prizes, sponsored by the J.M. Kaplan Fund, are
awarded under the aegis of the MPI's National Center on
Immigrant Integration Policy. These awards are one more
initiative, among many, keeping the phenomenon of immigration at the focus of
national deliberation and emphasizing its centrality in our intellectual
conceptions of American society. A focus and a centrality
that will doubtless be tested by the developments in prospect over the next
several years.
A Historian of
Diversity
The current number of the New York
Review of Books sets forth a lengthy and detailed exposition of the thought of
the celebrated George Marsh Frederickson, a professor of U.S. History at
Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, whose death, in
February of this year, at the age of only 73, ended a still productive life's
work as a historian of ethnicity and race in America. A
history that Prof. Frederickson painstakingly coupled with the history of
analogous events and movements in other times and places – a method of
comparative history of which he emerges as pioneer and exemplary
practitioner. The analyses he constructed, as a preeminent
theorist and chronicler of diversity on a world stage,
penetratingly illuminate the structure and dynamics of ethnicity in the
U.S. as a core phenomenon of the country's civic and social life.
In his last book, Diverse Nations: Explorations in
the History of Racial and Ethnic Pluralism, he posits several historically
encountered models of ethnic and class interrelationships.
The pyramid model, first, has the old line mainstream, English in
language and ancestry, at the top in authority, prestige, and wealth, the
descendants of other north European immigrants next, the south and east
Europeans next, along with Asians and others, while the new waves of Latinos are
scaled further down, and the African Americans are relegated to the remaining
spaces at ground level. The second, what one might call the
canonical culture model, has the newly arriving infusions of migrants
assimilated over the space of several score years to the reigning national
culture, it being assumed that such a culture is defined,
standardized, and fixed, and, moreover, is sufficiently
compelling to convert newcomers definitively to itself.
The more interesting model, one which, in the American context, has fully
taken shape only in the last fifty years, is that of the pluralistic society, in
which the distinct elements of the larger community, diverse in origin, culture,
time of arrival, etc., retain in some measure their own peculiarities, far from
settling for a lower position in a unitary prestige scale, far, again from
conforming themselves to a single authorized cultural style, but instead
maintaining their proper peculiarities, and all the while assuming particular
traits from other cultural elements while in turn conferring some of their own
special flavor to the others. None of these models has
established itself as the exclusive account of American society and its
diversity, while, on the other hand, none of the historical
phases that they respectively describe has entirely disappeared.
They persist in a sort of tension throughout the country's history,
although at this juncture it is the pluralistic model that appears most broadly
explanatory and most clearly catches the spirit of the times.
The NYRB article explores at the same
time another of Prof. Frederickson's books, Big Enough to be
Inconsistent, a subtly detailed account of Lincoln 's
views on the complex of questions that exercised American civic life in the half
century before the civil war. Lincoln emerges from this
narrative as a figure of uncommon intellectual creativity and of profound
wisdom, who carried on a decades long argument within himself on slavery, on the
virtues of the American constitutional system and the value of its survival as a
single undivided sovereignty, and on the ultimate position
within a single nation of the African-descended members of the national
community. His most evolved position, expressed in the 1863
battlefield dedication, exalted the value of the persisting union,
American history having come down to the test whether a country whose
conception and christening ["so conceived and so dedicated"] committed it to an
ideal of equality, might long endure. At the same time, in
the very haunting phrases of the second inaugural address, one finds the sad,
almost mystical, rumination querying whether it were the purpose of the almighty
that "every drop of blood drawn with the lash must be paid by another drawn with
the sword" – thus the entire enterprise of the national history being aligned
with the task of eradicating the evil of the country's dealing with the enslaved
people. It is surely of interest that in our own time the new
president-elect has on more than one occasion invoked the insights of Lincoln as
a moral beacon for sound policy – that in a diverse social system there may be
strains, but never rupture, to the essential "bonds of affection".
A Welcome from MD/DC
MSDC
Minority suppliers,
entrepreneurs of diverse ethnicity who aim, smartly and accurately, for
their positions in the supply chains of major companies and public agencies,
are invited to acquaint themselves with the Maryland/D.C.
Minority Supplier Development Council. Kenneth Clark,
head of the MD/DC MSDC, is eager to recruit added entrepreneurs for the
metropolitan area's stable of vendors to be recommended to the purchasing
authorities of the array of large firms whose procurement departments are joined
as members of the Council. With these departments the work of
building and maintaining diversity in the firm's chain of vendors is the name of
the game. The Council, for its part, certifies able and
well-managed minority enterprises and places them in line for slots in the
diverse supply chains that the Council members' procurement executives are
dedicated to maintaining. African American-owned businesses,
Hispanic-owned firms, and others qualifying as minority-owned
and professionally able may avail themselves of the Council's
services. The Maryland/DC Council is one of a national
network of local councils. The Maryland/DC
organization, headed by Mr. Clark, just gathered for its annual convention in
Washington the week of November 17. The national organization
had held its annual meeting earlier in the fall at Las Vegas .
Interested entrepreneurs may reach the Council at
301-592-6710. Its internet site, which should be
pulled up and carefully studied by any interested entrepreneur,
is www.mddccouncil.org.
Membership
Note: Friends of the Dialogue
should renew their membership for 2009. See the Web-site (www.dialogueondiversity.org) for the membership form -- choose
the membership level that feels comfortable for your own budget. We
look forward to welcoming you to the circle of our supporting members!
And a
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
