As horrors involving ethnicity occur in Israel, Iraq, and also here in the US, we should ask, who are the real experts on the subject of race and racism? Here are four people who have studied the subject honestly. If they are listened to -- and I can't think of anything more important -- things will change and there will be new kindness in the world between people who have seen each other as enemies:
1. Ellen Reiss, Chairman of Education, Aesthetic Realism Foundation.
Ms. Reiss gives the most powerful and logical argument against racism I know. She writes in part, in issue #1264 of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, the international periodical of which she is the editor:
"...Racism won't be effectively done away with unless it is replaced with something that has terrific power. What needs to replace it is not the feeling that the difference of another person is
somehow tolerable. What is necessary is the seeing and feeling that the relation of sameness and difference between ourselves and that other person is beautiful."
2. Arnold Perey, PhD, Aesthetic Realism consultant and anthropologist.
Here is a quotation from his invaluable -- and beautiful -- website:
"For anthropology to be relevant to ending the horror of racism today, we must be able to answer these two desperately urgent questions: (1) What is the cause of racism? and (2) How can it be
eliminated completely from human social relations? ... In over 30 years of careful study, I have seen that Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded by the great educator Eli Siegel (1902 - 1978), answers these critical questions."
Website of Aesthetic Realism consultant and anthropologist, Arnold Perey, PhD.
3. Allan Michael, Aesthetic Realism associate, Captain (retired), Circle Line, New York City
Allan Michael writes here about two kinds of anger and what he has seen personally about the difference between anger that is just and anger that is unjust and ugly. With recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere in the US it is a crucial distinction.
Allan Michael states, writing on the shooting of a young Black man by a policeman :
"There will be no rest, only a hiding of volatile feelings, until contempt as the cause of racism is studied. Community leaders and police commissions can evaluate race relations until Kingdom come but, if contempt is not understood, these vicious acts will continue. "
4. Ruth Oron, Aesthetic Realism associate & essayist
Dating back to 1996, when the publication of The Mideast Crisis Will End When Aesthetic Realism Is Studied, Ms. Oron and her Israeli colleagues have been courageously describing what can end the cruelty in that beautiful place known as the Holy Land. Her website has the answer. It needs to be implemented.
In one article she writes:
"Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, defined the unjust contempt that causes wars and explained its danger. Contempt is the "addition to self through the lessening of something else"-- and this I had done. The evidence is throughout history that mutual contempt is the cause of the untold agony and destruction of war."
