18 April 2008: Human Rights Speech, University of Arkansas

Human Rights Awareness Week
University of Arkansas
Greek Theater
April 18, 2008

The Burden of Teaching, The Process of Education: Tibet and the Human Rights Question
Sidney Burris

On December 10, 1948, the U.N. adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Preamble, which I’m sure has been read frequently this week, closes with a paragraph, I’d like to repeat one more time:

"Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
I will return to that phrase “strive by teaching and education.”

Tonight, I was asked to speak about human rights and the Tibetan situation. As it turns out, the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy just recently released its human rights report for 2007.

It is 150 pages long, and like all human rights reports, the reading here is grim.

I could recite the harsh figures for you; I could talk about yet another year of increased detention, unwarranted arrests, disappearances, violent suppression of religious freedoms, increased surveillance, and denial of the fundamental rights of free speech promised in 1948 by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I could tell you that it is illegal to have a picture of the Dalai Lama in your tent if you are a goatherder.

I could tell you that the Panchen Lama, who is second only to the Dalai Lama in Tibetans’ eyes, was kidnapped 12 years ago, placed under house arrest with his entire family somewhere in China, and has not been seen or heard from since.

If he is alive, he would be now 18 years old.

He was kidnapped when he was 6.

I could make predictions about the future state of human rights in Tibet, but it will be difficult to test them because two days ago, China closed Tibet’s borders to all visitors.

No one in; no one out.

Except of course for the 3000 Tibetans who yearly risk exposure, starvation, frostbite, imprisonment, and execution as they cross the Himalayan mountains and arrive in refugee camps in Bhutan and Nepal, there to begin a new life of hardship and re-adjustment, severed from the land they know, the religion they practice, the language they speak.

Many Tibetan parents voluntarily send their children on this arduous journey, hoping that they will grow up free in India and receive the education in Tibetan language and culture that is currently unavailable in Tibet.
The Dalai Lama has said that we are witnessing a cultural genocide in Tibet unless negotiations are begun immediately to bring these dire matters under control.

I could go through the 150 pages of this report, and provide you with credible evidence concerning the accuracy of his statement.

But I said I wanted to come back to that phrase, “strive by teaching and education.”

And if I think about that phrase long enough, and if I think about the students I have met this year in the class on Gandhi, King, and the Dalai Lama that I teach with Geshe Dorjee, our Tibetan monk, I realize that while there is a time and place to count the bodies, there is also a time and a place to realize that all bodies count, whether they are Tibetan, or whether they are Chinese, or whether they are Iraqi, or whether they are American.

And that the time to realize this, to understand that a victim of political violence is a victim of politics gone wrong, the time to understand this is now.

And it is largely through teaching and education, as the UN proclamation clearly states, that we gain this understanding.

And yet, regarding the Tibetan situation, we see violence and hatred erupting across the world.

The New York Times, for example, reported on Thursday that on the campus of Duke University, as Chinese students and Tibetan sympathizers were protesting on campus, an unsuspecting Chinese student walked out of the dining hall into the midst of the protest, and when she attempted to start a dialogue between the two rival parties, her picture was taken, and her image later appeared on Chinese websites, where she was labeled a traitor to her Motherland, and where her ID number and contact information were given out, as well as directions to the apartment of her parents who are still living in China.

Her name, as all the world now knows, is Grace Wang, and the firestorm generated on the Internet (over half a million Google references today) has raged with frightening intensity. The NYT reports that one site recommend that Ms. Wang be boiled in oil for her treasonous action.

Her parents, as all the world now knows, are in hiding to escape the death threats that they receive hourly.

And what was the student’s position on Tibet?

That Tibet must remain an integral part of China.

A student who simply asked for dialogue as the first step toward a solution is vilified, a Chinese student who wished to see her motherland remain united, but wished as well to listen to the Tibetan side of the story . . . .

How is it possible not to see Ms. Wang’s gesture as the only and vital step that we must take if human rights are to prosper, not as an idea, but as a daily practice?

How is it possible not to understand that a moral and ethical DMZ, a demilitarized zone where the facts cited by each side are temporarily suspended and our common humanity recognized, how is it possible not to see this as the only productive zone of engagement that we have left?

How is it possible that these steps toward securing this zone are not being taken?

This, I believe, is a failure of education and this, I believe, is the burden of teaching (and we are all teachers now) . . . to remind our students, to tell our friends, and most importantly to impress upon ourselves that the great gift the UN gave us in 1948 was a new language to conceptualize a new reality, a reality that rises above nationality, that transcends racial origin, and in times of hardship such as those now visiting the Tibetans and the Chinese, a language that asks us to do something that is ultimately revolutionary and certainly new in the annals of human history . . .

This language asks us to think of ourselves as human beings who have a fundamental set of rights that are guaranteed by the one and only thing that unites all of us, and that is our humanity.

Our nationality doesn’t guarantee these rights, nor do our politics; those come and go.

Our racial profile doesn’t guarantee them; nor does our ethnicity. They are the exclusive concerns of phenotype and culture, and they are written on sand.

But notice: whenever these rights are violated, whenever they are summarily suspended, they are violated and suspended in the name of nationality, politics, race, or ethnicity.

We know in our pulse, then, we feel it in our hearts, that the argument for human rights is the highest and most legitimate argument for equality that the human community has yet devised.
When we deprive others of their human rights, we spend our time arguing about nationality, politics, race, and ethnicity.

We do not imprison, we do not torture, we do not kidnap in the name of humanity; we commit these heinous acts out of fear, out of paranoia, and out of defensiveness, the very reactions that cripple us when we feel our nation, our politics, our race, and our ethnicity are being assaulted.

That is wrong, and it is only through teaching and education that we can correct these destructive tendencies.

In times of siege and confrontation, it is difficult to keep our eyes trained on our common humanity, but that is what we must do;

It is difficult to think in simple terms about the complex implications of our humanity, but that is what we must learn to do;

And it is difficult to look at those who hate us as bearers of the human spirit, the very same spirit that burns within each of us, but that is what we must teach ourselves to do;

This is not easy because this involves the transformation of the human personality.

But this is our human task.

It is very difficult, in fact, if you are Chinese, and have had no news of current events in Tibet, and are shown a single video of a Tibetan boy attacking an aged Chinese man, it is very difficult to think of yourself as having anything in common with the Tibetan boy.

But you do, and that is a fact, and because it is a fact, it must be accepted.

It is very difficult, if you are Tibetan, to see a disemboweled monk lying on the street of a remote village in eastern Tibet and to feel that the Chinese policeman who committed this atrocity shares anything at all with you.

But he does, and that too is a fact, and because it is a fact, it too must be accepted.

And it is very easy if you are an American, a spectator of sorts, to choose sides in this struggle.

But I would argue that there is only one side to choose here, and that is the side of human rights.

But I would also argue that choosing this side requires teaching and education and learning because choosing this side involves realizing that, if you are an American, human rights have not always flourished in your country or in many places where your country has exerted its influence.

So I would argue that a human rights violation that occurs within the community of East LA is a human rights violation that occurs within the community of the world;

I would argue further that what is required when looking out across the complex and highly developed landscape of human cruelty is a carefully cultivated blindness, a blindness that can only come of teaching and education and learning . . . because it is a learned blindness that schools us not to see the nationality of the suffering, but to see the unjust suffering of a just nation.

It is a learned blindness that teaches us not to see the religious faith of the dying, but to see the unpeaceful dying that comes of holding a peaceful religious faith in the wrong place at the wrong time . . .

And to teach ourselves to cultivate this blindness wherever we encounter suffering of any kind, and to say here is unjustified human suffering, and unjustified human suffering is wrong wherever I find it, whether it is in my family, my classroom, my neighborhood, my state, my country, or whether it exists in places whose language I do not know, whose laws I don’t understand, and whose ways I find repellant, to say simply that human suffering is wrong, and intolerable . . .

to be able to make this statement is to make the only moral statement that will guide us successfully through the 21st century.

We adopt this perspective now, or we confront dire consequences in our decision not to do so.

And of course this is the human rights perspective, and it is not one that is easy to practice, day by day, month by month, year by year.

It requires patience, tolerance, and continual self-examination.

It cannot be legislated, it cannot be lobbied, it must be cultivated by each one of us who has once looked out on the vast terrain of human deprivation and said, “This is intolerable.”

I always think of a story the Dalai Lama tells in situations such as these.

His Holiness had been living in exile for some years when a Tibetan monk who had been imprisoned and tortured for decades was finally, after much political pressure, set free. As do all of the refugees arriving in exile in Dharamsala, this old monk hoped for an audience with His Holiness who, as he tells the story, had developed an extraordinary admiration for the old man’s courage and endurance while living for years in the harsh conditions of a Chinese prison.

So His Holiness asked the monk, as he was leaving, “What was the hardest moment you faced while imprisoned?”

He was expecting a story of torture and deprivation. A story that would make its way into the human rights report I’ve mentioned.

But the old monk surprised him.

“Your Holiness,” he said, “I was once in danger of losing compassion for the man who daily tortured me.”

That’s our model, that’s the product of education and teaching and introspection, and while we see it in this old monk in its most advanced form, a form that most of us, or at least, I, find unimaginable, I think we see it in its infancy, as well, in Grace Wang, the young Chinese student at Duke who stepped between the protestors, who took the middle way between two hard lines, refused to vilify either side, and asked that each recognize their common humanity and begin the conversation that would lead them to embrace their own glaringly common humanity.

I find myself nowadays thinking a lot about that old Tibetan monk and that young Chinese student, and I hope you will too.

We have much to learn from them both.

Thank you very much.