How Governments and Individuals - Meaning Each of Us - Deny the Persistence of Racism and Abuse

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When you work on human rights issues, you notice a certain pattern in government denial of abuse. First line of defense: it didn’t happen. Or if it happened, they did it to themselves. Or if they didn’t, we certainly had nothing to do with it. Or if we did, we didn’t mean to. It doesn’t matter if the issue is torture, forced evictions, or garden-variety employment discrimination. The response from those in charge is often, if not always, the same.

Though this pattern is annoying, to say the least, I have lately become acutely aware of a much more depressing trend: the denial of abuse among those of us who should know better. Of course, we don’t call it denial. We call it "realism." But the mechanism is the same.

1. “It didn’t happen.”

For decades, commentators and a large proportion of the US public have posited that racism no longer exists. Despite the fact that skin color and ethnicity matters with regard to just about any social indicator you care to look at — health, education, employment, housing, law enforcement — most white people believe the system we live in is racially just.

The writer Touré has described this situation as a “fog of racism:” a situation so subtle, it is blurred. “With this form of racism,” he says, “there is no smoking gun. There is no one calling you a nigger to your face. There's no sign saying you can't enter this building. ... But … it’s there.”  

This is not much different from the many people who are genuinely puzzled at the need for continued attention to women’s issues in the United States now that “the genders are equal.” I hear this argument almost daily, despite ample evidence to the contrary, including the continued pay gap and the vicious attack on reproductive rights for women and not men.   

2. “They did it to themselves.”

Blaming the victim is par for the course in rape cases, a context in which it (rightfully) is denounced by women’s groups as sexist, discriminatory, and just plain wrong. But it is also common for individuals who identify sexual or racial discrimination to be called silly, overly sensitive, or even vindictive. 

When I firmly told off a male colleague at a former employer for caressing my waist, a female colleague immediately and loudly concluded that I “must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed.” 

And I can’t count the times I have been told that “black people are racist too,” as a manner to excuse racial discrimination. In sociology and social psychology, this phenomenon is called internalized oppression, that is the manner in which an oppressed group comes to use against itself the methods of the oppressor. More commonly, it is expressed as a desire to maintain the dignity of the group: we may suffer, but we don’t complain or sulk. 

3. “We had nothing to do with it.”

Most people don’t like to think of themselves or the people they know as bigots. This is natural and reasonable. It is hard to remain sane if you believe your actions are consistently insensitive or morally wrong. This, however, is not the same as noticing and addressing injustice — especially injustice that we, ourselves, are benefitting from. 

For example, I cannot in good conscience say that I have nothing to do with racism (or sexism, or hetero-centrism, or…) when I know that I benefit daily from a system that overwhelmingly recognizes my humanity and rights because of my Northern passport, fair skin, perceived heterosexuality, motherhood, and Judeo-Christian background (I could go on). Unlike my Peruvian ex-husband, I don’t have to think about what I wear when I travel in order to avoid additional hassles at airport security. And unlike those of my female friends who are non-gender-conforming and childless, I don’t have to defend my worth as a woman.  

4. “We didn’t mean to.”

When all other justifications have failed, the usual fall-back for governments who violate human rights is lack of intent: we may indeed have tortured a couple of prisoners, but it was unknowingly done and therefore, it is implied, of limited importance. 

This excuse is hardly ever used as a denial strategy for continued and entrenched racial, sexual, and other discrimination in the United States. And not because we recognize our responsibility in the stereotypes we perpetuate. But rather because we don’t. In fact, as shown above, we routinely deny the very existence of discrimination.

I am not advocating a collective guilt complex, or, worse, some sort of warped paternalistic pity-fest in which those of privileged background pound our chests in earnest distress and bemoan the supposedly pathetic lives of those considered beneath us. I am, however, advocating a reckoning that allows us to confront those stereotypes that result in the abuse of human rights. Even, and especially, when this means that some of us must give up our special privileges.

And here’s why: I know I am benefiting from many of the stereotypes that prevail in the country I have chosen to live in. I also know I am complicit in the resulting discrimination to the extent that I don’t challenge it.

Street Harassment: A Means of Control That We Need to Get Under Control

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Street harassment—sexual harassment of women in public—has gained notoriety in Western media since the start of the Arab spring. Most recently, a harrowing first-person narrative of a mob sexual assault of a Western woman on Cairo streets had an editor from The Atlantic conclude that he would do anything to stop his daughters from going to Egypt and being exposed to that kind of abuse.

Unfortunately, research suggests that if you want to prevent your daughters from experiencing street harassment, you would need to keep them off the streets pretty much anywhere. The vast majority of women from Indianapolis to Beijing have experienced street harassment at some point, including leering, whistling, and sexual grabbing or touching.

And though most street harassment definitely is less physically aggressive than the story from Egypt, it is anything but benign. Enough scholars have examined the socio-political context and psycho-social consequences of street harassment to conclude that men harassing women in public is a symptom of the sentiment it perpetuates: women as inferior objects of prey.

I know what I am talking about, as does just about every women and post-pubescent girl. The worst case of street harassment I have suffered made me throw up and had me tank a job interview. Even now, 18 years after, I remember the smell of the guy who slid up behind me on a Paris metro escalator to hold me still while he whispered into my ear just what he was planning on doing to me. I froze, somehow unable to move. When the interminable escalator-ride was over, the guy was gone and I was retching. I did keep my interview afterwards, but lost the job.

But even the other, less horrible, cases of harassment took their toll. There was the adolescent boy who purposefully ran into me on a street in downtown Guatemala City some time in early 1997 and grabbed my crotch, hard, for precisely 3 seconds (I counted). Or the grown man who did the same on the F-train in New York City this very year. Both had me shaking and slightly disoriented for hours.

I could go on.

What I remember most clearly from each incident is the feeling of powerlessness and humiliation. The knowledge that this man, whoever he is, sees me as something (or rather: some thing) to crush and control. And the absolutely certainty—born out in fact—that no one around me was going to help.

I know, of course, that this is precisely what I am meant to feel.

I also know that the power imbalance and contempt of women’s autonomy and sexuality that is acted out in sexual harassment of any kind is what makes it hard to talk about. That and the fact that bystanders often acquiesce or contribute to the abuse.

Take sexual harassment in college. Despite the fact that two thirds of American college students say they have been sexually harassed, it is incredibly hard to get anyone to speak out about it on the record. Consider what Rush Limbaugh said about Sandra Fluke for defending access to contraception for college-students for non-sexual reasons. Imagine what would be said of someone who acknowledged that a professor or other student had made an unwelcome pass at them. I certainly understand not wanting to expose oneself to that.

(I have been sexually harassed at university twice. One of those times, a professor asked me to sleep with him the night before he was to grade my final paper. I declined. A fellow student, who had witnessed the exchange, promptly and not without glee informed me that now I was certain to flunk.)

The mob attack in Egypt highlighted this week in The Atlantic is, of course, closer to sexual assault than sexual harassment. Such assault is also not particular to far-off places like Egypt or South Africa. Statistics from the United States indicate a rape rate that is 13 times higher than that of Germany, and 20 times that of Japan.  

Rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and any other form of violence and abuse directed at those the perpetrator wishes to control all come from a place that will continue to exist as long as we let it. Whether in Egypt, in Paris, in Cape Town, or in Brooklyn, the least we can do is speak up.

The 2012 Global Family Planning Summit: Will Issues Be Adequately Addressed?

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In mid-July, world leaders will gather in London to discuss a real and urgent need: increased funding for family planning. Over the past 15 years, the United States—one of the largest foreign aid donors in the world—has cut its funding level for family planning by at least 25 percent. Meanwhile, the demand for modern contraception and family planning information has only increased. By most accounts, an investment of approximately $6.7 billion is needed annually to meet current needs for family planning.

The summit documents, which is co-hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK Department for International Development and supported by the US Agency for International Development and the UN Fund for Population Action, link the dearth of contraceptives and health services to poverty: women in “rich countries” have what they need, whereas women in “poor countries” don’t. This notion is supported by the fact that over 99 percent of maternal mortality happens in so-called developing countries.

This vision is not so much wrong as it is incomplete.

In early 2010, the medical journal The Lancet published new research on maternal mortality and morbidity. The research showed that improvements in maternal health — a good indicator for women’s access to health services overall — depend on 4 key factors, only one of which has to do with family planning: 1) lower fertility; 2) higher education levels for women and girls; 3) rising per capita income overall; and 4) access to skilled birth attendants.

Importantly, both the Global Family Planning Summit and research published in The Lancet potentially obscure the fact that adequate access to contraceptives and health services is a question of income rather than geography. To be blunt, a wealthy woman in a poor country is likely to have better access to care than a poor woman in a wealthy country.

Just as importantly, all four drivers of healthy motherhood depend on women’s ability to exercise their human rights, including the rights to quality health care, non-discrimination in education and health, and economic empowerment through job creation and protections for equality in the workplace.

But perhaps most to the point, the much-needed infusion of extra cash to development aid budgets for family planning is a means to an end. For the organizers of the London summit, that end is the provision of family planning services to poor women in the developing world. But even this very laudable objective is also a means to an end — or at least it should be.

Almost two decades ago the world’s governments for the first time promoted an understanding of individual empowerment as a vehicle for better policy outcomes on population growth, through the 1994 Cairo Declaration on Population and Development. The measures set out in this declaration supported the, at the time, radical notion that if individuals are empowered to make their own decisions about their family’s size and growth, these decisions, in the aggregate, will make for healthy and balanced societies. This notion departed from previous decades for population control through central planning and imposed government targets for fertility.

Of course a piece of paper is one thing. A real commitment to change is something else.  In the 18 years that have passed since the adoption of the Cairo declaration, few governments have shown a sustained commitment to actually empower all individuals, equally, to make decisions about their families.  

Some impose limits on family growth, punishing all women for wanting to have larger families than the government mandate. Others seek to limit the fertility of specific individuals within their population who for some reason or other are deemed unworthy parents, usually because of their color, class, family status, or gender identity. Still others force women to have larger families than that might have wanted through demonizing contraception, encouraging (or ignoring) early and forced marriage, and by perpetuating a culture where women without children are seen as somehow incomplete.

None of these situations promotes the kind of autonomy in family planning envisaged by the world community in 1994. And neither will merely stockpoling contraceptive methods.

The latter, however, will help. Here’s to hoping that the education, economic empowerment, and equality needed to ensure real family planning won’t be far behind.

A Theory on Gendered Effects of Insecurity, Or Why Men Tweet Their Penis Pix

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Last Mother’s Day, news had just broken that then-Congressional Representative Anthony Weiner had tweeted a picture of his erect penis to a woman, thinking the tweet was private. The blogosphere immediately erupted in debates over the relative merits of women over men, the moral weight of adultery (Weiner is married), and the need for public officials to stop thinking they understand new media.

For me, however, a central question raised by the event was never fully addressed: what is it with men and photos of their erect penises?  

In the 12 months that have passed since the Weiner incident, I have received unsolicited penis pictures from several men I wasn’t dating, didn’t plan on dating, and in some cases didn’t even really know.

And I am not alone. Only just this week, a friend of mine received an erect-penis picture via text from a coworker who said he had intended it for his girlfriend but had thumbed in the wrong number.

In fact, a quick poll of those of my (male and female) friends who cared to answer the question shows that un-solicited penis pictures are not all that uncommon. Interestingly, the women I asked all said they had never sent photos of their genitalia to anyone. Absent more representative polling (and somehow I don’t think this question has ever made it into a survey), let’s just say for now that men are more likely to take and send photos of their genitalia than women.

The question is why? And... so what?

Here’s my theory.

Men and women are taught to deal with social situations differently. Men and boys are overwhelmingly taught to depend on themselves, to be direct, and to celebrate their physical strength. Women and girls, on the other hand, are taught the value of social coherence and politeness, and are often not encouraged to celebrate their bodies at all. Whether these are innate sex differences or acquired characteristics is an open question, but socially, for most people, and in varying degrees, the sciences agree that gender (i.e. learned norms), if not sex (i.e. biological distinctions), makes a difference.

This is the framework that makes a man more likely than a woman to think a photo of an erect penis is a good way to communicate something positive about a man’s body. And it is the same framework that makes a woman more likely than a man to worry if she is overweight or unattractive (which according to prevailing norms often is seen as synonymous).  

Like most internalized behavioural patterns, the difference is the starkest when the individual feels threatened.

In the context of an inter-personal relationship this means — to be slightly clichéd about it— that men are more likely to react to insecurity by reasserting their physical superiority (“You have never seen a bigger dick than mine!”) and women are more likely to react by begging for approval (“Does this dress make my ass look big?”). Both proclamations get old fast, not least because anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of either knows there is only one appropriate answer, regardless the truth: “Of course not.”

But even if you transplant this dynamic to a professional or other public arena, these somewhat primitive reactions are problematic. Men are more likely to assert their superiority — despite and often because of any insecurity they might feel — whereas women are more likely to phrase statements as declarations of submission — despite being experts in their field and sometimes precisely because they are.

This very real gender difference is at least partially at fault when it comes to companies and society more generally valuing women’s work less than men’s: women, themselves, tend to play down their own value.

To be sure, there is no research on the relation between penis pictures, gendered social cues, and how it relates to job performance and pay rates. Moreover, I am certainly not trying to blame women for the discrimination they suffer. And I don’t believe any of these tendencies are universal, absolute, or inevitable.

However, there is more than enough science to support the existence of gendered reactions to threats and insecurity, and to point out the different ways in which boys and girls are taught to think about and enjoy their bodies, even today.

Perhaps more to the point, male (sexual) aggression — even when solicited, welcomed, and enjoyed — is part of a gendered framework that, if imposed in a general and mechanical manner, hurts us all. In fact, research shows that gendered norms make men much less likely than women to seek medical or other help for physical and mental health issues, with very real consequences for their health and happiness.

So, gals, next time you put on your favourite dress, ask yourself how you feel, not how someone else might think you look. And guys: if you find yourself about to snap a picture of your junk, ask yourself if that really is your best side, and if you wouldn’t rather be known for who you are.

Coleman v. Court of Appeals of Maryland: A Warning to Women

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Last week the U.S. Supreme Court held that states cannot be sued for denying workers sick leave. An employee of the Maryland state courts, Daniel Coleman, had sued for monetary damages after he was fired for requesting time off to take care of his health.

States generally cannot be sued for damages, but one exception is in cases that involve unconstitutional treatment, including discrimination. While the case decided on Tuesday therefore was framed in terms of state sovereignty, the Court’s very understanding of discrimination was at stake.

The majority opinion handing down last Tuesday should be a warning to women: the Supreme Court most definitely does not have our backs.

Here’s how.

US federal law protects the right to sick and family leave (unpaid leave either to take care of yourself or of a family member such as a spouse, an elderly parent or a newborn child) through the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).

In 2003, in the context of family leave-related discrimination against a state employee of Nevada, William Hibbs, the Supreme Court detailed the congressional intention behind the FMLA as predominantly a desire to overcome gender-based discrimination. Indeed, the 2003 ruling was very clear: “The FMLA aims to protect the right to be free from gender-based discrimination in the workplace.”

At the time, the Court held that employees of the state of Nevada were entitled to seek monetary damages for infringements of the family leave part of the FMLA. The Court felt that absent such due process guarantee, government officials would somehow lose their constitutional right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex. The final opinion was narrowly focused on the family leave provisions of the law because those were the provisions at stake in the case at hand, but prior to last week’s case, it seemed reasonable to apply the court’s conclusions in the 2003 case to the FMLA as a whole.

Last week’s ruling limits that precedent by concluding that the U.S. Congress didn’t have gender-based discrimination in mind when it enacted the sick leave protections of the FMLA.

The court’s analysis is based on technical considerations of what evidence Congress had before it when it enacted the FMLA—“Congress made no findings, and received no specific testimony” that women might face discrimination for taking more sick leave than men.

But the result is a decision that essentially says that sick leave—taking care of oneself—is fundamentally different from family leave—taking care of someone else—in that it does not depend on gender differences or stereotypes. This is an erroneous conclusion.

Had the Court argued that men and women take equal amounts of long-term sick leave—which is true—the majority opinion in last week’s Coleman case would at least only have been a selective reading of the facts, not a retrograde interpretation of discrimination laws. However, the Court argued that even though the denial of sick leave might have a disproportionate impact on women, denying anyone the protection of such leave still does not constitute discrimination. Such a conclusion flies in the face of international human rights law and even US legal definitions of disparate impact as discrimination.

It is ironic that this sentence was handed down the same week new research on health insurance was published, showing that women still pay more than men for the same health plan. Private insurers justify the price differential by reference to the fact that, all other things being equal, women need more medical care than men, notably due to our ability to bear children and recommended routine health visits related to our reproductive organs.

Of course, PAP smears and prenatal check-ups do not automatically translate into time off or sick leave, though as most of us know, they generally do. The Court majority opinion glosses over this fact by noting that most states have other protections that allow women time off to take care of their health. Again the Court majority inexplicably insists that the denial of a right that disproportionately affects women qua women is not discrimination, all the while reaffirming the fact that the differential impact is real.

None of the three female justices of the Supreme Court held with the majority. Justices Ginsberg, Kagan, and Sotomayor were joined by Justice Breyer to resoundingly disagree with the majority opinion in Tuesday’s ruling in the Coleman case. These four Justices rightly noted that “[i]t would make scant sense to provide job-protected leave for a woman to care for a newborn, but not for her recovery from delivery, a miscarriage, or the birth of a stillborn baby."

Indeed, it makes no sense as a matter of effective policy or legitimate legal analysis.

It does, however, make the same warped sense as the many recent state initiatives to simultaneously curb access to contraception, abortion, and child benefits. The message last week’s majority opinion for the Supreme Court seems to send is that women matter only as incubators and care-givers and not as equal citizens in a modern democracy.