A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity | New York Times

[Ediacara]

A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity
By MARC LACEY


Guillaume Bonn/Think, for The New York Times
Photographs of people killed in the massacres
of 1994 in Rwanda are on display at the memorial
center in Gisozi, near the capital, Kigali. Remains
of victims recovered from mass graves are buried
at the site.

Published: April 9, 2004

KIGALI, Rwanda, April 8 — Although he is not a government spokesman, Ernest Twahrwa can recite Rwanda's official view toward ethnicity with great precision: "There is no ethnicity here. We are all Rwandan."

Mr. Twahrwa, a Hutu, is halfway through a six-week government re-education camp set up to purge him and other former fighters of any ethnic ideologies that they may still harbor from 1994, when extremist Hutu massacred 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu.

"They're trying to change what we think," Mr. Twahrwa said. "There have been many changes in this country. I need to change too. I need to be a new person."

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[Barkley]

1. Sounds like California's Prop. 54

Prop. 54
Should state and local governments be prohibited from classifying any person by race, ethnicity, color, or national origin? Various exemptions apply.

[struggle4progress]

2. Maybe it sounds more like a UN report from forty years ago ...

"Science and the Concept of Race" (M. Mead et al.) arguing that there is no scientific notion "race."

Perhaps Rwanda has simply learned a bitter lesson ... The Divide&Conquer school of government invented (and continue to use) "race" to obscure other issues and to set human against human to maintain control.

While I, as a liberal, have (based on historical factors) always supported affirmative action (which I think Prop 54 was attempting to suppress), I think the SCOTUS was right to suggest recently affirmative action should not last forever, if persistent structural inequities can be addressed.