Many Races, Many Views
Commentators Assess UN Conference, the Issues Underlying It

Throughout the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, NPR will present a variety of commentators speaking directly to the issues at the Durban conference -- and personally about the experience of racism in their own lives.

On Morning Edition the week leading up to the conference, commentators debated the U.S. decision not to send U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to Durban.

Joe Davidson Photo: BET.com

• NPR commentator Joe Davidson, a columnist for BET.com, says that in deciding not to send Powell, the United States missed an opportunity to show leadership against racial discrimination. The State Department said the United States opposed making Israel a target of Arab criticism over Zionism and the Palestinian issue. Listen to Davidson's commentary on Morning Edition, which aired Aug. 28.

David Harris

• David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, says Powell was right not to go because of the racism conference's anti-Israel stance. "The truth is our government tried valiantly to put this conference back on its original tracks to deal with contemporary racism worldwide," Harris says in his Aug. 31 commentary on Morning Edition. "Months of intense negotiations, however, produced little progress." Harris's group will also boycott the conference. Listen to Harris's commentary on Morning Edition.

During the week of Sept. 3, Morning Edition presents a series of commentaries from people around the world who have experienced racial discrimination in their own lives.

K.P. Singh

• K.P. Singh, a Dalit or "untouchable" from India, is a sociology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He discusses the difficulties he had to overcome in India to get an education -- beatings by teachers when he performed better than higher-caste students, roommates who refused to let a Dalit sleep in their dorm. Singh says that even in the United States, he has encountered discrimination from high-caste colleagues. Listen to Singh's commentary on Morning Edition.

• Louise Mushikiwabo, a Tutsi from Rwanda, is a public relations executive in Maryland. She discusses personally investigating the murder of her brother's family during the genocide, only to find they had been killed by Hutus who had been their friends since childhood. Mushikiwabo says that in a strange way she has wished for some kind of reconciliation with her neighbors, even the families of the alleged killers, but that no one in Rwanda has ever offered her any kind of apology for the genocide. Listen to Mushikiwabo's commentary on Morning Edition.

Marie Lily Cerat

• Marie Lily Cerat, a Haitian, is now an educator in Brooklyn. She writes about growing up in a society without racial prejudice, then facing discrimination when she came to the United States. Cerat was fired from her first job when she told her boss she was from Haiti. She says that after many smaller instances of discrimination since then, it remains a struggle for her to trust white Americans. In the years that Cerat has lived in this country, she says she has never gotten used to Americans' obsession with race. Listen to Cerat's commentary on Morning Edition.

• Akida Rouzi, a member of the Uighur ethnic minority in China, now attends the University of Central Oklahoma. China annexed Uighuristan after World War II, and resettled ethnic Han Chinese on land belonging to Uighurs, much as what happened in Tibet. She recounts the discrimination she faced in school in the former Uighuristan, and her mother's imprisonment by the Chinese in apparent retaliation for her father's social activism. Rouzi says the hatred the Chinese seem to feel for her equals the hatred she feels for them. Listen to Rouzi's commentary on Morning Edition.



Other Resources

• Read more about Jose Masso at the WBUR Web site.

• Read One Woman's Quest for Justice, an article by Louise Mushikiwabo in Crimes of War Magazine about the death of her brother in Rwanda.

• Visit the American Jewish Committee Web site.