Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
genderbasedviolence
Ivory Coast Aftermath: The People, Not the President(s) Come First
011 months ago
I’m no expert in the electoral politics or cultural nuances of the Ivory Coast, the world’s leading cocoa producer. I can only tell you what I see through my African-American lens. And it’s breaking my heart.
I’m seeing yet another nation in my motherland caught up in a power struggle between two men on opposite sides of the post-colonial coin.
I’m seeing President Laurent Gbagbo–a former history professor and labor unionist who in 2000 defeated dictatorial General Robert Guei with popular support–exploit anti-immigrant sentiment in the nation’s Christian South to keep an office he agreed to vacate in 2005. I’m seeing how he’s delayed elections, how he’s altered the constitution to disenfranchise immigrant laborers from neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali, and how he’s allowed his country to split in half following the November 2010, UN-monitored elections that reportedly favored his opponent, Alassane Ouattara.
I’m seeing Alassane Ouattara, a former IMF official from the country’s Muslim North, rest on the power of so-called rebel groups, the military support of United Nations peacekeepers, and institutional muscle of the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States.
I’m seeing Ivory Coast former colonizer France–which still has significant economic interests there–take Ouattara’s side.
I’m seeing the inevitable euphemisms Western media use to characterize African leadership–Gbagbo is a ‘strongman.’ France, the UN and European banks are the ‘international community.’ And so on.
And then I’m seeing the above video in which thousands of sisters who were peacefully, joyfully protesting Gbagbo are shot at by what looks like Gbagbo-backed tanks. Seven died. Hundreds cried.
At this moment, the words of Syracuse University African American Studies and poly sci professor Horace Campbell, are the only ones that make sense to me. They’re not immediate. Not tactical. Just true to this non-expert who can’t sit still while women, men and children die in the crossfire of political machinations.
We must have a higher standard for what is called democracy and people’s rights and peace. And part of the lessons we should learn out of this long process to democratize the Ivory Coast, that is much more than Ouattara and Gbagbo, it’s about democratic rights for the working people, democratic rights for those who work on cocoa plantation, the rights of women, the rights of people of different religious and different ideological orientations. … The central political questions in Africa are life, health and the quality of the well-being of the youth.
I’m no expert, but I know that the people must come first. If you’re shooting unarmed women protesting for their quality of life, something is desperately wrong.
‘Sex Crimes Against Black Girls’ Exhibit Uses Art to Confront Incest
011 months ago
Last week, I checked out “Sex Crimes Against Black Girls,” a multimedia art exhibit that tackles many forms of sexual abuse black girls endure in the African Diaspora. The work, which will be at Bed-Stuy’s Restoration Plaza until April 2, was rich, provocative, and in some cases, quite pretty. But, because I’m a nosy writer, I was most intrigued by its curator, Shantrelle P. Lewis. For her day (and all-night) job, the New Orleans native directs programs and exhibitions at another organization, the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute. But the 32-year-old chose to use her free time and psychic energy to find works by black and Latina artists that address the knotty subject of intra-racial sexual violence. Lewis, an incest survivor, was kind enough to sit on the phone and explain why:
Tell me how “Sex Crimes Against Black Girls” came about.
It came about in several ways. In grad school, I read “The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight: In the Time of Daughters and the Fathers, an essay by [literary critic] Hortense Spillers that deals with the treatment of incest among African Americans in literature. I was struck by how she put it within a larger context of racism and socioeconomic oppression, not just as [individual] pathology of black men or because black men have so-called issues. That spoke to me as a black woman who uses art to educate people, and as someone who was molested.
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Can you talk about what happened? I was abused by three family members, between the ages of 7 and 9. It happened at relatives’ houses, when no one else was around. They took advantage of me, but I didn’t tell anyone until after Hurricane Katrina. What made post-Katrina the right time to speak up? Well, the flood brought so many community issues to the surface–poverty, police brutality, violence and high levels of intra-racial prejudice because of the color caste system. And for me, personally, Katrina brought my sexual abuse to the surface. I finally told my mother. How did she react? She blamed herself. And to this day, she’s still trying to figure out why I didn’t say anything because she had always stressed, “If anybody ever touches you, tell mama.” But as a young child, I truly believed my abusers when they said, “You’ll get in trouble if you tell.” I remember thinking, “My mom is always fussing at me about doing the dishes or cleaning my room. What’ll happen if I say something about this?” That’s why I love Delphine [Fawundu-Buford's] piece, “Speak No Evil” [shown at right] so much, because it highlights that silence. |
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“Speak No Evil,” one of several images photographer Delphine Fawundu-Buford contributed to “Sex Crimes Against Black Girls.”
I would imagine after mounting the exhibit and promoting it online, you had to talk to other family members about it.
Right before the February 5th launch, I had to tell my dad because I didn’t want him to read about it on Facebook. He said, “At this point in time, there’s nothing I can do besides become very angry and assault someone. I can’t do that.” It’s so hard. I mean, I had a wonderful, protective mom, dad, and stepdad, but they still couldn’t be around me 24/7.
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The title “Sex Crimes Against Black Girls,” is so tough in its directness. Did you consider making it more vague? You know, most of my other exhibit titles are like dissertations; they’re full of colons, semicolons and slashes. But for this, I could not toy with the abstract. I want people to feel a level of discomfort. I’ve found that when black women talk publicly about being sexually abused by black men, they face the so-called dirty laundry argument. Inevitably someone will accuse them of self-hatred, or being brainwashed by white feminists, or out to tear brothers down. Have you faced this kind criticism so far? Well several people I know who had never mentioned the issue of childhood sexual abuse before said, ‘But Shantrelle, this happens to black boys, too!’ And I had to say, ‘I’m curating this exhibit, and it’s about black girls. If other people want to curate another exhibit about black boys, they can do that.” The fact is: I will never demonize black men, under any circumstances. I grew up in a family full of incredible black fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins, and I know the types of issues and oppression [black men] deal with, like being harassed by the police and being [sexually] abused themselves. But we still have to hold black men who abuse black girls accountable for that abuse. |
“Forsaken” by Numa Perrier |
That sounds really stressful.
It is! You know, when the exhibit opened to the public, an older black woman came in to look at the work. I was on my way out–I was going to party–and she stopped me to talk about how she had been abused at 4. She told me that a man had urinated in her mouth and she started crying. All I could do was hug her.
As an incest survivor, how do you educate the public and stay sane at the same time?
With the support from close friends, male and female, and from my mother, a retired social worker, who keeps saying, ‘Don’t forget to take care of yourself.’ They understand my need to look at incest and sexual violence against black girls as a larger issue, and my own need for healing. They give me courage.
Asylum System May Open Door for Femicide Survivors
01 year ago
“Femicide” isn’t a word you hear too often. The public silence surrounding that term is due to the same reason why it happens in the first place: women around the world who are systematically brutalized and killed are rendered invisible on two levels–first by their murderers, and then by a society that looks the other way. But a narrow window to humanitarian relief could be opening in the for survivors of femicide in the U.S. asylum system.
Ms. Magazine reports that a recent court ruling involving a Guatemalan immigrant could set a precedent for aiding those who are escaping, or want to avoid deportation to, communities where it is dangerous to be a woman.
The case of Lesly Yajayra Perdomo represents the silent plight of thousands of women in impoverished and conflict-ridden regions, where gender-based violence takes place regularly and with impunity. (Beware cultural determinism: it happens right here at home, too.)
After migrating to the U.S. as a teen, Perdomo faced deportation in 2003 and argued that her life would be endangered if she were sent back to Guatemala, where a wave of several thousand murders of women over the past decade have gone largely unpunished (though the government has taken measures to address this, on paper). The judge agreed that she had a valid asylum claim, and she will now argue her case afresh in court.
Carrie Baker explains:
The Immigration
and Nationality Act allows asylum for people persecuted because of
religion, political belief, race, nationality or particular social
group. Gender is not an explicit basis for asylum under U.S. law.
However, advocates have argued that women who are subject to
gender-based violence should be eligible for asylum as a “particular
social group.” Courts have granted asylum to women fleeing domestic
violence, female genital cutting, honor killing, forced marriage and widow abuse. At the end of last year, an immigration
judge granted asylum to Rody
Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman who had a history of extreme abuse by
her husband and who feared he would kill her if she returned to
Guatemala. The Perdomo decision follows and expands this line of
reasoning.
So U.S. asylum law, although gender itself does not automatically confer victim status, forms of persecution that are tied to the social position of women might.
Right wingers claim the asylum system is easy for women to game, but empirical evidence reveals that, in fact, the court system that is often rigged against immigrants, resulting in arbitrary and endless legal limbo.
The ruling could dovetail with other gender-conscious legal remedies for undocumented immigrant women under the Violence Against Women Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. But again, we see piecemeal reforms building a lattice of protections for certain groups, though nothing could substitute for a broad human-rights based framework across the entire immigration system.
In the absence of a comprehensive overhaul that would establish a more uniform standard of justice, decisions like Perdomo are the best hope women have for enfranchisement in a world that treats them, on many levels, as second-class citizens.
Image: flickr via change.org