In honor of my interview with ISG’s Digital Dish, I decided to revisit my original thoughts on gender and sexism. At 23 years old and with some experience in the working world I have begun developing a more nuanced understanding of sexism. As I discuss in this piece, working to overcome sexism and the matrix of domination is a battle that will always need to be fought, but I’ve become more hopeful that the situation will get better.
In my first-ever podcast interview, I sat down with my Dad and ISG host Jeanne Cuff to discuss the pervasiveness of gender hierarchies in the workplace. As I have written about in the past, sexism is greatly aided by “ambivalent sexism,” meaning we understanding that sexism is bad, but that we qualify it under circumstances deemed exceptional, thus allowing sexist beliefs to be maintained. Listen in here as we discuss how this translates to the workplace and how we can work to make effective changes.
As part of my senior capstone, I was tasked with the biggest and most complicated group project I have ever had: negotiate the Israeli-Palestinian peace. My professor divided our class into three teams (the Israelis, Americans, and Palestinians) and asked us to simulate peace talks by formulating our own peace plan. Throughout the semester, we sat and negotiated. I was the leader of Team Israel, meaning that many times the negotiating decisions for my team came down to me. It was truly one of the most arduous tasks I had during my college career, but I believe we negotiated a relatively feasible solution.
Middle Eastern international political culture is often dominated by one question: which state is more powerful? This question is often most visible when looking at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since the start of the conflict, each side’s actions can be looked at through a model of realism. However, this realism is grounded within the cultures of each side, which dictates that the pride of each side is dependent on the amount of power shown. The more power a side shows, the more pride each side can have. Thus, it is because of this grounding that the dream of peace in the Middle East can only be solved through understanding and working within the Israeli and Palestinian cultures.
Eastern European nations were under the yoke of larger, more powerful states for many years, and as such, they were constantly forced into living situations with other nations that they felt they could not—and did not want to—identify with. Specifically, they did not want to interact with the Jews because they had been taught by the Catholic Church that Jews were Christ-killers and could not be trusted. Thus, when Eastern Europeans could not practice self-determination that would have allowed them to engage in authentic pride, they turned to hubristic pride that allowed them to distance themselves from the Jews.
I was never fully aware of my femininity and how it presents to the world until I became an adult. I was always aware that I was female, and I was always very comfortable with my female gender, but I never really thought of how other people perceived my identity. To me, it was always just a part of me, and since I accepted it, I thought others would, too. I was gymnast, a dancer, and a rock climber as a child, and I never regarded them as masculine or feminine domains—to me, they were always just sports with no extra meaning attached to them. It was about learning the trade and perfecting it—not about fitting into or being an abnormality within that domain. Yet, I realized later in life, particularly towards the end of my rock climbing career, that many people do gender sports. People gender everything, and that shocked me.
The discourse around black men in America has usually been that they are unwanted. Since the time of slavery, blacks have been viewed as lesser than whites. Even though laws guaranteeing equal rights and protections were passed after the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, blacks have always been looked at as inferior, lazy, and criminal by other Americans. Since this discourse is so prevalent within America, it has worked against these men for decades, particularly within the criminal justice system. Following the Great Migration of blacks into northern cities in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the swell of crime throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, politicians and police departments adopted “tough on crime” stances that disproportionately affected black men. Incarceration rates of this demographic skyrocketed once these measures were enacted. And since then, the discourse has been continuously reinforced that black men are dangerous and criminal through draconian criminal justice methods that only serve to cause more issues.
Our perceptions of the world are guided by pervasive discourses. These discourses have given us rose-colored glasses which make us believe that people are imbued with certain characteristics that would make them more suitable for certain positions in the world. By this measure, we also come to believe that certain people are unsuitable for certain positions in the world. Thus, we take abstract ideas of who people are—powerful, dangerous, feminine, or masculine—and assign them to various positions in the matrix of domination. Over time, this appears natural and objective—we become comfortable with our rose-colored glasses. These glasses make us ambivalent to the seemingly natural order.
In the 1960s, America saw a rise in crime. Desperate to curtail this rise, Americans looked for any reason that the crime rate was so high. People mostly pinpointed the main problem as being drugs and guns. While some minority leaders did try to say that the poverty was also an issue, most people simply focused on the drugs and guns aspect of the crime problem. They thought that the only way to stop crime was to cut drugs and guns out of society. Political, religious, and civic leaders endorsed punitive legislation that would cause the punishment for having guns or drugs to skyrocket. Many people thought that these punitive would cause criminals to give up the game and become law-abiding citizens, but without addressing the root cause of crime—poverty—many black and Latino communities, which were often the communities most affected by drugs, guns and violence, still saw many people become incarcerated. This effect was unintended, but it was devastating to communities throughout the country, causing a self-perpetuating cycle in which young black and Latino men ended up incarcerated.
Since 1951, Tibet has been under the autonomous ruling of China. And since then, human rights violations have been committed throughout Tibet under the autonomous rule of China. However, Tibet has always been on the periphery of international concerns. It has always been considered, at minimum, a satellite of China by the West. In the past, Tibet had its own diplomatic ties with other Asian states, but the West and China always saw China and Tibet as two related entities with China having the dominant position in the relationship. Because China is part of the United Nations Security Council as a permanent member, once it invaded Tibet, the UN mostly closed its eyes to human rights violations in the autonomous region. The permanent members of the Security Council are unlikely to infringe upon the domestic sovereignty of other permanent members.
It seems impossible for NGOs to forgo their identities even though they are professional organizations that are supposed to work for what would end up being the betterment of everyone involved in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It raises many questions about how these organizations deal with personal identities and biases. Do they differ in their discourses during times of peace and times of conflict? How has the discourse towards human rights changed within these NGOs since the launch of Operation Protective Edge in 2014? Does the reporting differ in terms of language used as well as incidents reported? In other words, does one NGO report different human rights violations than another? By examining how two human rights NGOs report on human rights violations in the territories, it is possible to begin understanding how discourse effects our understanding of the conflict.
