Baby Halder’s day

This is an extraordinary story.

It’s 11pm and Baby Halder’s day is just winding down. Dressed in a blue-and-white salwar kameez, the 39-year-old domestic helper finishes washing a pile of dishes, then mops the floor and turns off the kitchen lights before retiring to her small one-room flat on the terrace of her employer’s palatial, well-appointed house in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of India’s capital, Delhi.

But she is not yet ready for bed. Even though it’s late and she has to start work at 6am, Baby fishes out a notebook from the desk and begins to write. “It’s become a habit now,” she smiles. “I’ve got to write at least a few pages before I go to sleep. It’s fulfilling at the end of the day.” Baby has a lot of reasons to smile. Although she dropped out of school at the age of 12, the mother of three is already a popular author. Her first two books Aalo Aandhari (meaning Darkness and Light in Bengali) and Eshast Roopantar (Self-portrait) were literary successes in Bengali; her third book Ghare Ferar Path (The Way Home) was published by Dey’s Publishing, a Bengali publishing house, in December 2014 to rave reviews from the critics. [Read more…]

Proportionality

Hurriyet reports that parents want a teacher of religion classes in northern Turkey to be fired for telling her female students that they “deserve rape” for not wearing hijab.

“You don’t cover your head anyway, so raping you or doing evil to you is permissible [in Islam],” the female teacher, identified by the initials L.Y.İ., told students at the Halil Rıfat Paşa Middle School in the province of Tokat on March 9, according to parents who spoke to Doğan News Agency.

That seems very harsh. It seems way out of proportion. Rape is a terrible thing to do to a human being; not wearing hijab is not a terrible thing to do to anyone, not even Mohammed or Allah. One of the things punishments should be is proportional. [Read more…]

Guest post: Weaponized speech

Originally a comment by quixote on Hey the chant was on a school trip, so obviously no biggy.

Bigotry is harmful. Bigoted drunken chants are no exception. Bigotry uses speech to hurt, not to express a train of reasoning. It’s weaponized speech, and as such it stops free speech. It is the antithesis of free speech. The clearest example is not in racist speech but in gendered mobs aimed at women on the web, which is nastily effective at both hurting and silencing women while expressing no thoughts at all. It’s just plain old hatred and plain old hate speech.

This concept seems to be difficult mainly for some white males who are almost never the targets of weaponized speech. [Read more…]

Guest post: Homophobia in American African Migrant Churches

Guest post by Leo Igwe.

A lot has been said about how American evangelists are supporting efforts and campaigns to legislate against gay marriage in Uganda and other African countries, but there is very little mention of African churches that are re-exporting a homophobic gospel to Europe and America. Many African Pentecostal groups are extending their mission overseas. They are promoting programs and activities that undermine the rights of gay people in this region. These churches are mainly from West Africa, particularly from Nigeria. They are establishing branches in immigrant communities in Western countries where they propagate “Africanized Christianity.” Yes, they qualify their Christianity as African because they think American and European Christians have drifted from preaching the true word of God. They claim that Western churches have teachings and practices that are incompatible with their Africanized Christianity. But this is only a ploy to create a gospel niche for themselves where they can promote doctrines that go against the human rights laws of these countries. One of these homophobic African churches in the United States is the Mountain of Fire and Miracle Ministries (MFM). [Read more…]

Hey the chant was on a school trip, so obviously no biggy

The New Republic also has a piece on whether it’s constitutional for the University of Oklahoma to expel the two frat boys who led the racist chant on the bus. Of course it does; the New Republic is the National Review for people who think they’re on the left.

[A]s UCLA School of Law professor Eugene Volokh noted shortly before Boren’s announcement, a public university student has a right to express himself without being expelled—even if that expression is a virulent, racist chant. “First, racist speech is constitutionally protected, just as is expression of other contemptible ideas,” Volokh wrote. “And universities may not discipline students based on their speech.”

Public universities, that is.

[Read more…]

The Constitution steps in

But it’s unconstitutional for the University of Oklahoma to expel students for saying racist things, some people in the Law Community are saying. Eugene Volokh says that.

1. First, racist speech is constitutionally protected, just as is expression of other contemptible ideas; and universities may not discipline students based on their speech. That has been the unanimous view of courts that have considered campus speech codes and other campus speech restrictions — see here for some citations.

If that’s true, it seems problematic. Places where people have to work closely together need to be able to regulate the extremes of how those people treat each other. To put it crudely, bullying can make group life hell, so people in charge need to be able to regulate bullying. [Read more…]

Still a hack

Christina Hoff Sommers is still making videos for the American Enterprise Institute sniping at people who argue that there is sexism in video games. She made a new one on Monday, with a partial transcript.

“Is Gaming A Boy’s Club?” is the name of a school lesson plan developed by the Anti-Defamation League—ADL for short. The ADL is a well-respected organization that has fought anti-Semitism and racism for decades. As a long-time admirer of the ADL, I am baffled by its sponsorship of such a biased and dogmatic curriculum. The lesson plan advertises itself as meeting standards for inclusion in the Common Core—an influential national curriculum. The entire lesson plan is dedicated to the proposition that video games are a hotbed of sexism and misogyny, and it gives students the message that anyone who dares to suggest that games should be more inclusive can expect to be terrorized by malevolent gamers.

[Read more…]

Prizes

Laura Bates won a press award yesterday for Everyday Sexism.

The founder of the Everyday Sexism project has won the inaugural Georgina Henry Women in Journalism Award for Innovation at the Press awards for 2014.

Laura Bates was awarded the prize at the awards event at London’s Marriott Grosvenor Square hotel on Tuesday night.

The other nominees for the award were the GroundTruth Project’s Middle East correspondent Lauren Bohn, reporter and blogger Iram Ramzan, and freelance journalist and Daily Mirror columnist Ros Wynne-Jones.

Oh looky there, one of the other nominees is Iram Ramzan – who wrote that guest post I published here just three days ago. She was the runner-up. Congratulations, Iram!

Women in Journalism launched the annual prize in honour of Henry, the former deputy editor of the Guardian and one of the founders of the campaigning group. Henry’s partner Ronan Bennett and children Molly and Finn were in attendance at Tuesday’s ceremony.

The Times won newspaper of the year at the event, with the judges praising its “searing investigation” into the Rotherham child abuse scandal.

More “orientalist reveries” I suppose.

Into shivers of orientalist reverie

Nesrine Malik offers up a classic piece of warmed-over Edward Said at Comment is Free.

What happened is, a Lebanese tv presenter who is a woman told off a sheikh guest who is a man, and a video of the moment has gone viral (at least according to Malik it has). Malik’s point is big woop, because what she calls “Arab television news” is always like that. (There is such a thing? There’s generic Arab television news, about which one can generalize? Sounds dubious.) It’s always quarrelsome and noisy.

Moreover, Arabic TV news is predominantly staffed by women. The presenter in question, Rima Karaki, follows a long tradition of formidable female anchors that began at al-Jazeera Arabic and MBC, and it is nothing unusual to be interviewed by a woman on most channels.

I suspect that London-based Sheikh Hani Al-Siba’i’s sexism was ramped up in the reporting of the story, and I daresay he would have been as huffy and pompous if it had been a male presenter who had interrupted and cut him down to size. It didn’t hurt the mythologising of Karaki’s behaviour that she is attractive, and was wearing a headscarf.

But the headlines that followed in the western press are part of a now established genre that morphs the everyday behaviour of Arab and Muslim women as being something impressive and counterintuitive. The images of female Kurdish fighters in their fatigues sent the western media into shivers of orientalist reverie.

[Read more…]