(con)founding conflations

Two articles caught my eye over at the NYT today. The first is about Debbie Almontaser, who has lost the first round in her suit against the NY Dept of Education, filed after she was fired as principal of a Brooklyn Arabic language school. The second article is an Op-Ed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. You might recall that Hirsi was formerly a member of the Dutch Parliament, and has been outspoken against radical Islam, particularly in relation to women’s rights. She is currently a fellow at The American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank.

Taken together, the two articles highlight the predicament of a living in a diverse world in which moderate religious and cultural views are so important, but that is also a world that values extremism for its political and commercial value.

Hirsi Ali, whom I have following for a few years, has a real talent for making political statements. She is good at getting to what is at stake in an event, at the larger implications of events that might otherwise seem random or unconnected. In recent years, however, I cannot help but feel that Ali has lost sight of her feminist/activist goals and has simply become one self-interested talking head among many.

Several respondents to Ali’s article were quick to post links to the very kinds of moderate responses Ali seems to be calling for, particularly from national organizations. Why has she not reached out to these groups? Where do they fit in her article? Or where, for instance, do the lawyer marches in Pakistan (a story she could not have missed) fit into all of this? Read the rest of this entry »

In one of my classes this week we will be reading selections by the late Melvin Dixon, a gay and African American poet-scholar who died during the nineties. In one of his essays, “I’ll Be Listening for My Name,” he touches upon the kind of doubled death lgbt artists face in the AIDS crisis, as they face racial discrimination in the public sphere that is compounded by the denial of their emotional and sexual lives by families and communities who refuse to recognize gays and lesbians. We have also been reading Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, which is about a teenage boy who is the chosen one, smart and athletic. Also gay, he eventually dies under the burden of homophobia, of being forced to see himself as simultaneously chosen and damned, angel and demon.

Well, this morning I was greeted by a story on crimes against the LGBT community in Newark, NJ, “In a Progressive State, a City Where Gay Life Hangs by a Thread.” The story is by Andrew Jacobs, who’s on the Newark beat at the NYT. It’s not a terrible story, and it does a nice job of outlining a broad picture of options for the lgbt community in lower and working class communities of color in Newark.

The story got me thinking, though, about how difficult it is to talk about sex and race– especially when we barely have language for sussing out race and class. So what happens when, as in most cases, we need to talk about all three at once? Often, it seems, we latch onto the one that best serves our own needs, a need fed by our perceptions “what counts” and “what matters.” But, again, what does this mean for the possibility of
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