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Thanks!
Brian Kruger
And welcome to The Common Bridge. This is the third and final part of a three part series of a conversation that Richard Helppie had with Robert Greenfield. Greenfield is very popular guest and he's been on every season since we've started this podcast. We think you'll really enjoy this last segment of their conversation. So without any further ado, we join Richard and Robert in conversation.
Richard Helppie
One of the things that we often talk about is that people have differences and people have similarities around the world. The history of humankind is full of this. Today, we thought we'd chat a little bit about three topics that may not seem related but kind of are; they are affirmative action, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) and also political insight to indigenous peoples. I am going to be doing a series about indigenous peoples and hope that you'll tune in for that as well. Robert, here we are back again in studio, caffeinated, after an opportunity to talk about what's going on in the world. Let's begin on the indigenous peoples. You lived in Australia for how long? (Robert Greenfield: Off and on for 25 years.) 25 years. Most people don't understand, they see Australia from the English perspective but there's more to it than that with the Aborigines. Could you maybe try to take people like me from the kindergarten level at least to maybe a reasonable eighth grader?
Robert Greenfield
In Australia, when Europeans arrived - late, like 1780 - there were around 300,000 indigenous people spread across 200 so-called nations, they call them nations with different languages, etc. Essentially the Europeans come in, they have little communities and they keep pushing the indigenous - as you know, with most cases, even with the Smi in Finland - they push them to a smaller and smaller area. They were never recognized, they were not part of the constitution, they were not citizens until around 50 years ago when they became citizens. So they were very marginalized. This is very true with most colonial situations; not true in say, South Africa, where there were a very large population of local people, of Afrikans. But in Australia, that was not a huge number - 300,000 for the size of the United States - versus the US number, which ranges from 3 million to 6 million when Europeans arrived here. What's happened in Australia is - in the last 50 years - a highly paternalistic situation, which has not worked. You got a lot of administration about - and they have the same issues as the United States - take away the children, put them into Catholic schools, those kinds of things. There's a lot of family destruction, huge amount of alcoholism, etc. So this has been the long term situation. They are about three percent - 800,000 today - of the Australian population. So what's happened, the big deal today in Australia is mining. Mining is what the country makes money on; without mining we're pulling coffees and have got tourism, we don't make anything in Australia. Mining and all the mining people...Rio Tinto is huge, my daughter works for Rio Tinto, that's just a disclaimer there. She works on the heritage side with indigenous people. They're trying to figure out a way forward, how to be able to do the rights of indigenous; same thing that they're doing in Nevada through all these kinds of legal mechanisms. But the big question that's come up right now - and this is an important one for people to understand - is that they have proposed to alter the constitution of Australia to not just recognize the indigenous people with whom they call now "Traditional Owners," - moving from First Nations to Traditional Owners - but also to give them an independent voice. This has set off the alarm bells. The alarm bells are that, effectively, the independent voice could stop mining, it could stop development of any way. It could say we have these song-lines - they're called, like travel routes across - you can't go across that. So Australia is now going from a pretty leftist orientation, going down that road very strongly, to get more and more rights. And by the way, Australia spends on average 50,000 Australian dollars per year, per indigenous person. So it's not like money is not being spent in that area. Obviously, it's going through a lot of experts and everybody else, the indigenous people are not getting that much. But it looks like this referendum, which is going to be held in September, is going to lose, even though the government is really pushing it and really supporting it. Because the majority of the people are saying, we do not want to have an independent voice, we want to continue our life. So what happens with - to me - indigenous rights in a lot of places...what starts off as a really, really noble good thing, a really good thing, to redress wrongs now, with the leftist side, saying, well, you know, we need to do this, we need to do that; the expansion is such that it's pushing against the majority, and the majority are saying, whoa, this is too much too fast and maybe never. Similarly, by the way, in New Zealand with the Maoris, the Maoris want to rename the country Aotearoa. There's a whole host of things that are happening there. So around the world, I think you can look at indigenous rights really coming to the fore.
Richard Helppie
Well, New Zealand not wanting to rename it, but to reclaim the name Aotearoa, and of course, New Zealand was populated as the Maori by the Hawaiians coming down, and the Native Hawaiians were subjected to many of the indignities and the repressions that other indigenous people [experienced] like couldn't practice your religion, couldn't speak your language and such. I've just returned from a visit to the Smi lands in very northern Finland. The parallels are amazing. I am far from an expert on this, but I do intend to learn even more; it's my heritage. The Smi people, who are largely nomadic, could work things out with families - this is where my reindeer are going to run, this is where my winter home is going to be, this is where one of my summer homes going to be - not a concept of you can just carve up everything into squares and own land. The Smi heritage was something not to be proud of but to be ashamed of and the language was suppressed, the healing arts were suppressed. That identity, now that has changed, and there's actually a Smi parliament now in Finland, and the conflict is almost exactly what you've described in Australia. The Finnish government wants to get the mining for nickel and the other precious metals that are needed for electric car batteries and to do that would destroy the reindeer farming and reindeer herding of the Smi people. I am hopeful, in future episodes, of having Apela Colorado who is a worldwide expert who runs the Worldwide Indigenous Sciences Network, and then try to bring on people from Smiland, hopefully aboriginal people, potentially some native Hawaiians. But we do have a dilemma because our colonialism stomped out cultures, but not quite, and now it's time for redress. Probably that brings us to an interesting evolution in the United States where African Americans...one drop of African blood made you a black person, that made you subject to enslavement during our lifetimes. It was perfectly legal, based on the pigmentation of your skin to not allow you accommodations, couldn't get a hotel room, couldn't eat in a restaurant, couldn't use a restroom, couldn't use a water fountain. I like to say that we've made progress, and I think we have; what's the next frontier and where is the notion of Diversity and Equity and Inclusion fitting into this?
Robert Greenfield
Well, diversity and inclusion are a massive subject. I'm not qualified to talk about that, in some ways, we came as a very poor family to this country, but we were not enslaved and particularly not what's called chattel enslavement, which it means family, family, family, generations. It's not even like you came as an indentured servant and could get done. The more I learned about this in the background of the United States...and 16 of the first 17 presidents - 16 - had slaves; the only one that did not was Abraham Lincoln.
Richard Helppie
They had slaves while they were in office too.
Robert Greenfield
Exactly. Thomas Jefferson bred slaves including his own family. A lot of the stuff that needs to be looked at, it needs to be looked at dispassionately. I know that's easy for me to say but I also think that throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not a good thing. I do write about this quite a bit. I think that the principles were right but they were not applied equally. That's what you're saying. They were not applied equally, even in the 20th century, until quite recently. I think the question for the average person in America is kind of a different question, which is, do we want an America that's going to continue generally on the same lines that we are now or are we going to reorder society using those principles of diversity, equity and inclusion? In principle, sounds great, but also what people - to go into the other subject, which is affirmative action type of redress - a lot of people are saying, well, wait a second, how much redress do we need to do? What type of redress do we need to do? I think the reason - not to jump to it - but the recent SCOTUS, Supreme Court decision, which said, the type of affirmative action that was being used for selective universities - but it was being used everywhere - was outmoded. So I think that we are at a inflection point in our history. I think it's a good time to do that. But I would say this, nobody owns the playing field, not of African Americans, not anybody, not poor Irish, not anybody, not even the Smi. Nobody owns the playing field; everybody needs to be looking at how can we come up with a way to make a more inclusive society but at the same time not throwing out our basic principles.
Richard Helppie
When I think about the the notion of diversity, equity, inclusion, juxtaposed against this colonial history, and then overlaid with immigration, I was reading some family archival information; my great grandfather was ridiculed. He was an accomplished pharmacist, apparently, in Finland, but never learned the language here, and was ridiculed with his attempts to speak English so he stayed in their little town where they could speak Finn. That is not an uncommon story about immigration, every group that's come here has come for a purpose and voluntarily, except for those that were enslaved. Now I think that we've lost sight of what an equal opportunity society should be and who's actually been harmed. By way of example, you mentioned affirmative action and we see that Asian students are actually proactively discriminated against. They have the scores and all the accomplishments to be admitted to these very competitive universities, but they're kept out by their skin color. I don't know that anybody thinks that that's the right thing. Also, corporate America is de-investing in DEI. Blackstone, one of the largest private equity firms says, you can be in an ESG, or environmental, societal, government, fund or a business where we're just trying to make money. I think we need to get to an equal playing field and be inclusive of all people and loving toward all people. But I wonder, does the Asian person that came here voluntarily, the person from Central America or Mexico or South America, are they also African? And what about African black versus African, if you don't have African roots, does it matter what your heritage is? And is a homosexual or a transsexual the same as being discriminated against a black person? These to me are the questions.
Robert Greenfield
Yeah, those are very large and fundamental questions, which leads to your subject on immigration. Immigration next to climate change, to me, is the largest question globally. It's true for Europe, it's true for here, it's true in a lot of places. I don't want to be the right wing secure borders advocate but unless you have some kind of border control, you can't do any of those things that you're saying. If you are just allowing people in and you don't know who they are, you don't know what they do, you don't know anything about them, but they're just coming in because - quote, unquote - their families or some other [reason], we got to take them in, then you're not going to have a society that you can figure out how to move forward together. I think that the United States really has...we're not the only ones, Europe has just decided, no more; they're pushing folks back. Countries will say, we're not taking any refugees, these kinds of things. Australia puts them on an island; it's a big island, they put them on a smaller island; you can't get into Australia unless you've got a proper visa. So immigration to me is a kind of a part of this entire discussion. If you flip it on the other side, I just want to give you a little anecdotal story.
Richard Helppie
So when I think about that, immigration has been going on since the beginning of humankind, people move because it was cold or their crops didn't grow or the animals they were hunting weren't there. Some societies believed in building towns and some were just nomadic, more sustenance. We all came from someplace else at the beginning of time and throughout modern history. When I think about immigration in this country, in particular, my experience with immigrants, they just want to come here and work. They want to have a home, get an education, raise their children, provide for an opportunity in the modern world. I think we should be embracing that. I think what we're doing on the immigration front is the cruelest thing possible. We need to do a better job, there have been better answers, but it's become part of our dysfunctional political system that we just can't do the right things. We need more people here. We're not giving birth to enough people. If people can come here to work, great, they should be coming here to work and we should have a common set of laws that everyone has to abide by.
Robert Greenfield
In writing my blog and Quora, a question I was asked, does Australia need immigrants? I had 5 million views of that, by far the most of anything. So I tell you, this is a hot subject even in a place like Australia. But I want to mention one other thing, going back on the - not necessarily affirmative action - but what are we doing with our existing population? I went to something over the weekend in Westland, Michigan and I have to say this, and I'll say this right to the camera, I saw a broken people. These are people who are obese, they are in wheelchairs - both blacks and whites - and they're not productive and they're not in the system. We have not figured it out, it seems to me, looking around. Ann Arbor, it's a center of excellence but there are a lot of places in the Midwest that are not; these people have been left behind. I don't have, necessarily, the answer for that but I know this, just bringing in immigrants who are going to work hard, they're going to add a lot more value than these people. What do we do with the people that are left behind?
Richard Helppie
We don't send them to Canada because Canada's got the medical assistance in dying and that's reason enough; you're old and fat, but okay, here are the drugs, problem solved. Canada's a mess, probably a different topic. But having a society where everyone has the ability to achieve, and also those that are infirm, whether they're aged or obese or suffering from an injury, illness, accident, whatever it might be, we need to lift them up and support them. We need to make sure people are housed and fed so they can become as contributing as possible. I think we've gotten away from that by getting into the grievance Olympics, victimization Olympics.
Robert Greenfield
Contribution is where you and I really come together. In my view, people who are just sitting on the sidelines, it's a bad thing for them, it's a bad thing for society. Contribution is everything. And if that was the starting point and add things like immigration, add that with a new way in affirmative action, we as a people, we're unstoppable.
Richard Helppie
Robert, this has been an uncharacteristically short conversation, you and I have a lot more to talk about. I really want to thank you for this time that you've carved out of your schedule on this whirlwind tour of Europe and parts of North America, including Comerica Park, which pretty much is on everybody's list, I think. (Robert Greenfield: Thank you.) I'm happy to have you here. Anything else you'd like to just say, as a closing comment to our audience?
Robert Greenfield
I would like to say this about The Common Bridge, actually, and the two of you that have done this amazing job. I think it's wonderful that you took your trip to Finland and to your ancestral areas up in Lapland with the Smi people. You are constantly broadening - as I try to do myself - you're broadening your horizons. What you just said just a moment ago was incredibly compassionate and inclusive, if I might say so. So I want to congratulate you on your continued success with this, but also on your own personal journey, how you are now doing more than just the political spectrum, more than just some of the topics, and now you're looking at this kind of globally. I'm looking forward to our next conversation when we can get together. I'll come back with more European perspective and you will come back with more indigenous perspective and we can take it from there.
Richard Helppie
And we'll unite around the great policies of the United States of America and this world. Robert, it's been a pleasure. This is Rich Helppie, with our special guest, our favorite guest, Robert Greenfield, signing off on The Common Bridge.
(Watch, Listen or Read) Unfolding the Complexities of Immigration and Indigenous Recognition.