Monthly Archives: August 2013

Photo by Battle Creek CVB.
Blog

The Discomfort of #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen


photo of Sojourner Truth monument
Photo by Battle Creek CVB

“Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter.”

Thus began Sojourner Truth’s famous 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Or, at least, this is what we’ve been led to believe by suffragette and abolitionist Frances Dana Barker Gage. It’s her version of Truth’s extemporaneous oration that became popularized in American history.

According to one of Gage’s accounts of what happened at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, she granted Truth the opportunity to speak at the podium, in spite of protests from white suffragettes. They feared the emancipated slave would detract from their cause by bringing up the issue of slavery. Instead, in Gage’s telling, Truth acknowledged “negro’s rights” only in passing and focused on the rights of women.

To some, this account may come across as a heartwarming moment of white feminist solidarity in the face of race-based tensions. To others, like me, the story serves the suffragists’ agenda too neatly. A white woman gave a black woman a platform to speak, and she used that platform to support the cause of women who had just moments before called for her silence?

Historians have poked many holes in the accuracy of Gage’s retellings. In fact, much of what we’ve come to know about Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech may have been fabricated by Gage.

When #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen tweets began flooding my Twitter feed on Monday, I thought about the historical revisionism of Truth’s speech. Although a part of me wishes I still believed the rousing and monumentalized story, knowing the dubious purpose it served makes the words feel hollow. My enthusiasm for feminism long since waned in the wake of critiques from people who have been marginalized in the movement.

More than a 150 years after the delivery of Truth’s speech, many white feminists have yet to internalize the seminal theories contained in works like The Combahee River Collective Statement, This Bridge Called My Back, and the INCITE! anthologies. Our refusal to accept the perspectives of women of color regarding our shared history means white women continue to resist, dismiss, and ignore the same critiques when they are made today.

I was humbled by the magnitude of feminist history that was contained in Mikki Kendall’s spontaneous #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen tweet — its force enough to ascend the hashtag to trending in a matter of hours. But my delight quickly turned to dismay when the responses sought to divorce the hashtag from its historical context. So, I paused to remind myself that we all have different points of entry into conversations about race and feminism. After all, my own public introduction was something of a mess.

I stumbled into web-based debates about race and feminism in 2007 by writing a shamefully indelicate review of Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism. My utter lack of humility was justly greeted with a rather harsh smack down from a number of influential feminist bloggers, including Valenti. With arrogant amusement, I fired back and people came to my defense.

Except, the exchange that occurred wasn’t happening because anyone wanted to defend me. It was happening because I’d unknowingly expressed similar critiques to ones that had been lodged long before my review. Because I’m a white girl it didn’t have to occur to me that there might be discord between white feminist and women of color bloggers. And once I did see it, I thought all anyone needed from me was a declaration of solidarity.

The thing is, my actions weren’t really about being in solidarity with anybody. They were about doing what I needed to feel good about myself, to be seen as a white girl who “gets it” when it comes to race. I thought differentiation and distancing from the “bad” white feminists would show that I understood what people of color have been saying for all these years. That was a selfish mistake. I should have realized that the work to end racism isn’t going to be comfortable — for me or anyone else.

Many of the responses I’ve seen to #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen criticize the hashtag for its supposed alienation of white allies, angry tone, and defensive divisiveness. But those allegations overlook the context from which the hashtag emerged. Hugo Schwyzer debacle aside, Mikki Kendall is not the first woman of color to point out that some white feminists claim to speak for all women while excluding the concerns of a great number of them. So long as white women dictate a revisionist feminist history, just like Frances Dana Barker Gage did with Sojourner Truth, the conversation about race and feminism will continue its circular path.

#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen wasn’t meant to be an invitation for white feminists to participate in a discussion about white women’s privilege — again. It was intended to be an outlet for a woman of color’s frustrations. It turned into a clever litany of injuries women of color have endured (and do endure) due to the actions (and inactions) of white women whose solidarity has been illusive. The anger some women of color have expressed through #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen is justifiable in the face of white women’s consistent and systematic exclusion of what they say is critical for their survival.

Sometimes I think I’ve got this social justice thing on lock, but in truth, none of us do. We’re all fumbling through it and doing the best we can, hoping it’s better than those who came before us. In some ways, it is. That doesn’t mean we can allow ourselves to be seduced into complacency in order to meet our own needs and desires. It means that, although we are learning, we have the responsibility to be vigilant about how far we have left to go — and move things forward.

Whether we own them or don’t own them, our respective privileges are still there. We may not be able to eliminate their power, but we can mitigate their capacity for damage by making different choices. Sometimes those choices will be uncomfortable, but the discomfort is an indication that we are living into change. The discomfort is an opportunity to do something better that we have done it in the past. The discomfort is necessary for growth.

We all have the need to feel we are being heard, but it’s not enough for white folks to simply stop speaking and listen. We also have to learn to see and empathize with other people’s points of entry. We have to be honest about our own motivations when doing antiracist work, especially when we muck it up. We have to lift while we climb, but resolve to do this outside of our own cliques and communities. We have to stop denying that putting our own self-interest first is hindering collective progress.

In the process of learning to live with and learn from our discomfort, we may just find the means for healing.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

What Is Love


Americans in Bed hand-kissing couple


Part of the sweetness and intimacy of Americans in Bed, an HBO documentary that airs tonight, is the subtle things you learn when the couples who are interviewed are not talking. It is the silent gestures that matter: the wordless looks, the casual caresses.

In this way, similar documentaries in past years (such as the HBO series Real Sex) are simpler and more simplistic. Rather than focus on the physicality of the bedroom, director Philippa Robinson offers a nuanced perspective on what really keeps people together.

Robinson used the same approach for an earlier BBC documentary called The British in Bed, but it doesn’t feel stale. For context, viewers first see a few short lines about the state of our American unions: we have the highest rate of marriage in the world and the third-highest rate of divorce.

Through interviews with a handful of couples at various states of intimacy — boyfriend and girlfriend, domestic partners, married couples — Robinson captures the yin and yang of relationships: the affection and the bickering, the romance and the infidelities. Regardless of their racial, ethnic, class, or gender expression, these couples bring to their love lives a splendid assortment of baggage. Through all these pairings runs a common thread of early passion, too, and yet less certain is whether they each have the commitment to repair bonds broken over time. On one extreme is the polyamorous Leo, a 6’6”-tall man with the looks of a Disney prince, who has broken up with his 4’10”girlfriend Blanca twenty-six times in two years. On the other is Helen and Red, a couple that has been married for seventy-one years.

When couples are talking about how they fell in love and how they negotiate — or fail to negotiate — long-term commitment, the documentary is at its most interesting. The two same-sex couples express the most vulnerability, and their stories end up resonating the most as a result. Linda and Margie hold hands the whole time they’re interviewed. Linda describes having a hole in her heart that was filled by Margie, who was married when they first met and subsequently divorced. Her face turns red as she starts to tear up, yet she beams with pride and love the whole time. George and Farid are more subdued. Their love life started with lackluster sex, but as their level of intimacy grew that improved. And then they became parents to twins. This time, it’s Farid who ends up weeping, overcome with the love he has for his babies.

While there are moments of genuinely inspiring candor in their interviews, the African American and Latino couples in the film come across as tragically one-sided. The women are faithful martyrs; the men are unfaithful and lack remorse. One couple spends more time on screen bickering than anything else.

But what the film leaves unsaid is more compelling. Robinson turns the couples’ beds into background characters — sometimes hosting lovers along with the family dog or cat, and sometimes (tellingly) not. Each couple’s body language, too, is instructive. The ones who truly seem to love one another touch while they talk. They stare into each other’s faces.

Newlyweds Yasmin and Mohamed are the exception. Shy and reserved, they keep their hands to themselves. But as they open up on camera, she lovingly describes a marriage proposal that took her breath away. At another point in the interview, he speaks, with tears in his eyes, about the meaning of their love. “This is my person now and I am her person. I always wanted a person.”

That is the essence of Americans in Bed: we are all trying to find our person. Like the couples in the documentary, some of us have to try multiple marriages to get it right. And others of us are still trying, with varying degrees of success, to love, and be loved.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
News

A Country Doctor

Raised fatherless and poor in a Haitian coastal town, Dr. Jean-Gardy Marius studied medicine abroad thanks to the financial assistance of an American missionary. Now he is leading an innovative, grassroots effort to root out cholera and bring communities in Haiti’s rural north to health and self-sufficiency.


It’s easy to hear about what’s going wrong in Haiti. Search the news about the beleaguered Caribbean nation, and the negativity overwhelms. Cynical volunteers decry the country’s hopelessness. Aid organizations put forward flimsy justifications for their failures. Frustrated Haitians wait for foreign governments to make good on the “build back better” promises they made, with much fanfare, three years earlier, after an earthquake devastated the country. Today, over 350,000 people continue to live in shelters that were intended to be temporary. The ongoing cholera epidemic has claimed more than 8,000 lives, and malnutrition and famine plague the country.

It is not just that Haiti lacks homes to house its homeless, medicines to treat its sick, and food to feed its hungry. Over the decades, the country has been drained of its human talent, too. There are only four doctors, nurses, and midwives in the country for every 10,000 people, and most of them are located in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s densely populated capital. The dearth of trained professionals contributes to some heartbreaking health statistics: seventy out of every 1,000 children in Haiti die before their fifth birthday, and 350 out of 100,000 mothers die in childbirth.

It is against this national backdrop of despair that local stories of Haitian resourcefulness and resolution stand out. Even in some of the country’s most impoverished areas, there are people like Jean-Gardy Marius, a Haitian doctor leading an innovative, grassroots effort to root out cholera and bring communities in Haiti’s rural north to health and self-sufficiency.

Photo of patients awaiting services at the Oganizasyon Sante Popilè clinic.
Photo courtesy of OSAPO

Marius and his humanitarian group OSAPO have worked over the past six years to bring health services to the people of Rousseau, a poor rural community about sixty miles north of Port-au-Prince. When the earthquake struck and cholera spread quickly through tainted water supplies, OSAPO responded by putting up tents to house infected patients, distributing water purification tablets and chlorine, and creating hydration stations for ill people making their way to the hospital — ultimately saving the lives of thousands. OSAPO is now partnering with international aid organizations Oxfam and UNICEF in the country’s north to stem the spread of cholera during Haiti’s hurricane season.

But OSAPO’s efforts go beyond emergency care — and even medical treatment. Marius, who grew up in extreme poverty in a western coastal town, believes that groups like his can provide Haiti’s rural areas with the basic knowledge and resources they need to grow successfully on their own. “Our vision at OSAPO is to improve living conditions,” says Marius, forty-three, whom I interviewed over the phone while he was in Lincoln, Nebraska, in June. “To do that, we have to come up with a good primary health care system. For me, this means education for adults and kids, access to latrines, and healthy drinking water — all the things human beings need to survive.”

After all, the roots of Haiti’s current health crisis go far beyond the 2010 earthquake. The country’s deep and pernicious inequalities have existed since its days as a slave colony, the first one where the slaves revolted and threw off the yoke of colonialism two centuries ago — only to be beset by forced reparations to France, American occupation, and international trade embargoes that stunted its growth from early on. Since then, through brutal dictatorships and corrupt democracies alike, Haiti has struggled to grow its economy in any sustainable fashion, leading to a vicious circle of privation and poor health.

With Haiti’s entrenched poverty in mind, OSAPO has adopted a holistic approach to health care. The group does more than run a health clinic in Rousseau. OSAPO’s staff have trained and deployed health educators into the community to teach people about sanitation, immunization, and family planning. They have dug latrines for 360 families and constructed wells to provide clean drinking water for 2,500 more. They have trained midwives to recognize signs that a particular childbirth might require medical intervention, so that women who live hours away from OSAPO’s clinic will arrive in time to save the mother and child if complications arise.

Photo of an elderly woman awaiting care at OSAPO.
Photo courtesy of OSAPO

The organization’s focus is on helping people to help themselves. At OSAPO’s clinic, patients are charged nominal fees for each service. The fees, Marius says, are about teaching the community about self-reliance and accountability, while also avoiding the corruption that plagues other clinics. Likewise, instead of handing out food, OSAPO’s nutrition program provides seeds and chickens along with agricultural assistance and educational workshops. “You have to put people back to work,” Marius says. “Agriculture is one of the best solutions to help them economically.”

Marius knows something of self-reliance. The oldest son in a poor family, he never met his father and grew up watching his stepfather abuse his mother. After he stood up to protect her, his stepfather threatened him, and Marius moved in with an uncle.

“I took a bus to his house with hope that he could help me get back into school,” Marius says. “But my uncle used me for household labor.”

At the age of thirteen, Marius ran away from his uncle’s home. For a year, he slept and begged on the streets of Port-au-Prince. Then, a friend brought Marius with him to stay with his family in Pierre Payen, a small village in the northwest. When he was fourteen, he got a job assisting Dr. Victor Binkley, an American surgeon working in Pierre Payen. Through him, Marius met an American missionary who supported him financially when he decided to pursue a medical degree.

After studying medicine in the Dominican Republic and Germany, Marius decided — unlike many of his Haitian peers — to return to his country to work as a doctor.

Photo of OSAPO's clinic
Photo courtesy of OSAPO

In 2007, he founded OSAPO, or the Oganizasyon Sante Popilè (Popular Health Organization). After a year of working out of a mobile clinic, OSAPO built a permanent health-care center in Rousseau. Today, OSAPO has a staff of five doctors, nine nurses, and one agronomist; last year, it served roughly 52,000 clients.

OSAPO’s model of charging small fees for its services makes sense even in impoverished communities, says Dr. Kim Coleman, a radiologist from Lincoln, Nebraska, who has been to Haiti five times as a visiting doctor at OSAPO’s clinic. She points out that international aid organizations that step in to provide free services can unwittingly create “beggar economies” that undercut local organizations. “The buy-in from patients is so important,” Coleman says, “You can see the damage done by giving handouts. [Marius’s approach] is better for the people, and makes for better compliance.”

Whether foreign aid creates perverse incentives is a major point of controversy in the development world. In recent years, prominent economists such as Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly have taken opposing views of its effectiveness, while social entrepreneurs ranging from Paul Polak to Muhammad Yunus have argued — to varying degrees — for more market-driven solutions to the problems of poor nations. Perhaps nowhere else is that debate more relevant than in Haiti, which is believed to have more aid groups per capita than any other country except India — as many as 10,000, according to a 2006 report from the World Bank. (During the rule of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, foreign governments sought to sidestep the corrupt regime — notorious for funneling aid into Duvalier’s personal coffers — by sending their funds to NGOs instead.)

Since the 2010 earthquake, ninety percent of the six billion dollars disbursed to Haiti has been given to international NGOs and private contractors, while less than half a percent has gone to Haitian businesses and locally run organizations like OSAPO. As the group’s partnership with Oxfam and UNICEF makes clear, the two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. And yet OSAPO’s supporters argue that its cost-effective, comprehensive, and grassroots approach to development should be scaled up. At the moment, Marius points out, there are not even enough qualified candidates to fill his clinic’s need for trained doctors and nurses. If Haiti’s most educated health-care workers continue to flock to Europe and North America, Haiti will need to keep relying on foreign assistance.

Marius hopes that his example will inspire other Haitian professionals to stay at home and tend to a country that desperately needs their talents. When the aid dries up or the foreign doctors fly off, who will be there to care for the sick?

“I wanted to make something that is strong,” Marius says of his group. And in building that vision, he has made the people of Rousseau stronger.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Deferred Dreams from My Father


photo of Tina and her dadWhen I was growing up, I knew my father had become an American citizen around the time I was born in 1985. What I didn’t know was that until then he’d been living as an undocumented resident of the United States for more than twenty years. Never anxious to talk about this part of his life, my father simply didn’t volunteer the information.

Like many children of immigrant parents, I was told story upon story that began, “When I came to this country…” But certain details of my father’s journey weren’t shared until I was twenty-six. Even after all these years, the story of how he emigrated from Mexico isn’t one my father likes to tell. He came from a generation where one’s citizenship status was something not to be discussed. I only learned of the specifics because I poked and prodded until he finally gave in, saying, “Tell my story when I’m dead.”

To people like my father, in spite of being an American citizen, these stories remain unsafe to talk about publicly. In the back of his mind is the lingering fear that telling his story will somehow get him deported. If not deported, then he will lose his job, or some other bad thing will happen. Silence and secrecy are my father’s only means of protection.

When I told my dad about the Dream 9, a group of undocumented activists who openly defied US immigration law in an act of civil disobedience last month, he told me a story he had never shared before. After being in the United States for five years, my dad reached a point where he’d had enough. He was always hungry, tired, and on the verge of homelessness. Working under the table without papers resulted in constant exploitation, and all he wanted was to go home to his family.

Without a dollar to his name, my father walked along the Los Angeles highway with his thumb out, hoping someone would give him a lift to San Diego so he could cross the border into Tijuana. Once he arrived, he planned to find a job and save enough money to return to his parents, who lived in the Southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán. But, as he puts it, fate intervened.

My dad walked along the interstate for an entire day, and not a single person stopped to give him a ride. Since it was the 1970s and hitchhiking in California was fairly common, my father (ironically) took the drivers’ unwillingness to pick up a poor, brown man as a sign that he wasn’t supposed to return to Mexico, after all. He resigned himself to whatever fate was keeping him in the US, and walked all the way back to LA. For the next fifteen years, my dad worked backbreaking jobs that kept him one paycheck away from homelessness, separated from every family member and friend he’d ever known.

It’s difficult for me to think about what my father’s life was like during those hardscrabble years, but still I ask him to tell me. He explains the ways he was able to scrape out a living in a country he felt didn’t want people like him and made it as hard as possible for them to survive.

When he shares his pain, I see my father differently than the angry, quiet man I associate with my childhood. My dad had every intention of living the American Dream, even after years passed and it remained out of reach. He’d wanted to be a doctor or an engineer, and to give my brothers and me opportunities that were never possible for him. Instead, each day was simply about surviving. My father worked hard as a janitor to support our family, but he and my mom were never able to climb out of poverty. There was no time for dream chasing, so my father acquiesced to a dream deferred.

As the Dream Act is adopted in various states and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) allows undocumented youth to obtain driver’s licenses and work permits, I think of the adversities undocumented youth won’t face that my father had to overcome. I think of how the Dreamers, as they’ve come to be known, represent the unfulfilled desires of my father’s generation. So many of our parents secretly came to the United States, where they hid and were silent because to do otherwise would mean giving up what little they had for which they’d sacrificed everything. To them, immigration is not just a political issue; it is a life force that is brutal and beautiful, full of pain and of love.

My dad still struggles with using the term “undocumented.” For him, the word “illegal” comes much easier. He spent twenty years in a country where his existence was criminalized, and that feeling of not belonging isn’t something that “papers” can fix. My dad still behaves like that twenty-something kid who wasn’t protected under the law. He fears men in uniforms. He can’t speak out against those who treat him unfairly. He is constantly worried that everything he’s worked so hard for can be taken away in an instant.

When there is no ability for you to speak openly, no politicized community creating safe spaces, and no internet to connect you anonymously, you’re an island that internalizes what you’re told. The Dream 9 is helping my dad connect to his chosen country, to heal the hurts of its past abuse. Perhaps that is too much to ask from nine young people. But as they risk their own livelihoods for the sake of their communities, people like my father, whose lives have been steeped for so long in silence and in fear, are reading about their courage with tears in their eyes, in awe of a generation that refuses to hide in the shadows.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: