Tag Archive for "Human Rights"

Posts Tagged Human Rights

Can the Nanny Speak?

An article in this month’s Essence (available only in print, not online) gives me pause. Veronica Chambers’ “I’m Her Mother, Not Her Nanny” tells a Black Latina’s testimony about the frustration of being misidentified as the nanny of her biracial child.
Veronica explains her experiences of racism:

I have to deal with strangers who treat me as if I were a hired hand. It angers me because when someone asks something so ignorant, I’m reminded that even under the leadership of this historic Obama administration, there are many people who only see me as a dark-skinned woman in a position of servitude.

Veronica has every right to be properly identified as the mother of a child she helped bring into the world. ...

By Samhita • 13 years ago

Gender Justice and The US Social Forum

Guest Post from Nora Dye
“Another world is possible, another U.S. is necessary, another Detroit is happening.” That’s the tagline of the United States Social Forum, a convergence of activists happening this summer in Detroit. Detroit was chosen because it is ground zero for viewing the consequences of our current economic system, and the story of Detroit mirrors a larger story about the relationship between capitalism, race, gender, class, ability, nationality, and other social identities in the United States.
When Detroit is in the news (as it was recently due to the tragic murder of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, a seven year old who was killed by a Detroit police officer), it is usually portrayed as a place where a culture ...

By Courtney • 13 years ago

Thank You Thursdays: Rhonda Copelon

Feminist and human rights lawyer Rhonda Copelon died of ovarian cancer this month, at just 65, but she had plenty of time to leave her fiercely feminist mark on the world. Her friend and colleague, Charlotte Bunch, has a beautiful piece up about her legacy at the Women’s Media Center. An excerpt:

Friends and colleagues long ago recognized her keen intellectual acumen, her legal and political strategic brilliance, and her unswerving advocacy in the pursuit of justice. It’s true that her perseverance could drive us crazy when, late at night in a women’s caucus for the UN World Conferences, she would raise a critical point that clearly needed our attention after a document had already gone to the printer. But ...

By Samhita • 13 years ago

Female Genital Cutting Added to Possible Procedures via American Association of Pediatricians.

Over the last few years there have been a handful of high profile cases that involved families attempting to practice female genital cutting in the Western world. These cases brought up not only the reality and danger of FGM without access to medical care, but also the difficulty of treating issues cross-culturally within the Western context raising the question at what point can and should legal and/or medical systems intervene and do they have the right to? International debates around the FGM verse female circumcision are complex and can not be reduced to right and wrong. However, it has been widely established in Western feminist doctrine and in Western medicine that for a variety of reasons FGM ...

By Samhita • 13 years ago

Native Women in Alaska Are Twice as Likely to Experience Sexual Assault.

This is a fairly grim statistic found by the Urban Indian Health Initiative in a study released this week titled Reproductive Health of Urban American Indian and Alaska Native Women (pdf).
From the report introduction by Sarah Deer (Muscogee Creek) Assistant Professor,

Advocates for Native women may not be surprised by many of these findings, but this report confirms what many have been saying for years: Native women continue to be socially, economically, and physically marginalized by a society that doesn’t prioritize and sometimes doesn’t even acknowledge the realities of their lives. This report also makes crucial connections between violence and health. Violence against Native women is a public health crisis, and the urban experience has not received ...

By Samhita • 13 years ago

The Washington Times Publishes Blatantly Transphobic Editorial.

I really think when newspapers publish editorials they should pick ones that have more solid logic than, well, blatant transphobia. Reading Lara sends in this garbage published at the Washington Times,

ENDA purports to “prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.” Clever politically correct wording aside, this is a direct attack on common sense. On some matters, it is good to be discriminating. It is right to discriminate between honesty and dishonesty, between politeness and impoliteness, between right and wrong. And it assuredly is right to be discriminating in choosing who teaches our children. ENDA would make it impossible for a non-church-based charter school, for instance, to remove from the classroom a “she-male” who ...

ENDA purports to “prohibit employment ...

By Lori Adelman • 14 years ago

Maternal Mortality Rates Drop, But That’s Not the Whole Story

As Miriam reported in What We Missed, The Lancet recently released a report revealing that maternal deaths sharply declined worldwide in 2008, meaning that less women all over the world are dying in pregnancy and childbirth. Hooray! This is excellent, inspiring news, and advocates around the world are celebrating a breakthrough in one area that had been steadily losing hope for years (Just to give you a sense of where we’ve been at with this, back in May, the WHO director of health statistics said “Maternal mortality is stuck at what it was in 1990.”)
But this figure alone doesn’t tell the whole story for women’s health. Here are a few other points I think you should ...

By Chloe Angyal • 14 years ago

Interview: Alice Walker on violence, peace and compassion

Last week, I had the honor of speaking to author Alice Walker about her new book, Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel, which will be released later this year. Walker is the author of The Color Purple, for which she won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. A prolific writer, she has also written a dozen more works of fiction an impressive catalogue of poetry and nonfiction. Walker is also teacher, editor, activist and a central figure in modern African American writing and thought. It would be difficult to overstate the role she has played the American feminist and womanist movements: As the first Black woman to ...