how not to appropriate Malala and her story

Much has been said online in the past two weeks about Malala and her story.  I have been fascinated because I spend much of my time these days thinking about how those of us that do not live in war zones can listen more powerfully to stories told by those working for peace from inside those zones, and how those stories can help up build more respectful solidarity that can help us all work more powerfully together for peace. 

 

I particularly appreciated the article about Mala's story by Omid Safi, which I am reposting below:

How to keep Malala from being appropriated: 5 points on Malala, Obama, and Jon Stewart

 

Malala Yousafzai is the toast of the day.    There was a strong campaign to have her receive the Nobel Peace Prize this year, she has been featured on Jon Stewart, and had a private audience with President Obama .  The White House tabbed this meeting to mark their “photo of the day.”

At the same time, there are also many who are writing pieces critical of her, or concerned about the way in which she can be appropriated by the West.    A New York Times article asked the question many are asking:  “Is Malala Yousafzai a heroine or Western stooge?”
In light of these competing projects, we need some careful analysis.
Let us begin by admitting that the very anxiety over what Malala is doing and should or should not be doing  smacks of a patriarchal nature.   This is a bold and courageous young woman who has stood up to misogynist bullies, been the victim of an assassination plot by getting shot in the face, and again risen above that to continue with her calling to promote the cause of girls’ education.  No amount of analysis or concern—even righteous concern—should take away her agency, her will, and her resistance.   To negate her agency, even by would be allies, is yet another attempt to negate her humanity.  I write my own words mindful of the above.

Here are five points to help us keep a healthy perspective on Malala the person and Malala the phenomenon.

1)    Malala is indeed remarkable.
It is all but impossible not to come away with a deep sense of awe of the grace, dignity, intelligence, and composure of this young woman who has been in the public spotlight since she was 11 years old.   And lest we forget:  she was shot in the face by the Taliban simply because she insisted on the right of girls to receive education.
If we have a few critiques, let us be clear that they are not of her, but rather of the way she might be used by Western powers to advance their colonial agendas.
Malala’s interview with Jon Stewart gave a beautiful indication of the strength of her conviction.    Her comments about how she wanted to respond to those who would come to kill her is a great testimony to her courage, and profound commitment to nonviolence in a way that is actually quite reminiscent of Martin Luther King’s teachings:

I started thinking about that, and I used to think that the Talib would come, and he would just kill me. But then I said, ‘If he comes, what would you do Malala?’ then I would reply to myself, ‘Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.’  But then I said, ‘If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.’ Then I said I will tell him how important education is and that ‘I even want education for your children as well.’ And I will tell him, ‘That’s what I want to tell you, now do what you want.’

2)    Malala is remarkable.  She is not, however, exceptional.
Malala is remarkable, but we must resist the urge to make her exceptional.  There is a long legacy to the exceptionalizing narrative when it comes to Muslims, and it works like this:   “The majority of folks ‘over there’ are either monsters or victims.   Every now and then, there is an isolated solitary hero that stands against that.   That hero supports ‘our’ values.”  That tendency to view the lone solitary hero(ine) of the Muslim masses, the need to have the solitary exceptional Muslim is part of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” game.  And we are done playing these games.
Those of us who have spent years of our life living in and studying Muslim majority societies know that no one has a monopoly on goodness, truth, and beauty, or ugliness, evil, and cruelty.    These are human tendencies that percolate inside each and every single one of us.  And Muslim societies, like all societies, are filled with courageous people and communities who stand for what is just and beautiful.   Malala is a remarkable young woman, but she is neither an exception nor (in that sense) exceptional.   She is simply a beautiful personification of that courage and compassion.  But there are thousands of other courageous women and men in these societies who are going about living the poetry of their day-to-day lives, resisting evil, and striving for good.

3)    Malala’s inspiration is based on her own society.
It is well-known that Malala is struggling against the pathetic misogyny of the Taliban.  It should be well-known that the Taliban’s patriarchy actually violates the very teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, who stated unambiguously that the quest for knowledge was a responsibility for every man and every woman.    Malala is struggling against the patriarchal and misogynist tendencies of Muslim societies, that much is true.    But it also important to point out that her courage, her compassion, her conviction also arises out of the same society.   In short, it is her family, her community, and her faith that give rise her remarkable (though not exceptional) strength and beauty of character.

4)    Malala is not “ours” to adopt.
It is not often that I disagree with Jon Stewart.   He is quite possibly my favorite cultural critic, and my favorite comedian. That he can do both and weave them together is a testimony to his genius.
But I have to confess a profound discomfort with Stewart’s somewhat adorable comment to Malala “I want to adopt you.”  Yes, we understand the urge, and I don’t think Stewart’s comments were in any way malicious or intended as anything other than a spur of the moment adoration.   However, and this is an important point, Malala does not need to be adopted.  Nor is she available for adoption.   Her comments came right after she talked about how it has been the love and adoration of her own father that has given her wings to accomplish what she has.   She already has a father, she has a family.  And that family is as much a story of Pakistan, a story of Muslim societies, as the stories of the Taliban.
Malala is already rooted in a community, even as she is struggling to reform that community.    One can only adopt someone who is an orphan, without family, without communtiy.   None of these are true for Malala.   The extent to which she will be able to transform her own society will remain linked to the extent to which she remains grounded in her own community (while perhaps networking with international voices of resistance, human rights, etc.)

5)    Malala has to stand against both the violence of the Muslim extremists like Taliban and the violence of the American Empire.  
Malala reported that she had the following comments to President Obama  about the American policy of drones:

“I thanked President Obama for the United States’ work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees. I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact.”

Words like authenticity are overused.   Yet if one is going to be a genuine Muslim reformer, and not one manufactured by or promoted by Western powers, it is vital to have and maintain a holistic sense of justice in which one speaks simultaneously against both abuses of Muslim extremists and Western colonial powers.    As for Malala, it means simultaneously to speak against the misogynist policies of the Taliban AND the violence inflicted on the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan by American drones.   It takes a bold person to speak that type of truth to power, especially when the power is the charismatic power of the Office of the President of the United States.
Yes, the Taliban are vile, misogynist, and violent group that has practiced gender apartheid in Afghanistan and has killed thousands of people who disagree with their bigoted ideology.
And yes, it is easier for us to focus on the evil of the Taliban than to confront the evil of “our” own policies.   We have to speak against the evil of the Taliban, and we have to recognize that we too—as in the United States of America—are responsible for a great evil over there.  We too have used drones to kill thousands of civilians in these countries, including hundreds and hundreds of children.
Here are the numbers from the U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism about the cost of drone attacks in Malala’s own Pakistan:

Total reported killed: 2,548 – 3,549
Civilians reported killed: 411 – 890
Children reported killed: 168 – 197

These are the hundreds of civilian casualties that we as Americans have killed in Pakistan alone .  To these, we have to add the dead in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Somalia, in Iraq, the dead from sanctions in Iran, and elsewhere.

At that level, it is worth asking the tough question: if Malala had been killed or injured by an American drone, would she be celebrated?  If she been injured by an American drone, would she be meeting with President Obama and featured on Jon Stewart?   If the answer to that question is a no—and let us be honest about the fact that we do not feature victims of American violence—then we have to confront the betrayal of our own silence.

In short, all of us, including the millions of people inspired by the example of Malala, have to move forward by insisting on a holistic sense of justice where we speak simultaneously against injustice here and injustice there, connecting the sanctity of life here to sanctity of life there.
The way for Malala is the same way for all of us:  to stand against brutality anywhere and everywhere, whether it is state-sponsored violence or terrorism violence.    A better future for all of us depends on this stance for a holistic sense of justice.
 

is it useful to think in terms of allies and privilege?

A few weeks ago I posted about the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen, a powerful twitter conversation which was sparked in part by the public breakdown of public white male feminist ally Hugo Schwyzer. 

Well now there is another interesting conversation happening online about anti-racist ally work, again sparked by a public breakdown of yet another public white male ally, this time Tim Wise, probably the best known white anti-racist speaker and writer in the US.  Again, I'm not interested in focusing on what Hugo or Tim did, but I'm appreciating the conversations that emerged.

Black Girl Dangerous has a blog post entitled No More "Allies" in which she writes:

"henceforth, I will no longer use the term “ally” to describe anyone. Instead, I’ll use the phrase “currently operating in solidarity with.” Or something. I mean, yeah, it’s clunky as hell. But it gets at something that the label of “ally” just doesn’t. And that’s this: actions count; labels don’t.

“Currently operating in solidarity with” is undeniably an action. It describes what a person is doing in the moment. It does not give credit for past acts of solidarity without regard for current behavior. It does not assume future acts of solidarity. It speaks only to the actions of the present. Some other options:

• showing support for…
• operating with intentionality around…
• using my privilege to help by…
• demonstrating my commitment to ending [insert oppressive system] by…
• showing up for  [insert marginalized group] in the following ways…

These are all better ways of talking about–and thinking about–allyship because they are active, and because they require examples. This is key. Why? Because, as I and countless others have said many, many times, allyship is an every day practice. The work of an ally is never ceasing. As long as the isms are functioning–and they are functioning at full capacity every hour of every day–then the action of allyship must function just as perpetually, just as fully, just as tirelessly.

“Ally” cannot be a label that someone stamps onto you–or, god forbid, that you stamp on to yourself—so you can then go around claiming it as some kind of identity. It’s not an identity. It’s a practice. It’s an active thing that must be done over and over again, in the largest and smallest ways, every day."

I have never felt comfortable with the term ally or used it for myself, so I appreciate these arguments.

I also appreciated the article in Aljazeera by Tanya Golash-Boza entitled "The problems with white allies and white privilege" though I disagree that the concept of "white privilege" is based only on an individualist-based notion of how racism works and keeps us from seeing racist structures.  In my own work I certainly look at how the structures of racism play out in the day to to day use of privilege, as well as how those privileges might be used to wear down those same structures.

There has also been a lot of reposting lately of the article "The problem with privilege" by Andrea Smith. It's pretty harsh and I think falls into facile stereotypes of this sort of work, though there is certainly some truth to them.  I certainly agree that "individual transformation must occur concurrently with social and political transformation."  Ideally our work on each informs and strengthens our work on the other.  But again, I just don't think that talking about privilege always, or even usually, means that we are only talking about an individual self or individual privilege disconnected from structures. 

fabulous description of conquering fears together with international accompaniment

My doctoral research was on international protective accompaniment, in Colombia and beyond (a chapter with some of those arguments is just out in a new edited book on Geographies of Peace, a copy of it is up here - all of my work is available on my academia.edu page).

For my postdoctoral research I am looking at the stories told by international accompaniers, and how they work to build alternative securities through solidarity.  I have spent a lot of time reading blog posts and newsletters from the various accompaniment groups, and recently Sophia, an accompanier from Peace Brigades, posted one of the most compelling I've read, which also gives a great sense of what the work is like. I'm  reposting it below in its entirety:

Conquering fears with the campesino community of Pitalito 

I like going to terrain, and I knew that it would mean camping for the entire week.
I’m back in Barrancabermeja after a couple of month break for my second year with PBI. The big news is Pitalito. The team have already been accompanying the community for almost a month by the time I head off with my fellow volunteer Yoris, and so far it certainly hasn’t been boring! When two of my colleagues accompanied the Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners (FCSPP) on the community’s initial return to Pitalito they had a rather sleepless week: keeping guard at night; surprise visits from the military at dawn to see Pitalito´s return for themselves; and visits to and from the municipal capital (by boat) to accompany the lawyers on legal business. However, after the first week things had calmed down a bit, but we still felt that maintaining an international presence was important to ensure the safety of the community in case people tried to forcibly displace them, as they had in 2010.

I´ll be honest, I was a little nervous. I like going to terrain, and I knew that it would mean camping for the entire week. I also knew that it would mean bathing in the river which is always fun, and eating a lot of yucca, sometimes three times a day, which well… it’s that or go hungry. I was scared of two things: one, snakes (bring wellies!), and two… the lack of toilet. On their own these things are manageable, but when there is a serious risk of getting your bum bitten by a snake, you tend to avoid toilet breaks. However, I put these things to the back of my mind. This was going to be an adventure!

I´d seen photos of the previous accompaniments, and when the community had first arrived it had been nothing but a clearing in some trees. When we arrived I was struck by how much things had changed. I´d seen photos of the previous accompaniments, and when the community had first arrived it had been nothing but a clearing in some trees. However, since then, the makeshift shelters had become large solid tents, the cooking area had a roof, and there was running water for a kitchen sink and a shower. Tomato and yucca cultivating had begun and the community had got into a daily work routine that finished every night with a meeting. Everything was done collectively which was also quite exciting since it really gave it the feel of a project that everyone was building together, keeping everyone motivated. It was really quite special. These different families had been displaced just three years ago, and here they were, back on their land, united, determined to stay and were actually stronger for it!
 
My first day was excellent, I got to meet everyone, everyone was lovely (always a plus!) and they asked by name after all the volunteers that had passed through before. One of the days we went down to the local town with Rommel, the lawyer from the FCSPP, so he could get hold of some documents pertaining to the case they are bringing against the man accused of displacing the community in 2010. While we were down there we took the opportunity to download the videos and articles that had appeared in the international press about the Pitalito case; the community had not seen them because there is no mainline electricity, much less internet or computers…

And what a night it was! I think until that point people felt that we were the only thing between them and a forced eviction. When they saw the amount of support they had for their project beyond the borders of Pitalito, their motivation and the belief if their project grew. No one was going to be displacing them illegally anytime soon- they could start to think beyond the next few days and start planning long-term. International support showed them that the comunidad campesina de Pitalito project wasn´t an ambition anymore, it was a reality.


At night we would take it in turns to guard the entry into the community for an hour or two, whistle at hand to wake up the community if necessary. Some nights it was just be me and Yoris debating the ethics of international accompaniment , other nights Rommel would be there entertaining us with stories of court cases he´d worked on (you have to hear it to believe it!), and sometimes some of the Pitalito inhabitants would be there. One particular night I remember one of the young men telling us about the Madre Monte, a legendary figure that lives in the hills surrounding Pitalito who would force men to marry her if they were badly behaved. And this was no joke, it had happened to some brothers who lived in the next valley along. It was an absurd conversation, but it also highlighted how far Pitalito´s situation has come. If the Pitalito community´s most immediate worry for the time being is the Madre Monte, and mine are the snakes, then we´ve come a long way. That´s not to say the threat of being displaced has disappeared, but it´s not as imminent as it was when the community returned in May.

I´ve been back to the community twice now. I´ve seen two and a half snakes (one was dead, killed by one of the kids) and survived them all. The Madre Monte is still out there but so far hasn´t made an appearance. My colleagues who have been back since tell me the community has now got fully grown tomatoes and a working toilet, so I´m excited to go back this month and see them for myself. Things really are going from strength to strength.

Sophia

Sophia Kerridge has been working with PBI in the field since January 2012 both in Bogotá and Barrancabermeja. She is from the United Kingdom.

English language blogs feature Pitalito Political Prisoners Solidarity Committee

 

Misunderstanding, militarized

As a follow-up to my last post, I am reposting this entry  with more on the new Bowman expeditions, by my friend and fellow geographer Joel Wainwright:

"[Jerry] Dobson, a professor of geography at Kansas University [KU], is the lead researcher on one of 14 projects to win grants this year from the Minerva Research Initiative , a U.S. Department of Defense effort to learn more about other parts of the world through social-science research.  He and other researchers will receive about $1.8 million over three years to study indigenous communities throughout Central America, with a possibility to apply for renewal and receive a total of $3 million over five years. […] “There are too many instances where misunderstanding of other areas has cost us,” Dobson said. From Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, he says, the United States may have fared better in many of its conflicts over the past half-century with more knowledge about the culture and politics of other parts of the world." - Matt Erickson, LJWorld

Source: Public Political Ecology Lab

Yes, the Bowman expeditions are back, rebooted by a Department of Defense Minerva grant, and soon to arrive in all seven Central American countries. To study which indigenous peoples, exactly? Usually in academia such things are not secret, but this project involves the US military.After reading Erickson’s story I wrote Professor Dobson to ask for a copy of his research proposal. In reply to my request, he sent me a link to one of his peevish essays . I thanked him for the piece and asked for the proposal again; he replied by asking if I had read his essay—which, I gather, he sees as a scathing rebuke of critical scholars like me, hence an answer in itself. That’s the thing about collaborating with the military: it makes you more cloistered and secretive. The fraternal romance of power creeps in. Pretty soon you don’t share basic information about your research with other scholars, even when the work is funded from the public and motivated, ostensibly, by a need to create an “informed public.”
In fairness to Professor Dobson, he has reason to be defensive. His work has come under sharp criticism (see Joe Bryan’s essay , e.g., and its links). I recently published a book, Geopiracy: Oaxaca, militant empiricism, and geographic thought , that examines how Dr. Dobson and other geographers from the University of Kansas went to Mexico to map indigenous lands with funds from the US military and, according to the communities they studied, failed to mention the source of their funds and their ties to the US military. I won’t recapitulate the whole story (you can read Jeremy Crampton’s review here ), but it’s worth remembering that the controversy started when indigenous communities in Oaxaca discovered the ties between the Bowman expeditions and the US military. They rebelled, publishing a trio of public denunciations of the project, such as this 2009 letter from the community of San Miguel Tiltepec, Oaxaca:

[The geographers] never informed us that the data they collected in our community would be given to the Foreign Military Study Office (FMSO) of the Army of the United States, nor did they inform us that this institution was one of the sources of financing for the project. Because of this, we consider that our General Assembly was tricked by the researchers, in order to draw out the information the[y] wanted. The community did not request the research[;] it was the researchers who convinced the community to carry it out.  Thus, the research was not carried out due to the community’s need, it was the researchers […] who designed the research method in order to collect the type of information that truly interested them. […] [W]e wish to express to the public […] our complete disagreement with the research carried out in our community, since we were not properly informed of the true goals of the research, the use of the information obtained, and the sources of financing [for the entire statement, see Zoltan Grossman’s website ].

The ‘Oaxaca controversy’ shocked many by revealing US military collaboration with academic geographers. With his NSF/Minerva grant, Professor Dobson is again spearheading the military front within the discipline.  Although to read the coverage of his work in LJWorld, it seems the sole motivation is cultural understanding.
Thanks to the Public Records Office at the University of Kansas, I was able to obtain a copy of the proposal that won Dr. Dobson the $3 million. As a scholarly proposal it is not worth serious discussion. The text is comprised mainly of recycled bits of Bowman Expedition doggerel; superficially it resembles an NSF proposal, but the analytical architecture is just shoddy.  For instance, their research hypothesis is: “certain land tenure and land use practices will mean significant level of cultural resilience, with associated benefits, such as environmental conservation and tourism development…” (p 4). Yet these “certain” practices are never defined and the brief theoretical discussion on land tenure relies mainly on a handful of US military sources.  Their methodology is to vacuum up as much material about indigenous communities as they can obtain and repackage everything into one giant “ArcGIS database of digital maps, data, and statistics” (p 5).
Nevertheless, the proposal contains these useful hints about the project. Their fieldwork is based out of the Department of Anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (or UNAH ) where they are collaborating with anthropologist Dr. Silva Gonzalez (p 5).  They aim to study all the municipalities in Central America where at least 30% of the population is indigenous as classified by language (p 7). Presumably this means that they will conduct considerable fieldwork in Guatemala – home to the largest percentage of indigenous people in Central American – although, curiously, Honduras is the only country singled out for fieldwork in the proposal.
Less ambiguous are their promises about the project’s usefulness to the US military. The proposal’s one-page ‘abstract’ includes this statement:

Impact on DoD Capabilities and Broader Implications for National Defense: The proposed research addresses recognized deficiencies in U. S. foreign policy, military strategy, and foreign intelligence.  DoD will gain new capabilities to conduct human geographic research, similar to but more advanced than those employed extensively in World Wars I and II.  DoD will benefit directly and abundantly from the openly-reported research and the geographic information disseminated and from a greatly improved pool of regional experts, an improved labor pool, and a better informed public in times of future political debates and conflict [my italics].

Never mind a weak analytical argument; this is the stuff that wins Minerva grants.
The Minerva program emerged out of the DoD circa 2007, i.e. the same era as the Bowman expeditions. Through Minerva the DoD seeks to derive ideas and data about potential targets from US-based social scientists. To do so, the Pentagon has teamed up with NSF (which engages the scholars and handles the money). The funding isn’t enormous – a few million dollars per grant – but these are times when money is scarce and even research proposals rated as ‘excellent’ are not necessarily funded by NSF. Ironically, the competitiveness of normal NSF (scientific) funding increases the prestige value of the Minerva (military) grants. And the NSF helps some Minerva applicants assuage their fears that they are not actually conducting military research. But make no mistake; it is the DoD’s money and they shape the agenda.  They will also certainly get the ArcGIS database being built by the Kansas geographers.
Geographers have not been at the forefront of the Minerva program; Dr. Dobson’s was, I believe, the only geography proposal funded in this year’s batch. Among geographers there is practically nothing written on Minerva, but perhaps Dobson’s grant will change that (the Social Science Research Council has posted a useful overview on Minerva with some good essays, such as this one by Priya Satia at Stanford). To grasp something of the psychology of those geographers working with the US military today, we are best served by studying the recent pair of extraordinary papers published by Trevor Barnes on Walter Christaller’s work for the Nazi regime (including this one, coauthored with Claudio Minca, in Annals of the AAG 103(3). And in times of Bowman redux, we should reread the late Neil Smith’s outstanding biography of Isaiah Bowman, American Empire :

[C]iting the ‘growing influence of geography among military men,’ [Bowman] even urged the War Department [today’s Department of Defense] to send some officers to the AGS [sponsor of today’s Bowman expeditions] to advance their studies in ‘the field of geography as applied to military operations’.  He hedged about whether Latin American governments should be informed. What became of these plans tendering geography for the purpose of government spying is not clear.  There have always been social scientists who have collaborated with government intelligence organizations, and from the time of the Roman geographer Strabo to the current CIA [headed by Petraeus], geography as a scholarly pursuit has traditionally operated as a handmaiden to the state.  But the great majority of scholars have traditionally frowned on collusion with military intelligence operations, and scholarly associations often carry explicit prohibitions against spying. […] What is remarkable about Bowman’s injudicious peddling of geography and the services of the AGS is the lack of any sense that his eager cooperation with Military Intelligence, the government’s premier spy agency of this period, in any way compromises his scientific integrity or endangers scientists (pp. 89-90).

The Bowman Expeditions represent only one side-project for the US state/military and a small one at that. Thanks to Edward Snowden, the NSA’s spying has been exposed and we’ve learned how hundreds of thousands of people in the US have been subject to government surveillance . The situation is much worse when we consider US state surveillance of the rest of the world.  The task of systematically collecting geospatial data and conducting routine surveillance around the world for the US state/military falls to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA ), an organization that has not received the scrutiny given to the NSA. (On the NSA revelations and the NGA, see Jeremy Crampton’s excellent essay at the Society and Space website.) No less worrying are the myriad military programs to improve how the US armed forces – particularly the Army – ‘uses’ human geography as a weapon. As I have discussed elsewhere , these are geographical projects of much greater significance than the Bowman expeditions and led by people who are more dangerous than Professor Dobson.
We are witnessing an unprecedented attempt by one state to collect data – much of it geocoded – from multiple sources (data mining, satellites, outright spying, and much more), reaching into the most intimate spaces of our lives and saturating our very means of communication. The US government has constructed an unparalleled platform for geospatial data collection and analyses, capable of mapping people’s movements and communications across the entire planet. All of this has potential military ‘applications’, meaning the potential to harm people, including US citizens (since we can have little faith that these tools cannot be used on civilians through police, FBI, or other agencies). The capacity of the US state/military to locate, follow, track, and kill people is without precedent and without equal, and that is the point.  Given the extraordinary record of violence carried out by the US government over the past century – from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan – one would have to have an almost religious faith in the infallibility of US leadership and the rightness of their ideology not to look at the government’s military/intelligence capacities and feel enraged at the injustices already committed—and the many more to come.
What are we to do? One way to answer this question, as Professor Dobson reminds us, is to ask how we can “reduce international misunderstandings.”  His approach is to militarize those misunderstandings by providing maps and data to the Pentagon. There is another way, one elaborated beautifully by Edward Said in a 1991 interview. Allow me to quote at length:

There’s only one way to anchor oneself [as an intellectual], and that is by affiliation with a cause, a political movement. There has to be identification not with the secretary of state or the leading philosopher of the time but with matters involving justice, principle, truth, conviction. Those don’t occur in a laboratory or a library.  For the American intellectual, that means, at bottom, that the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world, now based upon profit and power, has to be altered to one of coexistence among human communities that can make and remake their own histories and environments together. … [Unfortunately, even] inside the university, the prevalence of norms based upon domination and coercion is so strong because the idea of authority is so strong, whether it’s derived from the nation-state, from religion, from the ethnos, from tradition.… Part of intellectual work is understanding how authority is formed.  Authority is not God-given. It’s secular. And if you can understand that, then your work is conducted in such a way as to be able to provide alternatives to the authoritative and coercive norms that dominate so much of our intellectual life, our national and political life, and our international life above all.

If we are going to criticize the formation of authority and provide alternatives to the norms that dominate intellectual life, we have no choice: we must confront the US military.

Geographers working for war and dispossession

It can be argued that political geography in particular began as the handmaiden of empire, war, and pillage.  There are certainly many of us trying to use it now instead for social justice, equality, and peace - but I am outraged to report that some are still using it to steal people's land and resources.  I think it's safe to call that the extreme opposite of solidarity. As part of a group effort to decolonize my discipline I am re-posting the following article by my friend and colleague Joe Bryan in its entirety:

The Lawrence World-Journal recently reported the Defense Department’s decision to fund the latest Bowman Expedition led by the American Geographical Society and the University of Kansas Geography Department.  Like the first – and controversial – Bowman expedition to Mexico , this latest venture will be led by KU Geographers Jerome Dobson and Peter Herlihy and will target indigenous communities.

Like previous Bowman Expeditions , the expedition’s goal is to compile basic, “open-source,” information about countries that can be used to inform U.S. policy makers and the military. This time, however, they won’t be focused on a single country.  Instead they’ll be working throughout Central America, a region that Herlihy and Dobson have elsewhere called “The U.S. Borderlands.” What is this Expedition about?  And why is the Defense Department funding academic research on indigenous peoples?

As with the expedition to Mexico, Herlihy and Dobson are focused on land ownership. Echoing a growing list of military strategists, Herlihy and Dobson contend that areas where property rights are not clearly established and enforced by states provide ideal conditions for criminal activity and violence that threaten regional security.

Herlihy and Dobson propose to use maps made with indigenous communities of their lands to clarify this problem, ostensibly with an eye towards securing legal recognition of their property rights. In their expedition to Mexico, Herlihy and Dobson turned over their findings to Radiance Technologies , an Alabama-based military contractor specializing in “creative solutions for the modern warfighter.” It’s not clear whether this new expedition will do the same, though the program funding it, the Minerva Research Initiative , evaluates proposals according to their ability to address national security concerns.

The rationale for these Expeditions has been parsed in film , print , and by academics (myself included ), revealing them to be little more than intelligence gathering efforts carried out by civilian professors and their graduate students. Zapotec communities visited by the previous expedition to Mexico have further denounced Herlihy’s and Dobson’s efforts as “geopiracy ,” (and again here ) that replay some of colonialism’s oldest tactics of extracting information from communities for people (the U.S. Army) who live elsewhere.  Zapotec communities in Oaxaca have also accused Herlihy of failing to inform them of the U.S. Army’s role in funding the Expedition and process data collected by it.

Military funding for the latest Bowman Expedition raises the question of what the U.S. military wants to know about Central America.  Moreover, why is it funding research on indigenous peoples? It’s hard to imagine that the U.S. military has much interest in the nuances that distinguish, say, Tawahka communities from Emberá ones.  Nor does the military appear concerned with the chronic insecurity of land rights, which continues to be one of the primary threats faced by indigenous communities. A far more likely answer lies with the military’s growing interest in collecting information about the “cultural” or “human” terrain that they can use as needed for a variety of purposes, from managing risks posed by natural disasters to planning military interventions.

Maps of the sort produced by the Bowman Expeditions are certainly useful for this task compiling information about who lives where and place names, to give two examples. But maps can only describe the territory. What they cannot describe are the intricacies of the “terrain ” such as the social networks through which access to land and resources are negotiated or the history of struggles over land.

The U.S. military is more familiar with this terrain than one might think. Beginning with the “Banana Wars” of the early 20th Century, the U.S. military has intervened more times in Central America that just about any other region in the world. Indeed the Marines’ first resource on counter-insurgency, the “Small Wars Manual ,” drew extensively from their experiences navigating the indigenous Mayanagna and Miskito communities in pursuit of Augusto Sandino’s anti-imperialist forces in Nicaragua.

In the 1980s, U.S. military advisors once again traversed the indigenous areas of Central America for tactical gain. In eastern Nicaragua and Honduras, they helped train and organize Miskito-led armed groups as part of the proxy battle strategy of the Contra War. In Guatamala they targeted Maya communities as bastions of guerilla support with genocidal consequence. Dense forests and other isolated areas throughout the region further provided cover for airstrips also used for illicit shipments of cocaine and weapons orchestrated by the Reagan Administration in support of the Contras.
Herlihy knows this history well. He’s been mapping the forested areas in eastern Honduras used by the Contras and Miskito armed groups since the late 1980s.  Herlihy’s (and Dobson’s) main military contact, Geoffrey Demarest , knows this history too.  A graduate of the School of the Americas, he served as a military attaché to Guatemala.  He’s since become an expert on counter-insurgency, publishing extensively from his experience in Colombia and its relevance for current wars . More recently, he enrolled in the Geography Ph.D. program at KU under Dobson’s supervision.

Still, what is the national security interest in Central America that a Bowman Expedition there can help address?  Indigenous land ownership has already been extensively mapped in much of the region as part of property reforms supported by the likes of the World Bank.  Several countries in the region now also have promising laws on the books recognizing indigenous and black land rights.
Yet neither maps nor legal reforms have been enough to stop the region from becoming a major transshipment route for cocaine en route to the United States. The State Department estimates that more than 80 percent of cocaine bound for the U.S. passes through Honduras. Some of this trafficking makes use of infrastructure created by counter-insurgency campaigns in the 1980s.

In 2011, Herlihy once again mapped the Honduran Mosquitia as part of another U.S. Army-funded Bowman Expedition. Shortly thereafter, in 2012, the region was targeted by the DEA who made use of counter-insurgency tactics developed in Iraq to fight traffickers.  Among those lessons of Iraq applied in the Mosquitia was the use of forward operating bases immersed in the region’s physical and cultural terrain of the Mosquitia. Two of those bases, El Aguacate and Mocorón , were repurposed bases constructed during the Contra War. The campaign fits a broader pattern of escalating militarization of Central America further illustrated by this map compiled by the interfaith Fellowship of Reconciliation.

The application of counter-insurgency tactics gives mapping indigenous areas a more sinister edge. Historically the U.S. military has relied on the designation of “Indian Country ” and “tribal areas” to designate areas at the edge of state control, often turning them into free-fire zones where the conventions of war, legal and otherwise, do not apply. Better knowledge of these areas has scarcely reduced incidents of violent conflict as Dobson suggests.  Instead, that knowledge has served as a “force multiplier” – to use General Petraeus’s term – that allows the U.S. military to intervene with greater efficiency. Herlihy and Dobson claim to champion the rights of indigenous peoples, but the money and data trail suggests that is only a secondary concern to U.S. military interests.

So why is U.S. military funding academic geographers to do research in indigenous areas in Central America instead of relying on its own people to do the work?  In Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has relied on social scientists embedded with combat units as part of the Human Terrain System program to gather similar information.  Funding academic researchers to do similar work poses a number of advantages.  For starters, it sidesteps the ethical controversy raised by the Human Terrain System. It also brings the added benefit of relying on “civilian” researchers to access communities who might otherwise be wary of soldiers in military uniform. At the same time, it gives the military precisely the kind of detailed, georeferenced information – the spatial “metadata” – sought by the Human Terrain System for areas that lie far from current combat zones. It’s an approach consistent with what geographer Derek Gregory describes as the “everywhere war ” currently waged across society on the whole by covert military teams, surveillance, and drones. By taking the measure of indigenous communities according to security interests, the Bowman Expeditions stand to perpetuate a role that is far too common in Geography’s history.  The Bowman Expeditions have generated some productive debate (see also here , here , and here ) in this regard, though in a context of shrinking budgets for university research and education the allure of military money remains powerful enough to trump ethical concerns.

Meanwhile, as geographers debate the merits of military funding, indigenous peoples continue facing a long list of violent threats from drug trafficking, illegal logging, loss of lands, and institutional racism. The military-funded Bowman Expeditions merely add to that list. Still, as the Zapotec communities in Oaxaca forcefully remind us, it’s their information and the decision to participate in projects like the Bowman Expeditions – or any other research – ultimately resides with them. Herlihy’s and Dobson’s failure to address those concerns will only diminish their access to this field, undermining the kinds of rights and free exchange of knowledge they profess to support.
See Also:
U.S. Military Funded Mapping Project in Oaxaca: University Geographers Used to Gather Intelligence?
Military-backed Mapping Project in Oaxaca Under Fire 

Joe Bryan is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For additional resources on the Bowman Expedition, see Zoltán Grossman’s fantastic website.

Beyond Solidarity - fabulous event

if you are anywhere near Oakland check this out! if you go I'd love to hear how it went.  (for those who get this as an email you may need to click the link to see the image describing the event)

#solidarityisforwhitewomen - except it isn't

I've written before about the prevalence of white women in US and Canadian based solidarity with Latin American peace and justice movements (with some thoughts about why and what this says about international solidarity in general) - so when I first saw the twitter hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen I figured it was about that and was amazed that a discussion like that was trending.  It turns out that the discussion is not about international solidarity, but about solidarity amongst feminists, and in particular the lack thereof by some white feminist organizations, websites, and individuals.  It started out as pretty US centric, but the tag and discussion then spread.

Let me briefly go over the basics for those few who might have missed this phenomena.  The tag was created by Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) to express her ongoing frustration with that lack of solidarity, and particularly the lack of response to ongoing harassment of blogging feminists of color by a self declared feminist man with a high profile who continued to publish on feminist sites.  The tag was sparked by said man's very public breakdown on twitter.  He posted over a hundred tweets in an hour where he admitted publicly to the harassment, as well as to addiction and mental illness.  In response there seemed to be more concern about him than expressions of remorse over continuing to support him over the years, or remorse for not supporting his victims. 

The hashtag quickly morphed into something much larger, and became a space for women of color to speak out about various ways in which many white women, feminist organizations, and particularly websites seem to only be able to see sexism, and not how it works with racism, and how they have not shown solidarity to women of color.  The same women who work and write against male domination are often uncomfortable confronting white domination, both in society and in their own organizations.  What is ridiculous about this is that you just can't effectively address the one if you don't recognize how intertwined it is with the other.

Patriarchy and racism don't just 'intersect', they interlock, as Sherene Razack has put it.  These and other systems of domination (classism, heterosexism, etc) prop each other up.  At different times and in different spaces one or the other may be the dominant note, but one never 'trumps' another, and they never work alone.  To bring down these systems and work for a world where we are all equal requires chipping away at the various strands - looking at just one is just not effective, for either understanding the world or working to change it. 

This is all seems like a fairly standard basic argument to me, and I feel lucky to work in the discipline of geography where when you say you do feminist work it is generally not assumed (as it often still seems to be in international studies, for example) that you work on gender - but rather that you look at intertwined systems of inequality.  For example I consider my own work to be deeply feminist but in my dissertation research I focused more on how racial, passport, and class privilege were at work (together) than on gender dynamics.  In my previous research on international solidarity I did look at the experience of women, but I would not have understood what was going on if I had not also looked at race and class - there was clearly a specific dynamic involved that had to do with white middle-class women in particular. 

Unfortunately it seems many 'feminist' organizations and websites based in the US still focus on gender in ways that end up meaning they only write about and for white middle-class cis women, but without specifying or owning up to that.  Kendall, who invented the hashtag, claims that the feminist movement has argued since its inception that gender should trump race, and that this was a point of debate even amongst very early "first wave" feminists.  That seems like a sweeping statement about a whole movement to me, and I know there are many feminist organizations and sites today around the world that are working hard to understand and struggle against multiple systems of domination and the ways they work together -  but still, reading the tweets has convinced me it's still a big problem. 

I hope it is obvious that the tag is both a space for women of color to tell their truths and a call for white women to listen and learn how they can express more powerful and real solidarity, in particular meaningful solidarity with all women. It's well worth taking the time to read the tweets.  Clearly there is still much to do to decolonize feminism.

(note, a few days later the piggyback tag #Blackpowerisforblackmen was started by Jamilah Lemieux of Ebony.com, expressing frustration with black men who can only see racism, and not how it works together with patriarchy). 

I am not Trayvon Martin - now officially a meme

The great video above came out months ago, but the meme seems to have really taken off after the ruling with this facebook post.  Now there is a whole tumblr page entitled we are not trayvon martin where people are posting pics and testimonies.  They are all over the map, but I appreciate the conversation. 

more powerful to recognize that we are zimmerman?

in light of the ruling, my last post seems painfully prophetic.

my friend Jorge Salazar posted the following on facebook:

"Instead of saying "I am Trayvon Martin" it would do more good for white people [and non-Black people] in solidarity with the Trayvon Martin case to recognize all the ways they (we) are Zimmerman.

As in, if you live in a "safe" suburban or gated community that is mostly white and that is considered a "good" neighborhood because it excludes people of colour [especially excluding Black people] then you benefit from the same conditions that created Zimmerman.

If you benefit from "police protection" to your property that depends on racial profiling of people of colour [especially Black people] and brutality towards them then you take part in the same systems that create Zimmerman.

If you have the racial privilege to work, move, live in mostly white spaces and have limited contact with... [Black people], particularly "low income" ...[Black people], then you live with the same social and economic policies of casual segregation that create Zimmerman.

It's good that people recognize the injustice of Trayvon Martin's death, but if that recognition is not accompanied by the work to recognize and undo the systematic economic, social, educational and employment policies that create neighborhoods where Black people are seen as threatening trespassers - and how people benefit from this racial privilege - then no true anti-racist work can occur.

Nobody wants to say "I am Zimmerman" but until we recognize how Zimmerman reflects institutionalized racism there will continue to be more Trayvons."

: El Jone — with Melanie Matining.

studies show it is harder for all to feel the pain of 'black' people

That you may already know, but a new study shows that even people of color assume that 'black' folks actually feel less pain that 'white' folks. wacky

Slate recently carried this article, which reports:

Let’s do a quick experiment. You watch a needle pierce someone’s skin. Do you feel this person’s pain? Does it matter if the person’s skin is white or black?

For many people, race does matter, even if they don’t know it. They feel more empathy when they see white skin pierced than black. This is known as the racial empathy gap. To study it, researchers at the University of Milano-Bicocca showed participants (all of whom were white) video clips of a needle or an eraser touching someone’s skin. They measured participants’ reactions through skin conductance tests—basically whether their hands got sweaty—which reflect activity in the pain matrix of the brain. If we see someone in pain, it triggers the same network in our brains that’s activated when we are hurt. But people do not respond to the pain of others equally. In this experiment, when viewers saw white people receiving a painful stimulus, they responded more dramatically than they did for black people.

The racial empathy gap helps explain disparities in everything from pain management to the criminal justice system. But the problem isn’t just that people disregard the pain of black people. It’s somehow even worse. The problem is that the pain isn’t even felt.

A recent study shows that people, including medical personnel, assume black people feel less pain than white people. The researchers asked participants to rate how much pain they would feel in 18 common scenarios. The participants rated experiences such as stubbing a toe or getting shampoo in their eyes on a four-point scale (where 1 is “not painful” and 4 is “extremely painful”). Then they rated how another person (a randomly assigned photo of an experimental “target”) would feel in the same situations. Sometimes the target was white, sometimes black. In each experiment, the researchers found that white participants, black participants, and nurses and nursing students assumed that blacks felt less pain than whites.

But the researchers did not believe racial prejudice was entirely to blame. After all, black participants also displayed an empathy gap toward other blacks. What could possibly be the explanation for why black people’s pain is underestimated?

It turns out assumptions about what it means to be black—in terms of social status and hardship—may be behind the bias. In additional experiments, the researchers studied participants’ assumptions about adversity and privilege. The more privilege assumed of the target, the more pain the participants perceived. Conversely, the more hardship assumed, the less pain perceived. The researchers concluded that “the present work finds that people assume that, relative to whites, blacks feel less pain because they have faced more hardship.”

This gives us some insight into how racial disparities are created—and how they are sustained. First, there is an underlying belief that there is a single black experience of the world. Because this belief assumes blacks are already hardened by racism, people believe black people are less sensitive to pain. Because they are believed to be less sensitive to pain, black people are forced to endure more pain.

public reading as protest

Wow, now not only yoga in Gezi, but public reading as protest?! Utterly fabulous. 

Aljazeera reports that new form of protest  has emerged in Turkey - the "Standing Man".  As they put it:

"Standing silently, and initially alone, Turkish performance artist Erdem Gunduz stood, with his hands in his pockets, facing the Ataturk Cultural Centre in Taksim Square, Istanbul, for eight hours.

With extraordinary speed, Gunduz become the latest symbol of the resistance movement. In days that followed, thousands of people would emulate his solitary act, standing silently, for minutes or hours, in places across Turkey.

The contrast with the images of tear gas clouds and water cannon could not have been greater. Faces obscured by masks and helmets were revealed to show expressions of quiet contemplation. 

Violent scenes are still occurring around Turkey, including in Istanbul once again this past weekend, but the Standing Man protests continue unabated.

The following images explore one aspect of the protest in Taksim Square, ongoing since before the communal standing took off. Public reading and informal education has been notable since the earliest days of the protest, but has since merged with the Standing Man to form "The Taksim Square Book Club".

Reading a book publicly in protest sounds like way more fun than listening to rally speeches. Lets make this tactic travel! (more fabulous photos here)