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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Barack Obama

So we can all agree Obama is white, right?

15 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Family, Politics, South Asia

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Barack Obama, caste, dharmaśāstra, Donald Trump, identity, Kamala Harris, law, Laws of Manu, Madison Grant, Meghan Markle, race, United States

Not long ago, Donald Trump exercised his usual penchant for making headlines by offending people, with comments about Kamala Harris “happening to turn black” and asking “Is she Indian or is she black?” In the latter question, Trump was doing what racial questionnaires have asked us racially mixed people to do for our whole lives: “Are you [ ] Black [ ] Asian [ ] White? Pick one.” (Wizards of the Coast, meanwhile, is now proud to newly erase mixed people from a game that actually represented us back in the ’80s.)

Nothing in Trump’s remarks is welcoming to racially mixed people, of course. Most news outlets and commenters predictably responded to them with righteous indignation. And that indignation might feel affirming to me… if I thought that those outlets really were trying to acknowledge racially mixed people as racially mixed. But they don’t actually do that.

News outlets regularly describe Harris simply as black, simply as Asian, or simply as both, depending on context. In the context of Trump’s remarks, nearly every story reporting on or replying to Trump’s comments will present some variant of this claim, embedded in a subordinate clause as an obvious matter of fact: “Harris, who is both Black and Asian American…”

To which I cheerfully respond: “Yes! Like Barack Obama, who is both black and white! Right?

… right?“

Continue reading →

Defending half-elves and half-Asians

13 Sunday Aug 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Play, Politics

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Barack Obama, David Klion, Dungeons & Dragons, identity, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jeremy Crawford, Kamala Harris, Margaret Weis, race, Tracy Hickman, United States

Since the game began in the 1970s, Dungeons & Dragons players have always had the option of creating characters in various Tolkienesque nonhuman (“demi-human”) varieties like elves, dwarves and orcs, each with different kinds of abilities in the game. The term that the game has always used for these varieties has been “races”. Circa 1980 few people worried about any unfortunate implications of that approach, though there’s reason to think Tolkien’s “races” were tied to racist views.

Also since the old days, players have had the options to play half-elves and half-orcs: characters with one human parent and one elvish or orcish parent. One implication is that these different “races” were not different species, since they can interbreed. The existence of half-elves and half-orcs was a boon for those of us growing up with D&D who happen to be descended from two different “races” in the real world. I read Weis and Hickman’s Dragonlance novels while spending long childhood trips in India, and identified with the character Tanis Half-Elven who similarly found himself an awkward fit in at least one of his ancestral lands.

So I’m alarmed that Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns D&D, apparently plans to remove half-elves and half-orcs from the game – and this on the grounds that it’s “inherently racist” to have them in there. As you might imagine, the issues presented by this decision go well beyond role-playing games.

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The value of forgetting

11 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Buddhism, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

21st century, autobiography, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, pragmatism, race, United States

Ten years ago today, my first wife and I were in the process of moving into our new unfurnished student apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had rented a moving truck and driven over to the house of a friend, who had generously offered us an old piece of furniture. My wife rang the bell and we waited a minute or two. Then my friend came running down the stairs, slightly flustered and dishevelled. “I’m sorry I took so long,” she said, panting a little. “I was watching the news.”

“The… news?” We looked at each other.

“Oh my God, you haven’t heard! Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. It’s collapsed.”

“Two planes!” I said. “Then it must have been deliberate.”

“Yeah, they think it’s Osama bin Laden.”

“Huh,” I said. “Wow.” I paused for a few seconds, saying “Wow” and “Huh” a few more times. Then I shrugged my shoulders and said “Well, let’s get back to moving.”

This was not, I would soon learn, the way most Americans reacted to the same news. Continue reading →

Living through the ’00s

30 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Buddhism, External Goods, Gratitude, Happiness, Hope, Karmic Redirection, Meditation, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity

≈ Comments Off on Living through the ’00s

Tags

21st century, academia, Atrios (blogger), autobiography, Barack Obama, Canada, Disengaged Buddhism, Engaged Buddhism, George W. Bush, natural environment, S.N. Goenka, Śāntideva, United States, war

My philosophical awakening occurred in Thailand in 1997; but it has been over the past decade, “the ohs,” that I’ve really had the chance to develop my thoughts. As that decade closes, I would like to note how my thoughts were shaped by their time.

I spent almost the entire decade living in the United States, except for two three-month stints in Toronto in 2001 and India in 2005. It was not the ideal decade in which to do this, for the US of this decade was the US of George W. Bush: a man who opposed almost everything I had ever stood for, whether substantively (torture, wars of choice, gutting environmental regulations), procedurally (incompetent patronage appointments for natural disasters, governing unilaterally without respect for other branches of government) or symbolically (insisting on suits and ties in the White House). I had grown up despising Ronald Reagan, but Reagan now looked like a saint compared to W – Reagan at least was competent. And in the face of all this, Americans returned him to office in 2004.

For my many American friends – the vast majority of them left-wingers like me – this decade was a time of powerlessness and rage. But they at least could vote, could contribute to political campaigns, could do something about it. Continue reading →

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