Asian psyche

Chinese reactions to the US election...

"I think the main reason Chinese have liked Obama so much is he's a black person and we Chinese have sympathy for the weak side," said Li Bingxin, an official with the China Journalists Association "They have fought so many years for equality. If the black side can win it will be a breakthrough."

One good Chinese friend had asked me days earlier if Mr. Obama would be the first black president and was surprised by the answer. "Wasn't Abraham Lincoln black?" he asked.
Um, no.
"But he did something really good for the black people, right?"

Another friend asked to know more about Mr. Obama. I played her a video clip of a speech and she was shocked when he expressed a litany of economic problems, including people struggling to pay for health care and send their children to school.

"Is this all true?" she asked, and was shocked by my affirmative answer. "We thought everyone in America was rich."

Ways to go...

Meanwhile the rest of the world (esp. the Middle East) have quite some catching up to do in matters of race. As this Lebanese daily reports:

Racism against black people has been alive and well in Arab countries for a long time, with Saudi Arabia ending its own private brand of slavery only at the beginning of the sixties and Mauritania still maintaining a very active slave trade until this day. Even in countries in which the practice of slavery never existed, the view of blacks as inferior has been prevalent for many years, and carries its own brand of prejudice culturally and politically.
One of the highest selling type of cosmetics in Egypt, Sudan and the Gulf today are skin-whitening creams that carry names such as "Fair and Lovely," "Ultra Fair" and "B-White," and whose advertisements send the message that girls will get the job/ men/look of their dreams if only they were whiter.
"Most westerners do not have an idea of how racist a place the Middle East can be," said Anthony Badran, a Lebanese Fellow for the DC-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. "They are completely unaware, for example, that in many Arab countries, the word still used to refer to a black person is 'abed' or 'slave.'"

Dianne Blell combines fashion advertising, mythology and art history in the production of her photo tableaus. Here she seems to use classic elements of Hindu folklore using the vehicle of Radha and Krishna’s love story. The inherent stereotypes latent in many societies are reinforced subliminally using their mythologies and histories. This might be one reason why it is easier for people to transcend race here in the United States (the United States is relatively a new union without too much mythological baggage) but will be a much tougher act to follow in many other parts of our world.

Of swift boats, baby mamas and long term cortical storage

Tell a lie a thousand times and people might (just might) start to think that it rings true. An elegant explanation of how the brain achieves this is documented here and is attributed to a phenomenon called 'source amnesia'.

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a non credible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength.

The news channel FOX has been burning the midnight oil in the recent weeks and have come up with the following innovative things to say about one of the candidates for the Presidency of the United States:

- A commentator accidentally confused "Obama" with "Osama" and then joked on the air about killing Obama.

- An anchor talked about a playful fist bump by Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama and theorized that it could be a "terrorist fist jab"

- The news network also managed to label Michelle Obama "Obama's baby mama"— slang for an unmarried mother of a man's child...

The connections between this pattern and the one seen during the Swift Boat days four years ago are not lost on the political observers among us… Fortunately, Obama has started a website that aims to counter statements that could contribute to ‘source amnesia’. I am not too sure how successful this endeavor might be, but personally I am bracing for a long, hot summer ahead where barbs are certain to fly back and forth and the latent animosities between blacks and whites will reach fever pitch. My only wish is that after all the dust settles post elections, the rancor between the races should come to an end. More than Republicans or Democrats ruling this country, simmering and uncompensated race dynamics could do the most harm to our fabric.

Edouard Manet (1832 – 1883), ‘Le rendezvous des chats’, 1968, French lithograph, 42 X 33 cm (source JAMA magazine April 18, 2007 Vol 297 No. 15)