Sonia, a 25-year-old convert to Islam, was born in France but says that many French perceive her as a foreigner. Discrimination has only gotten worse since 9/11,” she says. (photo by Tanguy Kouessan)

In a scruffy classroom at the University of Paris X at Nanterre, in a suburb outside Paris, a group of academics, journalists, and activists of all stripes gathered in March to hash out the “crisis”: what to do about the Islamic veil in French schools.  A small group of college-aged women at the back of the room listened quietly until a man at the front pointed in their direction. Three of the women wore a hijab covering their hair, forehead, and neck. Together, they had been half-heartedly working on a crossword puzzle, but now they were on the spot.

“When I look at these girls,” the man said, “I can’t help but think that they’ve been branded ‘hallal’ — like a piece of meat — by an Islamist patriarchy. I fled Algeria for France to get away from this sort of intolerance, and now it’s infiltrating the Republic!”

One of them put down the crossword. “I’ve been wearing this veil since I was twelve, and it was my personal decision to put it on.” she said.  “It’s not a question of submission to men, but of religious expression.”

Her voice started to shake, and then, fighting back tears, she said, “I’m a French citizen. I was born here. I thought the French Revolution was fought for freedom, but here we are being marginalized and humiliated once again. Stop insulting our intelligence! Stop treating us like imbeciles!”

“Islamism is a wart on the face of this country.” responded the man, Derri Berkani, a journalist, filmmaker, and practicing Muslim. Berkani said he had heard enough about the symbolism of the voile.  “The veil is not a religious issue, but a political one, so I could give a damn about their cause,” he said. “There’s nothing in the Koran that obliges a woman to wear a veil.”

The packed lecture hall erupted in fragmented arguments and debates that exceeded my level of French. A literature professor who called himself a communist extolled the secular values of the Republic as a counterweight to religious extremism and American imperialism, while a young Moroccan proclaimed that only Islam could combat the moral decline of the West. Just when the room verged on complete anarchy, Nelcya Delanoë, a professor in the Anglo American Studies department at Nanterre, called for order, but the women in the back were still seething.

The veiled woman who had spoken earlier, a 23-year-old political science student named Khalidja (students quoted in this article requested that only their first names be used), asked Delanoë if she could respond to some of the comments, but slipped into the informal “tu,” rather than the more formal “vous,” in her request.

“You will not address me as ‘tu,’ young lady,” Delanoë chided. “You will show me some respect!”

“Only when you show us some respect,” Khalidja replied.

When I found Khalidja after the meeting, she was exasperated and enraged. Surrounded by a group of friends chatting away on cell phones, some wearing veils, some not, she seemed to embody all the contradictions of a reinvigorated Islam in secular France: She wore stylish sneakers poking out from under an austere robe and sprinkled her French with a variety of curse words. Khalidja had almost finished the equivalent of a master’s degree and would soon start looking for a job, probably as a government functionary.

I asked her if she would have to take off the veil if she worked in government.

“I will leave France before I’m forced to take off my veil. I’m French and I don’t see a contradiction between my country and my religion, but I’ll move to the U.S. if it comes to that,” she said.

I asked her if she thought Islamophobia — a popular term in the French media — is a problem in the United States as well. Like almost every French person I had met, she despised President George W. Bush and prefaced her answer with a denunciation of the war in Iraq and the current administration’s Middle East policies.

“But do you think the United States is more tolerant?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Religion is important in the States. Here if you have any sort of religious belief people think you’re a barbarian or just plain retarded.”

The Paris Mosque is the spiritual center of France’s “second religion,” Islam. Many French now question whether the growing popularity of Islam is compatible with the country’s strict secular traditions. (photo by Tanguy Kouessan)

Lost in translation

Like the United States, France constantly wrings its hands over the separation of church and state, although the rebirth of Islam in the marginalized banlieues — dreary, crime-ridden suburbs — poses a problem for France which the United States has yet to face on the same scale. It is undoubtedly a vast, complex problem that has much to do with France’s troubled colonial history as it does with religious extremism. Nevertheless, the veil has become the flashpoint for almost every discussion about immigration, Islam, terrorism, or French identity since last December when a 20-member commission, assembled by French President Jacques Chirac, named the Stasi Commission (after a former education secretary), recommended a ban on all conspicuous religious symbols in state-run spaces. In addition to the ban on the veil, the commission called for a ban on large crosses and yarmulkes, the Jewish skullcaps, as well as two new official days off for Yom Kippur and Aid-e l-Kebir as tokens of acceptance of non-Catholic holidays in a country where Ascension Day is still a paid holiday.

By all accounts, a majority of the French supported the ban: in a poll taken in early February  2004, 57 percent said that conspicuous religious symbols were “a threat to national cohesion” and 69 percent said they favored banning the headscarf from public schools. The law sailed through the National Assembly shortly after the poll was taken, with little opposition.  Although Chirac signed the bill into law in February, it took the French Council on Education until May to work out the finer details, like whether bandanas will be prohibited (it will depend on the point of view of individual principals). The law is set to go into effect at the start of the next school year. Among the few politicians to criticize the law was France’s new economics minister and fastest rising political star, Nicolas Sarkozy, who went so far as to call the ban “secularist fundamentalism.”

To really understand why the Islamic headscarf has become so controversial in France, one must try to understand two words that are often bandied about in this debate and are not easy to translate into English: laïcité and communautarisme. The first term is often translated in the American press as “secularism,” as if it simply designated the separation of church and state, a familiar issue to Americans. In reality, laïcité implies a set of political and cultural values, that, in a way, have become a pseudo-religion of the state.

As one member of Chirac’s Stasi Commission, philosopher Henri Peña-Ruiz, put it in Le Monde Diplomatique recently, “laïcité only favors what is in the common interest [of the Republic]. With moral and intellectual autonomy, it promotes the freedom of conscience and the total equality of rights without regard to sex, [ethnic] origin, or spiritual conviction.” Because of laïcité, he continued, “tomorrow, thousands of young women will be recognized by the Republic as having preserved their right to bare their heads at school and sit next to boys who have the same status as them.”

Communautarisme, on the other hand, roughly means “multiculturalism,” although its connotations are almost entirely negative. Communautarisme, to the French, is what happens when you let immigrants form their own communities, speak their own languages, and practice their own religions. Consequently, France becomes less “French” and more open to foreign values and cultural practices.

To be sure, there are real dangers associated with communautarisme — such as support for female circumcision in Malian or Senegalese communities or acceptance of stoning women who are accused of adultery by certain Muslim imams — but it’s hard to distinguish when legitimate concerns about human rights cross over into racist notions about cultural superiority.

The controversy surrounding the Islamic veil actually dates back to at least 1989, when the Council of State, one of France’s high courts, ruled that religious symbols that “constitute an act of intimidation, provocation, proselytizing or propaganda” could not be worn in public schools. Under this decision, individual schools were left to determine what was a provocation and what was simply a personal expression of faith. Often, this came down to a judgment call by individual teachers and principals.

“I had girls with half-scarves and full-on veils,” remembers Isabelle, a middle-aged English teacher in a poor suburb northeast of Paris who did not want her last name used. “You couldn’t tell the difference between religious proselytism and fashion. That’s why I supported Chirac’s law at first: It backed teachers up so that it wasn’t just us against the students and their parents.”

Now, however, some of the same teachers who favored the ban are rethinking their positions. “It’s going to be impossible to enforce,” Isabelle predicts. “And the Muslim girls who refuse to take off their veils — where are they going to go?”

Khalidja, the political science student, says she favors opening up more Muslim private schools if France won’t compromise on the veil issue. So far, however, there is only one Muslim school in the entire country, in the far north near the Belgian border. “Every time we start the process of opening up a school, the government shuts it down,” Khalidja says. “Catholics and Jews can have their own schools, but if Muslims want one, it’s labeled as communautarisme by the government. It’s a totally hypocritical position.”

Contrary to popular belief, many leading French Muslims like Dalil Boubaker, the rector of the Paris Mosque, have not opposed the new law, and some of its most vociferous proponents, such as Derri Berkani, the filmmaker and journalist at the Nanterre meeting, are Muslims themselves.  Although many Muslims I spoke with took varying positions on the veil, the sense of discrimination at the hands of the secular French state seemed nearly universal.

“I’d say the biggest problem is not the veil at all, but jobs,” says Sonia, a 25-year-old Muslim convert who wears the veil. “You don’t see any diversity in French media or French politics. I’m a French citizen, but because I’m black and because I wear a veil, I’m doubly marginalized,” she explains. “I’ve had people scream, ‘Go back to Morocco,’ at me from their cars. I’m from France and my parents are from Benin.”

“This isn’t about the veil,” one Moroccan-born student at the Nanterre meeting had said. “It’s about a profound problem that France has with Islam.”  

Many staunch advocates of laïcité argue, on the other hand, that it is the version of Islam which refuses to separate religion from the public sphere that is the problem. This is what Nelcya Delanoë, the professor who kept order at the meeting, tells me later.  When I sum up Khalidja’s and Sonia’s arguments to her on an unseasonably hot May day at her apartment in central Paris, she seems unimpressed.

Delanoë has written extensively about secularism in Morocco and France, but doesn’t view this issue with the typical detachment of a scholar. Delanoë was born and raised in Morocco and speaks Arabic. Her father, a Moroccan-born Frenchman who was also raised Jewish, fought against the French occupation of his homeland and envisaged a “liberal and independent” country quite different from the Morocco of today. Delanoë shares that vision and works closely with liberal Moroccans on human rights and women’s rights issues. For her, the headscarf is a pretext to legitimize an extremist political movement.

“There were no headscarves here three years ago,” Delanoë claims, referring to the Nanterre campus. “Now, they’re everywhere. I’ve heard people say, ‘This is multiculturalism, this is great,’ but we’ll see where it leads in ten years.” She cites her experience in Morocco as proof that Islamism is indeed a threat to democratic countries like France. The Islamists “claim that there’s no contradiction between their religious beliefs and democracy, but they have an ignorant understanding of democracy: It’s not just voting, but a social contract,” she insists. “I’ve changed my mind on this issue about fifteen times, but I’m now convinced that each new veil is a victory for the Islamists.”

A popular poster at the university in Nanterre labels George Bush as the world’s biggest terrorist. (photo by Russell Cobb)

The Revolution is dead. Long live the Revolution!

My window into this controversy opened last year when I took a year-long position as an adjunct English teacher at the university in Nanterre. It is a strange place: Most of the buildings were built in the early 1960’s and resemble a modern American-style commuter campus. Despite its placid exterior, it has been a hotspot for radicalism. In fact, Nanterre has changed the course of French history at least once. In May 1968, a group of students protesting everything from same-sex dorms to the Vietnam War ignited a sequence of events that eventually led to the downfall of President Charles de Gaulle a year later.

Decades later, the place is still roiling in political turmoil, and classes are often disrupted by routine strikes, sit-ins, and sometimes violent protests over Israel, Iraq, and the length of spring break. Non-French professors and lecturers, such as I, learn to take these things in stride. When a chalkboard is spray-painted with graffiti or a lecture is interrupted by a megaphone call for a general strike, we generally sigh and say, “c’est Nanterre.”

It was surprising, then, that when I asked my students to debate the headscarf controversy in class, I got an almost uniform endorsement of French Enlightenment values over what was perceived as American-style multiculturalism. Rare was the student who argued against Chirac’s new law. I asked one Jewish student, a 19-year-old named Nili, if she thought that banning religious symbols from schools might backfire and intensify religious extremism and anti-Semitism.  “France’s policy of laïcité is preceded by the concept of equality, which prohibits any sort of discrimination. In order to maintain social cohesion and public order, we must keep religion out of public space,” she said thoughtfully.

I received similar — almost identical — responses from most of my students, who agreed that the Islamic headscarf should be banned. My plans for class debates turned into rousing eulogies to French values: liberty, equality, fraternity, and, most importantly, secularism.  

I taught, arguably, some of the best and brightest in the university system: future lawyers and technocrats studying for the equivalent of a major in English and a law degree. Whenever the subject of religious symbols came up, however, the students started to sound like modern-day Jacobins. “If you allow religion into the public sphere,” one bright Italian student said, “France could become like the United States, where the president declares war while in church.”

Declaration of war? In church? Did I miss something? I tried to explain that in the United States there is also a separation of church and state — however precarious it may seem these days — and that no president since Roosevelt had actually declared war. Still, it was useless: These law students were convinced that France was caught between two dangerous fundamentalist movements: one Christian (led by George W. Bush), and one Muslim (led as much by radical French imams as by Al-Qaeda).

But while France has proven largely immune to Bush’s seemingly messianic vision — a recent New York Times poll reported that 85 percent of French respondents had a “negative” image of the American president — radical Islam appears to be gaining a foothold in the marginalized outskirts of the country’s big cities. Young, firebrand intellectuals like Tariq Ramadan have gained popularity at the expense of more moderate, government-backed leaders like Dalil Boubaker. Politicized Islam is becoming a force to be reckoned with among France’s five million or so Muslims, about 8 percent of the total population; the questions, of course, are how significant this force is and how to respond to it.

The government’s reaction to political Islam has been famously heavy-handed. Clerics accused of spouting anti-Semitism have been deported in recent weeks. Police arrest and interrogate Arab-looking men in the banlieues and in the Paris Métro without cause. The far right party of Jean-Marie Le Pen continues to gain popularity in some areas. And now Islamic headwear is banned in schools, even though the Sikh turban, for example, is still allowed. On the campus of Nanterre, meanwhile, Arab students have complained of the appearance of a mysterious group called the Jewish Defense League and of being singled out and beaten up by university security guards since the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict broke out. The whole thing, many Muslims claim, smacks of a growing Islamophobia at best, and at worst, a European import of Middle Eastern conflicts.

Considering the complexity and gravity of the issue, it started to bother me that my students all had the same point of view. So I devised an experiment. I divided my classes into pairs and told them to debate the pros and cons of such hot-button topics as the death penalty, the war in Iraq, and, of course, the veil. We talked about multiculturalism vs. equality, personal freedom vs. security, and private vs. public space. We had very interesting discussions, but when I asked them to give their honest opinions about the headscarf issue at the end, only one, an 18-year-old named Caroline, said she was definitely opposed to the ban.

“You can’t be serious, can you?” Valentin, the guy sitting next to her exclaimed in French.

But while my mostly white, middle-class students attacked the veil and supported the government, others on campus have a quite different take. After I asked professors and minority students about the issue, I found that everyone on campus had become hyperconscious about headwear and its symbolic power, but no one could agree on what the Islamic headscarf actually represented. Oppression by a fundamentalist patriarchy? An Islamic expression of feminism? The latest fashion in teen rebellion?

Michel Allner, a professor in American Studies at Nanterre who has recently finished a book about the West’s perception of Islam, explains that the foulard has replaced Che Guevara T-shirts as the ultimate symbol of anti-Western imperialism. “The veil is a uniform in opposition,” he says with the lyrical abstraction so often found in French intellectuals.

I heard all sorts of interpretations on the veil’s true meaning. Still, the diversity of the foulard itself made it hard to generalize about its symbolism. At one point, I had a Lebanese student in my class who wore a polka-dotted silk scarf lightly draped over the top of her head. But she also wore more make-up than most of my “French” students. Certainly her headscarf did not mean the same thing as Khalidja’s all-black veil, which covered the forehead down to the eyebrows.

Civilizing the natives

Nanterre and its surrounding communities — like many Parisian banlieues, or suburbs — are heavily populated by Muslim immigrants from North Africa, many of whom live completely cut off from mainstream French culture. Among young people, unemployment runs as high as 50 percent in some banlieues and crime has soared the past two decades, even though it slacked recently in the face of controversial, Giuliani-esque tactics taken by Nicolas Sarkozy during his tenure as interior minister, which expired in April.  

To see a slice of la France communautariste, I went to a suburb in Northeast Paris widely regarded as one of the poorest and most disadvantaged. Collectively, the area is known as “93,” for its postal code. The high school I visited, Olympe de Gourges, has one of the lowest graduation rates in all of France and teacher turnover is high.

I expected the worst. The French media play up ethnic tensions in the banlieue to the point that it seems, in the eyes of a bourgeois Parisian, like the Balkan Peninsula circa 1995. There are stories every day of Muslim dads keeping their daughters out of P.E. and biology classes, teachers derided for teaching the Holocaust, and Jewish students beaten up and called “salle juif” (or “dirty Jew”) by their Muslim classmates.

So I was surprised to find the most diverse group of French I’ve ever encountered, lingering outside the school’s gates. There was a Russian-Congolese guy flirting with a blond French girl, whose best friend was Algerian. They weren’t dealing drugs or beating each other up; they weren’t even engaged in the national pastimes of smoking and arguing. They were like poster-children for racial harmony: They smiled and took turns practicing their English on me. They all seemed to get along so well, I decided to ask them what all the fuss was about.

“I think it’s played up by TV,” Olaf, the Russian-Congolese kid says. “There’s no intolerance here at school,” he says even as his face darkens. He points across the street to a housing project. “Over there, though, now there’s intolerance.”

More and more of these students — children of immigrants — have entered the university system, which, with its promise of free and universal acceptance to all French students holding a high school diploma, promises to be the great equalizer of socio-economic and cultural difference.  Despite the relatively new influence of Anglo American concepts like multiculturalism and affirmative action (or “positive discrimination” as it is known here), many French still believe, like Diderot over two centuries ago, that “to teach is also to civilize.” The pinnacle of civilization being, of course, the French version, armed with the ideals of its Great Men buried at the Pantheon: Rousseau, Voltaire, Hugo, et al.

Indeed, the French secular state has become a sort of church unto itself, in which all loyalties, allegiances, and creeds must be sworn off in favor of Enlightenment values. One Stasi commission member, Régis Debray, a former Marxist revolutionary-turned-public intellectual, has unwittingly supported this argument with an oft-quoted analogy: “If I visit a mosque, I take my shoes off before I enter as a sign of respect. We only ask that Muslims show the same respect when they enter the French schools.” Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the blunt Prime Minister, has noted with optimism, “Secularism has a chance to become the religion of France.”

If the school’s job is to create model citizens of the French Republic, then the university’s job is to be “the temple of reason,” claims Michel Allner. “This is the heritage of the Third Republic,” Allner tells me. “The idea back then was to erase regional differences and build a nation based on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Regional dialects and customs from Brittany and the Basque Country, for example, were suppressed and the tablier (a sort of white smock) was imposed as the uniform for all schoolchildren. It was a very repressive system and I think we can agree now that it was a mistake.” As is the current ban on religious symbols, Allner says. “I know it’s an unpopular position, but I think multiculturalism is the way to go.”

Not surprisingly, many high school students I spoke with agreed that any sort of dress code for kids was a bad idea. “The teachers want to make us all equal,” a 17-year-old student at Olympe de Gourges named Camelia says. “But look at how we dress — of course we’re not equal. Still, I think we’re old enough to make our own decisions about how we want to dress.” Camelia, for example, comes from a conservative family of Algerian origin but no one — including her parents — has ever tried to force her to wear a veil. “I wouldn’t wear it even if they did,” she says firmly.

Nicolas Ginsburger, a professor of Franco-American relations at Nanterre, disagrees that secularism à la française is simply about freedom of choice, as many Americans would believe. The law that definitively separated church and state in 1905, notes Ginsburger, declares that the state must remain neutral with respect to religion. “That means in school, the student and teacher must remain neutral as well,” he notes. “This law has guaranteed civil peace in France and put an end to many centuries of religious warfare. ”

Ginsburger puts the issue in a historical context, which is perhaps lost in the media frenzy over exotic images of veiled young women living in what is, after all, a highly sexualized country. The current flare-up over the veil is nothing, he says, compared to the civil wars between Catholics and Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries, or even 19th-century anti-Semitism.

Nevertheless, Ginsburger has been shocked by the negative reaction to the ban on religious symbols coming from the American media and government. Last month, a Justice Department spokesperson called a similar ban on headwear in an Oklahoma school district “un-American” and “morally despicable.” Also, last December the U.S. ambassador on religious freedom said that the Bush administration would “watch carefully” what happened in France on the headscarf front. “Why can’t they mind their own business?” Ginsburger asks. “The big difference is that, in America, religion is used as proof of morality in political life,” he says. “In France, the idea is that the less religious one is, the better.”

When clichés come home to roost

Throughout my year in France, I discovered that the two primary fears in French society — radical Islam and Americanization — are often mingled into one discourse. During the meeting at Nanterre, for example, the only thing the leftist French professors and Islamist students could find in common was their disgust for American cultural relativism and political correctness.  The professors worried about American-style multiculturalism ruining the secular “exception française”,  while some Muslim students voiced conservative concerns about the liberal American influence on the gay marriage debate in France. The “threat” always came from elsewhere — the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Algeria — and never from a domestic source.

A similar phenomenon took place in my classroom: When it came to tough issues like the veil or racism, students blamed the Other. I was reminded of the reaction to a tragic incident that took place two years ago at the Nanterre City Council, when a gunman burst into a meeting and killed eight people. The next day, French newspapers called it an “American-style massacre,” as if the United States invented mass-murder. “Everyone in America carries a weapon,” proclaimed one of my students, 19-year-old Alexandra. I told her that I had never owned a weapon and did not know anyone who actually carried a gun. “This can’t be possible,” she responded. “Have you not seen Bowling for Columbine? That is the real America!”

I suddenly felt a strange solidarity with Sonia and Khalidja, the two women I had met who wore veils: I knew what it felt like to be assaulted by stereotypes. That wasn’t my America, I wanted to answer Alexandra. Instead, I was seized with the opportunity to impart a little English language pedagogy.

“Here’s a good idiomatic phrase to learn,” I said. “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

STORY INDEX

TOPICS >

“A Frenchman or a Jew”
By Fernanda Eberstadt. Published by The New York Times Magazine. February 29, 2004.
URL: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40D1FFF3C580C7A8EDDAB0894DC404482

Le Monde Diplomatique dossier on secularism and the headscarf
URL: http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/index/sujet/laicite

ORGANIZATIONS >

Ni putes ni soumises (Neither whores nor doormats)
URL: http://www.niputesnisoumises.com/html/index.php

The Brookings Institution’s take on Islam in France
URL: http://www.brookings.edu/fp/cusf/analysis/islam.htm

“

Russell Cobb

The wedge issue” is a time-tested election-year strategy, and the Bush administration is unusually fond of – and unusually good at – the practice. Oppose the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance? You must be an atheist. Oppose the Patriot Act? You must hate America, or have something to hide, or both.

The controversy surrounding “Healthy Marriages” – President Bush’s plan to use welfare money to spread marital bliss – isn’t a spectacular battle like gay marriage or the “under God” business, but it’s as much about creating divisions and gaining leverage. It’s just less “shock and awe” and more stealth bomber, engineered to both look impressive and go unnoticed.

Bush first introduced Healthy Marriages in early 2002, with little accompanying fanfare. But with the flap over gay unions bringing the definition of family to the top of the national agenda, the media are taking a second look.  

Ostensibly, the program is about improving the lives of poor children, by fostering “stable families.” And it sounds good. It appeals to core constituents and seems innocuous – if not downright reasonable – to most everyone else. The few opponents are so ideologically diverse that their varied objections dissolve in a sea of “ifs,” “ands,” and “buts.” Best of all, it won’t cost taxpayers a thing – at least, not so much that they’ll notice.

In light of the war in Iraq and the stumbling economy, Healthy Marriages may be considered a “soft” issue, but poverty in America is a pervasive and immediate problem. Approximately 35 million Americans – one out of every 10 people and one out of every six children – live below the poverty line. The Bush administration says encouraging marriage will reduce those numbers.

There is some evidence suggesting they may be right. Social scientists have found that children in married families are less likely to be poor, addicted to drugs, and involved in crime, and more likely to finish high school and have healthy families of their own. Under the new plan, the Bush administration would put more money toward eliminating the disincentives to marriage that now exist in the welfare system, support existing marriages by teaching relationship skills, and educate the country on the value of the institution.

But the administration is touting one fact – children in married families are generally better off than those in single-parent families – while conveniently ignoring another: We have no idea how to promote marriage among the poor. In his “Fatherly Advice” column for the National Fatherhood Initiative website, child psychologist Wade Horn even admitted as much. “There is no evidence that any of this will work,” he wrote in 2000. That was before he was appointed as Bush’s healthy marriage pitchman.

Critics argue that it’s premature to put so much money into what amounts to a vast social experiment. The enthusiasm for the plan, they say, isn’t as much about reducing child poverty as it is about defending traditional marriage as a panacea for all of America’s social ills. Critics allege that for healthy marriage defenders – a diverse group of concerned citizens, beltway policy analysts, and “faith-based” organizers – Bush’s program is meant to initiate a widespread culture change that extends beyond the poor.

And there is evidence to support critics’ claims. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act, a bipartisan bill signed by President Clinton, already provides for all the “marriage promotion activities” included in the Bush plan. Under the 1996 law, states have recently begun experimenting with policies and initiatives to promote marriage. But as expert Theodora Ooms points out, “There certainly isn’t any evidence that they’re having much effect.” In fact, the potential implications of current state initiatives are so unknown, the administration won’t endorse any particular method of promoting marriage.

Bush is betting that the perceived softness of Healthy Marriages will carry it through Congress. The welfare reauthorization bill has been hung up in the Senate for months, but lately the sticking point has been minimum wage, not marriage promotion. If the bill passes while Bush is still in office – there’s a chance that the Senate might not consider it again until 2005 – Healthy Marriages will likely pass with it. So far, the administration has succeeded in presenting it as a common-sense plan. But hard questions remain unanswered.

Clinton’s compromising legacy

The idea of the federal government promoting marriage predates the Bush administration. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat, was pitching similar ideas to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think-tank, have been building the case for marriage promotion almost as long.

By 1992, when welfare dependence was at its peak, there was a widespread, bipartisan feeling that reform – including work requirements and family formation goals – was a legislative, if not moral, imperative. As a candidate for president, Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it” by imposing work requirements and time limits on benefits, and funding programs that would reduce out-of-wedlock births.

At the end of his first term, during his bid for re-election, Clinton signed the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. “A long time ago I concluded that the current welfare system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility and family,” Clinton said. “Today we have an historic opportunity to make welfare what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life.” The new law effectively ended the New Deal guarantee of welfare for poor Americans.

Conservatives complained that their agenda had been coopted. Liberals cried treason. Two high-ranking Health and Human Services administrators, including long-time Clinton family friend Peter Edelman, resigned in disgust. Moynihan called the new law “the most brutal act of social policy since reconstruction,” predicting that the law’s backers would “take this disgrace to their graves.” But the plan was roundly regarded as a bipartisan success – it still is – and Clinton’s propensity for compromise helped deliver a landslide victory.

At the time, most critics were overwhelmed by the abandonment of the old welfare system and the sweeping changes of the new one. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the cornerstone of welfare for six decades, was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which gave states more discretion over the use of funds, limited the duration of assistance to five years, and established strict work requirements.

The new law was focused on encouraging recipients to get to work, but it was also explicitly aimed at influencing family formation. New Deal welfare programs contained implicit financial disincentives to marriage for single parents; often, a mother’s benefits would drop significantly or end altogether if she got married. Under TANF, states could eliminate those disincentives, but they were also directed to actively encourage marriage as a method for ending welfare dependence.

While there were deep concerns on the left about welfare reform generally, the family –based objectives weren’t that controversial. Little was made of the fact that states could theoretically use 100 percent of their welfare grants to promote marriage – and not just among the poor. Programs aimed at reducing out-of-wedlock births and encouraging two-parent families could be directed to the general population (see Box 2).  

Since it was unclear how, exactly, the goals were to be met, few states implemented explicit family formation policies. That is, until Bush became president.

How marriage will cure poverty and other tall tales

Shortly after taking office in 2001, Bush appointed one of the marriage movement’s most vocal leaders, former President of the National Fatherhood Initiative, Wade Horn, as Assistant Secretary in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. With one of their own heading ACF, the movement has more clout than ever. But critics worry that the administration is publicly “soft-pedaling” a vague and potentially dangerous – and extraordinarily well-funded –experiment. Since 2001, 35 states have adopted some form of marriage promotion. And many states are already using TANF money for “marriage promotion activities” aimed at whole populations.

Horn is careful to say in public that the government won’t be “playing cupid,” and that the emphasis is on healthy marriages, not marriage for its own sake, or marriage as the solution to poverty. “We’re focused on helping low-income couples build strong marriages and get equal access to marriage education services on a voluntary basis,” he told the Boston Globe last month. (Horn denied repeated phone and email requests to be interviewed for this article.)

When speaking for the president, Horn anticipates and neutralizes objections to the plan, but it is not clear that he takes them seriously. “Someday someone has to explain to me what the controversy is,” he said to The Weekly Standard in March 2002, “why it’s a terrible idea to help couples who’ve chosen marriage for themselves to develop a skill set which will allow them to have a healthy marriage.”

But Horn’s posturing obscures the real issue. Few object to the expressed goals of teaching relationship skills or fostering loving families. Rather, critics fear that the administration is putting a pretty face on a dubious ideology that holds up marriage as the answer to poverty and the welfare state. They point out that there are very few restriction on how the TANF money can be used. The language is vague enough that faith- and community-based organizations can easily go from endorsing healthy relationships to promoting marriage as the only possible healthy relationship (see Box 1).

“In the abstract, this is a great thing,” said Stephanie Coontz, co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families and history professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She acknowledges, as most critics of the plan do, that a healthy marriage benefits both parents and children.

But she is uneasy about dispatching non-profits and religious groups – some with no training at all – to implement unproven programs. One marriage promotion method touted by the Bush administration, “Marriage Education,” can be taught by “para-professionals, lay leaders, teachers, clergy, or mental health professionals,” according to ACF literature. “Some courses require no training and are ready to teach out-of-the-box.”

Coontz is also suspicious of the intentions of the White House and its ideological backers. “The administration isn”t putting it forward as an anti-poverty measure “they’re soft-pedaling it as much as possible,” Coontz said. “Their biggest supporters are people who really do see this as an alternative to the welfare system.”

“The people at the Heritage Foundation clearly argue that getting people married is the way to stop poverty, and that that’s where the bulk of our efforts should go,” Coontz said.

She’s right. Heritage – the policy pipeline for the White House – is saying what the administration won’t. In a March 26 report, Heritage scholars Robert Rector and Melissa Pardue wrote, “the collapse of Marriage is the principle cause of child poverty in the United States.” It’s a convenient theory, but not one that is widely accepted outside Bush’s tight ideological circle.

Most experts on welfare, marriage, and social policy share a lot of common ground and mutual respect. If it weren’t for sectarian ideologies, they say, they might be able to hammer out a workable healthy marriage program that could satisfy everyone.

“People on both sides who are debating this issue believe that families need help and support and need to escape poverty,” said Dorian Solot, co-author of Unmarried to Each Other: The Essential Guide to Living Together as an Unmarried Couple. Solot is also Executive Director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, which she founded in 1998 to advocate for marriage-neutral social policy. “I do think, interestingly, that these groups share very similar values,” she said.

But Wade Horn doesn’t see it that way – at least he didn’t use to. Before joining the Bush administration, when he was still president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, he characterized his opponents as “the we-hate-marriage left.” The Heritage Foundation voices this adversarial divide: “We have two very different worldviews and two very different strategic goals, and they’re totally irreconcilable,” Heritage policy analyst Patrick Fagan said in a phone interview. Like Horn before he was initiated into Bush’s circle of trust, Fagan is quick to dismiss his opponents’ arguments. He sees his side of the debate as “the traditional, Judeo-Christian, orthodox, ortho-praxis community,” and critics as “the newer, sex-without-consequences-with-whomever-you-want-as-long-as-it’s-consensual” community.

But the majority of concerned researchers and scholars locate themselves somewhere between the ideological poles. To them, the debate isn’t as contentious as the media or the Heritage Foundation are making it appear. “I’m not sure where these people are who he’s making out to be his opponents,” Solot said of Fagan, “but I’ve never met them.”

Fuzzy numbers, clear disclaimers

Both camps in the marriage debate have research to supports their views. But analysts at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), widely acknowledged as a responsible, non-partisan think-tank, argue that we don’t yet have answers to a couple of important questions. States are expected to develop innovative programs to promote marriage, but whether they have the know-how remains to be seen.

Much of the research on the relationship between marriage and poverty is imperfect, inconclusive, or worse, purposely partisan. Politicians and advocates on all sides manipulate the numbers to suit their needs; sometimes they even cite the same numbers to make different points. If the trend supports one’s argument, the unwritten rule goes, cite the trend; if the trend casts doubt on one’s argument, cite an individual case. It’s this rhetorical calculus that gave us the “welfare queen” in the 1980’s, and gives us the average “healthy” family today.

In a recent report that synthesizes marriage and poverty research, Mary Parke, a CLASP policy analyst, concludes that there are no simple answers. “Findings from the research are often oversimplified, leading to exaggeration by proponents of marriage initiatives and to skepticism from critics,” she writes. “While it’s difficult to disentangle the effects of income and family structure, clearly the relationship operates in both directions: poverty is both cause and effect of single parenthood.” It’s a conclusion that undermines the Heritage Foundation’s premise that marriage is the main cause of child poverty. Despite evidence to the contrary, the Heritage Foundation continues to insist that the merits of the initiatives are beyond doubt. “This is an equation made in Hell,” Fagan said of the historical resistance to federal marriage promotion. “We know that marriage reduces poverty,” he said. “It’s been a known, open secret for a long time.”

In any case, states have begun experimenting with a variety of initiatives aimed at reducing divorce rates, cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock births. Arizona has dispatched a 48-foot semi-trailer that carries marriage counselors to low-income areas. West Virginia is giving a $100 monthly bonus to poor couples that marry. Despite the flurry of new initiatives, the Administration of Children and Families acknowledges that most programs haven’t been properly evaluated, if they’ve been evaluated at all.

Theodora Ooms, a senior policy analyst at CLASP, regularly consults with federal, state, and local public officials on marriage promotion policies and strategies. She thinks federal marriage promotion is a good idea. But she has reservations about the plan as it stands. Since states have just begun implementing the programs, Ooms said in a phone interview, “it’s much too early” to know if they’ve been successful. “There certainly isn’t any evidence that they’re having much effect.”

At a Healthy Marriage conference sponsored by the ACF last year, the Director of the Division of Child and Family Development, Naomi Goldstein, acknowledged that states’ evaluation methods have been flawed. “They are too often based on small, non-representative samples and lack adequate experimental design or long-term follow-up,” she said. “They have not generally focused on low-income populations and/or unmarried parents, or included child-level outcome measurement.”

The ACF’s published list of approaches to promoting healthy marriages includes such initiatives as modification of no-fault divorce laws and television advertising campaigns extolling the virtues of marriage, none of which are directed exclusively at the poor. Four states have passed reductions in the cost of a marriage license for couples, poor or not, who take a marriage course. Florida, for example, has dropped its fee from $88 to $55.50 for such couples. But these programs’ inclusion, the document warns, “does not constitute or imply favoring or endorsement by ACF.”

Although they’re clear in disclaiming responsibility, Bush and Horn have still not answered the central question: If we don’t have any confidence in the current programs and we haven’t evaluated them, why are we expanding them?

Deploying the culture warriors

We may not know Bush’s true intent for “Healthy Marriages,” but it’s somewhere in between a sop for “family values” conservatives and a nefarious Orwellian plot. What’s clear is, there’s a vast middle ground, and he’s not reaching out for it. He’s not even looking out for it.

By design and by some chance, the plan has eluded widespread scrutiny. Bush has managed to sell it as a soft-and-fuzzy, “it’s all about the kids” plan. But he has had to be deceptive to pull it off. The administration maintains publicly that the interest is in promoting healthy marriages, but without enough information to endorse any marriage programs, they can have no real idea what the results of state-sponsored initiatives might be.

Even the staunchest critics of the Bush plan acknowledge that the government would be wise to promote healthy relationships among the poor. But instead of trying to pacify his critics, Bush and his strategists prefer to deploy the culture warriors. Oppose Healthy Marriages? You must be one of those “sex-without-consequences-with-whomever-you-want-as-long-as-it’s-consensual” types.

Scales photograph from istockphoto.com

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Heritage Foundation
URL: http://www.heritage.org

The National Fatherhood Initiative
URL: http://www.fatherhood.org

Center for Law and Public Policy (CLASP)
URL: http://www.clasp.org

Administration of Children and Families
URL: http://www.acf.hhs.gov

Council on Contemporary Families
URL: http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org

Alternatives to Marriage Project
URL: http://www.unmarried.org

TOPICS>

Understanding the President?s Healthy Marriage Initiative
Report by Heritage scholars Robert Rector and Melissa Pardue
March 26, 2004
URL: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Family/bg1741.cfm

ACF list of approaches to promoting healthy marriages
URL: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/region5/htm_pages/compendium.htm

Doing Something to Boost Marriage
Essay by Wade Horn
URL: http://www.fatherhood.org/articles/wh102500.htm

The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study
URL: http://crcw.princeton.edu/fragilefamilies/index.asp

“

henrypb

Red bangles are an essential part of the Indian bride’s trousseau; the color red is considered auspicious and signifies prosperity.(Inga Dorosz)

One afternoon, when I was a teenager growing up in India, my mother beckoned me to watch Oprah on cable. Oprah was profiling couples of Asian descent who had been raised in America but nonetheless entered into traditional arranged marriages. While the audience gaped, a husband beamed indulgently as his new wife shared how she was still discovering things about her husband each day even after being married for a few months. Thousands of miles away, I shook my head and thought, “I am never going to let this happen to me!”

Six years later, I found myself engaged to a man after meeting him for two hours in front of a food tray stocked with tea cups and black forest pastries, as my father and future mother-in-law compared notes about The Gita six feet away. Today, three years into marriage, I still marvel about the possible hardwiring of my system that may have led me to give my full throttled assent.

While my husband rode a horse on our wedding day much like our respective fathers had, much had changed in the intervening decades. After being reassured innumerable times that I had the right to say ‘no,’ I had the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with my prospective husband, something my university-educated mother and civil servant father never had. My future groom, a Silicon Valley geek, found himself having to defend his career choices.

Such alliances, bringing together tradition and modern liberal values, Indian and U. S. roots, have become less rare. A surge in immigration to the United States over the last few decades has brought a new twist to India’s ancient custom. The arranged marriage structure offers an invaluable way for ex-pats to keep ties to their home countries alive by giving them mates who share the same heritage. And for those with little time for courtship and dating or little inclination to search for a life partner on their own, returning to one’s country of origin to find a bride or groom is a quick and usually very dependable method.

To the Westerner, arranged marriages have become an exotic peculiarity of Eastern cultures. Recent movies such as Bend it Like Beckham and Monsoon Wedding have paradoxically both demystified and heightened the caricature of Indian marriages.

So what exactly is an arranged marriage? For the uninitiated and the unarranged, here is a quick primer: It is a match wherein the marital partners are chosen by others (typically family members), based on economic and social factors. Instead of marriage following love, in arranged marriages love follows marriage; love is learned as the marriage grows. In countries like India where the two genders do not mix very freely and family ties remain strong, arranged marriages address important needs. The attention paid to the appropriateness of the spouse, in theory, helps to improve in-law relationships (since the spouse is deemed acceptable by the family first), and increase compatibility.

And while audiences of Oprah may gape wide eyed when a girl raised in the United States by her Indian parents chooses an arranged marriage, there was a time when it was as much a part of life in the Western hemisphere as it is still in the East. Though it might seem hard to believe, arranged marriages were once the norm the world over — when the desire for a “pure” bloodline was common across cultures. All over Europe, kings married princesses, often much younger than them, who brought kingdoms as dowry. Romantic love was then considered a lower-class practice.

More than just a method of financial planning, arranged marriages ensured that everyone found a mate and those lacking charisma were not unduly penalized. Over time, marriage based on attraction between partners became more common and the creation of a society that has encouraged dating and liberalized its rules of sexual conduct made go-betweens and the need for family approval virtually unnecessary. All to the extent that today, arranged marriage strikes Westerners as alien or incomprehensible.

Yet, while the days of Mrs. Bennett seeking suitable men for her daughters in Pride and Prejudice have long since gone, the phenomenon of arranged marriage persists in the West under different guises: online dating, mail order brides from Eastern Europe and Russia, and blind dates set up by family, to name just a few.

At the same time, in Eastern cultures like those of Japan, Pakistan, and India, the process of arranged marriage has undergone significant modifications. From a time when future spouses would first set eyes on each other on their wedding day, arranged marriage has transformed itself into a system resembling quick blind dating initiated by family or friends. Photographs and biographical data are now freely exchanged over email as parents have become increasingly liberal and westernized. Shared veto power between the boy and girl means external appearances and polished social skills come at a premium. And more ex-pat Indian grooms means that dislocation and adaptation by both brides and their families has become far more common.

The bridegroom collects a blessing kiss from a senior member of his family before going to fetch his bride. The saber is a throwback to the times of warrior kings and communities and the sword is a symbol of honor, power and the promise of protection that men carry on their wedding day. (Rajveer Purohit)

An unlikely candidate

Dr. Rajveer Purohit, who has been married for three years, exemplifies the new trend. An urologist and a prolific painter in San Francisco, he reminisces in his two-bedroom apartment filled with his paintings, paint supplies, and antique furniture from Rajasthan, India.  

“I would define an arranged marriage as one in which there is limited pre-marriage dating and parental approval of the marriage, and by that definition, ours was one,” he says.

A distant relative introduced him to his gynecologist wife, Dr. Mamta Purohit. After exchanging emails and speaking on the phone, then-29-year-old Purohit flew to India accompanied by his older brother for a face-to-face meeting. A few family-sponsored dates later, they decided to take the plunge.

Raised in the United States since the age of five, Purohit continues to have strong ties to India, especially to Jodhpur, his hometown in Rajasthan. “I saw my desire to have an arranged marriage as something more fundamental and proactive. It was helped by the combination of finding the right person who shared similar values,” he says.  

His wife’s Indian nationality was a welcome part of her identity for Purohit. “I have a lot of affection for Rajasthan. And my marriage helped leave a lot of options open and gave both of us more mobility,” he notes. “We can think of retiring in India at some point.”

Purohit’s conservative Rajasthani family discouraged dating overtly. “Growing up,” he says, “I perceived arranged marriages as anti-modern, oppressive and fear-based choices. That my peer group viewed them the same way added to my sentiments.”

But soon Purohit found himself disappointed with the transitory relationships people around him seemed to have. He realized that he identified with the Indian community’s emphasis on loyalty, commitment and longstanding emotions, all values that have contributed to low divorce rates of Indian-Americans living in the U.S.

“I was disappointed by how relationships are commodified and subjugated to economics, finally becoming relationships of convenience,” he says. “There is a lot less mobility in the American non-arranged marriage than people acknowledge. People typically date among their own class. For example, people who are Ivy League marry Ivy League.”

Purohit, on the other hand, has seen many cases of couples in his own extended family who come from different economic classes.  Purohit felt confident that an arranged marriage would last, being based on a solid foundation. He believes “people who get into arranged marriages tend to have expectations besides lust and youth” and that “this keeps the relationship stable after temporary feelings have subsided.”

Purohit sometimes feels criticized by American and even Indian peers for his traditional choice. “I see Indian women who grew up here feeling threatened by and competitive about second-generation men going to and marrying in India,” he says. “But somewhere along the way I decided that there is no point in trying to educate peers or colleagues. It is not a public proposition that I want to go and sell, and perhaps what may be right for me might not be right for them.”

Purohit was also inclined to marry a career woman since he saw immigration to be particularly hard on his mother, who is a homemaker. Mamta seemed to him as the right blend of the traditional and the modern.

A relative of the bride smears vermillion on the groom’s forehead as the first step in the welcoming process. She will then do an ‘aarti’ wherein she will pray for him by encircling his aura with a special oil lamps. This process conveys the following sentiment: May the light of the divine be with you and may this start be auspicious. (Rajveer Purohit)

The suitable girl

Ipsita Roy, a 28-year-old scientific researcher who has also been married for three years, does not seem like the typical immigrant bride moving from India to America.   However, unlike a generation ago, the Indian women who immigrate today to be with their husbands are frequently highly educated professionals themselves. The petite and loquacious Roy shares a unique story that may not be so atypical.  

“Mine was not a spontaneous meeting and falling in love with someone, and the fact that the process was initiated by our families did not and does not bother me,” says Roy, who holds one masters degree in biotechnology and another in molecular biology. She moved to the United States after marrying Sumit Roy, a mild-mannered and unassuming director in an electronic design automation start-up company in Santa Clara, California.

When Roy’s younger teenage sister responded to an ad placed in a Calcutta newspaper, little did Roy know that such adolescent perkiness would locate her future life partner. Sumit’s Calcutta-based parents, now her in-laws, liked her profile and soon scheduled a meeting with her family. After Roy’s parents, who also live in India, met the prospective in-laws, they soon gave their approval. Although Roy and Sumit had only spoken a few times on the phone before meeting in person, Roy believes “our fates were already sealed together even before Sumit flew in from the U.S.”

“I saw that my future husband trusts his family completely and had very simple criteria for a life partner whom he thought should, above all, get along well with his family,” Roy explains. She laughs and adds, “I personally feel that the real test of a marriage is when you start living together. Because after a while it doesn’t matter how you got married. I have many friends all over the world who have had love marriages and they are facing similar issues that I am, such as the division of labor between the partners, adjustment issues with in-laws.”

Roy avers that although some people may want to test the waters by living together before getting married, her own sensibilities were already set and defined by the environment she grew up in — an environment where “shacking up” was not encouraged and the focus was always on total commitment. “But then, it all depends on the individual’s comfort zone,” she admits.

Both Hollywood and Bollywood often depict having a series of boyfriends or girlfriends as cool.  Such images subtly suggest that relinquishing autonomy and going for an arranged marriage somehow signifies a fundamental personality failure. But the majority of all marriages in India are still arranged, even among those in the educated middle class. Roy represents the growing number of Indian women who pick from either option. “I had a lot of suitors when I was in college. My parents were open to me choosing my own mate,” she says. ”My decision to let them initiate the process was totally free of pressure or coercion. It was a leap of faith and I took it because of the trust I had in my parents.”

One difference between those of Roy’s generation and her parents’ generation is the number of ex-pat Indian men entering the arranged marriage market in India. Roy’s father initially had difficulty in facing the fact that all her prospective grooms seemed to be settled in the United States. “We are a small family and my father wanted both his daughters close,” Roy says, “but when he realized the inevitability of it he made peace with the idea that my destiny might lie abroad.”

Ipsita and Sumit Roy on vacation in Hawaii during January 2003.

When the honeymoon is over

Roy talks animatedly about the dream-like six months between her engagement and her wedding — of phone calls, letters and a slowly blossoming long distance romance. “ I soon fell in love with Sumit and then my situation was just like that of any other girl who might have fallen in love and was about to get married,” she explains. “The only difference in my case was that my man was discovered by my family.”

This courtship made phase two, married life, a little hard to digest. Roy contends that marriage has been harder on her than on her husband. While he remained in Santa Clara, she moved continents to be with him, leaving behind all that was close and familiar while struggling to create a new life in the United States. She also experienced some of the gender distinctions that have traditionally gone along with arranged marriage for women.  “Indian society continues to be a very family oriented society with the bride deferring to the groom’s family after marriage — and arranged marriages help keep it that way,” she observes.

Turbulence between Roy and her in-laws cropped up in the first few months. Although still based in India, her in-laws visits brought out tensions. “I was brought up with a lot of liberal ideas for girls and my husband’s family subscribes to a passive notion for women. Dealing with that, I felt like everything of consequence to me had been stolen. Soon I found myself in a desperate bid to gain affection by trying to match everyone’s needs,” Roy says. “I still keep trying even though that doesn’t work,” she adds wryly.

Roy talks passionately about trying to work through this identity crisis and reconciling the two disparate life styles — one from her parent’s home and the other in her new family. “I would like my in-laws who are in India, to stay with me permanently so that I can take good care of them, but during times of stress, while talking to them long distance or during meetings, I wonder whether I should chose responsibility or comfort,” she says. “I wanted to be very close to them but somehow it has remained a formal and distant relationship.”

The clash between traditional mother-in-laws and their modern daughter-in-laws is one of the fruits of modern arranged marriage. As younger women become increasingly westernized, prospective mother in laws seek brides for their sons who, although educated, have been indoctrinated with once common notions of passivity. Friction arises when girls brought up in liberal and semi-westernized environments refuse to be docile. Roy elaborates: “Although my relationship with my husband has evolved wonderfully over time — he is my best friend — the marriage has been tough. But that is something one faces in a love match too. But of course since my in-laws chose me, their expectations from me are greater.” With a chuckle, she adds, “it’s like an employer asking you to feel grateful after giving you a permanent job.”

“Sometimes I think that had I been solely my husband’s choice, they would have been tentative about me and grateful for any positive signs,” Roy muses. At the same time, however, Roy believes that parents who have contributed to the pick are more likely to contribute to solving any problems that arise. “Observing others, I find that if one goes through a bad phase in a love marriage parents are generally not that supportive but since they feel mentally responsible in an arranged marriage, they help the woman start a new life if things go wrong,” she says.

“I feel that arranged marriages help in keeping Indians the family oriented people they are,” says Roy, although she doesn’t necessarily think they would work well for everyone. She adds that such marriages are like shooting in the dark but also shares that this disadvantage is probably a blessing in disguise. While Roys says, “There are times I think, ‘Oh my God, I got married like this!’”, she also believes that love matches can lead to disappointment, “while people like me have lesser expectations and try to hang in there and make it work.”

Purohit also adds a word of caution about matches arranged long-distance: “It’s always better to have someone you trust confirm the validity of things. People sometimes manipulate the process and lie about who they are and what they want, using marriage as way to gain economic security.” Despite such drawbacks, he believes that the tradition is an enduring one. “I think arranged marriages are a resilient form. The format might change but the structure will stay.”

Although Purohit sees himself as an anomaly, believing it is unusual for people to be raised here and then to seek an arranged marriage, he may be part of a growing trend. His conclusion bodes well for those who would follow in his footsteps: “I can’t imagine being married to someone I would be happier with.”

STORY INDEX

TOPICS >

General information about arranged marriages
URL: http://www.mangalyam.com/arranged_marriage.htm
URL: http://schools.cbe.ab.ca/b143/humanrights/arranged-marriages/
URL: http://marriage.about.com/cs/arrangedmarriages/

Arranged marriages and the myth of romance
Essay by writer Hilary Doda
URL: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/vecna05mar02.html

First comes marriage, then comes love
Essay by Ira Mathur about Indian expatriates in arranged marriages
URL: http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/3321/win4a.htm

ORGANIZATIONS >

websites that arrange marriages
URL: http://www.shaadi.com
URL: http://www.arrangemarriage.com/arrangemarriage/default.asp
URL: http://matrisearch.com/default.asp?source=GoogleUSA

“

In The Fray Contributor

Go to part one

In recent years, the activists have refined their use of direct democracy, discovering new ways to use technology (anything from cell phones to pirate radio) to keep their various groups coordinated. Weeks before the FTAA summit in Miami was set to take place, protest organizers were holding their spokescouncil meetings over telephone conference calls. “We’ve had to figure out how you organize with direct democracy when people are all over the place, and most people can’t come here weeks early,” says Starhawk, a veteran organizer. Moreover, activists are getting better about coordinating the protest actions on the streets and the ones inside the convention halls — as the authorities learned, to their chagrin, in Cancún. “They thought that they could keep the voice of civil society out, [behind the barricades] seventeen kilometers away, but everyday we’ve been able to come in, and show the WTO what the other side is,” says Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South, who helped stage anti-WTO publicity stunts inside the convention center the week of the ministerial. The defiance is contagious: Marches and rallies of thousands of people build up “street heat,” which inspires representatives of nongovernmental organizations to stage their own demonstrations from within the security perimeter — which encourage delegates from developing countries to resist the demands of the United States, European Union, and Japan during trade negotiations (as members of the G21, a group of twenty-one developing countries led by Brazil, China, and India, did at the Cancún trade talks).

If the global justice movement has managed to adapt to growing repression in recent years, some of its older tactics are increasingly being questioned. At every large protest, you can find men and women dressed in black, professing anarchist beliefs, who smash windows and perform other acts of vandalism — and sometimes rough it up with cops. In defense of their form of protest, activists who use “Black Bloc” strategies explicitly appeal to the movement’s own notions of inclusiveness, saying it should be open to a diversity of tactics. As one woman in black wrote: “Third World peasants, vulnerable in their poverty, generally cannot challenge the ultra powerful multinationals … We are the voices of the voiceless, and we must be loud, because the men in suits high up in their office towers don’t hear the screams of misery below or see the wasted ruins of the Earth. So, we attack their symbols. It’s the least we can do.”

But as Jerry Mander sees it, the property destruction and violence simply undermine the protesters’ credibility and suppress their message. “I understand why people do it, out of frustration and so on, but … it’s, in the end, counterproductive,” says Mander, who is the president of the International Forum on Globalization, a think tank critical of free trade and corporate power. “Because then the media covers the violence.” That has been the trend ever since Seattle, Mander says, “Once [the property destruction] happened — which all the other protestors tried to stop — once that happened, the media only reported that and we had no more substantive reporting from that day forward. It’s police vs. protestors. Period.”

Mander and other activists say that the actual amount of violence in the movement is being grossly overstated. “The only violence is the violence of the World Trade Organization, which needs to police us as if we were thieves when they are the ones who are robbing us,” says Javier Sánchez Ansó, director of international relations for COAG, a Spanish farmworkers’ group. Dietrich, an anarchist who is affiliated with the Green Bloc (activists into “guerrilla gardening” and other forms of pro-environment direct action), says that news reports misinform the public about his movement. “The media has just drilled home that we [anarchists] are violent, angry, young white men,” he says. “But that’s not true. I am a young white male, but not violent. The media portrayal of anarchy and anarchism, it never goes into the debate about the politics of what anarchy is, it’s just, ‘Anarchy is chaos.’ Anarchy is people doing it for themselves, direct democracy at its best and finest.”

Nevertheless, the focus on violence in the nightly news seems to be having an effect: In the days before protests began in Cancún, locals said they feared the activists coming into their city. Gabriel Marez, a forty-five-year-old waiter at the La Ruina cantina, told me that he was opposed to the FTAA and other free trade agreements, but added that the protesters upset him: “I am not in agreement with radical forms of protest, with the violence.”

“Personally, I don’t think throwing things at the police brings about social change,” says Danaher of Global Exchange, whose mother was a police officer. “You’re not going to have a revolution in the U.S. with a unified police force. There has to be a significant portion of the police who realize that it’s in their self-interest to be neutral in the class struggle between capital and labor.” Danaher does police liaison work during demonstrations, and speaks with pride about the occasions when police officers tell him, “We really appreciate that you’re trying to humanize the situation.” These days, Danaher is trying to start a nonviolence training camp to bring together police and activists. He says such a confab could help the two sides to better understand each other, and help the global justice movement win allies among the ranks of blue.

After Seattle police were roundly criticized for allowing their city to descend into chaos during the 1999 WTO ministerial, the police have put on a massive show of force at every international summit. (In Miami, law enforcement agencies received $8.5 million from the $87 billion Iraq reconstruction bill to protect the city from protesters: The funds helped pay for helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and an array of sophisticated weaponry.) Now that police have so many resources at their disposal, the global justice movement should think about moving away from its strategy of “summit-hopping,” some activists say.

“I think that you’re never going to win a fight with the cops. You just won’t,” says David Amdur, a community organizer for the East Boston Ecumenical Community Council, a progressive organization that works with the local Latino community to further immigrant rights. Before he landed his current job, Amdur worked for years as an activist on international causes — first in solidarity with Latin American social movements (he lived in E45El Salvador from 1996 to 2000) and then as a member of the Boston Global Action Network. But these days he believes he’s doing more good by working in local communities. “Part of me feels that the most important maybe is to stay here, to organize something here,” he says. “And the most vital of all is not just to focus on globalization and a summit — it’s about educating people about the FTAA, and motivating people to take action and stop it.”

Amdur and other activists say they shouldn’t abandon the protests, which help energize people and get different groups talking to one another. They acknowledge that the global justice movement has made some efforts to bring local voices to the large-scale protests (consider, for example, Root Cause, a South Florida-based coalition that staged a thirty-four-mile march the week of the Miami ministerial to highlight the FTAA’s potential impact on local communities). But in their view, some sectors of the movement have a misguided belief that protests alone will put an end to free trade agreements. Meanwhile, the focus on demonstrations keeps the movement from doing other important work, such as building coalitions that include more people of color and working-class Americans. “There are times for big mobilizations,” Amdur says, “but there are times when you need to have organizing, education, and mobilizing in your community, because you have to realize in terms of class, in terms of race, and in terms of immigration status, not everyone can go to these big protests.”

A protester holds his opinion high in front of the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington. April 20, 2002.

Global solutions

Writing in The New York Times the very day that global justice protesters clashed with Italian police in Genoa, Thomas L. Friedman declared the anti-globalization movement to be a bunch of irresponsible naysayers: “To be against globalization is to be against so many things — from cell phones to trade to Big Macs — that it connotes nothing. Which is why the anti-globalization protests have produced noise but nothing that has improved anyone’s life.” This portrait of an “anti-globalization” movement of Luddites and reactionaries became even darker after September 11. Soon after the terrorist attacks, Britain’s international development secretary, Clare Short, warned: “There is a danger that the terrorists and the anti-globalization protestors will get what they want, which is to blow up world trade and to separate us.” Canadian journalist Leonard Stern was a tad kinder: The demonstrators were “still several rungs behind Osama bin Laden,” he said, even if they were “climbing the same ladder.”

Global justice activists say their critics are misguided. “It has nothing to do with being afraid of globalization. It has everything to do with putting forward a new form of globalization,” says Bill Moore-Kilgannon, director of campaigns and communications for the Council of Canadians, a Canadian citizens’ watchdog organization. But part of what makes the criticism stick is the fact that the global justice movement has done such a bad job of getting its message out into the mainstream media. “I think some reporters are just lazy,” says Jason Mark, co-author (with Danaher) of the new book Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power. “And it’s a lot easier to just write the story in a simple way. I think another part of the challenge is that these issues are a lot more complicated than an anti-war march is. At an anti-war march it’s very simple to get the message: ‘No War.’ Two words … But if you go and interview somebody in the street about the IMF, even without their protesting, it’s going to be difficult for them to offer their vision.”

These days, global justice activists are trying to spell out that vision — on the streets and in the convention halls. Instead of just shouting their opposition to the WTO and other suspect multilateral institutions, they stage “alternative” summits just blocks away from the trade ministerials — anything from forest forums to farmworker gatherings to fair trade confabs. (In Cancún, anarchists from the Green Bloc even built their own “eco-village” in a city park, featuring exhibits of some of the sustainable technologies that people could use in their own communities, such as systems to collect rain for drinking water.) The movement’s most ambitious effort to institutionalize alternatives, however, has been the World Social Forum, an annual gathering that for the past three years has been held in Porto Alegre, Brazil — at the same time that business elites and heads of state meet up in Davos, Switzerland, for their World Economic Forum. The next World Social Forum will be held in January in Mumbai, India; like the first, it will bring together global justice activists from around the world to discuss the movement’s alternatives to neoliberalism.

The going has been slow, but in recent years it seems that the various activist communities have made some progress in sketching out their alternative world. Some of their economic proposals include:

• Last year, the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) put out a book, Alternatives to Economic Globalization — the product of a three-year discussion by nineteen academics and policy analysts, including Bello, Mander, and Vandana Shiva. Their report calls for a moratorium on the negotiation of new trade agreements, and also highlights a wide range of “alternative” systems for energy, transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing — from hydrogen fuel cells to “smart growth” urban planning, from local food production to accounting methods that take into account environmental cleanup costs.

  At the heart of IFG’s alternative vision is a concept called subsidiarity. “Subsidiarity doesn’t exactly mean localization,” Mander says. “What it means is that power should reside in the governing unit that’s closest to the people where practical.” When dealing with global crises like AIDS or ozone depletion, there is a need for international arrangements with some degree of power “because everybody’s in the same soup,” Mander says. “But they should be one at a time. They should be one case at a time. There should not be an overall structure that dominates all of these things, like the World Trade Organization tries to be.”

  Diversity and democracy are entwined in this idea of subsidiarity — diversity in the promotion of a variety of local solutions to problems, and democracy in the decentralization of production. “The great thing about wind and solar [energy],” Mark of Global Exchange points out, “is you can put it everywhere. The idea is, okay, if each community is creating their own energy source … then that creates more community control, local control. It helps and enhances democracy.” As Danaher puts it, “The basic idea is, democratize access to capital. Capital is horseshit. Concentrated in a pile, it stinks. Spread it out, it makes things grow. It’s like fertilizer, right?”

• Promoting diversity is also one of the explicit goals of Berkeley’s BREAD Hours, one of the world’s local exchange trading systems. An alternative to the greenback, BREAD Hours allow Berkeley residents to keep money within the local community. BREAD Hours are based on labor: Individuals provide services in exchange for Hours, which they can use at local shops, restaurants, and business. (Ithaca, New York, has a similar currency called Ithaca HOURS, and Argentina’s RGT system, a national trading and barter network, transacts several million U.S. dollars of business every year.)
• “Fair trade” is another diversity-friendly form of production that has taken off in the past decade. To be certified fair trade, goods must meet certain standards — among other things, the producers have to receive a stable, minimum price, and the goods must be made under safe working conditions, without forced labor or exploitative child labor. Today, a wide range of products — including coffee, chocolate, and crafts — receive international fair-trade certification, allowing consumers to make sure their purchasing reflects their values. According to Global Exchange, fair trade coffee every year benefits 350,000 farmers organized into more than 300 cooperatives in twenty-two countries; fair trade products overall accounted for $100 million in sales in the United States in 2000. Even Starbucks — whose store managers are never too happy to see anarchists waltz by their plate-glass windows — now sells fair trade coffee in its stores.
• While some global justice activists want to get rid of corporations altogether, others want to reform them by getting at the root of their problem: their obsessive pursuit of the bottom line. The idea of a “triple bottom line” — one that takes into account environmental and social impacts as well as profit — can be seen in the efforts by the AFL-CIO and other labor movements to introduce workers’ rights in the WTO and trade agreements. It can be seen in the “living wage” campaign, which has focused on implementing city ordinances that require city contractors to pay their workers a minimum wage that provides adequate support for their families. And it can be seen in shareholder activism, a strategy that has been pursued in recent years by groups like Amnesty International USA to persuade multinational corporations to stop supporting human rights abuses in countries like Indonesia and Nigeria. By putting forward shareholder resolutions that stir up dissension, Amnesty has been able to insert morality into the usual corporate debates, and promote a form of (albeit limited) democracy in otherwise unaccountable institutions.
• In the anarchist community, activists talk about how their models of decentralized decision-making can help fashion a more inclusive and democratic society. For these activists, the whole purpose of the global justice struggle is to bring radical democracy to the world. “That’s not just the means to the change, but that is the change,” says Solnit. “We can’t change the world through political parties and politicians or reforming corporations. We have to just make a new world, and actually very much not seize power, but exercise power.” These days, Solnit is putting together an anthology of essays (the forthcoming Globalizing Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World) that spells out the political vision that he and his fellow activists share — one opposed to any system of government that centralizes power. “Other social movements have had alternatives, but I think it’s significant in that anti-globalization is at its heart an anti-systemic movement,” Solnit says. “In the last decades we’ve been trapped into single-issue movements that talked about alternatives to the war, alternatives to sexism, alternatives to racism, but not alternatives to the entire system.”

  New forms of political participation in other parts of the world have provided inspiration to Solnit and other global justice activists. In Argentina, where four out of ten people now live in poverty, spontaneous neighborhood councils have been convened in middle-class neighborhoods, where residents are upset over unpopular government decrees. In Brazil, the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) has organized hundreds of thousands of landless peasants to squat on and take over unproductive land — carrying out their own version of grassroots, extralegal land reform. And since 1989, Porto Alegre, a regional capital city of 1.3 million in southern Brazil, has used a “participatory budget” process that allows thousands of city residents to make decisions about how their tax dollars are spent.

If global justice activists fall almost in lockstep behind the general principles of diversity and democracy, there’s plenty of disagreement over how far to push these things. On one hand, the reformists question whether democracy is always a good thing (couldn’t you consider the genocide of a minority group by a majority group “democracy in action”?). On the other hand, the radicals are concerned about the darker side of their movement’s diversity: co-optation. “To a large degree, single-issue nonprofits, [nongovernmental organizations], and trade unions serve a function for the system of normalizing things, preventing genuine rebellion, keeping people in check, and then providing someone who’s much more manageable,” says Solnit.

Nevertheless, there are signs that the two camps are growing more comfortable with each other’s company. Lisa Hoyos, an organizer for the AFL-CIO, points out that “radicals” like herself could learn from the lobbying strategies of more traditional political campaigns. “When it comes to international trade and the World Bank and all those things, it’s Congress that’s voting on these measures and accords,” says Hoyos, who formerly facilitated the “Our World Is Not for Sale” global justice network. “And I don’t think that, for all the great visibility work we’ve done in protests and so forth, that we’re pressuring them enough.” Meanwhile, reformists are realizing that there are tactical benefits to having a diversity of political viewpoints under one banner. “Those of us who are in the reformist camp are beholden to the abolitionist camp [for] moving our agenda for us,” says Zafra Whitcomb, business and human rights program coordinator at Amnesty International USA. “When a moderate group meets with a governmental or corporate organization, often the organization will say, ‘We’re so glad we can talk to you. We’re so glad you’re not just out there beating us over the head.’”

A new era in organizing

The conventional wisdom is that “successful” social movements need a single, compelling vision, strong, charismatic leadership, and hierarchical, centralized organization. Throughout history, this perspective has won over movements that began as experiments in direct democracy. “By the late 1960s, many new leftists had abandoned efforts to create an egalitarian microcosm of a future society in favor of centralized, often militaristic organizations modeled on those of their Third World revolutionary heroes,” writes sociologist Francesca Polletta in her book Freedom Is an Endless Meeting. “It was among radical feminists and in a counterculture largely disdained by politicos, that experiments in movement democracy continued.” Democracy, in other words, was a luxury of the delusional political fringe.

From the moment it began in the Lacandón Jungle of Mexico, the global justice movement has sought to become an exception to the rule. Seattle became the global rallying cry for a new vision of organizing: one that saw diversity and democracy not as weaknesses, but as strengths; not merely as means, but as ends. By taking this position, activists hoped to avoid the fate of the two progressive experiments whose failures some of them had witnessed in their youth: the U.S. New Left, and international communism. The former had been driven into division by arrogant leadership and an inability to relate across lines of class, gender, and race. The latter had sought to impose yet another hierarchical, oppressive model of organizing society and the economy.

Instead, we might compare the global justice movement to another kind of organizing from another era: the U.S. civil rights movement. It began as a reaction against Jim Crow in the South — in Montgomery, Alabama, against segregated buses, and in Greensboro, North Carolina, against whites-only lunch counters. In later years, however, it grew into a much larger movement, with aims that went beyond tearing down racist laws and institutions. Key leaders, like Martin Luther King Jr., and key activist organizations, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, shifted away from a more or less reactive approach — demonstrating against specific injustices like Jim Crow — and increasingly advanced their own visions of democracy and economic opportunity in America. By the mid-1960s, the SNCC was working among black communities in Mississippi to register voters and build black politica+E94l power; King and other black leaders were calling for jobs and education and “something more” than legal equality for African Americans. As King said in 1968, two months before his death, “What good does it do to sit at the counter when you cannot afford a hamburger?”

Three decades later, another social movement is on the cusp of a similar transition. In their post-MTV, post-Internet version of the Montgomery bus boycott, global justice protesters shut down the city of Seattle and sabotaged the 1999 WTO ministerial. That protest was a defining moment, which unleashed a wave of other demonstrations around the country and across the globe. But like the U.S. civil rights movement did in the late 1960s, the global justice movement has entered a new stage in its organizing: broadening its ranks, diversifying its tactics, and dreaming its own versions of tomorrow.

The question, of course, is whether the movement can rise out of the fringe of left-wing politics — what one activist calls the “anarchist gutter.” Will the movement’s campaign to diversify simply lead to more crippling divisions? Will its effort to further democratize strip it of the very tools it needs to confront its enemies? Last year’s massive rallies against the Iraq War have provided some momentum, and the general drift of public interest is in their favor, activists insist. “The point we’re at now is unique,” says Whitcomb of Amnesty International. “Even though economic globalization has been going on for three centuries, there hasn’t been a true awareness. Even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were activist movements … But now I think it’s more decentralized, filtered out through the population. And it’s focused on the issues of economic justice, equal voice, participation, rights to decent work, decent living conditions, fair wages — equal participation in the benefits of economic development. It is shaping a new paradigm.”

HELP NEEDED: To take part in a survey of global justice activists being conducted by Tom Hayden and Victor Tan Chen, please click here.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Protesters march through downtown Washington, demonstrating against the “war on terrorism,” corporate power, and globalization, among other things. April 20, 2002.

About 2,500 police officers had shown up in downtown Miami, hailing from more than forty local, state, and federal agencies. With their black helmets, chest armor, and body shields, they looked like twenty-first-century Roman legionnaires, staring down the barbarian hordes from beneath their polycarbonate visors. Their adversaries were some 15,000 strong: protesters, mostly labor union members, with smatterings of dreadlocked anarchists, backpack-toting students, and gray-haired retirees, who had come to Miami to demonstrate during the week’s negotiations over a hemisphere-wide trade pact known as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). As activists ended their protest march on that sunny Thursday afternoon, police began their own. Slowly but relentlessly, they pushed the crowd back with wooden batons, firing rubber bullets and drenching the crowds in pepper spray as they advanced. A police spokesperson said the melee — what seemed more like a rout — started with a few protesters hurling rocks. By the end of the next day, 231 people had been arrested, and dozens injured, including a handful of police officers.

Two months earlier, at the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) summit in Cancún, Mexico, there were thousands of police as well, though they did not march, nor fire any bullets. They did not have to. Eight-foot-tall chain-link fences had been erected all along the road leading into the Mexican resort town’s “hotel zone,” where trade ministers from around the globe were meeting. The protesters, their placards, and their puppets stayed on one side; the riot cops stayed on the other. Activists ripped down the first security perimeter on two occasions that week, but for the most part the crowd of several thousand was kept where police wanted them — miles away from the trade negotiations.

Four years after the landmark protests in Seattle that shut down a WTO ministerial meeting and landed the “anti-globalization” movement on the map, activism against free trade and corporate power has not gotten any easier. Authorities have responded to the mass mobilizations at every international summit by moving their events to far-off locales, where social movements are weak and trucking in large numbers of activists is next to impossible. Police have learned from the failures of Seattle, cordoning off key city blocks in advance and using a combination of tall fences and non-lethal firepower to keep protesters in line. And though last year’s demonstrations against the Iraq War helped bring back the nation’s taste for popular protest, American activists in the past two years have had to deal with an unfavorable political climate ever since September 11, when pundits started likening anti-globalization to terrorism and anti-Americanism.

“There’s a lot of reasons we got lucky in Seattle,” says Gan Golan, a Boston-based activist who participated in the so-called “Battle in Seattle” and spent last summer helping organize the anti-WTO protests in Cancún. “We’re seeing incredible advances in [police] tactics. They’re learning their lessons, and we’re learning ours.”

While it’s likely Golan and his friends will never shut down another WTO ministerial again, there are signs that their movement is adapting to new realities. One difference is in the ways activists now identify themselves. Rejecting the “anti-globalization” label that critics foisted on them four years ago, many have settled on a more proactive name for their work: “global justice.” They have broadened both their ranks and issues to widen appeal. And they have made strides in addressing the question that has vexed them in newspaper editorial columns for years: What does their movement stand for? “I think what you see here,” says Walden Bello, director of the Focus on the Global South, “is what The New York Times said: There are only two global superpowers at this point — one is the United States, and the other is global civil society.”

Rather than offering a single solution, global justice activists have staked their movement’s future on the two things that critics have continually called its “weaknesses”: the “incoherent” diversity of its membership, and its “ineffective” style of democratic organizing. “I think now the politics is one of, ‘Diversity is healthy,’” says David Solnit, an activist from Oakland, California. Solnit quotes a saying of the Zapatistas, the Mexican indigenous rights movement: “One no, many yeses.” “We all have a similar enemy, but we all create an alternative ourselves in a thousand different ways,” he says. That means not just diverse agendas, but diverse tactics; not just demanding more accountability from political leaders, but achieving a radically democratic way of life. “The globalization from above is corporate capitalism and people who want to control the world,” Solnit says. “From below, it’s those of us who want to reorganize society and empower people and restructure the world.” At the World Social Forum, the annual gathering of activists and intellectuals dedicated to global justice, that spirit has its own slogan: “Another world is possible.”

Two boys join their families in denouncing the occupation of Palestine. April 20, 2002.

‘A world where many worlds fit’

If you want to understand the roots of the global justice movement, you have to look long before the 1999 Seattle protest — decades before. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank began imposing “austerity” measures on a wide range of countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Billions of dollars of loans were provided, but under stringent conditions: that governments cut social spending, loosen controls on foreign capital, privatize state-owned firms, and follow other tenets of the so-called “neoliberal” economic model. Intended to help revitalize national economies weighed down by colossal amounts of debt, these “structural adjustment” policies arguably worsened already desperate levels of unemployment and starvation in many countries. Over the next two decades, widespread popular protest erupted in country after country: Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Argentina, and Zambia, among others.

Few people in Northern countries seemed to care. Then, on January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. That same day, an army representing 1,111 indigenous communities occupied five cities and towns in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The insurgents demanded basic social services: schools, clinics, electricity, running water. They denounced Northern-imposed, corporate-controlled policies of free trade — in a word, neoliberalismo. Taking their name from Emiliano Zapata, a hero of the Mexican Revolution, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) called upon the world to defy the neoliberal order. But they refused to advocate one alternative. In their Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, the Zapatistas declared: “The world we want is one where many worlds fit.”

When the Zapatista uprising happened, Jeff Duritz was living on the Cayman Islands, teaching scuba diving and saving up his money. He had just graduated from college and was out to see the world. Between dips into the sea, Duritz would stop by the local library to catch up on The New York Times. “I remember reading about this Indian uprising in southeastern Mexico,” he says. “A lot of them had guns, but some of them only had sticks and they were riding around on the back of trucks. They were saying that they wanted to overthrow the government of Mexico … And it was just preposterous — ‘Like, who are these people, what the hell are they doing?’”

Seven years later, Duritz went to Mexico to witness the Zapatista struggle for himself. He arrived in Chiapas just in time to join the EZLN in the largest mobilization of its history: a caravan of thousands of Zapatistas and foreign allies, traveling from rural, impoverished Chiapas to downtown Mexico City, where the “Zapatour” was going to confront their national legislators and demand the passage of an indigenous Bill of Rights. Along the way, Duritz saw first-hand the democratic style of organizing that the Zapatistas preached and practiced. Many international journalists had focused on the charismatic spokesperson of the movement, Subcomandante Marcos — the masked man who quoted Lewis Carroll and Borges and wrote poetry. But Marcos insisted that he was not the leader, but merely a “subcomandante.” Decisions were made by the twenty-four-person council of Zapatista commanders, each chosen by their respective communities.

Theirs was a struggle that went far beyond the Lacandón Jungle. The subcomandante once told a reporter, “Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 p.m., a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.” Duritz was not sure what to make of the Zapatistas’ radical acceptance of diversity, springing as it did among indigenous people with limited education living in the poverty-stricken countryside of Mexico. “Here’s the Zapatistas, they get all this respect — what happens when they hit a provincial area?” Duritz says. “Everybody comes out, and then Marcos … says, ‘We want rights for the taxi drivers. And we want rights for the domestic servants and we need equal treatment for the street sweepers,’ and people are cheering, ‘and we need equal rights for gays and lesbians!’ And people just cheered.”

If one event could be called the beginning of the modern-day global justice movement, the Zapatista uprising is probably it, Solnit says. Many of the people who would go on to organize anti-WTO demonstration in Seattle attended the encuentros in the jungle of Chiapas, where members of the ragtag guerrilla army gathered to talk strategy. It was one of the earliest articulations of the vision that would motivate global justice activists in the years to come: radical democracy and radical diversity. “I think of a new politics of people not trying to take power but trying to exercise it themselves.” says Solnit. “The Zapatistas didn’t want to take over the government. They wanted to have autonomy within their own community, and then catalyze other communities to do the same.”

Five years after the Zapatista uprising, the diversity that Subcomandante Marcos had philosophized about suddenly became a reality — in the Pacific Northwest. The “Battle in Seattle” drew tens of thousands of demonstrators from around the country and across the globe. “Teamsters and Turtles, Together At Last!” read one of the signs, and sure enough, trade unionists from the AFL-CIO were out in full force, alongside the environmentalists they had once shunned. The Teamsters and turtles were joined by a hodgepodge of other activists loosely tied together by a common distrust of the WTO. They ranged from radical anarchists to liberal environmentalists to centrist union members — and even included a contingent of die-hard conservatives (right-wing political commentator and presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan was in Seattle, along with his “Buchanan Brigaders,” arguing that the WTO threatened the sovereignty of the United States). For Russell Howze, an artist and activist from San Francisco, the spectacle downtown was mesmerizing. “I remember just walking down the street at 6 or 7 in the morning … and all colors, all nationalities — and I just remember going, ‘Holy shit! There are people in the world that think like I do.’”

Journalist and activist Naomi Klein has called the 1999 Seattle protest the global justice movement’s “coming out party” — that decisive moment when a “movement of many smaller movements” that had labored for decades in relative isolation and obscurity suddenly reached hands across oceans and marshaled an army in the very heart of the capitalist world, the United States. Activists who were there almost universally describe Seattle as a personally transforming experience — as one activist puts it, that moment when she swallowed the “red pill” that sucked her out of the corporate Matrix. But in recent years, it has also become increasingly clear that, in spite of Seattle’s unprecedented coalition, the U.S. global justice movement has failed to mobilize key segments of the population.

The Wonder Bread “whiteness” of the global justice movement is one of its most widely acknowledged handicaps. Shutting down the WTO was a “great victory,” points out one African American activist, but where were the people of color? “You talk about anti-globalization and the effects of globalization, and it’s on people of color, so where was that voice?” says Seth Markle, a youth activist from New York. There were some foreign protesters on hand, but for the most part, if political diversity went on parade in Seattle, racial and socioeconomic diversity stayed at home.

Stephen Dietrich, a white punk/anarchist from Santa Rosa, California, says that racism, sexism, and other kinds of prejudice continue to be a problem in the movement. “These are all the things that we’re fighting against, but they’re all socialized into us,” he says. Other activists point out that flying people across the globe to protest at these summits costs money — money that communities of color tend not to have. People of color are also loath to get arrested, concerned about how the criminal justice system will treat them. Finally, many communities just aren’t aware of the importance of trade issues. “Nobody knows what the FTAA means. White, black, yellow — nobody knows,” says Barbara Salvaterra, a Brazilian activist who helped organize protests against the FTAA for the group Jobs with Justice. “Most [global justice] activists are people who are well-informed in politics, in international politics.”

The movement has made some progress in recent years in bridging these divides. Organizations like Jobs with Justice and Global Exchange provide grants to help activists with low incomes afford the costs of travel and lodging to global justice-related events. At the movement’s organizing sessions — known as “spokescouncil” meetings — speakers of foreign languages get running translations of what’s being said. And when activists return from protests, they often give “report backs” to let people back home know what happened.

The Cancún WTO ministerial in September became an occasion for activists from Latin America to take a more visible role in an international protest. While there were hundreds of foreigners on hand — Americans, Canadians, Europeans, Australians, South Koreans, and South Africans, among others — the bulk of the week’s turnout was comprised of Mexican students and farmworkers, with sizeable delegations from Central and South America. “I think the real story here [in Cancún] is the interpersonal connections that are happening, that totally transcend national borders,” says Dave Meddle, a twenty-eight-year-old activist from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Activists are also getting better at talking about issues of diversity. “I think the global justice movement has had a lot of internal dialogue about race, where you actually saw the movement change,” says Carwil James, a twenty-seven-year-old activist from Oakland, California. “It’s hard to say at a national level, but definitely at the local level that’s taking place.” In October, James, who is African American, went to a conference sponsored by Anarchist People of Color, a group founded two years ago to help people of color find their place in the white-dominated anarchist community. James feels that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered issues have also gained greater prominence within the movement in recent years. “There’s a strong sense of community across that whole space, and a sense of not atomizing ourselves,” James says. “One of the things that capitalism has us do is divide ourselves up into little nuclear families, little consumption units.”

Even as the movement has made progress in working across lines of identity, however, stark ideological differences have remained between its two major constituencies — that is, labor and everyone else. Whereas some global justice activists argue that poor countries need greater access to the U.S. market, for example, labor leaders often favor tariffs to keep foreign competitors out (the recent debate over the Bush administration’s tariffs on imported steel, which benefited American steelworkers at the expense of their foreign counterparts, is a case in point). Union activists are optimistic that they can eventually bridge these divides. More rank-and-file members — especially younger ones — are coming to the conclusion that they can’t ignore the plight of workers overseas, says John W. Murphy, assistant business manager for the Tampa, Florida, local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. “There’s a groundswell of realization that we can no longer succeed with that mindset,” he says. “It’s about every person sticking up for other people, regardless of race or sexual orientation, and not [for] the fat cat politicians who are running our nations and the globe.”

For their part, top officials at the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest federation of labor unions, point to their current support of immigrant rights, a dramatic reversal for an organization that from its earliest years built its strength by channeling workers’ anger against African Americans and immigrant coolie labor. “We’ve really moved much further on immigration policy than we have in the past, and this is only in the past five years,” said John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, said at a teach-in earlier this month in the Boston area. “There will be differences, but we have to find common interests and common ground.”

Kevin Danaher agrees. “I’m in meetings sometimes with anarchists who say, ‘Fuck the trade unions!’” says Danaher, co-founder of Global Exchange, an international human rights organization that has played a prominent role in the global justice movement. But without the trade unions, he adds, there won’t be a mass movement: “You aren’t talking revolution, you’re talking parlor games. You’re talking café debate.” The movement needs to build a “unity of diversity,” Danaher says. “If you can build unity, my team can be smaller and less well-funded than yours and less talented, but if we’re more united and your team is divided against itself, we’re going to kick your ass because you’re wasting energy fighting amongst yourselves.”

A protester brings new meaning to the slogan “Death to capitalism.” April 20, 2002.

Smart mobs

If “anti-globalization” brings to mind black-hooded protestors throwing rocks through storefront windows, David Solnit doesn’t fit the TV image. A carpenter by profession, a puppetmaker by avocation, the thirty-nine-year-old activist is stick-thin and boyish-looking, with only a light stubble of red hair on his jowls and a voice that tends, in personal conversation, toward the inaudible. His everyday demeanor may not exactly rouse the rabble, but other activists in the movement are seemingly uniform on one point: Solnit is one of the movement’s best organizers, a mover and shaker in a resistance movement that, by principle, has no leaders.

Solnit also happens to be one of the movement’s most ardent proponents of unconventional, creative forms of protest. In his view, the movement’s broad repertoire of tactics and its constant innovations have allowed it to keep an edge over authorities, even as it has faced greater repression. “I think resistance is like an ecosystem and you need a diversity of ways for different communities and different people to struggle and try and change things,” Solnit says. “In a monoculture, just like in agriculture, if everyone does the same thing it’s unhealthy. When everybody does different stuff it really complements [things] and makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts.”

In the mid-1990s, Solnit and his fellow activist-minded artists founded a radical protest group known as Art and Revolution. Inspired by groups like Bread & Puppet and Wise Fool Puppet Intervention, activists at Art and Revolution were trying to get beyond the tactics of traditional demonstrations: placard-waving, shouted slogans, occupied buildings, endless petitions. Instead, they used puppetry, music, and street theater to make their point — and make it lively. (In Britain, a similar movement called Reclaim the Streets drew attention by staging “festivals of resistance” — huge parties that blockaded the streets with masses of dancing and singing people.)

The idea was that art could break out of the linear communication of traditional forms of protest. Signs could be overlooked, slogans could be ignored, but art was irresistible, directing its messages straight to the heart and gut. Art and Revolution’s objective wasn’t to decorate the old sign-and-shout protests, but to restructure them: Dreary marches were to be exchanged for “festivals of resistance”; sheep-following-the-shepherd for “participatory street theater.” In Seattle, using these creative tactics helped activists to bring together diverse groups, assert their presence on the streets, and befuddle authorities (“partly they didn’t quite know how to respond and partly they looked ridiculous when they responded rudely to puppets and dance,” Solnit says).

Especially since Seattle, the artful protest that Solnit and others pioneered has “spread like a virus” throughout the movement. Artist-activists swear by its effectiveness. For the protests surrounding the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, Jonathan Youtt worked with two other artists to create a two-headed “corporate monster” puppet: one head was George W. Bush, who wielded a “lethal injection” syringe in his hand, and the other head was Al Gore, who was depicted tossing democracy into the toilet. On the pinstripes of the suit that the Gore-Bush monster wore were written the hundred corporations that gave $10,000 donations to both parties. “One picture, one image, could basically show corporations controlling the political system,” Youtt says.

Music, too, has become an important part of the global justice protest scene. Pod, a thirty-five-year-old San Francisco artist and activist, carried a drum when he marched in the 1999 Seattle demonstration. He and other drummers would head to the “hot spots” — the places where cops were about to clash with protestors — and start a lively rhythm to try to deescalate the tension. “I remember being in this alley and there was a stand-off with cops and protesters and there was a real nervous tension in the air, as to whether or not people were going to start getting pepper-sprayed,” Pod says. “And we started a certain rhythm … to create a festive atmosphere.” It worked, Pod says; the people on the street became visibly calmer as the drummers drummed away.

At global justice protests these days, you will bump into groups like the Radical Cheerleaders, who dance at the frontlines shouting cheers like, “Free people, not free trade!,” and the Infernal Noise Brigade, a marching band dressed in black coolie hats and fluorescent orange stripes that generates a truly infernal, if heart-thumping, racket. In Miami, the cheerleaders were on hand, dressed in flashy purples and pinks and fishnet stocking, with their hair in pigtails and wrapped up in bandannas. “You get to be loud, you get to run around and do all this — and you also get people to listen to ideas that they might not listen to otherwise,” says Carwil James, the only cheerleader sporting curly chin stubble along with his pompoms. “It’s a lot easier to shout down capitalism and the state with a pompom, for some reason, and have people on your side.”

In recent years, global justice artists have taken their agitprop to another level. In Cancún, for instance, puppetistas fashioned an ensemble of Mayan deities to bring home a political point: The “gods were angry” that WTO’s policies were hurting indigenous communities. A towering, faux-stone rendition of Chac, the Mayan god of rain, was meant to highlight the dangers of privatizing water utilities — a WTO-supported intervention protested by poor people throughout the global South, who believe they shouldn’t have to pay multinational corporations for their tap water. In newspaper photographs and TV clips that appeared afterward, Chac and the other Mayan gods figured prominently. “No matter how much control the authorities have over the press … still a beautiful image of a puppet is going to get documented because they got to run something with the story,” says Youtt.

At the 1999 anti-WTO protest, activists showed off another tactical innovation: “direct democracy.” This organizing approach borrowed heavily from previous movements, including the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s and American feminist and anti-nuclear activists from the 1980s. In Seattle, non-hierarchical “affinity groups” of five to twenty people packed the downtown streets, working as teams within loose coalitions known as “clusters.” The clusters, in turn, sent their representatives (known as “spokes”) to “spokescouncil” meetings where the protesters collectively decided important issues for action — though leaving the ultimate decision about whether and how to act to the affinity groups themselves.

Activists insist that their commitment to direct democracy amounts to more than a moral fetish. After participating in decision-making, they say, people are more willing to take ownership over their actions. “It’s almost a way of ritualizing your own commitment — saying, ‘I’m committed to this course of action,’” says Golan, who adds that the “wisdom” of the decisions often improve with more people making them. Direct democracy also encourages people to stay on top of the relevant issues. “You’re going to have more people care and be involved,” says Youtt. “They’re going to say, ‘Oh, wow, I came to that meeting and I affected the direction of that meeting by my comment. And I’ll continue to be informed.’” (Youtt works at a San Francisco arts collective that runs itself on a “hybrid” consensus-based model — that is, the group strives for consensus, but as a last resort it will allow a three-quarters majority vote to move things forward.)

In Cancún, the activists held their meetings in a hot and stuffy room on the third floor of the convergence center. A sign tacked to the wall listed more than a dozen “principles and practices” to abide by (“don’t interrupt,” “become a good, non-defensive listener,” and so on). “Meetings are often long and difficult,” the sign concluded. “Let’s all work to create a safe, open, and loving space for all to be able to share their thoughts, feelings, and concerns.” At some meetings, activists will appoint a person to be a “vibes-watcher” — someone pays attention to the group’s interactions to make sure feelings aren’t hurt and speakers are sensitive to gender and other issues.

Cesár Ariza, a Mexican global justice activist with the group Juventud Global, pointed out that the Cancún convergence center was a place with no leaders. “There is no group controlling this space. We operate in a democratic manner,” he said. That sentiment is shared by many global justice activists, who insist that they will not allow any one person or clique to define their agenda. For one thing, having a small group of leaders allows the police to decapitate the movement by arresting them. Beyond the pragmatic reasons, however, there is also a matter of principle: Direct democracy is about transforming relationships, and transforming the larger society. “We don’t want a few people to be in charge,” Solnit says. “That’s part of our critique of society — that there are a few people at the top making decisions for everyone else.”

The Cancún protests showed how versatile such a decentralized approach to organizing could be. When protesters couldn’t march past the fences, they slipped by the security in taxis and buses posing as small groups of tourists. Three activists climbed up a construction crane and hoisted a banner that read “¡Qué se vayan todos!” (the slogan of protesters last year in Argentina, loosely translated as “Throw the bums out!”) within sight of the convention center. Later that night, affinity groups converged on the street alongside the center, staging a sit-down strike that tied up the police for hours. Roving media activists with camcorders documented the demonstration, watching over police and gathering evidence for possible legal battles. “What this protest shows is where there is a will there is a way,” Golan told me during the sit-in. “People have found those holes in the fences and found ways to get inside the convention center and stage a protest here.” Their strategy worked, Golan says, because of the decentralized, autonomous structure of the movement, which allows individual affinity groups to make quick decisions and adapt to changing circumstances — what some call the “smart mobs” approach to organizing.

Go to part two

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Ahmed Bouzid is the founder and acting president of Palestinian Media Watch.

In May 2002, an Israeli tank shell killed a Palestinian mother and her thirteen-year-old daughter. The pair was grazing sheep on their land, far from any Israeli checkpoint. In defense of their actions, the Israelis said that the two women “looked suspicious.” The incident did not make the front page of any national American newspaper. The next day, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed two Israelis near Tel Aviv in response, and the event topped headlines of every major paper in the country.

The discrepancy did not go unnoticed. Activists from Palestinian Media Watch (PMWATCH) immediately barraged newspapers across the country with letters criticizing the unbalanced coverage.

Founded in 2000, PMWATCH now has thirty-nine local chapters in cities across the United States and tens of thousands of members, who regularly contact media oulets to demand fair coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Group leaders and members have attended dozens of meetings with editorial boards and foreign desk editors, published scores of op-eds and letters in major newspapers and magazines, and appeared on various radio and television shows. The group has become so well-known that writer Ahron Shapiro of the Jerusalem Post called it, “one of the best media monitoring sites I’ve encountered, period.”

PMWATCH began with a single letter. Sitting at his computer three years ago, Ahmed Bouzid wrote a letter to The Philadelphia Inquirer, criticizing a recent article for being pro-Israeli. The letter was published, along with Bouzid’s name and email address. Over the next couple of days his inbox was flooded with responses — some encouraging his efforts, others criticizing his reaction to the paper’s coverage.

Bouzid replied to the supportive emails, encouraging the authors to send their own letters to The Philadelphia Inquirer, and inviting them to participate in a dialogue with him about media bias relating to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Many of his responses were ignored, but three Philadelphia residents wrote back, and an initial mailing list of four — Bouzid and the three respondents — was set up.

The four discussed media bias, emailed articles and opinions back and forth, and wrote to The Inquirer. They also set up a meeting with the paper’s editor to discuss what they perceived as a systematic prejudice when it came to reporting on the conflict. Through word of mouth, news of the list and its goals spread, and others interested in the issue joined. Soon the list had members in cities other than Philadelphia, ranging across the United States from Washington to Los Angeles.

In October 2000, an official organization evolved out of this email list: Palestinian Media Watch. The organization’s mission was two-fold: to identify and protest instances in which U.S. journalists failed to cover the Palestinian-Israeli conflict accurately and fairly, and to help mainstream media outlets access pro-Palestinian perspectives.

Redefining a ‘community organization’

While Palestinian Media Watch’s short-term goals are to monitor U.S. newspapers, it does so with the larger intention of increasing Arab American participation in domestic politics. The group works to empower its members to change the perceived image of Arabs in the media, as well as to teach them how to promote a political agenda using the press as a medium for effecting change.

With these long-term goals in mind, PMWATCH is wary of the strict hierarchy and “take-it-or-leave-it” culture that seems to plague many media watch groups. Media watch organizations tend to attract a more educated audience, and their work ranges from starting and maintaining relationships with editors to publishing media reports. Given these activities, it seems only natural that these organizations often end up as elitist institutions dominated by paid staff and experts.

The leaders of PMWATCH wanted to avoid creating this kind of culture within their own group. It wasn’t just a matter of being idealistic activists. Bouzid and his fellow activists worried that an organizational structure that was less-than-democratic would stifle creativity and intimidate ordinary members from speaking their minds.

Francesca Polletta, a Columbia University sociology professor, argues in her book Freedom Is an Endless Meeting that it is sometimes more “effective” and “efficient” for activist organizations to organize “democratically” rather than hierarchically. In the case of the Arab American community this rang especially true. Arab Americans are not as clustered in cities as are other ethnic groups. While some do attend mosques, most do not, and hence there was no obvious institution from which Bouzid could solicit a constituency.

Moreover, Bouzid’s willingness to get involved in politics, which led him to become the founder and acting president of Palestinian Media Watch, seemed an exception among Arab Americans. In an interview with The Chicago Tribune, Bouzid described the Arab American community as a “punch bag,” absorbing blows that Jews, Hispanics, and African Americans would never tolerate.

The personal experience of many members of the community with monarchies or totalitarian regimes may be one explanation for their lack of political participation. Rashid Khalidi, director of the University of Chicago’s Center for International Studies, says that most Arab Americans confine their activities to business, not politics, and “they have not played the political game.” James Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute, points out that “the problem is not just apathy but a lack of connectedness that people have to the political process. People aren’t investing in it.”

Working with a constituency resigned to political silence and believing in an “Israeli-controlled” media was PMWATCH’s first challenge. The new all-volunteer organization had a long way to go to reach the level of pro-Israeli media watch groups such as Honest Reporting, which boast large constituencies that are quickly mobilized, paid staffs with office space and administrative assistants, well-endowed activities, and long-standing relationships with newspaper editors and TV producers.

Khalidi stresses that building a mass political movement is no easy task. Even if people do become involved, he says, “Political influence will not come quickly. You have to start at the local level with local building blocks. It took the Jewish community literally decades to do this.”

This became painfully apparent to the founding members of PMWATCH. Change did not occur overnight; as hard as it was to get one letter published, a single letter would not make a difference. There were no short-term incentives to encourage the rest of the community to join the effort. How could this new organization, with no history and only an email list of members dispersed across the country, begin to make a difference?

Organizing the ‘politically Palestinian’

PMWATCH’s membership slowly began to grow, initially through word of mouth and later through organized advertising efforts. The new recruits ranged from university students to businesspeople. As membership grew, so did the ethnic and social diversity of the members. Soon separate groups in thirty-nine cities — spread across the United States — had their own email lists and websites.

After Rania Awwad, a graduate student in genetics at George Washington University, set up a Washington chapter, PMWATCH launched its first large campaign. In December 2002, the Israeli army destroyed 350 Palestinian homes and damaged 500 more in the Rafah neighborhoods of occupied Gaza along the Egyptian border. The next day, The Washington Post did not mention the incident but ran a front-page story about several Israeli deaths. For Awwad and several other PMWATCH Washington members, this was the trigger event that inspired them to start challenging media bias.

Washington chapter members wrote and called the Post’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, to demand an explanation for why the Rafah home demolitions were not reported. In his weekly column on the following Sunday, Getler mentioned the complaints about the newspaper’s silence on the home demolitions, before proceeding to discuss the event in detail. This initial success was publicized on the PMWATCH email list, and soon similar strategies were being tried in cities across the country.

With each success, membership grew, and as groups in certain cities became significantly larger, the organization developed “task groups” and “media groups” that spanned the entire network and that any member could join or lead. The task groups focused on developing the PMWATCH website, drafting media reports, and working on other tools that the organization could use to further its cause. The media groups concentrated on national newspapers and magazines, like Newsweek or Time, which were beyond the scope of local communities. (Recently, PMWATCH also established a “movie group” to examine how Arabs are portrayed in Hollywood features and on television — the group is especially popular among younger members.)

Because of the overlap between groups and the lack of a consistent hierarchy, the leader/member divide within chapters has faded. Moreover, since most of the discussions take place over group emails and are posted online, each member has a good chance of being heard as a leader. Often in community meetings, more gregarious attendees and community leaders dominate. However, over email there are no time limits, and shy individuals are generally better able to express themselves. “While you can lose out on getting to personally know people over email, I never felt the group suffered, and we always got to hear people’s thoughts,” Bouzid says.

PMWATCH’s open registration and email communication system have also allowed a wide range of personal experiences and backgrounds to be shared among group members. Just under half the group are non-Arab Americans. The ethnic diversity of the network has not led to any problems, according to Bouzid.

In their book The Miner’s Canary, Harvard law professor Lani Guinier and University of Texas law professor Gerald Torres discuss what it means to be “politically black” — that is, being able to identify with the African American experience regardless of one’s own race. A similar sort of identification process can be found in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. “The nature of the conflict is such,” Bouzid explains, “that the Palestinians no longer question the origins of people involved in it.”

You could call these activists “politically Palestinian.” Some Jewish leftists, such as MIT professor Noam Chomsky, fit the label; they have often been the Palestinians’ greatest supporters. Bouzid himself is Algerian, and has never been asked how he came to be so dedicated to the Palestinian cause. (In fact, most Arab Americans identify with the conflict, often called the “Arab-Israeli” conflict). If there are arguments among members of the group, they are often dealt with in the “public arena” of a PMWATCH messaging board.

Turning laypeople into media critics

The fact that PMWATCH members were spread out across the country meant that for the first year of work, the group’s leaders never met in person. The work was done over email and in chat rooms. Strategies were discussed over the Internet, but ultimately the success of the organization came down to the degree of mobilization in each city, and the effectiveness of the group in persuading editors.

The media is a fast-moving industry, and quick response time is essential to success. Waiting for a centralized group to react to a specific event would have incapacitated the organization. Each city group had to be trusted to respond on its own initiative. Furthermore, city groups were best situated to establish the necessary working relationships with editors and foreign correspondents that PMWATCH needed to gain a solid reputation.

Other media watch groups have remained much more centralized and hierarchical. They enjoy fully paid staffs and the money to fly out to visit newspaper editors. In contrast, PMWATCH’s slim resources have resulted in a horizontal structure, which also seems to represent the network’s democratic philosophy.

At the heart of PMWATCH’s mission is a desire to undermine the “us” vs. “them” perceptions that many Arabs have about the media. The organization works to persuade newspaper editors to “print more,” to give a more comprehensive view of the situation. While other media groups, such as Honest Reporting, organize widespread boycotts of newspapers (such as last year’s boycott of The Washington Post for describing atrocities allegedly perpetrated by the Israeli army), PMWATCH has not yet participated in any boycott effort. The group collectively feels that a boycott would undermine the group’s “report more” philosophy.

Because the network does not focus its efforts on boycotts, it has the more challenging job of gaining legitimacy and respect from editors and television show producers. Experience has taught them that it is counterproductive to walk into an interview unprepared. Editors will always claim that the complaint is about a “one-time event” and that, overall, the coverage of the situation is balanced. PMWATCH learned fast that to be taken seriously, its members had to do their homework. Letters to the editor would only be effective if written well and intelligently.

PMWATCH had to bring its members up to a level of critical thinking that editors would respect. To this end, PMWATCH has put a lot of time and energy into the development of its online resources. On the “action page” of its website, for instance, links are provided not only to important articles and the phone numbers of editors, but also to guides for letter writing and detailed reports on current issues. Furthermore, visitors to the site are invited to participate by doing research or writing up reports.

While new members of PMWATCH might balk at the idea of writing a research report criticizing the media, they quickly learn that there is no one else to do it. PMWATCH has gotten around having a paid professional staff by teaching laypeople to research the issues and write the reports by themselves. The website provides templates of previously written reports, and simple instructions on how to calculate figures of a newspaper’s bias, and how to classify articles under the terms “pro-Israeli,” “pro-Palestinian,” and “balanced.” Authors of previous reports are available to help any city group or individual writing a report for the first time (even though this support might only be over email or the telephone), and the researchers can send emails to the list soliciting input along the way.

Another key component of Palestinian Media Watch’s strategy is “constructive pressure.” PMWATCH regularly sends editors and foreign correspondents updates about academic work on the conflict, as well as lists of potential sources or op-ed writers: people who are able at a minute’s notice to grant interviews, or who are articulate enough to react immediately to a column or event with an op-ed that newspapers can publish.

An organic and effective structure

As Polletta argues in Freedom Is an Endless Meeting, groups that choose participatory democracy over more conventional forms of organization do so because it is more efficient. Though it may seem counter-intuitive, such decentralized structures have certain advantages over hierarchical ones: Members working within a participatory system, for instance, have more say over decisions and are thus more likely to accept them as legitimate.

Believing in the cause and trusting group decisions becomes even more important when being a member of the group also makes one a target of harassment. So far, the negative repercussions for PMWATCH have been fairly minor: Bouzid received a call from the FBI after newspaper editors and television show producers complained about vulgar emails sent by hackers from his account (the email accounts of several other PMWATCH members have also been hacked into).

Having a healthy level of participation within an organization also encourages innovative thinking. At PMWATCH, members from across the country can offer their input about different strategies and approaches. The group as a whole benefits from the diverse array of media experiences represented, and can draw from this resource base to rapidly respond to a constantly changing news cycle.

Participation is especially important when it comes to developing leadership skills and increasing self-confidence. For many members, meeting with a newspaper editor can be a frightening experience. When a member feels she or he has contributed to the group’s overall strategy and is well-versed in the rationale behind it, that member’s ability to carry out the task effectively is substantially enhanced.

By promoting democracy within their organization, PMWATCH activists have encouraged the often shy Arab American population to begin getting involved politically. In the process, they have enfranchised and mobilized a broader membership than anyone would have thought possible. Working upward from an initial four-person email list, PMWATCH has created what Harvard Professor Archon Fung refers to as “social capital with fangs.”

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

Committee for Accuracy in Middle Eastern Reporting in America
A media-monitoring and research organization “devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East” and fighting anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice.
URL: http://www.camera.org

Honest Reporting
Media watch organization that monitors instances of anti-Israeli bias.
URL: http://www.honestreporting.com

Palestinian Media Watch
Group that seeks to increase attention to Palestinian viewpoints in the news.
URL: http://www.pmwatch.org

PEOPLE > BOUZID, AHMED >

“Keeping an Eye on the News”
By Sandi Cain. Published by Arab-American Business. July 20, 2003.
URL: http://www.arabamericanbusiness.com/July%202003/newsfocus.htm

“Palestinians Find Their Voice Online”
By Mark Glaser. Published by the Online Journalism Review. October 22, 2003.
URL: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1066177054.php

Personal website
URL: http://www.ahmedbouzid.org/

PEOPLE > FUNG, ARCHON >

Personal website
URL: http://www.archonfung.net

PUBLICATIONS >

Philadelphia Inquirer
URL: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer

TOPICS > ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT >

“Photostory: Home demolitions in Rafah”
By Darren Ell. Published by the Electronic Intifada. December 19, 2002.
URL: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article995.shtml

“Covering the Company, etc.”
By Michael Getler. Published in The Washington Post. January 20, 2002.
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A6797-2002Jan19¬Found=true

In The Fray Contributor

St. Joseph House on East First Street, one of the two Catholic Worker houses located in Manhattan.

Like many of her classmates at the University of Notre Dame, Sarah Brook came to New York soon after graduation, looking for work. But the job she ended up applying for last summer had few of the “perks” that a typical graduate might look for, such as health insurance, retirement benefits, or even a salary. It also had a somewhat unconventional way of interviewing candidates — one involving a mandatory overnight stay at the organization’s downtown office.

Since August, Brook has been living, working, and volunteering at Maryhouse on East Third Street in Manhattan, one of two Catholic Worker houses in Manhattan. The other house, St. Joseph House, is just two blocks away on East First Street. Brook and the other dozen or so volunteers at each house have agreed to live and work at this house, wage- and rent-free. They assist the poor directly by serving meals, giving out clothing, and providing homeless men and women access to showers. The volunteers eat the same food they cook and serve to the destitute. They also wear clothes that have been donated to the group.

But Brook and the other Catholic Workers do not just serve the poor. They live with them. Every day, St. Joseph House and Maryhouse welcome hundreds of New York’s estimated 39,000 homeless into its living quarters. And every day, these individuals — many of whom suffer from mental illness — eat with, talk to, and sleep alongside volunteers from more or less privileged backgrounds.

“The ideal is to be with the poorest people and to do as much as we can to obliterate the distinctions,” says Tom Cornell, a volunteer who lives at a Catholic Worker farming community in upstate New York. Cornell and his wife, Monica, have been volunteers with the movement since the 1950s.

The Catholic Worker movement itself goes back seventy years, when activists Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started handing out copies of their newspaper, the Catholic Worker, at a May Day communist rally in New York’s Union Square. (To this day, the 80,000-circulation Catholic Worker still sells for a penny a copy.) A year later, Day and Maurin decided they should do more than simply publish articles about social justice. They began establishing houses to serve the poor, the first of which opened in New York in 1934. There are now 185 Catholic Worker houses, serving thousands of poor people in the United States as well as abroad.

Day once said that young people will always want to come to Manhattan — and there will always be poor people in Manhattan. Decades later, residents of the New York houses — both the Catholic Workers and the people they serve — continue to represent a wide range of ages and backgrounds. Brook, who is twenty-two, says that living at Maryhouse is “an ideal way to still be in school. You’re getting your hands dirty, but getting to use your mind.” The Catholic Workers live off donations, she says; they do not take any pay, except for $20 a week in “fun money.”

This lifestyle of self-imposed poverty is precisely what continues to draw people — especially young people — to the movement, nearly two decades after Day’s death. “There is … great freedom in giving up your possessions, in devoting yourself to love of the poor and of fellow members of your community and devotion to social and political justice,” says Jim O’Grady, the author of Dorothy Day: With Love for the Poor. Bill Griffin, a former volunteer who often eats dinner at the Maryhouse, calls the Catholic Worker movement a “school of life.” Most volunteers stay for two or three years, he says; some end up staying indefinitely.

The organization’s name is somewhat misleading: The Catholic Worker has no official relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, and its statement of “aims and means” explicitly states that it has no “religious test.” Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day were both practicing Catholics when they founded the movement, but they wanted the organization to be open to people of all faiths. To this day, most of the organization’s volunteers are practicing Catholics, and religious faith remains a central motivation for their work. (“Our priorities don’t make any sense unless you believe in God,” says Felton Davis, a volunteer at Maryhouse.) That said, in some Catholic Worker houses other faiths have been known to dominate: The volunteers in the Catholic Worker house in Boston, for instance, are mostly Buddhist.

Of the 185 operating Catholic Worker houses, none of them can be rightfully called the movement’s “headquarters.” Informally, however, the New York houses function as the de facto center of the movement, as it was there where the movement began and where Day did her charity work. Today, Maryhouse and St. Joseph House sit inconspicuously alongside chic restaurants and boutiques in Lower Manhattan. When Day and Maurin founded the organization seven decades ago, this area — known as the Bowery or the East Village — was a blighted urban neighborhood. Over the years, however, real estate prices soared and the area’s poor left for other parts. Today, some volunteers question whether the Catholic Worker should move to Brooklyn, Central Harlem, or the South Bronx, since these areas now have the highest concentrations of the city’s poverty and homelessness.

One positive thing about their current location is that it allows the Catholic Workers to directly confront New York’s materialistic culture, says O’Grady. The Catholic Workers rebuke the “disgusting wealth reveling that goes on in Manhattan,” he says. “They sit right in the middle of it, but by going about their daily business, they say to us: ‘What obsesses you doesn’t matter.’”

In fact, the Catholic Worker movement seems to take pride in rejecting many mainstream cultural values, especially competition and materialism. “You’re not supposed to reject competition. That’s a rejection of the American way of life,” Davis tells me on one of my visits to Maryhouse. In Davis’ view, some people are in need and some people have too much; the Catholic Worker simply helps facilitate this redistribution of wealth. “If we weren’t here, how would people who have more than they need hand over to those who don’t?” he asks.

As we’re talking, a young woman stops by the house to drop off a bag of clothing. “People come to give and come to receive,” Davis says. “We’re living at that point where give meets take.”

Sarah Brook, a Catholic Worker volunteer, takes a break from her duties at the Maryhouse shelter in Manhattan.

One family

At Maryhouse, there is no formal training for new volunteers. And that, Brook says, was perhaps the most difficult part of getting started as a Catholic Worker. Brook had never before lived among the mentally ill. She often felt confused when her mostly female charges would act happy and talkative and then, moments later, begin screaming at her. Other volunteers were supportive, she says, and Brook felt comfortable asking them questions. Still, no one took her aside to point out which house residents had which types of problems.

It is precisely this lack of structure that defines the Catholic Worker movement and makes it so different from other social service organizations. As one volunteer puts it, the Catholic Worker is “a family.” It strives to create a relaxed, accepting environment in its houses. Many people who come to the house for food feel comfortable wandering through its pantries. “We try to offer someone not just a plate of food but a home or something that can be their home,” says Brook.

Meals at St. Joseph House or Maryhouse are a cross between a Thanksgiving family dinner and summer camp. One Friday night I walk into a macaroni and cheese dinner prepared by volunteer Jim Regan. The Catholic Workers sit right beside the people who come seeking meals. Smoke fills the air of the dining hall. Alcohol and drugs are not permitted in any of the houses — many of the residents are recovering from drug or alcohol addiction — but cigarettes seem to be the accepted indulgence. Some of the men and women yell or talk in disjointed sentences, while the volunteers doggedly try to engage them in conversation.

Griffin describes the Catholic Worker as the place where the “voluntary” poor and the “involuntary” poor come together. For a casual observer like myself, the two categories blended together so discreetly that it was often difficult to distinguish between those who served as volunteers and those who came seeking food. I initially thought a woman named Stacey was one of the volunteers. When I spoke to other people who ate or lived at the Catholic Worker, it was immediately clear that they suffered from a mental illness. Not Stacey. As she explained to me her problems with the city shelter system, she came across as strikingly intelligent and aware. Stacey said she was thirty-five, though she appeared much younger, and had been homeless for two years. She knew few details about the Catholic Worker organization, but she had been coming regularly to St. Joseph House and Maryhouse for clothes, food, a shower, and sometimes even a nap.

Stacey is one of hundreds of people who pass through the two Catholic Worker houses in Manhattan on a daily basis. Many of these people complain of problems they’ve had with the New York City shelter system. What makes the Catholic Worker houses stand apart from the other shelters, they say, is the unique attitude among the staff — the direct personal engagement that Catholic Workers bring to their work. For the past seventy years, this particular approach toward public service has been an explicit part of the movement’s mission, encapsulated in a philosophy known as “personalism,” which Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin studied in the writings of the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier.

At the time of the Catholic Worker’s founding, the world was beginning to be split between two warring political ideologies. The conflict between the classical liberals who favored capitalism and the Marxists who favored socialism would dominate the history of most of the twentieth century. Mounier’s philosophy of personalism advocated a middle ground between the liberals’ glorification of the individual and the Marxists’ glorification of the collective, both of which (according to Mounier) failed to put sufficient emphasis on personal responsibility.

In a 1955 issue of the Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day explained how Peter Maurin adapted the principles of personalism to the work of social justice: “His whole message was that everything began with one’s self … If every man became poor there would not be any destitute, he said. If everyone became better, everyone would be better off. He wanted us all ‘to quit passing the buck.’” In their daily work, the Catholic Workers live out the personalist philosophy by both choosing poverty and working to help those who have to live in poverty. As Griffin points out, “The way you help is as important as the money you give to help.”

The Maryhouse on East Third Street.

Act locally, act globally

It’s noon on Saturday in Manhattan’s Union Square, and nearly a dozen people are gathered around the statue at the northern edge of the square. The Catholic Workers and other activists have been holding a weekly vigil here for years. Now it’s about Iraq, but they’ve always had reasons to protest: Before the September 11 terrorist attacks, the group protested the presence of U.S. troops in Colombia.

How do U.S. policies in far-off lands connect to the movement’s mission of helping the poor? Art Laffin, a volunteer at the Catholic Worker house in Washington, says that the poor person on the street and the people in Baghdad are both “victims of our society.”

“We’re trying to live an alternative, a nonviolent alternative,” Laffins says. “We choose to not cooperate with a consumer society and a system that sanctions killing.” For Catholic Workers like Laffin, protests and vigils are as much a part of their day-to-day work as feeding the poor. Every Monday for the past sixteen years, Laffin and about fifteen other volunteers have held a vigil in front of the Pentagon. Every Friday for the past six years, they have demonstrated in front of the White House. Laffin was arrested last August for participating in a vigil at the Pentagon commemorating the Hiroshima nuclear bombing; the police said he had entered an off-limits area. “Dorothy Day said we have to fill the jails,” Laffin points out.

Besides taking part in protests, Catholic Worker volunteers also go to war zones to bring food and other supplies to victims. Laffin visited Iraq in 1998, Central America twice during the 1980s, and the occupied territories of Palestine three times between 1996 and 1998. “You see firsthand the immeasurable suffering of people,” he says.

Over the years, many notable pacifists have joined forces with the Catholic Worker. Daniel Berrigan regularly attends the Union Square vigil. Berrigan and his brother Phillip, who passed away last year, were known for their creative acts of civil disobedience in the 1960s, when they were both Catholic priests protesting the Vietnam War. The duo made the cover of Newsweek, and Paul Simon mentioned them in a song, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.”

Of course, not everyone can fill the jails at the same time. When certain volunteers are in jail, others must be around to help feed the poor, says volunteer Matt Daloisio: “No one of those things is more important than any other, but they’re all connected.” Daloisio says that no one in the organization pressures the volunteers to get arrested. “It’s more pressure that we put on ourselves,” he says.

On one hand, being part of the Catholic Worker clearly makes it easier for these volunteers to practice the pacifism that they preach: Davis, the Maryhouse volunteer, points out that people who work in full-time jobs can’t risk going to jail because that might jeopardize their jobs. On the other hand, when Catholic Workers do go to court, they often have to defend themselves. The organization does not use lawyers, Laffin says, because “courts are complicit” in the injustices that the volunteers are protesting.

The Catholic Workers’ radical denunciation of war also puts them somewhat at odds with the Catholic leadership in Rome. At many points in its history, the Roman Catholic Church has accepted the idea of a “just war” — that is, a war that can be justified on moral grounds. Earlier this year, for example, the Church did not come out against the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

While the Catholic Worker has no affiliation with the Catholic Church, most volunteers say they would like the Church to actively advance a pacifist agenda. The group has held meetings with Catholic bishops all over the country to ask them to take stronger public stances against war. Many Catholic Worker volunteers also work with other Catholic groups, like Pax Christi, that are part of the international Catholic peace movement. “We would like to see the Catholic Church become a peace church,” Laffin says.

“If the Catholic Workers, by speaking to their pacifism, unsettle us in our war-making for a just cause, well then that’s a good thing,” says O’Grady, the biographer. “Because it’s terrible if we’re blithe or smug about going to war.”

As with all radical politics, however, it’s difficult to be optimistic about the Catholic Worker’s ability to achieve the social and political transformation it seeks — at least in the near future. For all its devoted volunteers and relentless crusading, the Catholic Worker has all the “political impact of a grain of sand falling from the sky,” O’Grady notes. Nevertheless, he adds, even if there are few immediate results to speak of, in the long term the influence of a popular movement like the Catholic Worker can manifest itself in “mysterious and subterranean” ways.

It’s unclear what changes we’ll see in another seven decades, but there’s a good chance that the Catholic Workers will still be toiling then, still building the society that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin envisioned so many years ago — a society “where it is easier for people to be good.”

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Catholic Worker Movement
URL: http://www.catholicworker.org

Pax Christi USA
The national Catholic peace movement that “strives to create a world that reflects the Peace of Christ by exploring, articulating, and witnessing to the call of Christian nonviolence.”
URL: http://www.paxchristiusa.org

Plowshares Movement
An organization working toward nuclear disarmament in the United States and abroad.
URL: http://www.plowsharesactions.org

Voices in the Wilderness
A Chicago-based organization working to end economic and military warfare against the Iraqi people.
URL: http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/

PEOPLE > DAY, DOROTHY >

Biography
Co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.
URL: http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/ddbiography.cfm

PEOPLE > MAURIN, PETER >

Biography
Co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.
URL: http://www.catholicworker.org/roundtable/pmbiography.cfm

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maureenfarrell