Category — In the news

SJSU’s RAINN Day participants won Cosmopolitan Magazine’s national “Cosmo Fights Campus Rape” Magazine Multimedia Contest!

SJSU’s team created a terrific Flash Mob to the music of Glee…congrats to Bonnie Sugiyama, Jennifer Momi Gacutan-Galang, Kyle Burt, Yan Yin K. Choy, Amarissa Mathews, Rose Fried, Staci D. Gunner, Chris Hernandez, and #SJSUMadeYaLook, among others.

When we launched our Cosmo Fights Campus Rape campaign earlier this year, our goal was to end the epidemic of sexual violence at colleges and to encourage schools to update their sexual assault policy requirements. As part of this campaign, we teamed up with RAINN (Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network), the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the country, to hold the RAINN Day/Cosmo Magazine Multimedia Contest 2011. The idea was for students to boost awareness of sexual violence and RAINN through events such as benefit concerts, art projects, or roundtable discussions. The winner, which was announced this week, is San Jose State University’s flash mob… (from RAINN Day Cosmo Contest Winner 2011)

We have lost another brilliant, visionary African feminist thinker, Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai, a leader who fused the needs of local women with feminism, civil rights, and environmental sustainability. I am so sad about this loss.

I particularly enjoyed sharing Wangari’s story with my daughter in this wonderful children’s book we read about Wangari that details her childhood in a Kenyan village, her education, and her return to the village to identify the loss of forests, village lands, and her work with other women to re-plant and re-shape the villages, one tree at a time, despite police and government harassment.  Wangari is and always will be our hero.

Details about Wangari’s passing are below. Also, here is a 2004 interview with her daughter Wanjira after Wangari was awarded the peace prize, and here is a link to the Greenbelt Movement website which Wangari founded.

CNN writes:

World leaders have paid tribute to Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai who passed away while having treatment for ovarian cancer on Monday.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu praised Maathai as a true “visionary African woman” and called her a “leading voice on the continent.”

He said: “Professor Maathai introduced the idea of women planting trees in Kenya to reduce poverty and conserve the environment,” in a statement released via his office.

“At last count, the Green Belt Movement she helped to found had assisted women to plant more than 40 million trees. She understood and acted on the inextricable links between poverty, rights and environmental sustainability. One can but marvel at her foresight and the scope of her success. She was a true African heroine,” the statement continued.

“Our condolences go to Professor Maathai’s family, to the people of Kenya, and to the countless women (and men) across Africa and the world to whom she was an inspiration.”

Story continues here

Professor Ruth P. Wilson, Chair, Department of African-American Studies forwarded this entry, writing:

by Lewis R. Gordon
Reprinted from Truthout.org

Lewis R. Gordon is the Laura H. Carnell professor of philosophy and Jewish studies and director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the famed African-American literary scholar and director of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, recently reflected the following in an interview on National Public Radio: If it weren’t for affirmative action, he would not have been admitted to Yale University, regardless of how high his credentials were and he would not have had the opportunities to demonstrate his talent over the past four decades.(1)

Gates’ admission reflects a fundamental problem with affirmative action. It works.

I had the opportunity to reflect on that out loud in a discussion at the Race and Higher Education conference in Grahamstown last month when I asked: “Are there no mediocre white people in South Africa? Is every white person hired, every white person offered admission to institutions of learning, an excellent candidate?”

My rhetorical question was premised upon what Gates and many other highly achieved blacks know and that is the myth of white supremacy is the subtext of the “qualifications” narrative that accompanies debates on affirmative action. [Read more →]

SJSU Women’s Studies Professor Susana Gallardo was featured last Wednesday night on a Los Angeles radio show, Feminist Magazine, at KPFK  Radio (click here to listen, starts at 21:00).  Hosts Ariana Manov and Celina Alvarez interviewed her about her website Chicanas.com, an online educational resource for and about Mexican American women.  ”I created the website in 1996 so that anyone could have access to the history and issues I was learning about in graduate school,” said Prof Gallardo.  She recently redesigned and updated the site.

On the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, the Global Fund for Women (GFW) looks back over the past year and celebrates some of the extraordinary victories won by women’s movements around the world. From progressive new national and international legislation to mass mobilizations for peace, we celebrate the hard work of our grantee partners. These 10 victories remind us that despite enormous odds, women are paving the way to a more just and equal world.

#1  Domestic Workers to Win Workers’ Rights

Despite restrictive working conditions and limited infrastructure, domestic workers worldwide organized, advocated for, and won a victory in June that began the process through the International Labor Organization (ILO) to extend basic labor protections to millions of women employed in other people’s homes.

List continues here »

Hisaye Yamamoto, one of the first Asian American writers to earn literary distinction after World War II with highly polished short stories that illuminated a world circumscribed by culture and brutal strokes of history, has died. She was 89.Yamamoto had been in poor health since a stroke last year and died in her sleep Jan. 30 at her home in northeast Los Angeles, said her daughter, Kibo Knight.

Often compared to such short-story masters as Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O’Connor and Grace Paley, Yamamoto concentrated her imagination on the issei and nisei, the first- and second-generation Japanese Americans who were targets of the public hysteria unleashed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Yamamoto was 20 when the attack sent the United States into war and her family into a Poston, Ariz., internment camp. Her most celebrated stories, such as “Seventeen Syllables” and “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” reflect the preoccupations and tensions of the Japanese immigrants and offspring who survived that era. Among her most powerful characters are women who struggle to nurture their romantic or creative selves despite the constraints of gender, racism and tradition.

“She wrote in a true voice,” said Wakako Yamauchi, the Japanese American dramatist who wrote “And the Soul Shall Dance” and had known Yamamoto since childhood. “She wrote about what she knew and that was about us — Asians, Japanese Americans. Her stories were wonderful, beautiful legacies.”

A private, somewhat taciturn woman with a wry outlook, Yamamoto began writing in the 1930s and published her earliest stories in such prestigious journals as Partisan Review as well as in anthologies, including “The Best American Short Stories of 1952.” But she did not receive serious critical attention until the 1970s, when Asian American scholars began to study her work.

“She was the opposite of the self-promoting writer,” said UCLA English professor King-Kok Cheung, recalling a woman who often responded cryptically, if at all, to questions and lacked flair in public readings. Yet Yamamoto was, Cheung notes, “a very unusual writer, especially given the times, when it was so hard for a Japanese American, not to mention a woman, to publish.”

Obituary continues at the Los Angeles Times

Newsreporter Amy Goodman interviews Egyptian Feminist Nawal El Saadawi.  An excerpt:

NAWAL EL SAADAWI: We are in the streets every day, people, children, old people, including myself. I am now 80 years of age, suffering of this regime for half a century. And you remember, Mubarak is the  continuation of Sadat. And both Sadat and Mubarak, you know, their regime worked against the people, men and women. And they created this gap between the poor and rich. They brought the so-called business class to govern us. Egypt became an American colony. And we are dominated by the U.S. and Israel. And 80 million people, men and women, have no say in the country.

And you see today that people in the streets for six days, and they told Mubarak to go. He should have gone, if he respects the will of the people. That’s democracy. Because what’s democracy? It’s to respect the will of the people. The people govern themselves. So, really, we are happy.

But what I would like to tell you, the U.S. government, with Israel and Saudi Arabia and some other powers outside the country and inside the country, they want to abort this revolution. And they are creating rumors that, you know, Egypt is going to be ruined, to be robbed, and they are also preventing—we don’t have bread now, and the shops are using this to raise the price. So they are trying to frighten us. They have two strategies: to frighten the people, so we say, “Oh, we need security, we need Mubarak,” because people are living in fear. But when I go to the streets, there are no fear, you know, but when I stay at home and listen to the media, I feel, “What’s going to happen?” But when I go to the streets, to Midan Tahrir, and see the people, the young people, the old people, the men, I feel secure, and I believe that the revolution succeeded. So, they are trying to abort the power outside and inside. But we will win.

NAWAL EL SAADAWI: We are in the streets every day, people, children, old people, including myself. I am now 80 years of age, suffering of this regime for half a century. And you remember, Mubarak is the continuation of Sadat. And both Sadat and Mubarak, you know, their regime worked against the people, men and women. And they created this gap between the poor and rich. They brought the so-called business class to govern us. Egypt became an American colony. And we are dominated by the U.S. and Israel. And 80 million people, men and women, have no say in the country.And you see today that people in the streets for six days, and they told Mubarak to go. He should have gone, if he respects the will of the people. That’s democracy. Because what’s democracy? It’s to respect the will of the people. The people govern themselves. So, really, we are happy.But what I would like to tell you, the U.S. government, with Israel and Saudi Arabia and some other powers outside the country and inside the country, they want to abort this revolution. And they are creating rumors that, you know, Egypt is going to be ruined, to be robbed, and they are also preventing—we don’t have bread now, and the shops are using this to raise the price. So they are trying to frighten us. They have two strategies: to frighten the people, so we say, “Oh, we need security, we need Mubarak,” because people are living in fear. But when I go to the streets, there are no fear, you know, but when I stay at home and listen to the media, I feel, “What’s going to happen?” But when I go to the streets, to Midan Tahrir, and see the people, the young people, the old people, the men, I feel secure, and I believe that the revolution succeeded. So, they are trying to abort the power outside and inside. But we will win.

Interview continues at Democracy Now

In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 languages? Sure.

But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

Articles continues at NYT

Health officials in Israel are subjecting many female Ethiopian immigrants to a controversial long-term birth control drug in what Israeli women’s groups allege is a racist policy to reduce the number of black babies. The contraceptive, known as Depo Provera, which is given by injection every three months, is considered by many doctors as a birth control method of last resort because of problems treating its side effects.

However, according to a report published last week, use of the contraceptive by Israeli doctors has risen threefold over the past few years. Figures show that 57 per cent of Depo Provera users in Israel are Ethiopian, even though the community accounts for less than two per cent of the total population.

About 90,000 Ethiopians have been brought to Israel under the Law of Return since the 1980s, but their Jewishness has subsequently been questioned by some rabbis and is doubted by many ordinary Israelis. Ethiopians are reported to face widespread discrimination in jobs, housing and education and it recently emerged that their blood donations were routinely discarded.

“This is about reducing the number of births in a community that is black and mostly poor,” said Hedva Eyal, the author of the report by Woman to Woman, a feminist organisation based in Haifa, in northern Israel. “The unspoken policy is that only children who are white and Ashkenazi are wanted in Israel,” she said, referring to the term for European Jews who founded Israel and continue to dominate its institutions.

Story continues here