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)

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.”

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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.

When I was tenured at Brown University, the process required evaluations of my work from five referees. Expected performance was a published monograph, several articles, satisfactory teaching, service and signs of international recognition. My dossier had the following: three monographs (one of which won a book award for outstanding work on human rights in North America), an edited book, a co-edited book, 40 articles (several of which had gone in reprint in international volumes), two teaching awards and service that included heading a committee that recruited 23 scholars of color to the university. The process for my promotion and tenure was dragged out because of continued requests for more referees. The number grew to 17.

There was a comparable white candidate in the philosophy department. He also supposedly worked in existentialism, one of my areas of expertise. His dossier? A contract for his dissertation and a few articles. His case was successful. His contracted dissertation was published several years later. He has since then not published a second book. He is now a full professor at that institution. Over the years, I have only met one person in his field who knew of and spoke well of his work. That person was a classmate of his in graduate school.

Was affirmative action necessary for my promotion and tenure? Yes. But as should be evident in this example and no doubt Gates’ and many others, there is another truth. Was investment in white supremacy necessary for less than stellar whites to be promoted? Yes.

Affirmative action, which brought people of color to the table to learn first-hand about the level of performance of their white predecessors and contemporaries, stimulated a reflection on standards in many institutions. As more people of color began to meet inflated standards, what were being concealed were the low standards available to the whites who preceded them (and no doubt many who continue to join them as presumed agents of excellence).

So, what is the truth about the qualifications narrative, the claim about having to lower standards for the admission of people of color? It masks racial hegemonic mediocrity.

There is another truth. There are few systems that depend on excellence to function. Most of the services we rely on to get through our lives depend on average levels of performance. And that’s pretty much it. The rewards lavished on many whites in the modern world have not been based on merit. What many people of color discovered upon entering those previously closed corridors was not white superiority but, for the most part, white mediocrity.

Now, to preserve such a system, what is often brought up is the mediocrity of blacks and other groups of color who enter. What is not brought up, however, is the group of blacks and brown people who were excluded on the basis of their excellence. The prevailing view in predominantly white institutions about such candidates is fear of whether such candidates are “controllable.” Yes, that is the word that is often used behind closed doors.

Although I mentioned blacks and other people of color, this concern of controllability is almost exclusively used for blacks and it is especially so for black males. Women fall under the rubric of affirmative action as well. The success of affirmative action is evident with gender, but, as is also clear, that is the case primarily with white women. Black and brown women are harder cases, but in recent times, the logic of controllability, with all its sexist connotations, has found a home with gender, where it remains until women seek leadership roles. There are exceptions, but in truth, real power, which means not what is seen in public, but what is behind closed doors, the power behind power, remains categorically male and white.

Keeping institutions white and predominantly male is not only about tests and evaluating dossiers. It’s also about creating obstacles rationalized as important criteria. Consider the story of James Weldon Johnson, the famed novelist and song writer of, among other great works, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the Black National Anthem. Johnson was also a lawyer. How he became one changed the criteria for the American Bar admissions. He became one the way Abraham Lincoln became a lawyer. He took the bar examination. At that time, it did not require a law degree. It did not even require a bachelor’s degree. The sole requirement was passing the examination. Doing so meant that one mastered the required understanding of the law to practice it.

Johnson, a secondary school principal, showed up to take the Florida bar exam in 1897. Seeing he was black and realizing there was no rule stating that blacks couldn’t take the exam (since they had presumed no black either would dare show up to take it or could take and pass it), he was permitted to take the exam. As it became clear he knew the law, his examiners inflated the standards and tested him at several times the expectation of the white candidates. One of the examiners left the room out of protest to the possibility of a black man passing the exam. Reluctantly, the others capitulated and he was sworn in as a member of the Florida bar.(2) Other blacks followed in droves.

We know what happened next. First, there was the bachelor’s of law. Since many blacks couldn’t afford to go to college, that reduced the pool by a significant number. But since there was a growing black middle class, even with American apartheid, more began to meet that criterion. So, the American Bar Association then required post-graduate study. To sit for the exam, a candidate must now have completed law school, which is, for the most part, three years of study after completing an undergraduate degree. In effect, seven or more years of investment in higher education became the criterion to sit before the bar. The stratagem was effective: the number of blacks qualified to take the bar examination plummeted.

This story of increased obstacles is also one of great social costs. If one considers the damage to institutions of legalized white supremacy done by the small cadre of blacks who met the additional criteria, imagine what would have happened if their ranks were larger? Nelson Mandela studied law, but what might have been the case if he were joined by a large number of comrades who were not only armed with the knowledge of law, but also with the credentials to act on it?

Law is but one example: there are many cases across a variety of professions, disciplines and activities ranging from political participation to sports.

What a genuine commitment to affirmative action would demand under circumstances such as the ones outlined here, then, is not only the insistence of inclusion, but also a critical reflection on the purposes of articulated criteria. Criteria should be created for the healthy function of an institution, which will entail just practices of exclusion. But, as we know, in a society committed to injustice, it is very easy to create unjust practices of exclusion.

So, we come to another problem with affirmative action. Its existence is the admission of continued racism and sexism.

In the United States, the bad faith language of denial has hijacked the language of affirmative action. The expression “past discrimination” dominates debates. Past discrimination? If racial and gender discrimination were aberrations of the past, that would mean that no overseer of criteria is any longer motivated by racist and sexist goals. It would mean there is no racial or gender discrimination, which would make the use of race or gender as criteria unjust. It would be prejudice. Yet, as we know, the language of “reverse discrimination” emerged in the US. Such language turned the tables on the situation. In effect, it made discrimination a reality faced only by white males precisely through denying the continued existence of racism and sexism.

We come, then, to an observation made by Frantz Fanon. Although he detested violence, as his former student and friend Alice Cherki reminds us in her poignant portrait of his life and thought, he did not shy away from speaking the truth about tolerated violence under colonial regimes and the strange logic of what he called the “Greco-Latin” pedestal of supposed moral objections against decolonial movements.(3) Since colonialists regarded colonialism as just, how, then, could they be expected to see decolonization as anything but unjust? If the ongoing efforts needed to maintain colonialism were considered just, how, then, could they be considered violent? That became a charge made against efforts to dismantle colonialism. And relatedly, if the exclusion of colonized people were considered just, then, would not their inclusion be considered unjust? Even worse, the appearance of such people was considered more than unjust. It was considered violent.

Fanon argued that the effort to demonstrate nonviolent change was futile. By this, he did not mean that one should aim to be as violent as possible. His point was a negative one: the only way to satisfy the expectations of nonviolence was to be ineffective at practices of social change. We forget that Martin Luther King Jr., one of the apostles of nonviolence, was considered violent in his day. When fellow protesters and he marched against American apartheid, it was not the police officers who set German shepherds on them, not the hoards of whites who stoned them, not the fire fighters who sprayed them with water at a force capable of stripping skin, not the gangs who lynched many of them; it was not those people and agents of state power who were considered violent. What supporters of the status quo “saw” was violent black people against whom the society was being protected.

The situation is familiar to many in South Africa. There are those who praise South Africa for making the transformation to a supposedly post-Apartheid society nonviolently. Without violence? The many blacks (in the Black Consciousness conception) and their supporters who were killed, tortured and imprisoned; the many protesters harmed; the tanks; the guns; the dogs; the 3 AM knock on the door; the many instances of trauma, none of them count? What is hidden in this misguided notion, as with what is suppressed about racism and sexism in the anti-affirmative action rhetoric of reverse discrimination and qualifications, is this: in a white supremacist state, violence is only recognized if it is waged against whites.(4)

So, the hysteria about crime, about insecurity in South Africa is, as no doubt everyone knows, similar to the same in the United States. Even when the actual figures of violent crime declined, incarceration of blacks was high, because there was, in effect, the criminalization of a people. As violent appearance, black visibility was criminalized.

An odd feature of post-colonial states is that criminalization of black populations doesn’t require white institutional leadership. In so-called black countries, the phenomenon is there and it is color dependent, where darker-skin blacks are the most criminalized. The reasons for this are manifold, but most amount to the near isomorphic relationship between closed social options and skin color as a legacy of racialized slavery and colonialism in the midst of post-colonial environments heavily invested in keeping capital in the hands of the former governing population.

The correlation between anti-affirmative action and the preservation of colonial institutions of exclusion and violence emerges because both rely on the same things – namely, racist states and civil societies. In fact, “uncivil society” becomes the inclusion of the black masses.

There isn’t enough space to discuss why the existence of black leadership in South Africa and in the United States does not harm a white supremacist state. I will leave that for another time. For now, I will just say this: Loving Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama is not requiring the same for black people. One need simply make them “exceptions” to the rule in a world where black failure is the norm. Their existence can, thus, be subverted, ironically, for the preservation of a racist system, however noble their individual intentions are. This has been a difficult problem of black achievement from the moment anti-black racism emerged. Such blacks face having to succeed, even where their success is undermined as exceptions to a rule. Mandela and Obama did not get rid of white supremacy, but we have a sense that the world would be much worse off without them.

And there is the irony of the situation of each black person who manages to scrape through and rise in a system premised upon black suppression. There will always be objection to the presence of such people, as the uproar to the emergence of a paltry black middle class across the globe attests. Where millions of affluent whites don’t occasion a raised eyebrow, the existence of thousands – but not even a million – rich blacks in countries with populations exceeding 40 million people leads to outcries with often hypocritical concerns about class. There are even objections about where such affluent blacks live. A recent study at Brown University provided an answer: For the most part, affluent blacks live in predominantly black and brown neighborhoods with lower overall opportunities.(5) And why is this so? In the end, affluent whites, although welcoming the idea of integrated neighborhoods, prefer to live in segregated places in practice. Even white lower-middle-class and working-class people have access to neighborhoods with more resources and possibilities of accrued wealth than many blacks with higher incomes. None of this is news to black middle-class people. As with the affirmative action debate, the truth here could be denied only through closing one’s eyes to the continued practice of racism at institutional levels.

This is not to say that there is no excellence among rewarded whites. It is to say that, as with every group, high performance is by definition a virtue of those who are devoted and talented. But as Anna Julia Cooper had shown, far too much is invested in those who fail to meet such traits in white supremacist society.(6)Very little is put toward those who, with few incentives, produce more. Could one imagine what proper social investments in the people who are resourceful enough to survive in the shacks of South Africa, the favelas of Brazil, the slums of India and the ghettoes of the United States could mean for the future of humankind?

To make some headway on these matters demands, then, bringing to the fore the truth about affirmative action and the so-called post-apartheid world in which we now live. It requires admitting the onus of past victories is the next stage of struggle, a reality that, unfortunately, never fails to come, but whose battle must be waged, however weary our souls may be, because, as many of us in higher education know and those who sacrificed their lives to make access to it possible knew, what is at stake is no less than humanity’s most precious resource, which speaks, in the end, to the future of all.

Footnotes

1. See the interview, “What It Means To Be ‘Black in America,’” in the program Fresh Air (27 July 2011).

2. See James Weldon Johnson, “Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson” (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008), p. 143.

3. Alice Cherki, Fanon: “A Portrait,” trans. Nadia Benabid (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2006).

4. For elaboration, see my colleagues’ and my chapters in “Biko Lives!: Contestations and Conversations,” edited by Amanda Alexander, Nigel Gibson and Andile Mngxitama (New York: Palgrave, 2008); and “Living Fanon: Global Perspectives,” edited by Nigel Gibson (New York: Palgrave, 2011).

5. See John Logan, “Separate and Unequal: The Neighborhood Gap for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians in Metropolitan America,”US 2010 Project Report (08/02/2011).

6. See her essay, “‘What Are We Worth?’ in The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice From the South and Other Important Essays, Papers and Letters,” edited by Charles Lemert (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

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.

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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

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.

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