"I have a strong feeling that at the moment, especially in the United States, people are much more interested in the culture and backgrounds of minorities than they are in the cultures where those minorities originally came from. I think it’s a sign of people drawing inwards more and more. That goes for the Right Wing populists and White Supremacists just as much. They’re also drawing the wagons around what they see as their identity, and I think that’s exactly not the way to go…I can only emphasize that in terms of education is that everything should be fostered to open people’s minds. Open minds to the past, to other cultures and not to have minds closed by limiting ourselves more and more to the circumstances of our birth.”Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker,
The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals
by the Foreign Policy magazine.
· www.bard.edu/faculty/details/?id=153· www.creativeprocess.info