culture

Invisibility and the ‘Double Burden’

by matttbastard

(image originally uploaded by My Hobo Soul, posted under a Creative Commons License)

Attorney Sophia A. Nelson on Michelle Obama and being an accomplished black woman in contemporary American society:

Sad to say, but what [Michelle] Obama has undergone, though it’s on a national stage and on a much more prominent scale, is nothing new to professional African American women. We endure this type of labeling all the time. We’re endlessly familiar with the problem Michelle Obama is confronting — being looked at, as black women, through a different lens from our white counterparts, who are portrayed as kinder, gentler souls who somehow deserve to be loved and valued more than we do. So many of us are hoping that Michelle — as an elegant and elusive combination of successful career woman, supportive wife and loving mother — can change that.

“Ain’t I a woman?” Sojourner Truth famously asked 157 years ago. Her ringing question, demanding why black women weren’t accorded the same privileges as their white counterparts, still sums up the African American woman’s dilemma today: How are we viewed as women, and where do we fit into American life?

“Thanks to the hip-hop industry,” one prominent black female journalist recently said to me, all black women are “deemed ‘sexually promiscuous video vixens’ not worthy of consideration. If other black women speak up, we’re considered angry black women who complain. This society can’t even see a woman like Michelle Obama. All it sees is a black woman and attaches stereotypes.”

Black women have been mischaracterized and stereotyped since the days of slavery and minstrel shows. In more recent times, they’ve been portrayed onscreen and in popular culture as either sexually available bed wenches in such shows as the 2000 docudrama “Sally Hemings: An American Scandal,” ignorant and foolish servants such as Prissy from “Gone With the Wind” or ever-smiling housekeepers, workhorses who never complain and never tire, like the popular figure of Aunt Jemima.

Even in the 21st century, black women are still bombarded with media and Internet images that portray us as loud, aggressive, violent and often grossly obese and unattractive. Think of the movies “Norbit” or “Big Momma’s House,” or of the only two black female characters in “Enchanted,” an overweight, aggressive traffic cop and an angry divorcée amid all the white princesses.

On the other hand, when was the last time you saw a smart, accomplished black professional woman portrayed on mainstream television or in the movies? If Claire Huxtable on “The Cosby Show” comes to mind, remember that she left the scene 16 years ago.

The reality is that in just a generation, many black women — who were mostly domestics, schoolteachers or nurses in the post-slavery Jim Crow era — have become astronauts, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, engineers and PhDs. You name it, and black women have achieved it. The most popular woman on daytime television is Oprah Winfrey. Condoleezza Rice is secretary of state.

And yet my generation of African American women — we’re called, in fact, the Claire Huxtable generation — hasn’t managed to become successfully integrated into American popular culture. We’re still looking for respect in the workplace, where, more than anything else, black women feel invisible. It’s a term that comes up again and again. “In my profession, white men mentor young whites on how to succeed,” a financial executive told me, but “they’re either indifferent to or dogmatically document the mistakes black women make. Their indifference is the worst, because it means we’re invisible.”

As they say, read the whole damn thing.

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The Representation of White Perfection

by matttbastard

Professor, What If has embarked on a series of posts exploring how a consumption-obsessed culture in the US has continued to perpetuate the all-encompassing notion “that whiteness (in food, bodies, clothing, etc) is ideal”:

What if we woke up to the fact that white is not right, that brown bread is healthier, that teeth naturally yellow, that white t-shirts are boring, that, for god/dess sake, a white anus is darn right unnatural and unnecessary? Whiteness doesn’t do a body good-what it does is confer white skin privilege-a privilege that allows those with white skin to walk through the world with many advantages through no actions of their own. But [these] privileges are not good in the entire scheme of things for white skinned people either because what they perpetuate is a racist, colorist world that harms everyone-white people included.

As they say, read the whole damn thing.

h/t Renee

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Salman Rushdie – Great Art about 9/11?

by matttbastard

Bestselling Author Salman Rushdie discusses what he feels is a lack of great literature or other creative works about September 11, 2001.

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Citizenship and Submission

by matttbastard

I’m having trouble reconciling the following with “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”:

France has denied citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wears a burqa on the grounds that her “radical” practice of Islam is incompatible with basic French values such as equality of the sexes.

[…]

The woman, known as Faiza M, is 32, married to a French national and lives east of Paris. She has lived in France since 2000, speaks good French and has three children born in France. Social services reports said she lived in “total submission” to her husband. Her application for French nationality was rejected in 2005 on the grounds of “insufficient assimilation” into France. She appealed, invoking the French constitutional right to religious freedom and saying that she had never sought to challenge the fundamental values of France. But last month the Council of State, France’s highest administrative body, upheld the ruling.

“She has adopted a radical practice of her religion, incompatible with essential values of the French community, particularly the principle of equality of the sexes,” it said.

The article goes on to explain the Council of State’s definition of ‘radical’:

The legal expert who reported to the Council of State said the woman’s interviews with social services revealed that “she lives almost as a recluse, isolated from French society”.

The report said: “She has no idea about the secular state or the right to vote. She lives in total submission to her male relatives. She seems to find this normal and the idea of challenging it has never crossed her mind.”

The woman had said she was not veiled when she lived in Morocco and had worn the burqa since arriving in France at the request of her husband. She said she wore it more from habit than conviction.

Someone who adheres to a non-mainstream religious practice “out of habit” rather than “conviction” doesn’t strike me as all that “radical”.

Daniele Lochak, a law professor not involved in the case, said it was bizarre to consider that excessive submission to men was a reason not to grant citizenship. “If you follow that to its logical conclusion, it means that women whose partners beat them are also not worthy of being French,” he told Le Monde.

I really do find the use of the term “radical” interesting. The connotations are that the practice of Faiza M’s beliefs somehow pose an existential threat to French society, thus the rationale behind the denial of citizenship. And it’s telling that it’s the women who always seems to be the ones who are placed in the position of having to justify their existence (damned if you do, damned if you don’t).

But what about the men to whom she has “submitted”? They are already French citizens, and seem to be facing no consequences for making such “radical” demands upon Faiza in the first place. She has, in effect, been denied agency, reduced to a wayward vessel who deserves to be punished for, in effect, not saying ‘non’ as a ‘real’ Frenchwoman would (except when they don’t, as pointed out in the article). Once again, Muslims–specifically, Muslimahs–who dare to practice their oh-so-freaky religion in ways the majority find distasteful serve as public whipping posts for the sins of the nebulous ‘other’ which, by virtue of mere existence, is apparently chipping away at the structural integrity of the liberal democratic secular state.

And that’s really all I feel comfortable saying at this point, and probably won’t comment further, apart from moderation duties. I would much prefer to hear from women–especially Muslimahs–about what they think and how they feel about this.

Thoughts?

Update: Also see this thread @ BnR started by Chrystal Ocean of Challenging the Commonplace.

Edited at Chrystal’s recommendation (thanks!) to incorporate additional commentary originally posted at BnR/in comments in slightly different form (ie, I corrected some typos)

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PSA: Michelle Obama Watch

by matttbastard

From the creators of What About Our Daughters:

Michelle Obama Watch is a nonpartisan effort to monitor the media’s treatment and depiction of Michelle Obama, the most visible African American woman in popular culture. Michelle Obama Watch will become the repository of the good, the bad, the ugly and the indifferent.

Add Michelle Obama Watch to your bookmarks/blogroll/RSS feeds.

Also:

What About Our Daughters has received credentials to cover the 2008 Democratic National Convention. We are asking for your support in making sure that the voices, stories, and perspectives of African American women and girls are woven into the fabric of this historic event!Please consider donating by clicking our donate button in the sidebar.

Please give what you can and help WAOD make it to Denver!

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Quote of the Day: Half Mast Victories

by matttbastard

The truth about feminism is that we cannot imagine the road to change if it comes back in exclusive dividends. It is meant for the freedom of others who are not here, who have died in vain, in violence, in secrecy, in the dark, and in fear. Feminism, until it thwarts itself from the clutches of materialistic greed, will never liberate anyone. It will succeed in a half-mast victory for a few handfuls of women who’ll erroneously assume the battle was well-fought and won.

– Sudy, LIVE Blogging from WAM: The Truth Out About Feminism (h/t purtek)

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The Universal Fundamentals of Misogyny

by matttbastard

The murder of 16 year old Toronto high school student Aqsa Parvez this past December became an international cause celeb. Despite the lack of concrete information, media outlets from around the globe resolutely declared that Parvez was murdered by her father, an observant Muslim, in what must have been an honour killing (purportedly because Parvez refused to wear a hijab, although this popular line of speculation was later disputed by a close friend of hers). Ignorant opinion scribes quickly untied innumerable bales of straw, binding their hasty preconceptions about Islam into a virtual crusader army of anti-Muslim fallacies.

Yet if one digs deeper than knee-jerk Islamophobic squick, one will see that the practice of honour killings predates and transcends “fundamentalist” (read: contemporary heretical) Islamic practices. Nor is practice of using family or clan ‘honour’ as a justification for murdering women exclusive to Islam, or the so-called ‘Third World’. Though it’s comforting to pawn off deadly misogyny on the uncivilized darkies, we in the oh-so-enlightened West aren’t exactly saintly in our treatment of women.

IOZ puts it better than I ever could:

“[H]onor killings” are the sort of thing that happen in America all the time, with nothing to do with Islam. They’re plotted on prime time. They play daily on Law and Order. The absence of overt religious motivations doesn’t negate the fact that guys kill girls for cheating; husbands kill wives; fathers kill daughters. Intrafamilial and intracommunal violence is horrific and sad, but let us not pretend that it somehow affects the adherents of this or that sect more acutely than some other. Violence and possessiveness are universal frailties of our unfortunate species.

Violence against women must be addressed in a broader context than simplistically labeling it a Muslim problem. But, all too often, when feminists try to expand the boundaries to include men in all cultures, including our own, they are often unfairly criticized by those who would prefer that the “evils” of Islam be the focus of debate, rather than the many, many evils that men of all races, creeds and geographic locales commit on a daily basis. Thankfully, some feminists defiantly ignored narrow parametres of discourse when addressing Parvez’s murder:

We, as a society are bombarded with sexual images, young girls and women starve themselves to death in a deluded attempt for control over any aspect of their lives, we hear loudmouths constantly telling us that some women who are raped, asked for it.

Some would hold lifesaving information and attend disgusting “purity balls” so that their daughters can be handed directly from their father’s to their new owner, the husband.

[…]

[Women in the West] still are fighting the battle for control over our own bodies, uphill because there are those that would also not let women and girls know how to not get pregnant.

Boys will be boys, after all. Girls will be quiet and docile. “Girl Power” often is portrayed in such a way as to make damned sure that it includes lots of cleavage and butt shots.

[…]

So.

Aqsa Parvez was probably murdered by her father because of some “cultural” battle. (the 911 tape has a man saying he had killed his daughter)

Culture? Yes. The prevailing [culture] of men. The only way to change this? Is to change the prevailing culture Worldwide to a culture of humanity.

This post @ Muslimah Media Watch is also directly on target:

Apart from the role of Islam and culture, we must always remember that, at the end of the day, this was a case of violence against a woman. The result of patriarchy and in its worst manifestation. And although there is some merit in bringing to attention the pressures of clothing among Muslim women, the real issue in this case appears to be something much greater. We should not lose sight of this in the media portrayals of the case.

Of course, the mere suggestion that domestic violence stems from a universal culture of patriarchal dominance (and is not endemic to teh MOOSLIMZ!111) would likely raise the “secularist” (snicker) ire of cultural supremacists like Danielle Crittenden. However, secularism isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the antithesis of observance (nor is integration in opposition to the much-abused concept of multiculturalism, although with that said, I must admit that I’m uncomfortable with recent calls in the UK to recognize–even superficially—some variation of Sharia law). To paraphrase Holyoake, “Secularism is not an argument against Islam, it is one independent of it. It does not question the pretensions of Islam; it advances others.” I really like (and, as a secularist, embrace) the definition of secularism offered by wikipedia: “promoting a social order separate from religion, without actively dismissing or criticizing religious belief.”

To be fair, according to some estimates, 1/5 of honour killings in the year 2000 occured in Pakistan, where the Parvez family originally emigrated from. But putting an inordinate level of focus on Islamic fundamentalism (or supposedly “backwards” foreign culture) as the primary culprit is to place too much stock on a mere symptom, not the disease (ie, the denial of women’s agency in cultures where women are seen as mere property, to dispose of at whim–again I stress that Western culture is not immune, even if the set dressing is different). At some point, Aqsa’s father (and, in the capacity as accessory after the fact, brother) made the choice to kill a female family member.

Why?

At this point we really don’t know.

Speculation is fine, yes. But I don’t hear the staunch secularists-as-long-as-the-religion-in-question-isn’t-Christianity raising a single peep when white Western (Christian) women are murdered at the hands of male family members. In fact, in some instances one hears a lot of disturbing apologetics with regards to home grown (middle class) domestic violence (“She was asking for it”; “Why didn’t she just leave?”; or my personal fav, “Oh yeah? Men are abused by women, too!!1”)

These sorts of issues lay bare the base motivations of all involved in the discussion. And, frankly, those who rant the loudest about the inherent evils of Islam–eg, Michelle Malkin and Robert “I hearted Vlaams Belang until I didn’t” Spencer–don’t strike me as the sort who would normally give two shits about uppity wimminz (nor teh queerz).

Quite the opposite, in fact.

Aqsa Parvez almost instantly became the latest prop to be opportunistically appropriated by the usual xenophobic suspects as a crude means of advancing their narrow-minded, nativist Holy War against the Jihadi horde. That so many have quickly jumped to the conclusion that Islam is, by default, complicit in Parvez’s death further highlights the simmering resentment for the ‘other’ that, ever since 9/11, has threatened to boil over here in the civilized West.

Judging by how even Canada no longer appears to be exempt (if we ever truly were), I fear that it soon will.

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Privileged Ignorance

by matttbastard

Over @ Shakesville, Portly Dyke (h/t) examines how “we are being systematically de-sensitized to [racial] issues by the MSM.”

An excerpt:

People of color may have a better resistance to this insidiously toxic media message, as they are subject to the actual results of racism every day — and radical white progressives may (I said “may”) have an increased immune-response to this stuff as compared to whites of other political/sociological persuasions. I suspect, though, that all of us have slowly conceded corners of our resolve to the onslaught.

It happens so slowly — so incrementally, that we don’t notice at first — that’s why I love montages — because when you put all the messages together, you realize that…the indoctrination has been huge, and intentional, and vile — and not subtle at all.

Please make sure to read the whole damn thing (including and especially the comments).

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