noticing people

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

What Democrats need to say about reproductive freedom

Why do anti-choice activists want to make abortion illegal?

The answer has to be to decrease the number of abortions performed in the US.

It is a painful irony that many women who have abortions feel like they have no choice in the matter at all. The major reason why women have abortions is economic. There is a strong link between abortion rates and poverty. In the US the abortion rate among very poor women is four times the rate among wealthy women.

Worldwide, the countries with the lowest abortions rates are those in which abortion is legal and accessible and the countries with the highest abortion rates are those with highly restrictive abortion laws. We know that before Roe v Wade there were many illegal and dangerous abortions in the US. When you take away someone’s only legal option you restrict them to illegal and dangerous alternatives.

If it is genuinely the case that anti-choice activists think that decreasing the number of abortions is of primary importance, and we know that abortion rates are linked to women living in poverty, then it only follows that it is of primary importance that anti-choice activists address the feminization of poverty.

If the goal is to decrease abortion rates, and not just to bully or control women, then the focus should not be on creating highly restrictive abortion laws, it should be on improving the economic status of women in the US.

Labels: , ,

Monday, November 20, 2006

expert on race = oxymoron

The other day I was out with a group of women and one of them said of Hispanics: “Those people just don’t value education.”

Whoa. Seriously? Everyone in the room was white. No one was saying anything. I am a professor, and I study and teach about race in the US. I spent years developing expertise on the causes and the effects of racism and working on ways to counter racism in this country.

When I spoke up and said that such comments were not OK, a very disturbing thing happened. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that because I spent so much time learning about race, I was likely overly sensitive in my perceptions of racism, both in this situation and in general. My education makes me an unreliable witness.

That is like telling an oncologist that, because she spent so much time learning about cancer, her interpretations of diagnostic tests are likely overly sensitive. Her education makes her an unreliable diagnostician.

The difference is that going to school and spending six years learning about cancer has the effect of making you a reliable expert, but going to school and spending six years learning about race makes you an unreliable radical.

It is good to be someone who knows about cancer, and it is bad to be someone who knows about race.

What happens when the very act of knowing something stops people from treating you as trustworthy and reliable? The more that you know the less people are willing to treat you as knowledgeable. This means that, as a culture, there are some things that we simply can't know because the people who do know them, by their very act of acquiring the knowledge, become suspect in our eyes.

This is a way for whites to pretend that racism doesn’t exist, which means they can pretend that they are not complicit with it and bear no moral responsibility for getting rid of it.

The horrifying thing is that it does exist, they are complicit, and they bear responsibility.

I thought integrity was something that Americans valued.

Labels: ,