discrimination | The Direction of Intention

And Bok Choy [David’s blog on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on February 4, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

This week we made a miso pot-sticker soup (Japanese). 20 made for us a red curry noodle soup (Thai). We often make pasta dishes and will soon cook chicken marsala (Italian). Later this week we will make fajitas (Mexican). In one of our soups we used for the very first time bok choy (Chinese cabbage).

We drove on errands and passed Panda Express (Chinese), Pimmy’s (Thai), Masala House (Indian), Buono Beef (Italian), La Fogata (Mexican), La Caribeña (Columbian) Madame Pho’ (Vietnamese), Gyro Grill (Greek), Bisi (Ethiopian)…There are many more. A not-so-surprising statement of food diversity borne from a nation comprised of diverse people.

We passed a mosque, a Buddhist temple, a synagogue, churches of all shapes and stripes. A few miles north is a Sikh temple, a Hindu temple, an Amish community, and a Taoist Center to the west.

A quick look (less than a minute) at the labels on my clothes reveals items from Vietnam, China, Mexico, India and Bangladesh. I recently bought a pair of shoes from Columbia Sportswear Outlet store. They were made in China. My favorite Frye boots were also made in China. Frye is a company founded in Massachusetts. Massachusetts is an Algonquin word meaning “at the great hill.” Colorado is a Spanish word meaning “colored red”.

My name, David, comes from the Hebrew word “dod” which means “beloved”. It is a name that “has been adopted into languages all over the world, including Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Quranic. Quranic means “relating to or contained in the Koran.” Syriac is a literary language, Aramaic, used by several Eastern Christian churches. Kerri is named after a county in Ireland. Her parents cleverly exchanged the “Y” for an “I”. Kerry is a Gaelic word meaning, “Ciar’s people.” Ciar was a legendary warrior (This is new knowledge to me and explains a lot!)

In our history we find the word “settlement.” English, Dutch, French, Spanish. Another word, “migration”, shows up later in reference to the arrival of the Irish, Italians, Germans. “Immigration’ is a word that includes the arrival of the Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans and many people from Central America. Of course, we cannot forget the word “slavery” which was the path of Africans to this land, and “displacement” which is the sanitized word referring to the fate of the native peoples. “Attitudes towards new immigrants have fluctuated from favorable to hostile since the 1790s.”

This morning I read this from Heather Cox Richardson (Letters From An American, Feb. 1, 2025): Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy.

Given the reality of what is all around us, of what actually populates our lives, can you possibly grasp the magnitude of delusion and utter amorality in the minds (there are no hearts) of the current republican administration?

read Kerri’s brilliant blogpost (though she regularly disparages everything she writes)

likesharesupportwakeuplookaroundyoucommentsubscribetoreality…thankyou.

Filed under: Education, Identity, Perspective, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: artistry, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, DEI, delusion, discrimination, Diversity, equity, Heather Cox Richardson, immigration, inclusion, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, patriarchy, species diversity, story, studio melange, the melange | Leave a comment »

Recognize The Greater [on DR Thursday]

Posted on August 19, 2021 by davidrobinsoncreative

“Can a shallow mind appreciate beauty?…When the mind is merely concerned with itself and its own activities, it is not beautiful; whatever it does, it remains ugly, limited, therefore it is incapable of knowing what beauty is.” ~Krishnamurti, Think On These Things

What accounts for the strange color of the sky? Smoke from the fires? A coming storm?

The quote above is only half of the thought. It is the set up for the real point to be made. A shallow mind is concerned only for itself. And, while consumed with the lesser, it misses the greater. It is the unintentional theme that emerged for me this week: losing the greater for the lesser. The baby goes out with the bathwater.

It is a matter of perception, of focus placement.

Yesterday I wrote about the judge questioning the potential juror about his capacity to experience hardship in order to keep the system going and growing. The juror entered the exchange with a self-focus and exited, admonished, with perhaps the possibility of seeing something beyond his own agenda. Perhaps.

I read that Rome fell when the luxuries became more important than the essentials. Societies fall when they can no longer discern between what is important and what is not, when the lesser is protected at the expense of the greater.

Years ago, during a facilitation, a young woman pulled herself from and exercise. She sat on the sidelines and brooded. After the exercise, during the debrief, she claimed that she was discriminated against because her team did not listen to her ideas. Initially, her team scrambled to apologize – one does not want to be accused of discrimination. We asked the team to explore the situation a bit further. Because the young woman’s idea was rejected, was she truly a victim of discrimination? It was an illuminating conversation. The problem – the real problem – arises when we can no longer discern between what is discrimination and what is not? There is terrible discrimination in our world and needs to be addressed. It can’t be seriously confronted if we are incapable of distinguishing between the rejection of an idea and laws that prevent citizens of color from voting.

In a pandemic, a mask is not a breach of personal freedom. It is not the state ripping away control of your body. It is a minor inconvenience to ensure the mitigation of a virus that is killing scores of fellow citizens. Despite the rhetoric otherwise, the fearmongering and tribe-building, wearing a mask is something done for the health of the whole. It is not unlike jury duty.

It is a matter of perception. Of focus placement. Self or other? Lesser or greater?

The rest of the quote: “Whereas, a mind that is not concerned with itself, that is free of ambition, a mind that is not caught up in its own desires or driven by pursuit of its own success – such a mind is not shallow, and it flowers in goodness. Do you understand? It is this inward goodness that gives beauty, even to a so-called ugly face.”

Pay attention to the verb. Beauty is given. Concern for the well-being of the other is a sentiment expressed and championed in every corner of the world, by all the figures we quote, elevate, and sometimes emulate. Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa,…it’s a very, very long list.

Communities thrive when they are capable of enduring hardship for each other, for the benefit of the whole. They also thrive when they hold boundaries and protect the rights of the individuals. Those two seemingly different actions are, in fact, one and the same.

Societies fall when shallow minds prevail, when they can no longer discern between essentials and luxuries, privileges and responsibilities. When personal comfort takes precedence over enduring ideals.

It’s a matter of perception. Of focus placement, and make no mistake, focus is easily led. Just like a package of pastrami mistaken for a strange colored sky.

read Kerri’s blog post about PASTRAMI SKY

Filed under: DR Thursday, Identity, Perspective, Seeing | Tagged: beauty, community, covid, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, discernment, discrimination, essential, focus, focus placement, freedom, greater and lesser, hardship, jiddu Krishnamurti, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, luxury, masks, perception, priviledge, responsibilities, rights, shallow mind, studio melange, the melange, think on these things | Leave a comment »

See The Story [on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on April 28, 2021 by davidrobinsoncreative

Inosculation is a natural phenomenon in which trunks, branches or roots of two trees grow together. ~ Wikipedia

I’m re-writing my Creatures of Prometheus script. Yaki, the conductor of the symphony, asked that I re-imagine it so the story-within-the-music might better speak to the issues of our day. The original performance was in 2008 and the world has changed mightily since the last time we performed it.

Beethoven wrote his ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, as a creation story. Zeus ordered Prometheus to fashioned a human male and female. Zeus wanted them to be crudely made, their sole purpose, as he imagined them, was to worship the gods. Instead, Prometheus created something more powerful, more beautiful, more god-like. He knew Zeus would never allow something so beautiful to exist so Prometheus stole the spark of life so he might ignite the hearts of his creatures. That’s how the story begins; Prometheus steals fire to bring life to his beautiful creatures. The rest of the story is biblical. The creatures gain knowledge (separation). The gods corrupt the creatures and teach them division and the game of war, essentially booting them out of the garden. The gods like to watch war games like humans like to watch football on the weekends. It is a story of Prometheus’ punishment for daring to create something so beautiful, so capable, as human beings: he must watch them corrupt themselves for all eternity.

It’s a big story in a big ballet.

I take back what I wrote a paragraph ago. The world hasn’t changed so much. Our ancient and epic divisions and challenges have surfaced. They’ve bobbed to the top. The story Yaki asked me to specifically address is the black-white racial divide in these un-united-united-states. I have more thoughts on this story than I care to admit. And the story I will tell – so similar to the original – is a story of unity corrupted. The revision is a gift from Plato, a seed from The Symposium.

It was a common practice in colonial times, when the wealthy were vastly outnumbered by the locals and laborers – and the King’s army was an ocean away, to divide the commoners along some imaginary line. In the American colonies, the imaginary line was a color line. It’s explicit in our colonial logs and legislation. The fear. The solution. The cleaving. Any gain made by blacks is an automatic threat to white power. It’s a game the gods love to watch, like football on the weekends.

I have long thought that our division is impossible to heal when approached through a racial lens. It acts – and has always acted – as a trigger. Just as it was intended to do. The trigger is built into the system: approaching the racial divide as a racial divide will only serve to reinforce the divide. The division is knit firmly into our national DNA.

A systemic flaw must be addressed systemically. The division was designed in our colonial history because the colors united. For a brief moment the united colors were more powerful than the ruling class. The colors were cleaved and then knit back together through inequity. Keep ’em fighting. The dance of supremacy and suppression. United in discrimination. Unnatural inosculation.

Epic stories always end on a promise. There will be an awakening. The lost brothers will find each other. The Creatures of Prometheus, black and white, divided for the security and sport of the gods, will recognize that they are being used, distracted from their original state, and will join hands and together walk off the field. And only then will the natural inosculation, the branches and roots growing stronger together, become possible.

read Kerri’s blog post about INOSCULATED