[Navigating Way Net]
Last altered May 29, 1996
Sunu P. Chandy
everything I write
I write
as honestly as I can
believe me
it only gets a little easier each time
you may ask
what's so risky about writing conference reports
but when you are honest
everything you write can mean movement
which is often about risk
"Forging Forward, Women and Color and the Law" was the title of a conference held on February 24 & 25 at Harvard Law School." This event was planned and organized by the Women of Color Collective at Harvard Law School. It began with inspiring remarks from Barbara R. Arnwine, the Executive Director at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law in DC. She was a powerful and compelling speaker, and unlike many lawyers, she was really grounded in a full analysis of power and discrimination and discussed the fact that we need "strategies for a new social order." I definitely connected with her because she had a vision of law as just one tool in our larger struggle as activists and saw the necessity of challenging the continuing images which serve to perpetuate economic, political, and social disparities in our society. She reminded us that law is a manifestation of the political culture and that laws are built on the stereotypes such as 'immigrants who refuse to assimilate' and 'black welfare queens'. Then, these laws are used to promulgate the oppression many of us face. Barbara Arnwine challenged us to work on the same two issues which women of color must always work on: Building a mature women's movement that addresses racism and building gender equality in our race communities.
Barbara Arnwine also had a presence which contributed to my continual effort of dispelling my own faulty images of: 'What does a lawyer look like? Dress like? Sound like?' The second time she spoke, she focused on the 'clash of visions' in this country. Yes, there has always been a dominant way of thinking (patriarchal, racist), but there has always also been a countervision of inclusion. So, Pat Buchanan is continuing that first vision and we are continuing the countervision. The sentiment against immigrants and against affirmative action is created by the powerful in this country. Recent polls in this country indicate that the majority of people do not carry around these sorts of prejudices at the front of their minds. This hatred is consciously generated by the Right Wing. Commercial culture, popular culture continuously put out images which promulgate white supremacy and this means that as progressives, we need to do conscious media work. Ms. Arnwine reminded us that we need to be writing books that counter pseudo-scholarship done, for example, by Dinesh D'Souza.
As a woman of color law student at this conference, it was uplifting to see a number of role models who were working in the law. Ms. Arnwine also reminded us of other women of color in the law such as Patricia Williams, Lani Guiner, Mari Matsuda, and Kim Crenshaw and re-emphasized the fact that we need to work together to build a shared vision which defies current popular culture
Professor Margaret Woo gave a description of her identity processes. She made an interesting point that,often, facets of her identity take prominence based on the political context at the time. I thought this was useful to hear because I find myself doing the same thing for these very reasons, but had never acknowledged it. For example, today, in the face of anti-immigrant sentiment, Ms. Woo underlines her identity as a foreign-born woman from Hong Kong. In the same way, when I fight against anti-immigration legislation, I write letters 'as a child of immigrants.' Whereas when I fight for minorities in this country, I may say, (if I can force myself, since it is tricky to identify with this sort of undue privilege which shouldn't come with being born here, but sometimes does...) "As an 'American citizen,' born and raised in this country etc., I demand...." It is tricky. Ms. Woo also described the many media images which Asian women have to fight and how we must take on the movement towards self identity. We have to demand an end to racist questions still present in the thoughts, if not statements, of too many people: questions such as, 'Are Asian-American women really aggressive enough to be lawyers?"
At one of the panels, an interesting debate ensued around the question of working on 'American issues' first, instead of taking on worldwide oppression. One African American woman panelist felt that her issues weren't global and she needed to take care of her sisters here. However, many others pointed out that they have family worldwide, and not only that, politically, in a global economy, you can't deal with topics such as workers rights, without a global analysis. The African American woman felt like it was too much already, trying to be an expert on women of color in America, and she did not know how she could possibly take any more on. The issue was 'overburdening' versus global responsibility. It seems that the issue was somewhat resolved by agreeing that we can not possibly be experts on every trouble-spot in the world, or every issue in this country--but we must acknowledge some of the connections. We must have an analysis and an agenda which is inclusive of everyone who is being oppressed and we must try to stay as informed as possible about everyone's struggles since we have such similar goals and such similar forces working against us. Of course it is tiring. Many of the more recent immigrant women believed that we have no choice but to keep a global concern because our familial and political links are so strong. Whereas, women whose ancestry has been here for generations did not, perhaps, feel as compelled to maintain a global concern.
Another highlight for me was hearing Asian American lawyer, Margaret Fung, the Executive Director of the Asian-American Legal Defense Fund in NY. She discussed how Asians are often used as a wedge in the affirmative action debate along with the myth of us as the model minority. Statistics show that poverty rates among Asian Americans is twice as high as those among whites and that white college graduates make 11% more than Asian-American college grads. She stated that we, as Asian Americans need to realize that we, along with other people of color, gained from the civil rights movement in this country and that we need to break the myth that all Asians are 'foreigners.' There also needs to be more work done by us around the issues of poverty in Asian American communities.
A common thread in many of the talks was about 'intersectionality'-- meaning the intersection of race and gender in our lives, in a world that, if anything, only recognizes one oppression at a time. There has been a significant amount of scholarship on this subject and many speakers quoted Kim Crenshaw who states that intersectionality is a distinct category and that this dual vulnerability is greater than the sum of its parts. However, at the conference, I found this entire discussion to be limited, perhaps because I studied women's studies in college in a somewhat progressive department. Thus, for five years now, I have been discussing the fact that women of color have a different experience than white women and men of color. In the beginning, we used to say that women of color have a double burden because we deal with gender plus race. However, for some time now, we have also been saying that when these two identities converge in our lives, something distinct emerges and this experience has different qualities than either race or gender, when experienced one at a time. It is multi-axis discrimination. One small example is that when there are studies on interactions such as car buying (the studies document disparities in treatment), women of color still always receive the least respect. However, once again, at this conference, I felt like this point was acknowledged but I didn't know where to take that analysis.... Some panelists even asked the question I was wondering: What is the continued social significance of intersectionality ? How does the intersectionality work now that we know it is not simply a summation of race and gender?
This became more interesting and perhaps explained when one panelist told us that one of her mentees was planning a law review article on race/gender and was told by the people in charge: "that's not all that interesting anymore." (What really scares me is that some of us begin to internalize this idea that it's not interesting anymore, and that perpetuates the cycle of no new scholarship on these issues.) So, it seems that the white male world of law was interested for a bit in our issues, but now it's getting tiring. How offensive is that ? This idea also came up again when women of color professors described the challenges of finally being granted tenure. It seems that to focus your articles on race/gender is to take a true risk of not being taken seriously. The words used by committees to describe the work on our issues is: "shallow and boringly predictable". This concept of discounting race-based scholarship came up repeatedly in the panel on legal academia: "Save that piece until after tenure" or " Do you really want to use the word 'racist'?" "These ideas have been published many times already".
By far, the most impressive aspect of this conference was the inclusion of Native American women lawyers and their experiences. This is the first women of color event which I have attended that fully included Native women along with African American, Asian American, and Latina women. Ada E. Deer, Ass't Sec for Indian Affairs, U.S. Dept of Interiors, spoke about her work in the Government. Her background is in social work, and she strives to create a progressive federal-tribal partnership instead of continuing the tradition of federal paternalism towards Native American people.
I spoke with June Lorenzo is a Native lawyer who works for the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, during the conference. She explained how a Native person's existence is tied to federal law and more than race, it is about a political reality. "People ask me about new age spirituality and I say 'let me tell you about treaty rights." She was cordial at first, but after talking for a bit, we realized that she had a friend from my undergrad college and that she had some Quaker connections, at which point, she became more friendly. I guess this is the sort of thing which happens quite often in the old boys network, where such connections are made. It's hard to network sometimes because I attended a small college in the Midwest, and I don't have any lawyers in my family. I also don't feel interested to talk to most lawyers who I meet. However, at this conference, it was different. The women of color at this conference repeatedly made it clear that they want to be our mentors, and be supportive of us as women of color law students . This is an invaluable gift for us that we should take advantage of, and meanwhile, we should remember, as we become upper year students, to be supportive of the incoming women of color students in our own law schools.
Although many of the speakers included disability, sexual orientation, and 'other oppressions' in their lists of what we need to be working on, this was truly only lip service. Women of color must truly work to address more and more of these intersections, in addition to the race/gender intersection which we face, instead of falsely believing that there is no one among us who fits into other identity categories and experiences.
There were many other panels throughout the weekend discussing issues such as:
There was also time set aside for us to meet in small groups with women from our own ethnic background. There was one Indian-American woman from the Harvard Women of Color Collective and she led our discussion. There was probably about ten of us--from a diverse groups of Asian American backgrounds. We discussed stereotypes and issues specific to our group and wrote and posted them in the main room, as did other groups and then explained them to each other.
[Navigating Way Net]
Last altered May 29, 1996