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Archive for the 'News' Category
From Faisal al Yafai, in The National
A few days before the Netherlands goes to the polls, Aicha Bennani is riding through the Dappermarkt, an open-air market in east Amsterdam that sells spicy Indonesian food, Moroccan fabrics and products from all around the world. The serious faces of politicians stare down from billboards, marked with the colourful, if confusing, initials of the main parties – CDA, VVD, PvdA – and covered again with bright flyers advertising nightclubs.
“We never see the PVV here,” she says, referring to the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party of the populist politician Geert Wilders. “They wouldn’t dare. We have a lot of students and artistic people here and they would just laugh. No, they go to places where there are no Muslims, where they can say what they like.” And with that, she smooths some of her hair back beneath her headscarf and rides off.
Joel Whitney interviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in Guernica
Islam’s toughest critic on her new book, the Axis of Evil, and the neoconservatives’ moral high ground.
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969, Ayaan Hirsi Ali gained international recognition as the controversial member of Dutch Parliament who wrote a short film attacking Islam, called Submission Part 1. In the film, images of bare women’s limbs are scrawled with verses of the Qu’ran which—Ali has said—denigrate and subordinate women. As a result of the film, its director, Theo van Gogh was killed in cold blood on the streets of Amsterdam, a note jabbed into his chest threatening Ms. Ali (and the United States to boot) with a fate like van Gogh’s. Van Gogh’s last words were, “Can’t we talk about this?” After the incident, Ms. Ali spent several months virtually kidnapped by her security team.
From John Tierney’s “Findings” column in The New York Times:
If the Senate passes legislation establishing regular “workshops to enhance gender equity” in academic science, what exactly would scientists and engineers do at them? The legislation, already approved by the House, is a little vague beyond directing researchers and heads of academic departments to participate in “activities that increase the awareness of the existence of gender bias.”
But let me venture one prediction: There will be lots of talk about the male chauvinists on the Swedish Medical Research Council who awarded 20 postdoctoral fellowships in 1994.
…
I’d love to see more girls pursuing careers in science (and more women reading science columns), but I wish we’d encourage their individual aspirations instead of obsessing about group disparities. I can’t see how we’re helping them with scare stories about the awful discrimination they’ll face. And I can’t imagine that many scientists, male or female, are looking forward to being yanked out of the lab to play Gender Bias Bingo — or hear once again about the Swedish chauvinists of 1994.
Here we are, again.
From Wonkette
Hard to find even the Gallows Humor in this story, so maybe we won’t even try. Maybe it’s time to admit that large chunks of America are in the hands of unreconstructed racists and vulgar idiots, and that the popular election of a black man as president just might’ve pushed these furious, economically doomed old white people into a final rage that is going to end very, very badly. Ready? Here you go: An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face from the mural, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students pictured on the school wall to be repainted as light-skinned children.
by Serena Gordon, in U.S. News Health
Monday, June 7 — When compared to teens of the same age, adolescents raised by lesbian parents are doing just fine socially, psychologically and academically, new research finds.
Not only that, they have fewer social problems, and less aggressive and rule-breaking behaviors than other teens.
The nearly 20-year study has followed 78 teens since their lesbian mothers were planning their pregnancies, and concluded that these children “demonstrate healthy psychological adjustment.” These findings stand in contrast to what some vocal opponents of gay or lesbian parents might have expected.
by A.G. Sulzberger, in The New York Times
Frustrated by what he has characterized as continued obstructionism by the Bloomberg administration, a federal judge on Wednesday appointed as a special master who will oversee the city’s implementation of practices aimed at increasing the number of black and Hispanic firefighters.
The appointment of Mr. Morgenthau, who recently stepped down as district attorney of Manhattan after 35 years in office, can be seen as an effort by the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis, to choose someone with the stature and will to tussle with city leaders.
Reviewed by Theodore Dalrymple, in The Globe and Mail
All men are created equal, perhaps, but they do not by any means lead lives of equal interest. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is still only in her later 30s, has already ensured her place in history and is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable people in the world.
Her linguistic abilities alone would be more than enough to satisfy most people: Having learned Somali (her native tongue), English, Amharic, Arabic and Swahili, she learned Dutch sufficiently well in a couple of years to be able to stand for the Dutch parliament. But, of course, it is her public and uncompromising repudiation of Islam for which she is best known.
By Shikha Dalmia, in Forbes
Secularism does not justify eliminating women’s clothing choices.
Having grown up in a traditional Hindu family in India, I understand something about the domestic pressure for public modesty on girls. Jeans came into vogue just when I hit puberty. But for years the only way I could step out of the house in them without risking a minor nuclear explosion by my dad–a fairly urbanized doctor–was if I slipped on a blouse loose enough to smother my front and long enough to conceal my behind. A bathing suit–much less a bikini like the one that the first Muslim Miss USA wore to victory this week–was out of the question. Hence I never learned to swim.
From The Australian
The past 40 years have seen huge changes in the lives and expectations of women all across the world. To the women of the middle classes of the Western world it may well seem that the changes in their situation are the most relevant and the most important, as the proliferating media debate, revise, reformulate and revile feminist ideas. Much of this is mere chatter, which fuels the lifestyle magazines, is dictated by fashion and the endless hunt for novelty, and can safely be ignored.
Feminism was no sooner recognised as a social force than the commercial media were bound to declare that it was over.
By Avi Zenilman, in Vanity Fair Daily
The two finalists at last night’s Miss U.S.A. competition opened up a whole new set of avenues for empty political chatter.
Miss Oklahoma, Morgan Elizabeth Woolard, is for the Arizona immigration law. She really likes “states’ rights,” but she is against racial profiling.
On the other hand, Miss Michigan, Rima Fakih, is a Muslim. She won the whole event. According to Daniel Pipes, a former Giuliani adviser, her victory is a sign of affirmative action—the bad kind of racial profiling?—run amok. (Or maybe it’s a sign that you shouldn’t tout states’ rights once you’ve already won the right to represent your state.)
From Colin Marshall, in 3 Quarks Daily
So Yong Kim is the director of the feature films In Between Days and Treeless Mountain. The former, a portrait of the alienation of a teenage Korean girl newly relocated to Toronto, won a Special Jury Prize for Independent Vision at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. The latter, the story of a pair of very young sisters sent away from their home in Seoul to live with their remote, alcoholic Aunt and then with their grandparents in the countryside, won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, the Muhr Award at the 2008 Dubai International Film Festival and the Netpac Award at the 2008 Pusan International Film Festival. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas.
Because the film has its, to an American, foreign setting — I talk to a lot of Americans about it, and they do get caught up in the fact that it is in Seoul and Heunghae, the foreignness of certain elements of it. — how much did you want to make a story rooted in its geographic location, rooted in place, and how much did you want to make one in themes that are more universal: childhood, sisterhood?
Ideally, what I always dreamed of, making this film — I wanted to set it in my hometown, which is Heunghae, Korea. When I first started writing the story in 2003 or so, certain events were based on my memory of the location when I grew up there in the seventies. It’s quite a while back, so I wasn’t really sure how much the country had changed or how much my hometown had changed. I just started from very basic elements in the story that I wanted to focus on, which were the journey these two sisters take, and the emotional journey they go through. In that sense, that’s much more universal than the story being just a Korean story.
By Katie Roiphe, in Financial Times
For a long time people have been trying to define the American woman, mostly for the purpose of mocking, dismissing or putting her in her place.
“There is no such thing as ‘the fast girl’ in America,” says one of Henry James’s Englishmen, meaning, of course, that all American girls are fast – and this is more or less the view of an ambitious new Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
By Kelefa Sanneh, in The New Yorker
Glenn Beck excels at expressing adventurous thoughts in memorable language, but he outdid himself when, one morning last summer, he offered a diagnosis of President Obama. He said, “This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture. I don’t know what it is.” (The context was one of the summer’s most entertaining reality shows—the one starring the black Harvard professor and the white police officer who arrested him.)
In September, Beck sat for an interview with Katie Couric, and she asked him a deceptively simple question, which had been posed by a Twitter user named adrianinflorida: “what did u mean white culture?” Whatever adventurous thoughts this query inspired, Beck did not seem eager to share them. “Um, I, I don’t know,” he said. Finally, after two minutes of temporizing, he arrived at a nonresponsive response that was both honest and sensible: “What is the white culture? I don’t know how to answer that that’s not a trap, you know what I mean?”
By Kos, in Daily Kos
No surprise, since Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer faces a tough primary challenge, but still disappointing: she has just announced her intention to sign SB 1070.
The soon-to-be law allows Arizona police to challenge anyone they think might be undocumented, and demand immigration papers.
It also allows residents to sue their municipalities if they believe local cops aren’t doing enough to target and jail undocumented immigrants. You better believe that within a year, virtually every town and county in the state will be getting sued by xenophobic teabaggers.
From Howard W. French, in The National
Just who is Barack Obama?
Fifteen months into his presidency, we may have acquired an intuitive sense of the answer to this question, and yet Obama remains elusive, like a fidgety subject posing for a daguerreotype. He nods and bobs forward and back, in and out of focus, never altogether fixed.
By now we have all been sufficiently exposed to the Obama act to suspect real method. The recent passage of major healthcare reform presents one case in point: early in his term, Obama placed healthcare at the centre of his domestic agenda, and yet he long seemed content to avoid defining his own parameters for the reform, or even, for that matter, establishing a bottom line.
By Tony Judt, in NYR Blog
I never knew Toni Avegael. She was born in Antwerp in February 1926 and lived there most of her life. We were related: she was my father’s first cousin. I well remember her older sister Lily: a tall, sad lady whom my parents and I used to visit in a little house somewhere in northwest London. We have long since lost touch, which is a pity.
I am reminded of the Avegael sisters (there was a middle girl, Bella) whenever I ask myself—or am asked—what it means to be Jewish. There is no general-purpose answer to this question: it is always a matter of what it means to be Jewish for me—something quite distinct from what it means for my fellow Jews. To outsiders, such concerns are mysterious.
From Janelle Weaver, in Nature News
Prejudice may seem inescapable, but scientists now report the first group of people who seem not to form racial stereotypes.
Children with a neurodevelopmental disorder called Williams syndrome (WS) are overly friendly because they do not fear strangers. Now, a study shows that these children also do not develop negative attitudes about other ethnic groups, even though they show patterns of gender stereotyping found in other children. “This is the first evidence that different forms of stereotypes are biologically dissociable,” says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, director of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, who led the study published today in Current Biology.
From Alexis Okeowo, in The Economist
Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
The first time I felt deeply uncomfortable being black was when I was a kid. My family had just moved to Alabama, and I was in a car with my father and my brother. A white woman with a harshly lined face and brown frizzy hair yelled out a racial slur as we drove by. Dad immediately put the car in reverse and drove over to her as she pumped gas at a filling station. “What did you say?” he demanded. She glared at him and refused to respond. Shocked into silence, my brother and I didn’t say anything for the rest of the drive home.
From Ta-Nehisi Coates, in The Atlantic
Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary makes note of the fact that General Lee was opposed to slavery. I basically took that as true, until–in all honesty–some of my commenters informed me that it, in fact, was not. One of the saddest, and yet telling, aspects of the War, for me personally, is that on the two occasions when Confederate troops headed North, they kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery. Ditto for black soldiers who were captured and “lucky” enough not to be killed. Anyway, if you have a moment check out this lecture a reader was kind enough to send to me. At about the 55:00 mark, Elizabeth Brown Pryor talks about Lee’s relationship to slavery, and more interestingly, how the myth that he was somehow anti-slavery came to be.
From Sarah King Head, in University World News
The university system and its board of regents in the state of Georgia has been sued for failing to fund black colleges and universities to the same degree as the other 34 institutions.
A group called the Legal Defense Coalition for the Preservation of Public Historically Black Colleges and Universities filed the lawsuit on 1 April. It claimed there had been violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 14th Amendment of the American Constitution.
From Susan Douglas, in In These Times
Spring 1997.
This was the Spice Girls moment, and debate: Were these frosted cupcakes really a vehicle for feminism? And how much reversion back to the glory days of prefeminism should girls and women accept—even celebrate—given that we now allegedly had it all? Despite their Wonderbras and bare thighs, the Spice Girls advocated “girl power.” They demanded, in their colossal, intercontinental hit “Wannabe,” that boys treat them with respect or take a hike. Their boldfaced liner notes claimed that “The Future Is Female” and suggested that they and their fans were “Freedom Fighters.” They made Margaret Thatcher an honorary Spice Girl. “We’re freshening up feminism for the nineties,” they told the Guardian. “Feminism has become a dirty word. Girl Power is just a ’90s way of saying it.”
From Julie Bindel in Guardian
Iceland’s prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, was wrongly credited with being the country’s first female head of state. That honour goes to Vigdis Finnbogadottir, who served as president from 1980 to 1996.
Iceland is fast becoming a world-leader in feminism. A country with a tiny population of 320,000, it is on the brink of achieving what many considered to be impossible: closing down its sex industry.
From Thomas Rogers in Salon
In 2000, the Human Genome Project finally answered one of the most fundamental questions about race: What, if anything, is the genetic difference between people of different skin colors — black, white, Hispanic, Asian? The answer: nearly nothing. As it turns out, we all share 99.99 percent of the same genetic code — no matter our race — a fact that, geneticist J. Craig Venter claimed, proves that race is a “social concept, not a scientific one.”
But as Nell Irvin Painter explains in “The History of White People,”
her exhaustive and fascinating new look at the history of the idea of the white race, it’s a social construct that goes back much further and is much more complicated than many people think. In the book, Painter, a professor of American history at Princeton, chronicles the evolution of the concept of whiteness from ancient Rome — where, she points out, the slaves were largely white — to the 21st century America and explains how, in the era of Obama, our once-narrow concept of whiteness has become at once far broader and less important than ever before.
From Hartosh Singh Bal, Dhirendra K. Jha in Open
On Friday, 18 July 1947, Renuka Ray, who was to go on to become India’s first Minister for Relief and Rehabilitation, got up to speak in the Constituent Assembly:
Mr President, Sir, I rise to support Clause 19 and in particular section (2) of this clause which provides for territorial representation without reservation of seats. We are particularly opposed to the reservation of seats for women…
I think that the psychological factor comes into play when there is reservation of seats for women. When there is reservation of seats for women, the question of their consideration for general seats, however competent they may be, does not usually arise… From the very start of our national awakening in this country, enlightened men have encouraged women to come forward as equal partners in the struggle for freedom and to do service for national regeneration in the different walks of life… So, it is not only the inherent qualities of women, but more particularly I should say the qualities of our men that is responsible for the fact that in our country, there has never been any strife between men and women.
…I should like to support this clause which has done away once and for all with reservation of seats for women, which we consider to be an impediment to our growth and an insult to our very intelligence and capacity.
‘Once and for all’ are strong words. By the end of her life, Ray had changed her mind. The men she had placed so much faith in had ensured that election after election, the proportion of women in Parliament barely made it past 10 per cent. And it was the men she had so much faith in who stood in the way of the Women’s Reservation Bill that made its way through the Rajya Sabha on 9 March 2010.
From Bonnie Angelo in Time
Toni Morrison, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her gritty novel Beloved, smolders at the inequities that blacks and women still face:
Q. In your contemporary novels you portray harsh confrontation between black and white. In Tar Baby a character says, ”White folks and black folks should not sit down and eat together or do any of those personal things in life.” It seems hopeless if we can’t bridge the abysses you see between sexes, classes, races.
A. I feel personally sorrowful about black-white relations a lot of the time because black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war, to prevent other kinds of real conflagrations.
If there were no black people here in this country, it would have been Balkanized. The immigrants would have torn each other’s throats out, as they have done everywhere else. But in becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me — it’s nothing else but color. Wherever they were from, they would stand together. They could all say, ”I am not that.” So in that sense, becoming an American is based on an attitude: an exclusion of me.
It wasn’t negative to them — it was unifying. When they got off the boat, the second word they learned was ”nigger.” Ask them — I grew up with them. I remember in the fifth grade a smart little boy who had just arrived and didn’t speak any English. He sat next to me. I read well, and I taught him to read just by doing it. I remember the moment he found out that I was black — a nigger. It took him six months; he was told. And that’s the moment when he belonged, that was his entrance. Every immigrant knew he would not come as the very bottom. He had to come above at least one group — and that was us.
From Abbas Milani in The New Republic
Traditional Iranian husbands, the sort found in the highest ranks of the Islamic Republic, sometimes refer to their wives as “the house.” For them, this is not just an expression of their understanding of gender relations. It is viewed as a necessary euphemism, vital protection for a woman’s honor. The mere uttering of her name, after all, might compromise her chastity.
It is telling, therefore, that Mir Hossein Mousavi courted and eventually married Zahra Rahnavard. When they met, in 1969, Rahnavard was already an acclaimed pioneer in the field of Islamic feminism, as well as a sculptor and critic and all-around star of the intellectual scene that throbbed in Tehran at that time. But it was her political theories that vaulted her farthest: Rahnavard proffered the kind of critique of patriarchy percolating in the Western academy at the time. Yet she didn’t join her sisters in the West in launching an all-out assault on tradition. Yes, Islam has misogynistic elements, she argued in her speeches. But those misogynistic elements are not necessarily native to Islam. They only prevail because of the male domination of the faith.
From Tony Judt in NYR Blog
“Identity” is a dangerous word. It has no respectable contemporary uses. In Britain, the mandarins of New Labour—not satisfied with installing more closed-circuit surveillance cameras than any other democracy—have sought (so far unsuccessfully) to invoke the “war on terror” as an occasion to introduce mandatory identity cards. In France and the Netherlands, artificially stimulated “national debates” on identity are a flimsy cover for political exploitation of anti-immigrant sentiment—and a blatant ploy to deflect economic anxiety onto minority targets. In Italy, the politics of identity were reduced in December 2009 to house-to-house searches in the Brescia region for unwanted dark faces as the municipality shamelessly promised a “white Christmas.”
In academic life, the word has comparably mischievous uses. Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies: “gender studies,” “women’s studies,” “Asian-Pacific-American studies,” and dozens of others. The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves—thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine. All too frequently, such programs are job-creation schemes for their incumbents, and outside interest is actively discouraged. Blacks study blacks, gays study gays, and so forth.
From the archive of The Nation, May 29, 1984
The Supreme Court says separate but equal is inherently unequal.
The Supreme Court’s decision outlawing segregation in American public education was unanimous. If anything, world opinion was even more emphatic. Even the Communist powers, we suspect, must privately have applauded the decision. In Kenya a spokesman for the Luo tribe voiced the growing world-wide sentiment against all forms of racial discrimination when he said “America is right . . . If we are not educated together, we will live in fear of one another. If we are to stay together forever, why should we have separate schools?” Quite apart from this sentiment, the decision was especially welcome at this time since it enabled us and our friends abroad for the first time in some years to be equally and simultaneously enthusiastic about an important announcement from Washington. The decision was a fine antidote to the blight of McCarthyism and kindred fevers.
Transcript from The New York Times, March 18, 2008
The following is the text as prepared for delivery of Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia, as provided by his presidential campaign.
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates The Atlantic Wire
One of the reasons I’ve been blogging so much about obesity, class, and race, is that these are the questions I live with. To set down the road of food consciousness, to endeavor to understand what you’re putting in the only body you’ll ever have, is to phase-shift into a parallel world. You become acquainted with ritual of unwrapping aluminum foil on long plane rides. You cut elaborate deals with your partner over child-care and cleaning. You go hurtling through the internet in search of a decent pizza stone. It angers your son, because his simple request for Pop-Tarts turns into a pop-quiz referencing the ingredients on the box.
But more than that, it’s the world I live in. The buses in Harlem heave under the weight of wrecked bodies. New York will not super-size itself, so you’ll see whole rows in which one person is taking up two seats and aisles in which people strain to squeeze past each other. And then there are the middle-age amputees in wheelchairs who’ve lost a leg or two way before their time. When I lived in Brooklyn, the most depressing aspect of my day was the commute back home. The deeper the five train wended into Brooklyn, the blacker it became, and the blacker it became, the fatter it got.