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Reaching for equality through marriage


Dean E. Murphy reports today in the International Herald Tribune that Judge Richard Kramer has ruled in favor of same-sex marriage in response to a lawsuit filed by the city of San Francisco against the state of California. The current restrictions against same-sex marriage are based upon Proposition 22, which was approved in 2000 by California voters, and a law enacted by the Legislature in 1977. Kramer wrote,

“The idea that marriage-like rights without marriage is adequate smacks of a concept long rejected by the courts: separate but equal.

The state’s protracted denial of equal protection cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional.”   

Many of the arguments opposing same-sex marriage could be compared with those “once made against mixed-race marriages or racially integrated schools,” Kramer noted.

“The denial of marriage to same-sex couples appears impermissibly arbitrary,” he stated yesterday.

As Kramer must still meet with several parties to the litigation, the ruling will not become final until March 30.

—Michaele Shapiro

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Quote of note


“Same-sex marriage cannot be prohibited solely because California has always done so before.”

— San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer, writing today to explain his ruling, in which he declared that California’s current state ban on same-sex marriages violates citizens’ constitutional right to equal treatment. Kramer previously ruled in support of the same-sex couples when they, along with the city of San Francisco, sought legal recourse in March of 2004 after the Supreme Court annulled approximately 4,000 same-sex marriages that had taken place in San Francisco on the basis that the city had illegitimately allowed the marriages to take place despite the state’s ban on the practice.  

—Mimi Hanaoka

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Luring the female jihadists


Behind every great man stands a woman, and behind every militant jihadist stands an equally devoted jihadist woman. Or so says al-Qaeda.  

The Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute, or SITE Institute — an American non-profit terrorist-monitoring group that scours, among other things, militant Islamist websites — reports on a rising target demographic for militant Islamist websites: women.

In a passage purportedly written by the former and late al-Qaeda leader Yusuf al-Ayiri, the site proclaims:

“The reason we address women in these pages is our observation that when a woman is convinced of something, no one will spur a man to fulfill it like she will… The saying ‘Behind every great man stands a woman’ was true for Muslim women at these times, for behind every great Mujahid stood a woman.”

Targeting women for jihad is certainly not a new thing; eager to capitalize on an expanding Internet audience, Al-Khansa, a new jihadist online magazine directed exclusively at women, incites women to participate in jihad. What this recent jihadist message does demonstrate, though, is the ferocity of the media wars being waged for the hearts and minds of Muslims. While the al-Qaeda recruiting video tapes have tended to target men, this attests to an increasingly visible move to envelop women within the fold of militant jihad, even be it, in this case, as some sort of a support mechanism (woman are, according to this website, not supposed participate in physical combat). This, apparently, is gender equality’s new and militant face.  

—Mimi Hanaoka

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A.S. Byatt through the looking glass


For those of us who went to hear A.S. Byatt speak at UCLA, tonight will remain an evening to remember. She was interviewed by Santa Monica’s own Michael Silverblatt, the admirable host of KCRW’s literary talk-show “Bookworm.”

As the evening progressed, Silverblatt commented he feels at times that he is “living in a culture where people are angry at the literary.”

Byatt agreed. She remarked that she comes from a working-class family, whose members took turns reciting Keats at the dinner table. Literature meant everything to them; it was an activity of choice and engagement. Such anger surprises her, she said, because literature is one of the few things in life which belongs to everyone, regardless of social or economic class.

Byatt also finds it strange that some readers argue her use of references to classic works of literature is threatening, not inspiring. Others charge her with “showing off” her remarkable knowledge of literature, an idea which, it turns out, is unsurprisingly foreign to Byatt, who taught at University College in London before turning to writing full-time. “I always get excited about learning something new,” she said. Such inclusions of fragments of other works shed light on the stories she tells, creating revelations, and possibly inspiring readers unfamiliar with her references to seek out their sources.

—Michaele Shapiro

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Commentary

Democracy, Middle East-style

A search for footage to promote Afghanistan’s election.


Two women inspect the merchandise in a Kabul street bazaar.

From the air, Afghanistan is a more rugged version of the moon. Approaching Kabul, our plane flies low over the surrounding mountains as we prepare to land. With the city center out of view, Kabul looks like the desiccated remnants of an ancient civilization. Only a few small patches of green glimmer in the haze — everything else is the color of dust.

It is my debut as a government agent. Two weeks before Afghanistan’s first-ever presidential elections, I am part of a State Department team helping shape global public opinion of the elections — and, by implication, improving America’s poor overseas reputation.  It might be more appropriate to describe us as a few opportunistic freelance TV workers dabbling in propaganda. We have been hired by the U.S. government to produce video footage of the elections, footage that will be freely available to any television station that wants to use it. And although we will be operating independently, it is understood, of course, that we aren’t here to look for bad news.

Everyone knows Hamid Karzai, the American backed interim president, is going to win the election. The only questions are by how much, and whether or not Afghans — and the world —will believe the results. Our job is to make sure that, whatever the slant of the international media coverage, someone will be covering the good news in Afghanistan — if there is any. I wonder, though — as a hyper-liberal, anti-Bush zealot, do I really want to help put a good spin on United States foreign policy? On the other hand, we’re not exactly here to create a White House-sanctioned fantasy world a la Wag the Dog, either. So let’s call it “public relations” instead of propaganda. Or maybe “propaganda lite.”

Looking for trouble — and good camera angles

My friend Mathieu told me about the job a few months ago. He needed someone to come to Kabul with him and his colleague Siri, to be an audio tech during the day and a video editor at night. I had worked with them both before, and trusted them. Siri had been to Afghanistan several times in the last two years, and knew her way around the country.

I thought about it for a couple days. Things in Afghanistan looked less than promising. The U.N. Staff Union was lobbying to have U.N. employees pulled out of Afghanistan, and Doctors Without Borders, an non-governmental organization with a reputation for fearlessness, had pulled out altogether after 24 years in the country.

But how often do you get the chance to visit Afghanistan? I called Mathieu to tell him I would come. Second thoughts immediately followed when he asked for my hat and chest size to buy me a helmet and vest of body armor.

Once we land in Kabul, my doubts only grow.

At the airport we are met by Farid and Qais. Farid is our translator and guide, an earnest man in his early thirties. Qais is our driver, a snappy dresser with a mustache poised on his broad, slightly plump face. His minivan is bedecked with sunroofs, a metallic grey paint job, and the words “SUPER EXTRA” emblazoned on the sliding door. We pile in with our equipment, and Qais sends the Super Extra through Kabul’s chaotic traffic with a carefree recklessness bordering on glee.

I had imagined our security would be tight, envisioning fortified U.S. compounds as our lodging and fearsome convoys of armed humvees as escorts. In reality, the U.S.embassy hardly seems to know that we’re here, and our freewheeling Super Extra is apparently all the convoy we’re going to get. I tell myself incognito is better.

Qais and Farid drop us off at a modest Kabul guesthouse, run by an affable Australian chef. The outside is a drab wall with a metal door, but the inside is surprisingly pleasant. There is a central garden with a shady arbor where the other inhabitants — two dozen development workers and U.N. contractors — lounge in the evenings, drinking and playing ping-pong. After dumping our gear in our rooms, and setting up our editing computer, we sit on the patio and drink beers. There is a rumbling in the sky. We crane our heads. Two U.S. helicopters circle over the city, bristling with guns and rockets, rattling our windows.

Kabul is congested and dusty. Its recent history is evident in the sagging skeleton of a ravaged building or a wall pockmarked with the splash of a shell burst. But the etchings of violence are mainly just the backdrop for everyday bustle. Streams of men form a parade of flowing vests and tight cylindrical caps or flat pakol hats, which perch on the back of the head like a felt pancake. The flood of beige and brown is punctuated by an occasional Western suit, or by dark green camouflage jackets thrown over traditional clothing. Women in the streets wear conservative headscarves and long skirts with quietly defiant high heels and fishnet hose. There are also the almost genderless figures of women in flowing, sky-blue burqas, looking out through the embroidered face screen of a garment that, for an object so symbolic to us of sexual repression, is surprisingly beautiful.

Our job is to record life in Kabul and digest it into video clips for mass distribution, hopefully in a way that shows the current situation in a positive light. But these decisions aren’t up to me. I’m making absolutely no decisions about where we go and what we cover. My role is to tag along and get audio, leaving the thinking to Siri. She has been talking to the U.S. embassy in Kabul ever since we landed, and they aren’t offering her much guidance. Mostly, our movements are based on her gut feelings of what our employers will consider appropriate and — above all — what will make good television.

At the top of any cameraman’s list this week are the walls plastered with election materials. U.N. posters cheerily depict how an election is supposed to work. One shows a man and a woman, both smiling broadly, in traditional dress. A giant speech bubble hovers over them displaying the address of the nearest polling station.

There are also campaign advertisements from all 18 presidential hopefuls. Multiple posters for each candidate display the contender in varied poses of purposeful concentration. In vying for the passerby’s attention, however, a common image hovers in the background of many of the flyers: a man’s lined face, framed with a goatee, a shock of gray hair and a pakol hat. It is Massoud, the former head of the Northern Alliance, who was assassinated on September 9, 2001. His exploits are legendary: he defied more than hald a dozen Soviet assaults on his native Panjshir Valley, and later became the linchpin of anti-Taliban resistance. Now, with the fall of the Taliban, it seems Massoud is Afghanistan’s George Washington. And his sad-eyed ghost is everyone’s running mate.

Above the hubbub of modern Kabul, gutted buildings linger as stark reminders of the civil war of the 1990s.

Democracy school

On the outskirts of Kabul, we visit a voter education class at a local high school. (Fresh-faced youth learning about democracy equals good video.) The classroom is packed with young men, few of whom look over 18, which is the Afghan voting age. The teacher explains that the boys are given the class in the hope that they will pass the information on to their families. We tape the teacher gesturing to a set of U.N. posters that illustrate parts of the election process — voter verification, the secret ballot, collection and counting of votes. The teenagers’ concentration is intense. Do American high school civics class ever look like this? Perhaps the presence of a news crew has a focusing effect, but their attention seems genuine.

Siri interviews the teacher. In broken English, he tells us it isn’t always easy to get across the idea of how an election works. “Of course, we think it’s difficult for them,” he says. “But we are explaining more.

He continues: “In the past government, has any president asked you, ‘Can I be your representative, your president?’ They say, ‘No.’ So it is the election, that they are asking, ‘Can you give your vote to me? Can I be your president?’ This is democracy!”

My skepticism weakens. It is one thing to sit home in front of the newspaper and make knowing comments about power politics. How legitimate is “democracy” when it is imposed by an invading superpower, and when a country’s human development and rule of law remain in ruins? Those sentiments fade, however, when confronted with the straight-faced optimism of a classroom like this. Clearly, this is what we were paid to find, with the idea that our footage will have the same effect on viewers.

One dawn, Mathieu, Farid and I decide to hike up to the old city wall for a panoramic view. Mathieu has the constant, almost visceral craving for high, unobstructed wide shots that is common among good cameramen. To get to the crumbling ruin, we walk through a shantytown of mud brick houses. Several boys run out to accompany us. We climb on top of the wall, which runs precipitously down the side of the mountainous ridge that divides the city into two lobes. The boys tell us we shouldn’t go any farther, as there is a guard who haunts the other side of the hill, and he will be tempted to shoot at us if we continue. We are happy to stay put on the wall. From here, we can see Kabul stretching into the distance, a high flat plain ringed by bare mountains. Clouds of smog and dust rise towards the harsh morning sun.

In the town of Nasri, voters wait outside a mosque. An election worker checks registration cards at the door.

Fallout

Siri decides we should go to Bamiyan, the site of a pair of giant Buddha statues that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. There is a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) there, a small military base run by the New Zealand army. It is an irresistible opportunity to make a favorable contrast between the multinational forces and the Taliban.

Bamiyan is perhaps a hundred miles away, but it takes us twelve hours by van to negotiate the bumps and potholes of Afghanistan’s country roads. Between Kabul and Bamiyan, the landscape morphs. We rise through high, mountainous desert, almost totally devoid of vegetation, with giant toothy peaks looming in the distance. We pass drought-stricken villages with plowed fields of dust. Other villages are labyrinths of mud brick walls razed halfway to the ground. We spot an occasional Soviet tank lying destroyed beside the road, a vestige of the 1980s. Sometimes their cannon barrels are burnished and shining from years of being climbed by local children, or their sides are stenciled with advertisements (“Afghan tourism organization — Bamiyan Hotel”). Tank treads turn up as speed bumps on village roads. Spent shells appear as eaves holding up roofs, or as the edges of packed-earth porches.

We drive past healthier-looking villages of square adobe houses, puzzle-like assemblies of clay cubes nestled at the bottom of ridges. Children steer herds of goat and sheep, waving as we drive by. It is impossible to tell how old the houses are. Everything is made of baked, dust-covered earth. A ruined village: Was it left many decades ago to fall into disrepair? Or was it reduced to rubble in the civil war of the 1990s?

Thick clouds of powdery dust rise around us everywhere as we drive, entering the less-than-hermetically-sealed Super Extra. Soon all of us and our gear are the same color as the landscape. We wrap bandanas around our faces and Mathieu wraps a scarf around his video camera, the source of his livelihood, and clutches it to himself. “It’s alright, baby,” he croons. “It’ll be over soon.”
We reach the hotel in Bamiyan after dark, and in the morning we awake to the most inviting place we have seen in Afghanistan so far. The valley is a lively patchwork of green and earthy fields flanked by soaring rocky cliffs. The cliffs bear scores of little alcoves, carved by Buddhist monks fifteen hundred years ago. This rocky honeycomb houses three giant alcoves, the larger two of which once hosted Bamiyan’s famed Buddhas.

The Taliban achieved a special level of notoriety when they destroyed Bamiyan’s two giant Buddhas in early 2001. Perhaps more serious than the destruction of those ancient statues, though, were the attacks on the local people. In the ethnically Hazara region around Bamiyan, the rule of the Taliban, who are ethnic Pashtuns, was especially harsh. To tighten control over the region, they massacred locals and destroyed their communities.

Looming over one end of the valley are the ancient ruins of the hill fortress Gholghola — a labyrinthine citadel that eerily suggests Bosch’s image of the tower of Babel. In the 13th century, Genghis Khan laid siege to this fortress city as he took control of the valley. The death in combat of one of his grandsons made him even more brutal than usual, and when the city fell he slaughtered all its residents and laid waste to the surrounding valley. Only in Afghanistan, perhaps, do such tales not seem dusty and ancient. They live on in their modern versions: Russian gunships obliterating entire villages, Taliban massacres, giant statues falling from their ancient places in the cliffs — and, although I can’t tell which craters are which, U.S. bombs also figure in the litany of destruction.  Genghis Khan’s wrath was just a signpost on a bleak road that still stretches on.

Now that both Khan and the Taliban are gone, however, life is returning to Bamiyan.  Farid, who knows the town from earlier times, notices renewed life and activity. The central bazaar, a dirt road lined with two rows of trees, has doubled in size over the last year. It is now the bustling center of town, with a quorum of enthusiastic rug and trinket sellers that recalls the days, several decades past, when Afghanistan hosted more tourists than journalists. The story is perhaps not so rosy in other parts of the country, though, where the collapse of the Taliban’s strong central rule may have been politically liberating, but has also created an atmosphere of lawlessness that does little to help the common people. But lawlessness is not our beat, which is why we are in a place like Bamiyan.

Dragon slaying

Even in Bamiyan, times of relative peace have a military undercurrent. On a hill just opposite Gholghola is a New Zealand military base. We spend some time following a patrol, the Super Extra falling in line with the convoy. After recording a good amount of friendly-soldiers-interact-with-peaceful-locals footage, the Kiwis take us to the Valley of the Dragon for some heavily armed sightseeing.

According to local legend, the valley is named for a dragon that used to terrorize the villagers. A prince, with a single blow of his sword, hewed the beast into two rocky halves separated by a narrow fissure. The valley is a wide, forbidding gorge of Martian rock and dust. At the end, the ground rises steeply to close off the basin with a high, rocky ridge — the dragon’s carcass. To climb the precipice, we abandon our overheating Super Extra for military pickups, bumping and jolting as we ascend the dragon’s side. At the top, the soldiers kindly set up a perimeter to guard our sightseeing. On our right lies the gigantic, empty expanse of the valley. On the left, the ridge descends gradually to a bleak stretch of desert peppered with two shepherds and a dozen motley sheep.

On the road back to Kabul, we come across a village road crowded with people eagerly awaiting a campaign visit from Mohaqiq, one of the major presidential candidates. In a few minutes, as if on cue, the crowd starts to clap. At the bottom of the hill appears a green sport-utility vehicle with the candidate standing in the sunroof. The SUV creeps forward, a handful of machine-gun bearing guards surrounding it. The crowd mobs the truck. A man in sunglasses is screaming slogans into a microphone. Mathieu and I fight our way back and forth to get different shots.

Mohaqiq eventually dismounts from his SUV and makes his way over the side of the road towards a field where his fans will convene. When we reach the edge of the road, I see the rocks are spattered with blood. A sacrificed sheep, still kicking, lies at an old man’s feet, opened at the throat, glistening red in the sun. The man, wizened and toothy, salutes the camera, smiling as he raises his palms skyward, the knife dripping, his hands covered with blood.

After voting, two burqa-clad women return to their village.

Day of anticipation

Back in Kabul, Election Day dawns with a strange, yellow sky. There has been a dust storm during the night, and the sun is invisible behind an ochre haze. Wisps of sand swirl across the city’s eerily deserted streets. Finally the moment is here, when all hell is supposed to break lose, vindicating the months of media hype.

We drive north to visit polling places in the countryside. Next to a low-slung adobe mosque in the village of Nasri, crowds of men mill around and talk. There are no women — voting is segregated, and Nasri’s women are casting their ballots at a polling station up the road.  Two Afghan policemen sit on chairs in a field to the side, AK-47s resting across their laps. Snaking into the green-framed doorway is a line of men. At the entrance, a local man with a blue polyester U.N. vest checks registration cards and thumbs. Each voter gets his registration card punched and his thumb painted with indelible ink, which ensures that only one vote will be cast per person. We later learn this system has been bungled in some parts of the country, leading to charges of fraud.

The hush inside the mosque brings a sacred air to an otherwise secular ritual. Yellow plastic tape divides the room into two voting sections. After checking in at one table (and getting his thumb painted), each man goes to another table to get his ballot — a long, green sheet of paper. The photograph of each of the 18 candidates appears next to each name, accommodating the 70-odd percent of Afghans who are illiterate.

The men working the polling station have put on the slightly huffy air of the petty bureaucrat, but otherwise are indistinguishable from the townspeople casting their votes. At the ballot table, one man in a white Afghan cap dutifully folds each ballot and marks it with an official stamp before handing it to the voter, explaining with an upraised finger that they must remember to fold it up again before emerging from the curtained voting booth. After ducking under the curtain for a short while, each man emerges and tucks his ballot into a large plastic bin, which is guarded by another election worker. Through the clear plastic, we can see it slowly filling up with ballots.

Up the road, Siri is allowed into a women’s polling station with a small camcorder. The women all arrive draped in burqas, but inside the polling station, they throw them back like shawls as they shuttle from the check-in table to the booths to the ballot box. The polling station supervisor, a woman called Najiba, interprets for Siri as she asks a pair of women what they think of their first election. “I’m happy to vote,” says one. “I hope for a peaceful country where our children can get an education.” The woman next to her adds, “We want peace and stability and a free country.”

“They are very happy,” adds Najiba in halting English, beaming. “They say, ‘We were waiting for such a day, that we can come and put [our votes] in the box.’ They look happy.”

They do look happy, and they are making our job surprisingly easy. At the other voting sites we visit — indeed, at polling stations all across the country, we later learn — the scene is peaceful, almost beatific. We ask several men for their impressions, and they reel off answers that George Bush should have monogrammed on his suit lapels:

“Elections means selecting someone who will help the country and the poor. I have made my choice from the ballot, and I hope my candidate will win.”

“It was completely confidential. Nobody checked my ballot. I voted they way I wanted to, and I’m very pleased.”

“We’re happy to have these elections after 23 years of war. We cast our ballots without being told whom to vote for, and everyone has voted according to his own choice.”

I feel like I’ve been cornered into PR heaven. Where is the bitterness? Where is the distrust? The worst we have found is a certain resignation, born from experience, that the United States and its allies may leave and allow another civil war. But under the circumstances, such a wait-and-see attitude seems remarkably hopeful, if not idealistic.

When we return to the guesthouse, we will watch BBC and CNN on satellite TV. The international media will focus initially on failures of the Afghan election system — ink that rubs off thumbs, voters with multiple registrations — before noting the miraculous: no polling places have been attacked, and turnout has been heavy, especially considering the climate of fear during the campaign.

The election seems to have been a great leap of faith on the part of the Afghans. But does it represent a turning point for their country? I wonder how much relevance a peaceful election has for a country beset by warlords and overwhelmed with poverty and illiteracy. I suppose it is naive to be optimistic.

Cruising back to Kabul, I watch from the windows of the Super Extra. As a landscape of destroyed buildings slides by, painted with the white checkmarks and red stripes of the de-mining crews, I quietly hope Afghanistan’s good news will continue.

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Middle East Heroes


The tentacular reach and popularity of the graphic novel now extends to the Middle East with the first comic book specifically targeted for the audience in the region — AK Comics’ Middle East Heroes line of comic books, which is published in both Arabic and English, pits forces of good and evil for control of the City of All Faiths.

“We need to believe in a higher being that will be there for help, and can affect change on his own. There is a global and human need for that,” explained Marwan Nashar, managing editor at AK Comics.

The main characters — two men and two women — include Jalila, The Defender of City of All the Faiths; Aya, the Princess of Darkness; Rakan, the Lone Warrior; and Zein, the Last Pharaoh, who was spirited out of his pharonic age by a time capsule. The generous gender balance and the very literal strength of the female characters — the female Jalila has the most powerful abilities — is proving stunningly popular with women, and the comic book appears to be enjoying widespread general appeal. Al-Ahram Weekly recently ran an article about the comic with the cheerful title “My Favorite Superhero,” which quoted a 27-year-old business analyst explaining the appeal of the comic: “The setting is familiar and most characters’ names are Arabic … it’s just easier to connect.”  

The comic book seems set to enjoy even wider distribution, if not popularity; the AK Comics website gleefully notes that EgyptAir has agreed to a first-of-its-kind deal to dole out 20,000 AK Comics magazines on their flights.  

—Mimi Hanaoka

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Walking in another’s shoes


issue banner

Between work, family, friends, and significant others, most of us are forced to relate to people with whom we don’t see eye-to-eye on a daily basis. But as daily media coverage of distant places like Iraq suggests, the struggle to relate to others is also a global one, as we deal with differences both unfamiliar and surprisingly similar.

In this month’s issue of InTheFray, we examine some of these struggles to see eye-to-eye with people who can often seem to be a world apart — even when they’re just a few inches away. At home in the United States, Stacy Torian takes a look at the difficulties faced by working class academics, who can lack the resources and pedigrees of their more privileged peers, in “Breaking through the class ceiling.” Former prescription drug addict Alexis Luna, meanwhile, exposes her own struggle to get over “The joy of six milligrams” and to have healthier relationships with people — including herself.

On the subject of illness, Chip Chipman illuminates how the spirit of the legendary uniter and healer, Mother Theresa, lives on after her death. Through his vivid photographs, Chipman reveals Mother Theresa’s impact on San Francisco masseuse Mary Ann Finch, who runs a massage institute for the homeless, in “Touching the untouchables.”

Halfway around the world, two ITF contributors share their struggles to relate to others in the Middle East and Africa. Writing in a time of war, Andrew Blackwell shares the skepticism he felt while producing pro-Western video clips during Afghanistan’s first election in“Democracy, Middle East-style.”

Providing insight on the role everyday practices play in reminding us of what it means to be alive, ITF Contributing Artist Josh Arseneau shares his photographs from the Gambia.

Rounding out this month’s stories is ITF Assistant Managing Editor and Columnist Russell Cobb’s “Go ahead, make my next four years,” an insightful look at the Religious Right’s inability to transform Hollywood’s liberal ways — despite harsh criticism of Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning film “Million Dollar Baby.”

Coming later this month: stories celebrating women’s history. And in April, check back for an issue concerning belonging — something we all know about, for better or worse.

Laura Nathan, InTheFray Editor
Brooklyn, New York

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Quote of note


“I am concerned that the public may start to wonder: ‘Well what is a journalist and isn’t it all kind of a scam somewhere on the payroll, some seem to work for partisan organizations’ … I fear they may question all of journalism, it’s kind of a con game and a sham and that would be unfortunate.”

— Matthew Cooper, Time White House correspondent, speaking about the perception of journalists in the aftermath of the Jeff Gannon scandal.  

Bloggers recently unmasked Jeff Gannon, who had been installed in the White House as a correspondent for a media outlet, as a journalistic fraud; his real name is James Guckert, the ostensibly responsible media outlet for which he reported, Talon News, has been exposed as a Republican mouthpiece and has now been taken offline, and lurid accounts that link Guckert to pornographic websites have now surfaced.  

Bloggers began to research and subsequently expose Guckert after he asked President Bush the leading question that was too transparently partisan to evade scrutiny: “Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the US economy … How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”

—Mimi Hanaoka

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News

Breaking through the class ceiling

Working-class academics question the Academy’s diversity.


(Illustration by David Benque)

Cold, drenched, and hanging from a telephone pole on a rainy March day 16 years ago, Cathy Mulder decided she’d had enough.

Mulder had been with the telephone company for 11 years and was active in the union.  This was her sixth year as a cable splicer, a dangerous but well-paying position she landed after filing numerous gender discrimination complaints.

“I found myself hanging from a pole and decided I could do more for workers than getting soaked,” says Mulder, a 46-year-old labor studies professor with a straight-shooting Jersey accent. A year after the revelation on the pole, the Teaneck, New Jersey native quit her job and went back to school full-time. Two years later, she graduated summa cum laude from Stockton State College with a bachelor’s degree in economics.

Spurred on by her Stockton State professors, Mulder went on to do something she never thought she would do: She enrolled at Temple University and started pursuing a Ph.D. After two years at Temple, she took a terminal master’s and transferred to the University of Massachusetts to finish her doctorate. She has passed her comprehensive exams and is now completing her dissertation.

While race and gender diversity among university faculty and graduate students has increased substantially in recent decades, class diversity has lagged behind, making stories like Mulder’s less than typical. Many working-class academics say it is still unusual to find a Ph.D. colleague who is not the child of a doctor, lawyer, corporate executive or other middle-class professional. Working-class Ph.D.’s have written papers, dissertations, and even books about feeling out of place and misunderstood in the ivory tower.

Since for most fields, graduate school is the only route to becoming a professor, class bias within doctoral programs must necessarily translate into a bias in faculty hiring. But trying to get a statistical handle on that bias is nearly impossible. None of the organizations contacted for this article — the National Center for Education Statistics, The College Board, and UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) — could provide statistics on the class backgrounds of graduate students. Information on faculty class backgrounds is also tough to find. However, the studies that do exist indicate, as expected, a strong middle-class bias among the nation’s professoriate.

When Seymour Lipset and Everett Ladd analyzed the results of the 1969 Carnegie Commission on Higher Education Faculty Survey in their 1979 paper “The Changing Social Origins of American Academics,” they found that roughly 60 percent of the fathers of the over 60,000 survey respondents came from professional, managerial, and business backgrounds, while only 25 percent were “of working-class origin.”
Looking at faculty makeup in the 15 years following the Lipset and Ladd study, researchers Joseph Stetar and Martin Finkelstein reported in 1997 that the percentage of faculty from professional and managerial-class families had scarcely changed between 1969 and 1984, although the class demographics of university students changed “significantly” during that time to include more students from low-income families.

In 2001, Kenneth Oldfield, an emeritus professor of public administration at the University of Illinois at Springfield, and Richard Conant from the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, conducted a small-scale survey of the faculty at a Big Ten university. Over half of the 567 professors who responded said they had parents who were doctors, lawyers, or other professionals. Less than 2 percent of the respondents said their parents had jobs in the lowest 20 percent of the socioeconomic scale, in fields like farm work or dry cleaning.

What education destroys

Many people who identify themselves as working-class cite a family history of jobs involving manual labor, service work, and rock-bottom pay. Some, like Mulder, have earned a good living working with their hands. However, the social status of a well-paid manual laborer can be quite different from that of a well-paid white-collar worker.  

Growing up, Mulder used to accompany her father, a plumber, to his weekend jobs. She says that although he earned as much or more than many of the people in the suburb where she grew up, she was “treated differently” because she was a plumber’s daughter.

For Mulder, being working class is about more than money. It is about knowing how to “get your hands dirty,” something she thinks many Ph.D.’s have little experience doing.

Carolyn Law is an editor with fellow working-class academic, C. L. Barney Dews, of This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, a book that features narratives of scholars from working-class and poor backgrounds. She observes, “For poor and working-class people, access to higher education is all about class.”

In This Fine Place, Law and Dews examine the “oxymoron” of the working-class academic label. In theory, earning a Ph.D. should propel a person into the middle class. It is not that simple, however. A college degree does not change a person’s past, and many working-class intellectuals feel deeply connected to their blue-collar roots.

Law still remembers the conversation she had years ago with her mother, a widow who worked a number of low-paying jobs to keep the family going after her husband died. “Education destroys something,” she told her daughter. Law agrees. “It was a break, and it did break something,” she says.

“It comes out in the way I talk. I can hear myself as different from my family now.” To illustrate her point, she contrasts what she calls her “higher education-educated accent” with the Ozark hillbilly twang of her relatives.

Law did graduate work in modern literature at the University of Minnesota, but left the school to pursue a full-time editing career. Her most shocking encounter with class in the classroom occurred while she was an undergraduate in Missouri. The professors in her education courses often talked about “at-risk” children — kids who have no books at home and whose parents do not read to them. Such kids, they warned, would always be a “problem” in the classroom.

“They kept painting this picture of a culturally deprived and deficient home that created this culture of at-risk children,” Law remembers. “And I was one of them.” That was the moment when she concluded that “to be valued in society, I’d have to shift my allegiance. I’d have to buy into the professors’ message, and turn a very critical eye on my home life.”

Law, who was raised in a home with no books, said the professors’ words made her ashamed and ambivalent. “You, on the one hand, hate your past, but want to defend it,” she explains. Her experience might explain why it is so difficult to pin down numbers of working-class Ph.D.’s. Scholars who study the class dynamics of academia use the phrase “class closet” to describe the mentality of Ph.D.’s from working-class and poor families who refuse to talk about their class origins out of fear that their middle-class colleagues will look down on them.

Hidden bigotry

Some working-class Ph.D.’s, like Marjorie Gurganus, think their professional progress has been hindered by middle-class colleagues who buy into negative class stereotypes. Gurganus is a law student who spends her spare time doing pro bono tax work in low-income communities. Before starting law school, she earned her Ph.D. in genetics at North Carolina State University. Her father made his living as a factory maintenance worker while pursuing his law degree at night. Though he eventually finished law school and set up his own practice, he never made much money as a lawyer, and the family still qualified for food stamps.

Gurganus, who worked at McDonald’s for two years while in high school, recalls one Ph.D. who would make fun of her for having worked at a fast-food job. She says that, instead of being impressed by her hardscrabble skills and work ethic, ”He was just horrified” and viewed her as “a contamination” in the lab. She thinks academics from working-class and poor backgrounds take a professional risk when they talk to colleagues about past jobs or problems with money. “Some of them have always worked in a nice, clean place that was always advancing their career,” says the Jacksonville, North Carolina native, who did her undergraduate work at Cornell University. She thinks some middle-class Ph.D.’s have trouble relating to people who have to “deliver pizzas for eight dollars an hour rather than work in a lab for five” just to make enough money to buy groceries. “They start viewing you as someone who has these problems,” she says.

Gurganus left the genetics field in part because she was unsuccessful in landing a position as a professor, a circumstance she feels was partly related to her class background. She describes the Ph.D.’s she was competing with as “more established.” She says many of them already had the standard middle-class accoutrements — “a home, a couple of cars, a stable family, hobbies” — in addition to strong scientific backgrounds. Gurganus believes that, when choosing among candidates with near-equal academic credentials, middle-class professors have little incentive to hire someone from the working classes. She sums up the mindset this way: “If there are several of you who are smart, why take the one who doesn’t have the same background as me?”  

Blue-collar bonding

There is an irony inherent in academic elitism. After all, school is supposed to help level the playing field for people from economically underprivileged backgrounds. Students from working-class and poor families often expect a college education to increase their professional options and provide them with opportunities that their parents did not have. When that optimism butts with class realities, the effects can be painfully disillusioning.

Barbara Peters is a working-class academic from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who teaches sociology at Long Island University’s Southampton College. “When you’re brought up in working-class and poverty-class situations, you’re taught that education is the ticket out,” she says. “It’s like Nirvana: You’re going to go to college, and your life is going to change. So you’re kind of idealistic.”

Acknowledging that a degree doesn’t offer the access it seems to promise, in 1993, Peters founded an online support group called Working-Class Academics, where professors, Ph.D. students, and independent scholars can discuss what it feels like to be working-class in academia. The group, which started with just 25 members, now has between 250 and 300.

“It’s probably the thing I’m most proud of in my academic career,” says Peters, whose mother was a school cook.

Not everyone is impressed by her activism, however. Peters’s views were once challenged during an online discussion with fellow intellectuals. One person criticized the concept of class labels, saying that people change classes throughout their lives. The same person said that she herself had chosen to be working-class by taking a job as a waitress.

“If you chose to be working class, then you aren’t working class,” Peters replied. That exchange prompted Peters to start the Working-Class Academics list.

Peters, who walks with crutches due to a degenerative arthritis condition, points out that being disabled adds another dimension to her concerns about discrimination. She also notes the challenges faced by women and people of color in the academy. “It’s a matrix of oppression,” she concludes.

Despite the criticism she has faced (some have called her a “reverse classist”), Peters is determined to keep reaching out to working-class intellectuals. “We are here. It would be wonderful if people from the upper classes would listen.” Citing growth in the Working-Class Academics list’s membership, she adds, “I think there are more working-class academics out there than we’d even realized.”

Money too tight to mention

While in graduate school, Amy Feistel worked multiple research assistantships to avoid taking out loans she knew she could never repay. She says she was criticized for spending too much time at work and not enough time on her studies. She remembers one scholar telling her that she was “not cut out for academic work” and would “be better as support personnel than as a scholar.”

Such comments did little to bolster Feistel’s image of herself as an academic. “I felt like I was not provided with the appropriate support to build the analytical skills required to be a scholar,” she says.

Feistel, whose parents struggled to support five children on modest missionary salaries, did graduate work in cultural politics at a top-ranked university. Her family history reveals a mix of classes. She describes her father’s relations as upper-middle-class and college educated, “with well-provided, secure futures.” Relatives on her mother’s side, however, have always had financial problems, often raising large numbers of children on low military salaries.

While Feistel appreciates the support she received from some of her professors, she insists that “one or two people hardly make up for a difficult system.” She adds, “I have always been forthright about my circumstances, but have found the circumstances often make others uncomfortable.”

For working-class academics with few financial resources, the economic obstacles to graduate education begin long before the courses start. “It’s just difficult at every step of the way.” says Paige Adams, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Baylor University. She had to scrape together nearly $100 just to take the GRE, a large investment for a woman who waited tables, taught aerobics, and took out $35,000 in loans to finance her undergraduate degree at the University of Houston. She handwrote all of her applications to graduate school because she could not afford a computer. To make matters worse, some of the schools to which she applied did not offer application fee waivers.

“This whole idea that you have to have all of this money upfront puts aspiring working-class scholars at a disadvantage from the start,” Adams insists.

Most Ph.D. students put up with long hours and low pay as teaching and research assistants. However, Adams thinks those from working-class and poor families have it especially hard. “Most people I knew in graduate school had parents that helped them out,” she says. “There weren’t a lot of students there from poor families.”

Feistel remarks, “Working-class academics face the usual issues that all academics face, but I believe the issues are exacerbated by the concerns for daily living: income, housing, food, transportation.”

Jennifer Gibbons, a pharmacology Ph.D. student at Duke University, relates, “I find that many people here in graduate school went to private high schools, or at least large schools where they had the opportunity to have honors classes and take Advanced Placement tests.” Her own high school offered “no real honors classes” and only one AP test: English. The Indiana native continues, “I feel as if I had very many lost opportunities at my school, but had no choice — my parents couldn’t afford to send me anywhere else.”

Carol Williams, a professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, felt similarly disadvantaged coming into graduate school. “Poor results on the GRE is perhaps where I felt most disabled coming to graduate school initially,” Williams recounts. “I felt I came to the exam already lacking basic skills. No account is taken in standard testing for cultural or economic differences, and I feel this favors not only Caucasians, but those from wealth.”

A different world

Sociology professor Michael Schwalbe relaxes in his paper-packed office where a poster for his book, Remembering Reet and Shine, a biography of two working-class African American men living in the South, hangs near the door. Sporting shorts and sneakers, he talks about his journey from Boys Technical School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “I haven’t pursued my career in a conventional way,” says Schwalbe. On his way to becoming an academic, Schwalbe worked as a mechanic, a bartender, a music promoter, and a nature writer.

He calls his decision to buck family tradition and pursue a non-vocational path “risky but freeing,” though he admits he was a little lost at first. “I didn’t know what you do to become a professor.” When he decided to pursue his Ph.D., he considered only two schools: Washington State University for its natural surroundings and the University of Texas at Austin for its folk rock music scene. That way, he figured, if the sociology path did not work out, he could easily pursue one of his other passions. He did not even consider applying to the prestigious University of California at Berkeley, though one of his professors urged him to do so. At that time, Schwalbe had no concept of what he calls “the prestige factor,” and how going to a school like Berkeley might influence his professional future.

Most of the working-class Ph.D.’s interviewed for this article say they grew up knowing much less about the academic world in general than their middle-class peers. “You mean there’s school after this school?” was working-class academic Beverly Rockhill’s reaction when her undergraduate cohorts at Princeton started talking about doing a Ph.D.

The language of academia shocked Jodie Lawston more than anything. “They were talking very theoretically and using language I had never even dreamed of,” recalls the sunny-voiced Long Island native. She describes the students in her graduate program as being from wealthy families and “worlds ahead” in terms of vocabulary. Lawston found their theoretical lingo intimidating at first, but now pokes fun at the bulky phrases. Her answering machine greeting instructs unsuspecting callers to leave their name, phone number, and “a brief ontological explanation of women’s existential dilemmas.”

“The academy is a place for ideas and not for activists.”

During one of her graduate seminars, Lawston suggested that scholars put social theory into practice. According to her, a classmate erupted, “The academy is a place for ideas and not for activists.” Lawston was stunned. She later heard a similar comment from another colleague.

Lawston, whose father is a construction worker, grew up having to deal with things like the phone being disconnected and the heat being cut off in the middle of the winter. “We were not philosophizing at the dinner table,” she laughs. She thinks some of her middle-class counterparts take a hands-off attitude toward social activism because they have not had to do without basic necessities. “Even though they study classism, that’s all they do — study it.” she says. “They don’t really struggle with it.”

Working-class academics themselves struggle with it in different ways. Monique Lyle, a Ph.D. student in Duke University’s political science department, remembers being “really class-conscious” when she began her studies at the elite school. But for Lyle, class has always been a question of both money and race. “In a lot of ways, class distinctions are along racial lines,” notes Lyle, who is black.

Jason Allen, an assistant research professor at Duke, came to the United States from Barnsley, England, and earned his doctorate in exercise physiology from Louisiana State University. He lives with his pal, Gordon, a tomcat who paws for attention during our phone interview. Allen sums up the difference between the United States’ and England’s ideas about class this way: “In England, they care where you came from. In America, they care where you’re going.” Allen thinks American class distinctions are based more on money than birth, but, like Lyle, he also believes those distinctions are impacted heavily by race.

Allen, whose mother works in a bakery factory, has found that many American academics hold British people in high regard. He believes the Yorkshire accent that might have hindered his professional advancement in his native land actually worked to his advantage here in the States. “I moved from working-class to upper-middle class in the blink of an eye,” he says.

The discomfort of straddling

Several working-class academics speak of feeling torn between the world of their families and that of their peers. Carol Williams had a tough time explaining her academic ambitions to her mother. “When I was raising money to attend my program in a master’s degree in England, she stated, ‘Why all this trouble and pain to get a few letters after your name?’” Williams recalls. “She didn’t comprehend the motives for advanced education, nor did she understand what exactly we did there.”

Lyle has had similar troubles. “[My mom] thinks I talk like a white girl,” she laughs. Though she has a strong relationship with her family and loves going home, she does not think they have a real sense of what she does. She feels removed from her extended family and worries that she does not fit in with the black working-class community where she grew up.

Despite the challenges they face, most of the working-class Ph.D.’s interviewed say they benefited from going to graduate school. “I just had a great graduate school experience,” says Adams. “I had a great job, a great boss  …  It just felt like a family. I made a lot of good friends.”

Like Adams’, most of Mulder’s experiences in academia have been positive. Still, Mulder admits, “I don’t know anybody else like me.” Mulder now teaches labor studies to workers and unionists at a satellite campus of Indiana University, a job she got in part because of her unusual life path. “That’s precisely why they hired me,” she notes. “There are not too many Ph.D.’s that know how to be a worker.”

The hybrid advantage

The same family relationships that can complicate a working-class Ph.D.’s relationship to academia can also be a vital source of support. In working-class families where no one has attended college, there is often a sense of vicarious accomplishment in watching one of their own go all the way.

Paige Adams’ mother has been her biggest cheerleader, urging her to pursue the college education she herself always wanted. “She always felt that she missed out by not going to college,” says Adams.  

Jodie Lawston thought of dropping out many times during those first few years of graduate school, but her mother’s words helped her stay the course: “You gotta do it ‘cause we never did.”

In the end, having a foot in both worlds might be one of the working-class academic’s greatest assets. “I’m resigned to a sort of hybrid status, which, as I grow older, I recognize gives me a unique and under-represented intellectual perspective on many issues,” Rockhill says.

Feistel, who now works in educational administration, says her experiences have made her more understanding of the challenges facing working-class students. “I’m in a better position to understand a working-class student,” she remarks. “I’ve been on both sides of the system, and I know how the system works.”

“Mostly what makes me different is a consciousness of what work really means,” adds Law, whose father made his living digging basements with a bulldozer. “To hear some tenured professor talk about their work environment like they’re some kind of miner  …  it really hurts me.”

Other working-class academics, like Schwalbe and Allen, say their life experiences have made them extremely adaptable. “You can move in almost any environment and function with almost any group of people,” says Allen.

Jodie Lawston, who felt “so inferior” to her middle-class colleagues when she started graduate school, now views her working-class background as an asset. “I think it gives you a stronger perspective on everything. I think you’re able to relate to people better,” she says.

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