Activists from many different ethnic backgrounds have been pondering weighty questions involving race and globalization of late. Last weekend, a CSU-sponsored teach-in at Concordia gathered various interested parties to look at such issues.

What is the relationship between globalization and race? Does globalization have an effect that is specific to visible minorities? Do visible minorities have a particular vested interest in the coming world order of superstructures?

Lorenzo Komboa Ervin is a former Black Panther and current black activist. He has responded with an emphatic "yes" to the last two questions above.
"Globalization is nothing more than a white-rights movement," he told an H-110 audience on Friday.
Speaking as part of a panel discussion, Komboa Ervin claimed that corporations are incapable of liberating humanity, and that capitalists are creating a police state around the world.

Komboa Ervin spoke in harsh tones as he referred to the world leaders at the helm of today's globalization movement, calling them "criminals", saying they pose as statesmen while they dish out policies that "threaten the existence of humanity."
He alleged that many European laws (which are increasingly being applied to the whole of the continent, rather than specific countries) are having a huge impact on visible minorities on that continent."Europe has laws which allow for the imprisonment of immigrants without the right of appeal," said Komboa Ervin.

The United Nations agrees, saying in a report from last year that migrants workers on the continent are among those who have been hurt most by globalization.

Migrant workers in most cases, said the report, cannot vote in local or national elections, or in some countries, form political parties. In some European countries, the report observed, migrant workers are barred from taking jobs in the public sector.

Many of those in the anti-globalization movement are increasingly bothered by their inability to communicate with those, such as European migrant workers, who are most heavily affected by globalization.

Jinee Kim, a Korean-American activist in San Francisco noticed this trend over a year ago, when she told Colorlines magazine, "we have to work with people who may not know the word 'globalization', but they live globalization."

Komboa Ervin was joined on the panel by Debra Harry, a Paiute Indian activist from Nevada, and by Dolores Chew, from the South Asian Womens' Centre of Montreal.Harry said that genetic information is essentially being stolen from indigenous peoples across the United States. She said that the public is being fed a load of lies about the eventual benefits of the genetic research that many people are involuntarily participating in.

"Quick checkups (for indigenous peoples, at the doctor) often involve 'stolen' blood," which the doctors then use to conduct genetic research, said Harry. "You're not dying from your genetic makeup."
Harry has asserted that researchers are interested in this information because they believe it will give them insights into the origins of various indigenous peoples. This is insulting, she has said, because their conclusions will likely be antithetical to the beliefs commonly held by the groups themselves.

Chew, for her part, spoke about more familiar issues such as poverty at home and abroad, and the media's participation in perpetuating globalization's myths.

She also noted that there is little separating the upper classes in countries around the world.
"The cell phones of clubbers in Montreal and in Mumbai (India) ring in the same tones," she observed.

Curiously, the audience for the evening (and many of the weekend's events) was largely young, and predominantly white. This fact was not lost on at least one member of the crowd, who pleaded with her fellow audience members to try and encourage more people of colour to attend the weekend conference's remaining events.

The whiteness of at least some of the weekend's happenings is symptomatic of the North American anti-globalization movement. While so many of the participants in the movement desperately struggle to be as inclusive as they possibly can, it just doesn't seem to be working.

Following the infamous Seattle protests in 1998, Jinee Kim, was at a prison where many of the arrested protesters were being held. She said at the time: "...a big crowd of people was chanting 'This Is What Democracy Looks Like!' At first it sounded kind of nice. But then I thought: is this really what democracy looks like? Nobody here looks like me."