If you watch a little kid with a pile of stuff, you’ll often see them sorting. They’re putting some things together and separating others. On Sesame Street they sing “Which of these things are not like the other … “, it’s the first step towards developing a sense of discrimination … and also the first step towards discriminating. Still, it seems like a fairly basic human activity, even when categories are contested. Therefore, I was amused to read two stories recently about eliminating these divisions:

In conservative Nepal, authorities recently granted an official citizenship document to 40-year-old Chanda Musalman which lists “him” as both male and female:

With elections approaching, government teams are currently touring the country issuing certificates of citizenship. One team came to Chanda’s village in western Nepal. Chanda, who has had no sex-change surgery, asked the officials to erase the words male and female, listed under gender. They obliged, and ascribed Chanda’s gender as “both”… It is unclear how this unique legal status will play out in practice – for instance, how it will affect Chanda’s marriage rights. [Link]

A similar desire to eliminate pigeonholes is sounded in the opinion column of the NYT today, by an author who calls for the abolition of racial categories on the census:

There seems to be an emerging consensus that the system of racial classification that has dominated national politics and the census for nearly two centuries is so fraught with imprecision — and so tainted by racist ideas that have been disproved by science — that it should eventually be dropped altogether.

This view has been percolating among census historians for years. But it has gained traction since the 1990s, when there was a pitched battle over a proposal that would have added a “multiracial” category to the 2000 census. A compromise allowed people to check more than one box for race. But that change only fueled the debate by revealing a conflict between the fixed racial categories that have long dominated American life and a different sense of identity that’s clearly on the rise among younger Americans. [Link]

My family has been caught betwixt and between racial categories before. Back in the early 1970s my mom cut her hand and had to go to the hospital. The two nurses there started to argue about whether to denote her as white or black on the intake form. The white nurse pointed out that my mom is light (she needs sunscreen, unlike me), while the black nurse argued that since she isn’t really white, she must be black. Finally my father demanded that they admit her right away, telling them that they could put her in whatever category they wanted once the doctor saw her. Still, this story doesn’t argue that there should be no categories at all, just that categories should be useful (and that classification should be secondary to medication). So personally, I don’t get the argument for the abolition of racial categories altogether as long as they remain socially relevant.

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If you’ll all remember, one of the chief re-envisioned reasons that President Bush gave for taking the U.S. into a war in Iraq (after WMDs had been discredited) centered around the idea that with a democracy in place in the middle of the Middle East, neighboring nations would see it as a shining example of how their own governments could be if only they chose good over evil. Bush was half right. Iraq is turning into an example for its neighbors. The Christian Science Monitor reports on how democracy gets spread:

MULTAN, PAKISTAN – In this Punjabi city of shrines, Shiites and Sunnis prayed side by side during Ashura this week, the holiest holiday for the world’s 150 million Shiite Muslims. But a province away, suicide bombers attempted to strike Shiite processions throughout Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, leaving as many as 21 dead and more than 40 injured in three separate incidents, including two suicide attacks.

The violence, the latest in a sharp uptick against Pakistan’s Shiite minority, has heightened concerns that Iraq’s conflict may be feeding sectarian violence here. Whether the conflict in Iraq is capable of igniting Pakistan’s simmering sectarian tensions raises questions about a growing global sectarian war…

The answer is important, analysts say, because Pakistan’s 30 million Shiites – numbering more than Iraq’s – could become a flash point if sectarian violence spreads. [Link]

The belief that we could simply plant democracy like Johnny Appleseed is an example of the soft bigotry of unrealistic expectations. Most people that knew anything about the culture and history of the region basically foretold what has happened since. After a couple centuries of colonialism and arbitrarily imposed borders you can’t just expect people to forget their old conflicts to pray at the alter of democracy. Tocqueville in his 1835 work “Democracy in America” cautioned that democracy’s fatal flaw was that it could lead to a tyranny of the majority. In Iraq the Sunnis seem determined to prevent such a tyranny before it even begins. The great fear now is that the Muslim belief in “Ummah” will cause this fire to spread even further.

For some, Al Qaeda’s war against Shiites has already ignited tensions in Pakistan. Editorials in leading newspapers – particularly after this week’s suicide bombings – speak of a “new anti-Shiite wave that is radiating from Iraq …” and President Pervez Musharraf has warned of the need to diffuse sectarianism “not just for the country’s security, but for the entire Muslim world.”

Such fears may be well grounded, even though the number of sectarian killings is down when compared with the past. In January, police investigators in Karachi announced that Al Qaeda worked with local sectarian groups to carry out some of the largest suicide attacks against sectarian targets last year, which left more than 60 dead, according to local news reports. And this past week’s suicide attacks bore the signature of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan, observers say.

Whether or not it spells a war emanating from Iraq, the West should pay heed, say analysts… [Link]