"Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide": an invitation to discuss this film

Amie Kandeh speaks to girls in Freetown about staying focused on their studies.

Photo: Melissa Winkler/IRC

If you haven't as yet, I encourage you to watch the documentary, Half The Sky, based on a book by two New York Times journalists, Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof. It is filled with stories of pain and empowerment. (For any survivors of rape, trafficking, prostitution, female genital cutting, battery, and other forms of misogynistic abuse, please be warned: this film deals with each of these atrocities.)

Let's discuss the strengths and the problems with the film. What follows is from one of the websites for the film *here*:

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into
Opportunity for Women Worldwide

A special presentation of Independent Lens.

Watch part one online through October 8 and part two through October 9.

A landmark transmedia project featuring a four-hour PBS primetime national and international broadcast event (check local listings), a Facebook-hosted social action game, mobile games, two websites, educational video modules with companion text, a social media campaign supporting over 30 partner NGOs, and an impact assessment plan all inspired by Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, the widely acclaimed book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide was filmed in 10 countries and follows Kristof, WuDunn, and celebrity activists America Ferrera, Diane Lane, Eva Mendes, Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union, and Olivia Wilde on a journey to tell the stories of inspiring, courageous individuals. Across the globe oppression is being confronted, and real meaningful solutions are being fashioned through health care, education, and economic empowerment for women and girls. The linked problems of sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality — which needlessly claim one woman every 90 seconds — present to us the single most vital opportunity of our time: the opportunity to make a change. All over the world women are seizing this opportunity.

I'll add to this post soon, especially if there are no comments. But I'd like this to be a conversation about the film and the politics of it, as well as the activists featured in the film and the male supremacist atrocities against girls and women they are combating. The activists are:

Edna Adan

Edna Adan was raised in Somaliland in an educated and wealthy family, and went on to a distinguished international career with the World Health Organization. But after retiring, Adan returned to her roots and opened Somaliland’s first maternal health facility.

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Urmi Basu

Urmi Basu is the founder of New Light, a secular nonprofit charitable trust that has set up a shelter to protect and educate young girls, children and women at high risk of commercial sexual exploitation.

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Amie Kandeh

Amie Kandeh is the Women's Protection and Empowerment Coordinator for the International Rescue Committee in Sierra Leone. After fleeing Sierra Leone with her family during the country’s civil war, Kandeh returned in 2002 to put her skills as an educator and counselor to use in rebuilding the country.

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Rebecca Lolosoli

Rebecca Lolosoli is the matriarch of the Umoja Women's Village and an advocate for women's rights. Growing up as a member of the Samburu tribe, Lolosoli attended primary school and then nursing school but dropped out early on due to lack of money to pay the fees.

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Somaly Mam

Somaly Mam was born in an ethnic minority community in Cambodia's Mondulkiri province, and grew up as an orphan living in extreme poverty. A man posing as her grandfather sold Somaly as a young girl into sexual slavery.

Read more >>

 

 

Ingrid Munro

Ingrid Munro is a Swedish national who worked for eight years for the Swedish government in the Bureau of Housing Research. Following this, she began her career as an advocate for the poor in Kenya, pressing for their right to housing as a staff member of Habitat and the head of African Housing Fund, an advocacy group for the homeless.

Read more >>

 

 

Jane Ngoiri

Jane Ngoiri grew up in the slums of Nairobi and dropped out of school after the eighth grade. She married at age 18, but when she was pregnant with her second child, her husband took a second wife and she soon found herself with three younger children, pushed out of her home and with no money.

Read more >>

 

 

John Wood

John Wood is the founder and board chair of Room to Read. He started Room to Read after a career with Microsoft from 1991 to 1999, where he was in charge of marketing and business development teams throughout Asia, including serving as director of business development for the Greater China region and as director of marketing for the Asia-Pacific region.

Read more >>

So let's talk about this film and the activism.

Considering The Unbearable Whiteness of Being a Radical Feminist Who Isn't White

photograph of Sojourner Truth is from here

Almost two years ago I posted *this* from displayed the above image. Approximately one and a half years ago I posted *this*. In the time prior to then, and since then, I've seen almost no examples of white radical feminists taking responsibility for their whiteness or organising a white radical feminist movement that places the eradication of racist misogyny (including all the effects of globalised white male supremacy) at its center.

I have criticism here of whiteness--usually white men's. But as an ally to radical feminist women of color, I include in my critiques the often unacknowledged, unowned, and irresponsible display (via invisibilisation and denial) of whiteness in what is termed "radical feminism". Such critique, like my critique of sexism and misogyny, is seen as hatred of the oppressor group, or unfair, or mean, or, especially, insulting. How is naming something that harms people "insulting" to the people in charge of the perpetuation of the harm?

There are so many examples of this unacknowledged and irresponsible use of whiteness in "radical feminism" that many women of color I know won't use the term to define or describe themselves.

But if radical (and feminist) means "getting to the root" and "pro-activist" and "revolutionary", then surely what many women around the world are doing, in the realm of theory-building, community-building, and pro-revolutionary activism, is radical feminist. Asian women, Black women, Latina women, Indigenous women are most women. White women are not most women. Yet many white radical feminist perspectives, shaped by white experience and white privilege and power, are considered central to what radical feminism is and does.

I support and advocate perspectives which come out of white radical feminism of the last forty years. My own work has been deeply shaped and directed by the work of white radical feminists such as Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Catharine A. MacKinnon, and Sheila Jeffreys. But their work is not the center and foundation of radical feminism to me. It is complimentary; it is an addition to the core radical feminist work which is usually not termed such by whites and which may not be included in anthologies about the history of radical feminism, edited and published by white women and white presses. And when men term a woman "radical" or "feminist" often enough all they mean to do is stigmatise and insult the women.

White women's radical feminism, which will likely be termed here "white radical feminism" or "white racist radical feminism" or "white supremacist radical feminism" is critically important to me while it is also glaringly problematic--and harmful, and misogynistic--in its unbearable whiteness of being.

Radical feminism (by radical feminists of color) is the core, foundational work, to me. In North America that is often the work of Indigenous and Black women. Globally it is also the work of Latina and Asian women.

In my view but not mine alone, African American radical feminists, in the last forty years, such as Flo Kennedy, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde (who is also Caribbean-American), bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, have presented a far more comprehensive analysis of society from radical feminist perspectives and they don't leave out critiquing whiteness as most white racist radical feminists do.

A member of a (pro-)radical feminist collective I am part of has been in contact with a prominent white racist radical feminist who won't answer the question about whether or not she is racist. This is added to all the other experiences of white racist radical feminists who, in addition to not owning or acknowledging their own racism, will deny it quite defensively. I have seen this happen over and over and over again to the point that I consider the denial of whites' racism to be a key part of how whites keep white supremacy oppressively in tact and in control.

I can see the racism of white radical feminism and it's not difficult to spot if one is willing to call it what it should be called: one expression and manifestation of white supremacy.

No whites will use the term "white supremacist" to define themselves nor will they use "white supremacy" to define the ideology fused to practice that is their own practice. Not white men, not white trans people, not white women. Wherever whiteness exists, you can bet it will only be people of color who are willing (and, it appears, able) to name it accurately and appropriately.

The prominent white racist radical feminist argued to one member of the collective that there is a difference between racism or white supremacy and "race-blindness". Putting aside the problematic able-ism of that term for a moment, how is race-unconsciousness NOT racism-in-action? How is making that distinction NOT the practice of liberalism applied to race politics?

I know of no radical feminist women--of any color--who argue that men ought to be able to define and control terms and their meanings. Especially terms that refer to what men do that is oppressive to women. So "gender-blind" or "gender-unconscious" doesn't get to exist as a term, generally, among anyone I know who is anti-sexist and anti-misogyny. Why, then, should the term "race-blind" get to?

If a white person doesn't see race (which clearly the problematic term "race-blind" implies), doesn't that mean they operate in a multi-racial/racist world as a racist? How can they not? How does not seeing one's own whiteness result in one being anything other than racist and white supremacist in practice, interpersonally and institutionally, structurally and socially?

No white person I know, including myself, can explain how that might be possible. There's nothing radical (or pro-feminist) about protecting and defending whiteness, white supremacy, white privileges, white power, or white unconsciousness about race and racism. Because, especially in the last seven years, I have seen how much white women's racism negatively impacts (hurts, harms, demeans, subjugates, and oppresses) women of color, I look forward to the days when "radical feminists" popularly (and in practice) means "women who are organised to radically critique and challenge all forms of oppression that harm women--in the name of liberating women from all forms of oppression" and is no longer used synonymously to mean "white radical feminists". Most radical feminist women I know are not white and are not "color-blind" either.

And, contrary to the assumptions of many white radical feminists, the radical feminist women of color I know are clear about the need to end pornography, prostitution, trafficking, sexual slavery, and are far more conscious of the need to eradicate all of those forms of gross harm, each of which is founded on the existence and protection of racist misogyny, than are white radical feminists I know.

There is a white radical feminist conceit that only white women can really "get it" about things like pornography and prostitution and that being of color in North America means one is necessarily "Third Wave" or Liberal. Lost in such condescendingly white myopic analysis is the fact that neither pornography or prostitution are the "primary emergency" issues in the lives of many women of color. Also lost is the profoundly liberal politics of whites ignoring racist misogyny as a central form and expression of woman-hating.

If you are a radical feminist of color and are interested in co-organising a radical feminist women of color blog with other radical/feminist women of color, please contact me at aradicalprofeminist@gmail.com.

Feminist Action Alert: in Support of the Global Women's Water Initiative: Water is a Profeminist Issue

photo of two women carrying water is from here

When I have met white profeminists--on far too rare an occasion, I frequently have heard them speak out for justice and liberation for women. They are most usually referring to freedom from misogynistic interpersonal and media violence, and social and economic inequality as framed within a white, Western understanding of women's struggles globally. I challenge these men to expand their understanding of women's liberation to include the freedom to have clean water to drink and unpolluted land to grow food and maintaining quality of life and to bury one's loved ones, and to not be beholden to white supremacist patriarchal corporate capitalism in any regard. 

All that follows is from *here*:

The Global Women’s Water Initiative is a joint initiative that provides training for grassroots women and groups to implement water related-strategies through appropriate technologies, action planning, seed funding and leadership development so they can improve their communities health, self reliance, and resilience to climate change.

2010 West African Women & Water Training Program (10 min version), Ghana from Unseen Pictures on Vimeo.

2010 West African Women & Water Training Program from Unseen Pictures on Vimeo.

  

"We are living in a time when women's voices must be heard, considered
and respected at every level. Recognizing women's vital role in the
environment... is essential for a future of security and peace."

- Dr Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Laureate, in her letter of support
for the 2008 African Women and Water Conference

Abusive Husbands? Are you listening? "Wife-beating is unacceptable", says Dora Byamukama. So, men: stop beating women already!!!!

image is from here

It's not that hard to get, men. If you think women believing in their own inferiority entitles you to beat them, then you need to be removed from the home, permanently.

What follows is from NewVision: a leading feminist website. Click on the title to link back.

Wife-beating is unacceptable

Wednesday, 27th April, 2011

By Dora Byamukama

ACCORDING to the World's Women and Girls 2011 Data Sheet, Uganda records the highest percentage of women internationally who agree that wife-beating is acceptable if a wife argues with her husband. This state of affairs is totally unacceptable.

Sadly more women than men find wife-beating acceptable! One wonders why this is so. India was ranked second with 30% and Ghana came third at 21%.

In the East African region Ugandan women are considered gentle and submissive. Whether this is a positive or negative trait is a subject for debate. This notwithstanding, when gentility and submission have the potential to contribute to self-hate then this attitude calls for change. Change can only be effective when the causes are known otherwise whatever action is taken may be like mopping a wet floor, when the tap is left open.

Causes of acceptance of violence against women are several. These are basically beliefs and practices that treat women as inferior human beings and thus undermine their self-esteem. These beliefs and practices perpetuate an attitude that makes men and women believe that women are inferior and less intelligent--thus the need to punish them for arguing with their husbands.

Beliefs and practices permeate the human soul to the extent that women who are likely to be harmed by such a negative attitude internalize it and thus not only accept the degradation but also pass on the same to their children over time.

It is, therefore, not uncommon for a woman to be told to endure violence in a marriage by her mother on the basis that this is the wear and tear of marriage. While growing up, I heard of a story of a woman who reported such violence several times to her parents who kept sending her back to the marriage until their daughter was sent back to them in a coffin! In fact the coffins were two because the woman had been eight months pregnant.

Beliefs and practices that wife-beating is acceptable are rooted in several factors which include religion, culture, social pressure as a result of war, poverty and alcoholism. Most religions emphasise that women are inferior to men. Christianity, however, categorically states that all human beings are made in the image of God.

When some religions read texts to support oppression of women out of context then the resultant effect is to misinterpret and misapply the very same religion that is fundamentally based on respecting the person created in the creator's very image.

Religion shapes attitudes fundamentally because it is personal and the frequency with which one is exposed to it on a daily and weekly basis ensures that the belief is sustained and that is enforced through social pressure.

Culture is another aspect that shapes attitude that may promote women's tolerance to wife-beating. Culture is a form of religion because it dictates a person's way of life, and shapes what is socially acceptable. In fact most cultures do not condone wife-beating but because domestic matters are considered private, this privacy is abused and used to commit crimes.

Culture is dynamic and is also shaped and influenced by globalization through internet interaction, videos and films. Globalization has introduced what is termed as modern culture, which has large doses of violence and in some instances is spiced with witchcraft. One such good example is the growing consumption of Nigerian films in Uganda.

When one is exposed to such films over and over again, the resultant effect is that they will copy and put into practice what they see.

The World's Women and Girls Data Sheet also indicates that 31% of Ugandan women and 19% of Ugandan men said that it is acceptable for a man to beat his wife if she refuses to have sex with him. This indeed is an interesting and deeply disturbing finding. The question is, if after a beating the woman agrees to sex, does it make the man feel any better?

Apart from wife-beating being a human right abuse and a crime it also has the potential to spread HIV/AIDS and other venereal diseases.

In most cases when one talks about wife-beating people imagine that it is a mere slap. A mere slap has the potential to cause the destruction of an eye. More importantly no one has capacity to pre-determine the kind of beating that may be meted on a woman in any given circumstance.

The anger of a spouse can lead to grievous harm and even murder! Wife-beating also has the potential to turn the victim into a violent person with the potential to avenge the torture any time.

Uganda has set the trend in the East African region for the empowerment of women significantly since the NRM came to power in 1986. The law is clear. Wife-beating is a crime prohibited by the Constitution, the Penal Code Act and the Domestic Violence Act. All people have a right to freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

The fact that less men than women find wife-beating acceptable is cause to celebrate. However, more work needs to be done in order to make wife-beating totally unacceptable by religious and cultural leaders and the media.

Champions that promote and practise respect for the dignity of the person are needed at all levels of society--beginning with you.