The Protest Spring 2012 issue

THE PROTEST Spring 2012

The Modern Slave Trade page 12

www.the-protest.com

table of contents

3 shoving bullying to the forefront 4 how safe is evanston?

5 what is to be done?

6 working for sustainability: a real food system 8 the power of forgiveness 10 tfa under fire 12 the modern slave trade 15 nu’s misplaced budget priorities 16 what is asg?

18 the new “good germans�

20 daughter of democracy 22 waging war on women

the protest

| spring 2012

www.the-protest.com nuprotest@gmail.com

editor-in-chief matthew kovac feature editor anca ulea senior editors kathryn prescott charles rollet becca weinstein design editors jack foster jenna fugate designers cameron albert-deitch yoona ha christine nguyen jenna zitaner web editor lydia zuraw

photo by jack foster cover photos by jack foster

published by peace project, an asg-recognized and funded organization. the views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of peace project or the entire magazine staff.

SHOVING BULLYING TO THE FOREFRONT

by Alexandria Johnson

When the documentary Bully was tagged with an R rating by the Motion Picture Association of America, The Weinstein Company, congressmen, celebrities and activists mobilized to petition for a rating change.

Bully, a movie about five kids and their families’ experiences with bullying in schools across America, was originally given an R rating for language.

“We felt it was important to depict what bullying feels like and sounds like,” says Bully producer Cynthia Lowen.

Following the original MPAA decision, director Lee Hirsch and the Weinstein Co. decided to release the film unrated.

AMC Theatres showed the unrated version of the movie and offered a permission slip for those less than 17 years old.

“Bully is a documentary with a significantly relevant message for a broad audience, including teenagers,” said Ryan Noonan, AMC Theatres director of public relations, in an e-mail. “We believe Bully should be viewed by any person who can benefit from its message.”

Michigan high school student Katy Butler, 17, initiated a campaign on Change.org to push for the PG-13 rating

and received more than 500,000 signatures, including celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, Meryl Streep, Demi Lovato and Justin Bieber.

“About a month ago, I saw an ad for Bully, and I thought it was incredible,” Butler says. “Then I thought, why is this rated R? It obviously needs to be PG-13, so I started a petition.”

Butler has traveled around the country to speak about Bully and currently is supporting anti-bullying legislation, which she presented to members of Congress Mike Honda, Kirsten Gillibrand and leader Nancy Pelosi.

“I know it’s such a personal issue for many people,” she says. “It hits home.”

The MPAA decided to change the

movie’s rating to PG-13 in April after Hirsch agreed to remove some instances of the “F-word” in the movie.

“I think we always thought it was PG13,” Lowen says. “I think we made if for young people to see from their perspective. We were very happy with the decision we were able to come to and [that we were] able to keep language which was integral to the theme.”

Radio/Television/Film senior lecturer and documentarian Clayton Brown says that although his documentaries have not faced any similar controversy, he tends to agree with the push for a PG-13 rating.

“I think the main problem seems to be that the movie is geared toward middle school-age kids, and it’s a big disappointment they couldn’t get in to see it,” Brown says. “They had to find a balance between content and what was important.”

School of Communication adjunct lecturer and documentary producer Carey Graeber says she found out about the Bully rating controversy through working in the film environment and coverage of bullying problems around the nation.

She noted the troubling “normal” presence of bullying in the nation’s school culture and the refusal to acknowledge that how people treat each other can be bullying.

“When I heard about it, I was so glad they’re taking it into the real world and what happens to kids,” Graeber says. •

WHAT DO THE RATINGS MEAN? Source: mpaa.org

G PG R NC-17

General audience, all ages admitted. The G rating is not a “certificate of approval,” nor does it signify a “children’s” motion picture.

Parental guidance suggested, some material may not be suitable for children. PG-13 means parents strongly cautioned, may be inappropriate for under 13.

Restricted. Children under 17 require accompanying adult guardian. Contains some adult material. An R-rated motion picture may include adult themes, adult activity, strong language, intense violence, sexually-oriented nudity, drug abuse or other elements.

No one 17 and under admitted. An NC-17 rated motion picture is one that most parents would consider too adult for their children 17 and under.

THE PROTEST | spring issue 3

HOW SAFE IS

Evanston?

By Amy Li

A

lthough security at Northwestern has been a high priority for the university, a few robbery incidents on and around campus have left students and residents concerned.

However, Cdr. Jay Parrott of the Evanston Police Department says that there is no need to be apprehensive about Evanston safety. According to Parrott’s analysis, the total of reported crimes in Evanston in 2012 has decreased 20 percent compared to the crime report in 2011.

In addition to this positive trend, Parrott noted the growing relationship between the university and the Evanston police force, solidifying a partnership that he says will work to ensure Evanston safety.

“Over the past year, crime rate continued to decrease, which is a positive sign that what we are doing is effective,” Parrott says. “No murder has been reported yet this year while last year we had one in the first month of 2011.”

According to the Evanston Police Department, crime reports from the first three months of 2012 reflected major decreases compared to the 2011 report.

Burglary fell 32.7 percent and robbery cases went down 20 percent. Parrott says theft is always the top contributor to high crime rates. Though it remains the leading crime, theft has decreased 18.8 percent overall.

While the Evanston Police Department attributes this trend to proper deployment of officers, excellent relationship between officers and the community, or-

ganized community structure and keen precautionary procedures, Chief Deputy Daniel McAleer of the University Police further explains this trend as a result of the two police forces’ partnership.

“There’s tremendous cooperation between us and the Evanston police,” McAleer says. “We do training together and have joint bicycle patrols. The chiefs of both departments always meet weekly to learn more about the current safety situation.”

McAleer says 48 sworn police officers at Northwestern are affirmed under a mutual aid agreement by the city council to protect more than just the campus.

These officers are able to take action without having to involve the Evanston Police, allowing more effective teamwork between the police forces.

University Police not only have police cars on constant patrol, but also take three to four foot patrols to the downtown area every night to ensure the safety of students who live off-campus while keeping an eye out for other Evanston pedestrians.

However, even with increased patrols, Evanston might not be as safe as some thought. Neighborhood Scout, a national online database for city crime rate reports, shows that Evanston is only safer than 24 percent of the cities in the U.S. “I am actually shocked to hear this because everyone sees Evanston as a wealthy upper-class neighborhood, but I think that some of the rougher parts of Evanston are often overlooked and

forgotten about,” says Emily Fagan, a current Evanston resident from Aurora, Illinois.

A political science professor and an expert on crime and policing, NU professor Wesley G. Skogan has directed an evaluation of Chicago’s citywide community policing initiative and most of the Institute for Policy Research’s major crime studies over the past three decades.

“Because I’ve been here for a long time, I can say that crime rates have definitely been going down over the years,” Skogan says. “Of course, another reason for the decline is due to good police work.”

Skogan says that university police have gone through various specialized training that has prepared them for emergencies such as the spilling of nuclear and biological material. Currently, Skogan says, in addition to adding more blue emergency phones and extending its security systems, the university has hired private security companies that would patrol in and around the dormitory areas.

Although Skogan recognizes the decreasing crime rate in Evanston, he also says that Evanston has a high crime rate compared to nearby suburbs. He explains this phenomenon as the result of a more socioeconomically diverse population.

To ensure Evanston’s crime rate continues to decline, both the Evanston Police and University Police say they are on the lookout for new and effective ways to create a safer community. •

what is to be

done?

by Rafael Vizcaino That was the question Lenin asked at the dawn of the 20th century. We know how the rest of the story unfolded. Halfway through the 20th century, Ernesto “Che” Guevara warned us that “cruel leaders are replaced, only to have new leaders turn cruel.” We are also aware of the historical irony here.

What our generation, along with millions of people around the world, has been realizing over the past years is that Lenin’s question is not a 20th-century question. Staring at the still-existent contradictions in the logic of our current systems of political and economic organization, we find ourselves in the necessity of addressing the question of “what is to be done” once again.

The task is an extremely difficult one — some might even call it an impossibility.

After the experiences of the 20th century, the programs represented by that century are now defunct. Thus, we find ourselves in the situation that, unlike the revolutionary movements of the 20th century, we do not know where to go from here. We seem to know what the problems are —

perhaps we can group them under the rubric of the corruption of our political and economic systems. Carrying the heavy weight of the 20th century, however, the notion of revolution is unviable.

So what is to be done? The late Eric Hobsbawm, at the dawn of the 21st century, expressed his aspiration to maintain a peculiar continuity with the 20th century: “Communism as a motivation is still valid, but not as programme.” Now the reader will wonder: “Did you say Communism? Even if we break all continuity with the socialist failures of the 20th century, why should we maintain that incredibly tainted word for an ideal that we seek to uphold?”

Because, as Santiago Zavala has pointed out, “Being a communist in 2012 is not a political choice, but rather an existential matter.” Also, the Communist Idea as a political and economic alternative for the 21st century should shatter what I see as the problem of identity politics in a lot of present-day global social movements.

The Communism of the 21st century should not be about one’s own personal

or group interests. It should be, as Slavoj Zizek has said, about the commons. The Communism of the 21st century should address our contemporary condition as a Whole, as an entire community — at all levels of organization. Therefore, we choose to maintain this tainted word because its original etymology should prevail over its misconceptions and misappropriations: communis — shared by all.

In 1971, John Lennon famously immortalized the phrase: “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

Almost half a century later, our motivations are still labeled as chimeras. But as Slavoj Zizek has recently put it: “The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.”

This is not the place to elaborate on the above opinions. What we can say with confidence is that Lenin’s question is also our question — and we will not be able to continue living the way we do if we refuse to address this. •

THE PROTEST | spring issue 5

Every day more than 2,000 students pay about $11 per meal on the weekly 13-meal plan. Why is it that we can get a more nutritious and healthful meal at Whole Foods for less than that? What is in our food and where does it come from?

The Real Food Coalition (RFC) is working to get answers to those questions and bring sustainable, local food to Northwestern dining halls. But the reality of the situation and their undertaking is proving to be complicated.

Sodexo, Northwestern’s food service provider and the second-biggest catering services company worldwide, has come under increased student scrutiny since the Living Wage Campaign (LWC) took off in the fall of 2009.

“When people started talking about the food piece, I originally thought it was separate from economic struggles, but I’ve learned that the two things are completely linked,” says Will Bloom, Weinberg junior and RFC co-leader.

“Spending all that time building relationships with the workers as part of

“There needs to be a national challenge to see a real shift in the way the food systems function.”

- Katie Blanchard the economic fight, the strongest feelings of community were around food.”

Several students started the RFC in fall 2011 to start a dialogue about how to better integrate sustainability and fairness into NU’s food program. So far, almost 1,200 people have signed their petition calling for “food that truly nourishes producers, consumers, communities and the earth. A food system — from seed to plate — that fundamentally respects human dignity and health, animal welfare, social justice and environmental sustainability.”

RFC works closely with the Real Food Challenge, a nationwide movement aiming to create a real food calculator and shift 20 percent of catering services’ spending to real food by 2020. Real Food Challenge defines “real food” as being local, fair, ecologically sound, and humane.

“Every year food services spend $5 billion purchasing food [for colleges],” says Katie Blanchard, Midwest coordinator for the Real Food Challenge.

“There needs to be a national challenge to see a real shift in the way the food systems function. The organic food is a ‘movement’ but it’s still tiny; individual changes aren’t adding up to big change so we need to leverage institutional dollars and power toward really shifting the kind of food system that is being supported.”

Thanks to the LWC precedent, NU has involved workers in the process of creating a fairer food system, Bloom says. In a panel called “At Work in the Kitchen: Dining Workers Share Their Stories,” held last fall, workers said food

Why is it that we can get a more nutritious and healthful meal at Whole Foods for less than NU’s dining halls? What is in our food and where does it come from?

quality and amounts of fresh produce had deteriorated. They felt that the use of canned and frozen foods, justified by “consistency in product” and “lower costs for such a high-volume operation,” impeded their freedom to make more creative, delicious food.

While RFC has met with an overwhelmingly positive response from students, Bloom says Sodexo and some administrators have been more reticent to heed their calls for more local and organic food.

“It’s very easy to get 20 percent of local food if I live in Vermont or California, it’s hard to get 20 percent in the winter in northern Illinois,” says Rob Whittier, NU’s new director of the Office of Sustainability. “The Real Food Coalition is asking for a commitment we don’t even know is possible to achieve.”

A looser definition of local that encompasses surrounding states would make the 20 by 20 target realistic as markets expand and farms move from retail to wholesale, says Steven Mangan, resident district manager of Sodexo at NU. Purchasing food from local farms is difficult because the university’s peak consumption takes place during the winter, opposite the peak growing sea-

son.

“Moving into organics would be impossible right now because the cost increment is too high,” Mangan says.

“Our focus for the short term would be to focus on local [food] and if it happens to be organic, great. As other organizations [like hospitals and public schools] decide to change their structure, it’ll be quite some time before the supply meets the demand.”

Mangan declined to disclose the per-

“The Real Food Coalition is asking for a commitment we don’t even know is possible to achieve.”

- Rob Whittier centage of local and organic food Sodexo uses.

As a big institutional player, Sodexo holds sway in the food system. According to Mangan, the NU-Sodexo food partnership has already implemented an

array of sustainability practices. This includes a cage-free egg program, a hormone-free dairy program, and a sustainable fish and seafood program. Sodexo is partnering with wholesale produce distributor Midwest Foods to source from local and more transparent farms, including the Windy City Harvest urban farm. Sodexo has also started a composting program this spring and is planning a biofuel project for next fall.

“It’s the fashionable thing to have your sustainability program and compared to Aramark [another one of the big three food service providers worldwide], Sodexo is progressive I guess, but not really,” says Bloom, adding that transparency has been a problem between RFC and Sodexo. “We understand it’s a process, but I do know that we have eight years to try and get to 20 percent real food, and just looking at a specific set of numbers seems like a pretty bad reason to not try. We can surprise ourselves and make it happen.”

Although the relationship between Sodexo and students has been bumpy, both recognize that a cooperative dialogue is the most productive path to take going forward. As Bloom put it, “Food is a unifying thing and that’s why it’s important that we do it right.” • THE PROTEST | spring issue 7

THE POWER OF FORGIVENESs Stories From Grace House By Aozora Brockman At Grace House, a recovery home in Chicago for women exiting the prison system, Lisa Robinson reads her story with quiet strength: “My father came home drunk and my parents started fighting and arguing in the house,” Robinson says. “This was not uncommon. He often came home drunk. The violence between them escalated and became so heated they wound up outside in the front yard. My mom had tears in her eyes and so did I and my sister. My mom’s blouse was ripped off and her breasts were exposed. The neighbors and the kids on the block and other near blocks started appearing.

“I ran in the house thinking I needed to find something to help my mom defend herself — a weapon. I remember picking up a long pole off the vacuum cleaner. I ran outside with it and handed it over to my mother. Then I could see the color red in my mom’s eyes and her trembling. The police finally arrived and for several moments the police and neighbors begged my mom to let him go.

She was screaming at him saying, ‘I’m going to kill him!’

I believed she was and became very afraid for him as well as her. I was about seven years old when this happened.”

Robinson, 45, is one of the many Grace House women who attend writing workshops put on by Nancy Deneen, formerly of the Weinberg Dean’s Office, Northwestern professor Penny Hirsch, and her daughter, Jenny. At first, the Grace House women refused to believe that the workshops would help them, but Robinson says that after a while she found the workshop to have a positive effect on her.

“I had no idea that what I would write, my stories . . . how that would be the catalyst for me to heal,” Robinson says. “I didn’t know the impact that the past had on my present and future decisions. I just couldn’t see it. I think I broke down . . . in one of Jenny’s classes because digging back there brought up some things that I had no idea had affected me.”

Sabrina Gary, 42, another writing workshop participant,

says the writing helped her to express herself.

“I can put down my thoughts on the past and I had never told nobody about it. I didn’t want nobody to know about it.

But when I do it, it makes me feel good — real good — to get some of that load off, that I had stuffed away from years and years ago,” Gary says with a shy smile.

A Haven for Once-Incarcerated Women Grace House — an operation under St. Louis’ Ministries — began in 1994, after women began to be incarcerated more rapidly for drug crimes because of the War on Drugs.

“There became a need for assistance for women exiting the prison system,” says Kimberly Crawford, aftercare director at Grace House.

Women that are accepted into the program usually stay for about nine to 10 months, Crawford says. Eighteen residents live in the house at one time and three meals a day are provided.

“After you make a mistake, you kind of pay for that the rest of your life,” Crawford says. “So Grace House is a place that provides an opportunity for people to do something different, to change their lifestyle, to do something better, and to be able to have the opportunity to get some things that will help them be able to live a better life.

So we promote education, we promote employment, family reunification and things like that.”

The House also provides emotional support. One resident, Sabrina Gary, says, “This is a good place . . . ’cause all the ladies in Grace House, we all stick together, comfort each other, especially the staff. They help us with anything we need.”

The fact that there are no men is also a comfort to Gary.

“If there were some guys, I would’ve never opened up,” she says. “Never.

Nobody wouldn’t know nothing. They’d have had to pull it out of me.”

The Stories All of the women at Grace House have stories about their upbringings, some easier to bear than others. For Robinson, those stories revolved around her great-grandmother, whose mother was French Canadian and her father African American.

“My great-grandmother was my mother’s grandmother and she was beautiful,” Robinson says. “She looked like a movie star to me and she was very fair-skinned.

She came here from Laurel, Mississippi, in 1920. She was 20 years old. She did very well in the ’20s here in Chicago — she passed for a white woman. So she lived — for lack of a better way to say it — a white woman’s life, because she got by. Until she had my grandmother. . . .

You know, if you have any African American in you, it will show up in the baby. So when my grandmother was born, that put a damper on her entire life out here.”

Robinson’s great-grandmother had married a white man with blue eyes, and he did not know that she was part African American until the baby was born. Most of her friends in Chicago did not know of the existence of the baby, since she wanted to keep her secret.

Robinson’s great-grandmother also experienced violent racial hatred toward the members of her family. Her father was murdered for being seen with a white woman, her French Canadian mother. She also “had a brother who was the blackest of the bottom of your shoe, who came to Chicago, who she always tried to protect — she loved her brother. And because of the darkness of his skin, there were many times where she couldn’t even be seen with her brother here, or let anyone know he was her brother because they thought she was white,” Robinson says.

Because of the knowledge Robinson’s great-grandmother had about how the color of one’s skin affects individuals, she tried to protect her granddaughter

by warning her not to associate with anyone “of very dark complexion.”

“The older I got, she got very concerned with the texture of my skin turning and it being bad . . . I didn’t accept myself,” Robinson says. “I didn’t like myself. . . . So I didn’t have to hear about slavery, I didn’t have to hear about any of that. I already didn’t want to be me.”

But Robinson says she understands and forgives her great-grandmother for making her feel insecure about herself.

“I understand that that lesson she told me was how she survived in her time, and that she was only giving me what she had experienced,” she says.

Life After Grace House Gary arrived at Grace House at the end of June 2011, but already feels that she has come a long way. For one, she has learned to open up to the other women and share her story.

She has also been getting to know her biological daughter, whom she did not raise.

Gary says she talks to her daughter every other day and tells her what she has gone through, so she does not make the same mistakes.

“That made me feel real good, talking to her about what I used to go through,” Gary says. “’Cause I never wanted to tell her about it, but now I tell her a little at a time — why I didn’t raise her, and what I was going through. She said she was proud of me, and that made me feel real good.

Every time she say that, I be about to cry. She’s understanding.”

In the meantime, Gary is taking classes so she can get a high school diploma. She strives to become a nurse, a dream she says she has had since she was small.

“I know I got a lot to do — I’m looking forward to doing what I got to do. ’Cause I ain’t getting any younger,” Gary says with a laugh. • THE PROTEST | spring issue 9

THE BUSINESS OF TEACHING: IS TFA TOo ROTTEN for our schools?

by Audrey Cheng

While Teach for America has become one of the leading nonprofits countering educational inequality, the mounting criticisms against the program have led some college graduates to join competing alternative teaching programs.

Since its establishment in 1989, TFA has been determined to achieve its goals by hiring and training college grads and professionals to teach at low-income schools that lack effective teachers.

Corps members teach for two years and can decide if they want to continue their tenure.

Among the various criticisms is that TFA is unable to produce experienced, effective educators.

Kaitlin Gastrock, TFA communications director, says teachers are chosen through a rigorous application process in order to find the highest potential candidates who will be successful in the classroom.

“We’re looking for the characteristics that we see through 20 years of training,” Gastrock says. “We have 30,000 teachers that we have predicted will be successful to pass through.”

Gastrock says there are misconceptions about the rigor of the training teachers are

put through and the length of time the training continues. “[Training] starts during the summer, but it does continue throughout the two years,” Gastrock says. “Any teacher who enters into the classroom will know that there is a ton to learn, and that’s why we provide that ongoing support to give them strong fundamentals at first.

They can continuously examine what’s working well and what they need to strengthen and take the information that’s relevant and build it into their practice right away.”

The summer training combines experience in the classroom teaching summer school under the guidance of veteran teachers and taking coursework to gain fundamental skills.

“That’s not going to be enough to carry them through and be great teachers, so we continue that training to support the two-year corps members,” Gastrock says.

The 2011 acceptance rate for TFA was 11 percent, and many have criticized the reasoning behind the low number. Gastrock says with 48,000 applicants, TFA wanted to ensure selected corps members have characteristics that will lead them to become effective teachers.

“We have a certain set of characteristics that we’re looking at and evaluating,” Gastrock says. “Pretty much anyone who meets that bar, we’re going to accept.”

But as TFA continues to improve its system to counter various criticisms, other alternative teaching programs continue to challenge the nonprofit.

Mississippi Teacher Corps Founded in 1989, this twoyear teaching program is similar to TFA, as it sends college graduates to teach in highpoverty areas.

But MTC program manager Ben Guest believes the ideologies behind the two programs differ.

“The big difference between us and TFA is that Teacher Corps recognizes that we are the symptom of the problem in education, which is that there is a shortage of teachers and there is a shortage of quality teachers in high-poverty areas,” Guest says. “We don’t consider ourselves the solution. We consider ourselves the problem.

We hope at some point to put ourselves out of business.”

Guest says the way TFA represents itself is deceiving.

“I think a lot of the way TFA represents itself is that

they are the solution to education problems — that because they’re recruiting smart, talented people, they give them five weeks of training, and turn them into outstanding teachers,” Guest says. “That is definitely not true.”

Guest adds that in order for a teaching program to be successful, MTC has made its summer training program 10 weeks long, as opposed to TFA’s five-week training program.

In addition to its objectives, Guest also critiques TFA for its lack of transparency.

“Programs like TFA just seem more corporate and not as transparent,” Guest says. “One thing you can say about Teacher Corps is that we’re rigorously transparent about our program and what we’re doing. [TFA] reveals very few significant statistics about their retention rate, the number of people who don’t complete their training, and the number of people who drop out.”

Though Guest says the job is “incredibly difficult” and the program looks for people with grit, the benefits MTC offers are greater than other teaching programs.

“The benefits that we offer include a full scholarship and a master’s degree in two years,” Guest says. “We’re the

only program that I know of that offers that. You receive full paying benefits from the school districts, too.”

Citizen Schools Founded in Boston in 1995, this nonprofit organization offers the AmeriCorps National Teaching Fellowship, which provides a twoyear teaching experience.

The program partners with schools across the country, and while some teaching fellows work in traditional afterschool programs, a number of them work at “Extended Learning Time” schools.

“So it’s not like a traditional after-school program where kids or their parents can optin or say no,” says Stacey Gilbert, Citizen Schools’ director of media relations. “Instead, it’s a longer school day for all the students, and our staff is running the longer school day.”

The teaching fellows work closely with teachers throughout the school day, so what they teach in the afternoon complements what teachers do during the traditional school day.

In addition to working in the schools, many teaching fellows have a morning partnership, where they work in partner organizations around the country.

Katherine Docimo (Weinberg ’10) is currently a teaching fellow for Citizen Schools.

She says that although the program isn’t as expansive as TFA, it’s still very rigorous.

“I think that if you’re going to graduate and go directly into teaching, it’s going to be intense,” Docimo says. “It’s probably not what you went to college for and you probably didn’t do student teaching, so no matter what, going straight into teaching is intense.”

She says one difference she has noticed between TFA and Citizen Schools is the program model.

“At TFA, you have your one class all day and you have a ton of responsibilities that come with that,” Docimo says. “You’re in charge of their grades, and everything is all on you, because you’re the classroom teacher. At Citizen Schools, you are an additional teacher. There’s a core of teachers that teach their own subjects, so this is where each kid will have a different teacher for different subjects.”

She says that everybody she has met gained a lot from the experience.

“With Citizen Schools, you’re always supported by a group of people you work with,” Docimo says. “I go into school, and there are 16 other

people with my exact same job, and two people who are my supervisors. I can go to any of those people and ask for help. I think that’s something that Citizen Schools is really good at.”

Gilbert says that although Citizen Schools’ program is different than TFA’s, she thinks the opportunity to work for both programs is similar.

Looking Forward Despite the rise in teaching alternatives, TFA remains one of the most influential players in educational reform. TFA received 48,000 applications in 2012, and Gastrock says the acceptance rate will only continue to decrease with the rise in applicants each year. •

“Programs like TFA just seem more corporate and not as transparent.” - Ben Guest, Mississippi Teacher Corps Program Manager THE PROTEST | spring issue 11

THE

MODERN

SLAVE TRADE

By Yu Sun Chin & Joyce Lee

S

lavery is not dead. In fact, it is flourishing: there are more slaves now than there were in the transatlantic slave trade. Worldwide, up to 27 million people are victims of sex and labor trafficking, child labor and indentured servitude, according to the CNN Freedom Project. Children as young as 12 are forced to sell their bodies to hundreds of men in India, Latin America, Burma, Switzerland and the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Laborers are captured by slave owners and even sold by family members into horrific working conditions with little food or water.

The United Nations defines human trafficking as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another, for the purpose of exploitation.”

Many of us like to think that these issues stay confined to foreign countries.

But modern-day slavery also runs rampant in the citrus farms of Florida and in the

streets of cities during the Super Bowl, which Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott described as “the single largest human trafficking incident in the United States” in a 2011 interview with USA Today. About 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the U.S. every year, according to a 2007 U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report.

More specifically, Chicago is a fertile breeding ground for sexual slavery. Runaways from troubled or broken families are especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation and trafficking. Out of an estimated 1.6 million children who run away from their homes, 33 percent are lured into sexual exploitation within the first 48 hours, according to The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. On any given day, between 16,000 to 25,000 girls and women are involved in prostitution in the Chicago area, often by force, says Kristin Claes, the communication manager at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation.

“Many women in the sex trade are not there by choice but because they have no other choices,” Claes says.

In order to confront an issue as substantial as sex trafficking, a coalition of people on legal, governmental and even artistic

fronts is taking part in a modern-day abolitionist movement in Chicago.

End Demand Illinois, a segment of CAASE, was created in 2009 to work toward bringing legal advocacy to the forefront of the race to defeat sex trafficking in Illinois. The group has since partnered with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, where Anita Alvarez, who has held the position since 2008, prioritized the defeat of the sex trade.

“Illinois had trafficking laws on the books since 2006, but it wasn’t until Anita Alvarez came into office and made this into a priority that the laws have been used to hold traffickers accountable,” Claes says.

More than five years ago, Illinois took a forward stance and signed the Illinois Predator Accountability Act of 2006 into law, which made it easier for victims of traffickers to file civil suits against johns, or clients of prostitutes. But according to an August 2011 New York Times article, no lawsuits were brought forward under the law between 2006 and 2010.

End Demand Illinois and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office have since been working to pass more laws that take into account the methods of predators and the protection of sex trafficking survivors.

In 2010, the two groups realized their first successful legal initiative when Gov. Pat Quinn passed the Illinois Safe Children Act, which defines all minors involved in prostitution as victims of sex trafficking.

Authorities do not need to prove that the minors were forced into prostitution, and individuals involved in the prostitution are arrested and penalized without exception.

The Illinois Safe Children Act also allowed for wire-tapping capabilities, a provision in the law authorities used to build cases against traffickers. The wire-tapping capabilities led to success in August of 2010 when a year-long undercover investigation culminated in a big sting in Chicago. According to a press release from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, nine street gang members were arrested and charged with trafficking girls as young as 12 for sex.

“Most of these young women and children are recruited and seduced into this life by experiencing predators that first prey on their vulnerabilities and then force them into a violent and demeaning ordeal,” said Alvarez in the press release.

End Demand Illinois also worked to pass the Justice for Victims of Sex Trafficking Crimes Act in 2011. The law lets victims of sex trafficking convicted of prostitution clear their record of those charges. “[The law] enables anybody who was convicted of prostitution,” says Dr. Tianne Bataille, an international attorney, at a speaker event at Northwestern University.

“It’s quite common that [sex trafficking victims] already have 20, 30, 40 charges.”

End Demand Illinois also focuses on precisely what its name suggests — ending demand for the sex trade. According to a study of 130 johns in Chicago conducted by Rachel Durchslag, the president of CAASE, the average john first bought sex before completing college. Claes says Durchslag realized the need to reach young men earlier in order to prevent them from buying sex.

“We’ve reached more than a thousand students since 2010 and we’ve talked to them about the realities of the sex trade,” Claes says. “We believe that without demand for paid sex, there would be no pros-

titution and no sex trafficking.”

But Anne K. Ream, the president of the Voices and Faces Project, says the issue won’t be solved until the general attitude toward the victims of sexual assault charges.

“There are huge incentives for the women to remain silent and to remain visible, and those are sometimes driven by the survivor’s own desire to remain private,” Ream says. “We often send out the message that we don’t want to hear their stories or when we “We believe do encounter that without their stories, we see it as demand for sensationalpaid sex, there ist.” would be no The Voices and Faces prostitution Project, based and no sex in Chicago, trafficking.” works toward

bringing the

Kristin Claes stories of survivors of sex trafficking and sexual violence to the public consciousness. The project collects and shares the testimonies of survivors through its website and films. It also holds workshops to teach people on how to give their own testimonies and listen to the stories of survivors.

“Basically you can’t change people’s attitudes without bringing to their attention the very real women, children and men affected by these issues,” Ream says. “So we take the position that too often when these crimes of women exist, they exist as invisible crimes.”

The Voices and Faces Project also collaborates with CAASE to lobby for gaps in sex trafficking policies, asking a survivor to become the name and face of the initiative.

“You create the space for people to share testimonies, but then you have to create a space for people to take action,” Ream says. “If it’s just the former, it may make everybody feel good just by listening but, in the end, words have to [be polished] into action.”

The Salvation Army PROMISE Program (Partnership to Rescue Our Minors

A brief modern history of sex trafficking in Illinois

*However, no lawsuits have been brought forward under the law between 2006 and 2010, according to an article in the New York Times.

2009 End Demand Illinois is created to prioritize the end of sex trafficking in the state and promote legal advocacy for victims.

August 2010 A year-long investigation ends in a sting in Chicago with nine gang members arrested and charged with trafficking girls as young as 12 years old.

2006 Illinois signs the Illinois Predator Accountability Act, making it easier for sex trafficking victims to file suits against predators. *

2010 Gov. Pat Quinn passes the Illinois Safe Children Act, which defines any minor involved in prostitution as a victim of sex trafficking.

2011 Illinois passes the Justice for Victims of Sex Trafficking Crimes Act, which allows sex trafficking victims to be cleared of prostitution charges.

THE PROTEST | spring issue 13

$32 Billion 27 million

Total yearly profits generated by the human trafficking industry

Number of people in modern-day slavery across the world

50 PercentAGE of transnational victims who are children

161 Countries identified as affected by human trafficking

800,000

Modern-day slavery around the world from Sexual Exploitation), which serves to combat the sex trafficking of children, has also fought hard on the front lines of the abolitionist movement. The program has trained community leaders in the Pullman and Roseland communities, areas with a high risk of human trafficking, in reporting suspicious activities. With a $1 million grant from the Department of Justice, its curriculum on human trafficking has also trained over 10,000 first responders in five major cities across the country, as well as over 125 students in high-risk secondary schools in Chicago.

“You have to reach out to all avenues of community and train them and make them aware of it,” says Frank, the director of PROMISE, who asked to conceal his full name for security purposes. “If you’re a teacher and you have a student with a tattoo on her neck, you need to be able to identify that that might be trafficking.”

PROMISE also runs Anne’s House, the first residential home for victims of sex trafficking in Illinois. The home provides services such as individual and group therapy, medical care, educational and vocational planning, and nurturing spiri-

Number of people trafficked across international borders every year

tual guidance for women who often are trapped in a “trauma bond,” according to Frank.

“The bad guy becomes the good guy, the perpetrator becomes your friend in your own mind’s eye because you’re traumatized,” says Frank. “. . . The whole game is to [get the victims to] respect and like you as a staff more than they think they love the pimp they’re with.”

Buy Art Not People fights slavery through a more alternative avenue: art. Formed by artists who realized the need for a “visual voice” for slavery, the group raises funds for anti-slavery non-governmental organizations through a series of art auctions, which receive submissions from students of the Art Institute of Chicago, local Chicago artists, and even international artisans.

Its upcoming art exhibit in May, which will focus on themes of recovery and transformation, will display artwork by the 13- to 18-year-old victims from Anne’s House.

“I really believe when people encounter that artwork, it will have a different effect on them,” says Elizabeth Grace Andrews, the director of Buy Art Not People, “to be connected hopefully with survivors, with

Source: The Polaris Project

girls that have experienced this travesty.”

Andrews also pointed out that grassroots organizations like BANP play a pivotal role in empowering people on the “fringes of society” to become abolitionists.

“They’re the people that end up being the ones to really create change and make people stop and think . . . they’re able to connect people on a more basic level,” Andrews says.

And the last pivotal puzzle piece of the abolitionist movement? Students, according to Claes.

“Challenging your peers when they’re talking about going to the strip club, when they’re making light of a situation that involves the sex trade, to be able to have the resources to challenge them,” Claes says.

“That, college students can do.”

Steps to end modern-day slavery don’t have to come from sweeping legal or administrative changes. They can come right from our own ability to check for free trade products, our willingness to start awareness campaigns and invite speakers, and our compassion for these traumatized victims. Quite simply, an end to this injustice can start with us. •

$ $

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If Northwestern Didn’t Spend So Much Money on Flowers. . . .

By Kathryn Prescott Northwestern University is a great place to be in the springtime. It’s a time of lighter jackets, lighter homework (for some), and, quite ostensibly, perfectly cultivated landscapes with bright purple, white, and pink flowers blanketing every corner of campus.

Yes, they are beautiful, but where does one draw the line between beauty and excess?

According to the Office of Budget and Planning, Northwestern spent 11 percent of its operating budget in fiscal year 2009 on maintenance, utilities, and equipment, which includes landscaping and campus beautification. In comparison, only nine percent of the university’s 2009 budget was spent on employee benefits. Could that money be allocated somewhere else? Here’s what some NU students thought:

“Bail out Greece.” — John MacGaffey, Communication ’15 “Bring better artists to Dillo Day.” — Tim Reilly, Communication ’14 “Replace all street lamps with black lights.” — Robbie Stern, Communication ’14 “Not hike tuition 4.3 percent.” — Timothy Baxendale, McCormick ’15 “On the part of Sheridan that turns to the left when going south, there are signs for cars to stop for pedestrians, but cars almost never stop and it’s extremely dangerous. . . .

I think that we should either get better signs or have better enforcement of the ‘yield for pedestrians’ thing because I’ve almost gotten hit by stupid cars at least three times, and it’s ridiculous. I shouldn’t have to fear for my life on my way to class EVERY DAY.” — Chi Chi Onuigbo, McCormick ’15

“U-Passes.” — Tara McManus, Medill ’15 “Tune the pianos in all of the music buildings.” — Joseph Schuster, Bienen ’15 “I think they should use that money to renovate all the dormitories, or create university-owned, apartment-style dorms for upperclassmen who want to live offcampus.” — Sofia Porter-Castro, Weinberg ’14 “Get dorms that don’t look like they’re from That ’70s Show.” — Christine Espíndola, SESP ’15 “Illegally recruit athletes to start winning national tournaments.” — Adam Logeman, Weinberg ’15

THE PROTEST | spring issue 15

What is

by Mauricio Maluff Masi We call it student government, but it’s not really government in the usual sense of the word. If I have a dispute with another student, I don’t go to ASG to decide who’s right. ASG doesn’t make laws that I have to follow. And it certainly can’t put me in jail. So what exactly does it do? What is its function, and how does it affect us as Northwestern students?

These questions have many possible answers. Here I offer only four:

can afford as a group.

This is essentially the purpose of a country club: very few can afford to buy their own golf course, so a bunch of people get together and pool their money to have a golf course for all the members of the club, and assign a group of people to manage the funds. Except we are forced to be part of this club, and instead of a golf course we get Regina Spektor. Many consider this to be the primary function of ASG.

1) ASG is our country club management

2) ASG is our parliament

Every student pays a fee of $150 for “student activities” adding up to a total of more than a million dollars, and it’s ASG’s job to allocate these funds. The money is used to fund Dillo Day, A&O, and various other student groups. That is, things that most of us wouldn’t be able to afford as individuals, but that we

A parliament is, at its core, a group of people that talk. ASG is a place where students can discuss matters that concern them, such as the lack of Wi-Fi in the Lakefill or how bad the food is in the dining halls.

In a way, this is good in itself: talking can help us figure out what is wrong

?

with our community and how to fix it.

Or if you don’t really care about fixing it, at least talking about it can serve as a kind of therapy.

Of course, I can always just go to any group of my own friends and talk to them about these same issues, but it is good to have a large and diverse central parliament to which anyone can take their concerns. Moreover, what ASG has to say carries more weight than what my friends have to say because the university recognizes ASG as our representative.

Which takes us to . . .

3) ASG is our lobbying group ASG represents the voice of the students to the university administration.

But how well do they do this? After all, it isn’t particularly representative of the student body in the way it’s elected. For example, a student who lives in a dorm and is a member of two student groups may get to vote for as many as three different senators, whereas a student who lives off-campus and isn’t a member of any “important” student groups may be ineligible to vote for any senators.

Even ignoring this, ASG doesn’t really have any power over the administration.

Morty can listen to them if he wants to, but he doesn’t really have to. And even Morty doesn’t have much power. It’s the Board of Trustees that approved his selection and has the ultimate say in anything that happens at the university.

Guess how often ASG gets to meet with them? Once a quarter. ASG sends some

representatives, they discuss campus issues with the Board, and that’s it.

While ASG does meet more frequently with individual committees within the Board of Trustees, the conclusion is that your average Washington lobbying group has much more power over the U.S. government than ASG does over the university. They can make phone calls and meet with congressmen whenever they want, offer them campaign money, and listen in on their meetings. So ASG may be our lobbying group, but it’s not a very good one.

4) ASG is our model U.N. A student who wants to become a politician can get experience working while they’re at Northwestern by becoming an ASG senator. In this way they can develop skills that might serve them later in their career: they can propose bills, debate them, vote on them, and they even get to play with real money! Plus, ASG bears many striking similarities with the United States Congress. It’s bureaucratic, ineffective, has apathetic constituents, and represents some of them more than others. In sum, it’s the perfect training ground for real-life politics.

ASG may have other minor functions, but I believe these are the main ones. I should point out that this was not at all

a normative analysis; you might actually think that it’s perfect the way it is, or that it only needs some minor reforms.

I think that we as a student body ought to constantly question our institutions, especially ASG, since it’s the only one that claims to represent all of us.

You might ask, for example, “Why doesn’t ASG have the power to make direct changes at the university, without having to go through administrative hoops?” Or, “Why do we even have a separate body to represent the students, a completely independent one for the faculty, and none for other university employees?” Or, “If the Board of Trustees is in charge of university policy, but we’re the ones who live and work here, why aren’t they forced to at least talk to us more often?”

It is our responsibility as students to ask these questions, and to have these conversations with the university administration. Otherwise when the administration does something we don’t like, like raising tuition by 4.3 percent, we’ll be limited to criticizing the outcomes, and forget about the processes that inevitably led to them. •

THE PROTEST | spring issue 17

THE NEW

By Matthew Kovac

, every day posed a moral crisis. Forced to choose between resistance and collaboration, dissent and complicity, ordinary Germans faced one of the ultimate existential problems: what does a good person do in the midst of overwhelming evil?

It is not a hypothetical question. It never has been. For people living in the United States today, there is no question more demanding of their attention — and action.

Hitler’s Germany is often regarded as uniquely evil in human history. Virtually no one disputes the morality of resistance, even violent resistance, to the Nazi killing machine.

After all, the Nazis were engaged in the mass murder of innocent people. This is rightly viewed as their fundamental crime — an act so irredeemably evil that the only proper response was to resist.

Today the United States government stands guilty of the same offense. At this very hour, in drone strikes and night

raids, artillery barrages and cluster-bomb attacks, the U.S. government is slaughtering innocent people by the score in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. In Pakistan alone, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has confirmed that U.S. drone bombings have killed at least 174 children.

There is no difference between gas chambers and Hellfire missiles for those on the receiving end.

These deaths are not “accidents.” There is nothing accidental about wars of aggression. And it is the nature of aggressive war that innocents will die. It is not simply a matter of killing civilians. The U.S. military could fail to inflict a single civilian casualty and it would remain drenched in

innocent blood, because many of those resisting U.S. forces are themselves innocent. They did not start this fight. They act only in defense of their homes, their families, their very lives. The Americans kicking down their doors can make no such claims. Even an American general in Iraq has acknowledged the presence of “good, honest” Iraqis in the fight against U.S. forces, according to Gulf News. He recognized, as the subjugated peoples obviously do, the existence of a “good resistance,” one that combats occupation troops but refuses to harm innocents.

Only by admitting this can one truly comprehend the scope of the horror unleashed by the U.S. government. The U.S. cannot attack only legitimate targets because there are no legitimate targets.

Like the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, the entire bloody enterprise is il-

At this very hour, in drone strikes and night raids, artillery barrages and clusterbomb attacks, the U.S. government is slaughtering innocent people by the score in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. legitimate from beginning to end. As a result, U.S. forces have as much moral justification to kill “insurgents” as German troops had to kill members of the

French resistance — none whatsoever.

Strip away the nationalist fervor and every such killing is laid bare as nothing but an act of murder.

The conclusion is inescapable. In moral terms, the actions of the U.S. government are indistinguishable in principle from those of Nazi Germany. The details may differ — victims, methods, rationales offered — but the principle remains the same. Innocent people are innocent people. Mass murder is mass murder. The moral imperative to resist is as strong now as it was then. To passively accept such bloodshed is to embrace the role of the “good German.”

It is a role that, for the past decade, too many Americans have been content to fulfill. Over the last ten years, they watched stoically as their government bombed or invaded no less than six countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya. They looked on with indifference as hundreds of thousands were murdered in slow motion, millions more maimed and disfigured.

According to investigative journalist Dahr Jamail, an entire generation has been poisoned by American depleted uranium weapons, their infants now ravaged by birth defects and cancers.

These horrors mark only the latest chapter in American depravity. Progressives deceive themselves when they claim that the government’s descent into moral hell began with the Bush Administration. The truth is that the U.S. government has slaughtered people without pause since its very inception.

Native Americans were the first casualties, but they are far from the last. Every American knows this at some level, although few are willing to acknowledge what it means.

Leo Tolstoy observed a century ago that the sole function of government is

the exercise of power, or the ability to compel people to act contrary to their wishes. Understanding that this can only be achieved by violence or the threat of it, he concluded that the basis of all government is physical violence. In this sense, every government known to his-

Innocent people are innocent people.

Mass murder is mass murder. The moral imperative to resist is as strong now as it was then. tory resembles Nazi Germany. That is not to say that there is no difference between the competing forms, but that the difference is one of degree, not kind.

This is a bitter pill for most Americans to swallow. So it was for the Germans.

The lesson offered by Pastor Martin Niemöller was that his countrymen realized only too late the evil of Nazi rule.

But Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 reveals a far more horrifying truth: many Germans never realized it at all. Even after the war ended, they did not think that their government had been evil, just flawed. To them the wars of aggression were policy mistakes, the Holocaust an ideological excess. The lesson is undeniable. Viewed from the inside, no country looks like Nazi Germany — not even Nazi Germany itself.

Nearly seventy years after the fall of Hitler, the question remains. What does a good person do in the midst of overwhelming evil? • THE PROTEST | spring issue 19

It’s not very often that Ghanaian members of parliament visit Evanston.

But Samia Nkrumah, who represents the constituency of Jomoro in southwestern Ghana, is no ordinary MP.

As the daughter of Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of an independent African state, Nkrumah carried her father’s aura with her as she entered the HiltonOrrington’s lecture room on April 26, hushing the crowd with a characteristically deliberate yet relaxed tone.

“I think my most important achievement, if I may put it that way, is for me to be recognized as the daughter of the greatest leader Africa has ever had,” Nkrumah said in her introductory remarks.

African BBC listeners voted Kwame Nkrumah the continent’s “Man of the Millennium” in December 1999. A 2004 survey by New African magazine named him the second-greatest African of all time, behind Nelson Mandela.

During her lecture, titled “Ghana’s Democracy and Economic Development,” Nkrumah explained the influence her father’s African Socialist vision has had on Africa since the end of colonialism.

“At the heart of the vision for us to create fair distribution of opportunity, not of income, is the restoration of our dignity as African people, from slavery to colonialism to today’s serious and

avoidable economic marginalization,” she said. “That vision of Kwame Nkrumah lives on and on.”

But Nkrumah, as one of 19 female MPs out of 230 and first female head of a major Ghanaian political party, is not content with basking in her father’s legacy. After enduring exile from Ghana following a coup in 1966 in which her father was ousted by a military junta, she returned to the country to eventually lead her father’s party, the Convention People’s Party, and represent the Jomoro constituency.

“As an MP in Ghana you are not only a legislator, you are a philanthropist, a social development agent, you are many things. And that is simply because we have not yet met the basic needs of our people,” Nkrumah said.

She then described the poor conditions many of her constituents live in.

“In many of our schools, our classrooms sometimes have 100 pupils in the classroom. The only hospital in the district, which serves thousands and thousands of people, has no ambulance,” Nkrumah said. “This is in a constituency which is in one of the most fertile and mineral-rich parts of the country. My father used to say Africa is very rich, almost the richest continent in the world, but Africans are poor. Is this good for democracy?”

Nkrumah criticized the IMF and World Bank for providing “quick solutions” to African countries’ need to pay off deficits, forcing countries like Ghana to cut subsidies in health and education and deregulate the labor market. “[These policies] placed markets at the center of growth and development. This is the neo-liberal economic policy: that business has no business doing business,” she said. “They are part of the reason many African countries remain [economically] marginalized.”

As for her own solutions to Ghana and Africa’s economic worries, Nkrumah emphasized a focus on getting

better negotiators at institutions like the World Bank and investing in infrastructure, along with protecting infant industries and involving academic leaders more heavily in development.

“The increase in industry that we’ve enjoyed [recently] is as a result of our discovery of oil and mining,” Nkrumah said. “But the sectors like manufacturing remain stagnant or even in decline.

We must increase our infrastructure capacity. We must produce more locally.”

“My father said that the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with African unity.”

-Nkrumah Nkrumah also praised the Ghanaian education system her father helped build, citing it as a major reason why the country has held together, as different ethnic groups were made to interact through public and compulsory schooling.

“They studied together, they worked together, they married together, and that has held the country intact in many ways,” she said.

But Kwame Nkrumah’s legacy as president of Ghana remains controversial. Despite his key role in pressing for African freedom and in peacefully

leading Ghana to independence from Britain, in 1964 he brought one-party rule to Ghana, banning all political parties not affiliated with his left-wing Convention People’s Party. He also declared himself president-for-life before being ousted in 1966.

Perhaps speaking with this mixed legacy in mind, Nkrumah stressed the importance of all-inclusive democracy.

She spoke of governing Ghana in a way “that includes embracing every single Ghanaian irrespective of their political views” and praised the successes of multiparty democracy in Africa.

Finally, Nkrumah spoke of her father’s last great project: Pan-African unity. She paid tribute to her father’s Pan-African vision, describing the currently fragmented West African regional system as “unsustainable.”

“My father said that the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with African unity,” Nkrumah said. “How can we make use of the economies of scale if we can’t pool our resources and plan continentally?

The call for unification is for our economic survival.”

Yet although her own leadership has been noteworthy, Nkrumah knows her father holds a special place in history as the first leader of a fully free and self-governing African people in the 20th century. After all, Ghana freed itself from British rule in 1957, a full seven years before segregation was ended in the American South after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.

Nkrumah related a telling story of this oft-forgotten dichotomy. According to some, when Richard Nixon visited Ghana as part of an American delegation sent after the country’s newfound independence, he asked a black man how it felt to be free.

“I’m not free: I’m from Alabama,” said the man.

He was Martin Luther King, Jr., who was also part of the American delegation. • THE PROTEST | spring issue 21

Waging War

on Women IN 1916, Margaret Sanger opened America’s first birth control clinic.

Aided by a progressive minority, she lobbied for women’s quality of life — for unfettered access to contraception and the decline of back-alley abortions.

It is 2012, one century later. And yet here we are, debating the morality of birth control, the legality of abortion, and the tenuous bearings of female empowerment. We are, once more, fighting battles that were waged by our mothers and grandmothers.

In recent months, contraceptive issues have dogged the congressional docket. Legislators have voted on (and to an extent, ratified) an army of policies — ones that equate moralism with medicine. The would-be legislation runs an impressive, if harrowing, gamut: seven states require abortion-seekers to receive an unsolicited ultrasound, Arizona holds that employees can be fired for the use of birth control, Kansas enables doctors to withhold information on birth defects, and Tennessee is looking to publish names — that is, of doctors who perform abortions and of private citizens who request their services.

These policies are a drop in the bucket — an inadequate summary of legislative inroads. They say nothing of the acts

By Corinne Zeman that were rejected, that stalled on the House or Senate floor, i.e., funding for Planned Parenthood and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Without question, women — and the rights of women — are implicated in this discussion. But astoundingly, they have been barred from speaking, from sharing their thoughts on procreative rights. In February, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform assembled a panel to discuss birth control — specifically, whether an insurer morally opposed to contraception should cover its cost. The committee, chaired by a male, consisted of eight men. One would hope that this irony was corrected, that a discourse on women’s health had comprised of — or had listened to — women’s voices. It wasn’t, and it didn’t.

In itself, this fact is appalling. But what’s shocking, what’s truly disconcerting, is the vitriol that’s resulted.

Recently, women who use contraception — or 99 percent of women in the

United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute — have been branded as promiscuous, derided for immorality by prominent conservatives.

Foster Friess, Rick Santorum’s financier, claimed that women should place an aspirin between their knees — or in unveiled terms, close their legs. In support of a bill that bans abortions after 20 weeks, Rep. Terry England said that women should carry stillborns to term, for calves and pigs do it with regularity.

(And, of course, women are comparable to livestock.) And having roused Rush Limbaugh’s ire, Sandra Fluke, a law student that spoke on contraceptive benefits, was vilified as a “slut.”

One could argue that conservatives are out of touch, that their treatment of women is edging on unacceptable. But the issue, here, isn’t partisanship. And it isn’t contraception — whether one is pro-life or pro-choice, whether one believes in fetal personhood or the probity of marital sex. Rather, it is our representation of women. It is our willingness to treat women as objects — the objects of legal study and medical discourse. Their rights are dissected and stripped by Congress, their bodies are scrutinized by insurers, and their voices are silenced. And when they dare to speak, dare to defend their right to sexual autonomy, they are maligned — publicly and unapologeti-

“In sup port o f a bil Rep. Te l that rry En bans a gland borns bortio said th to ter ns aft a m, for t wom er 20 w calves en sho eeks, uld ca and pig rry st s do it illwith r egular ity. ” cally. By the same token, though, there hasn’t been talk of limiting access to vasectomies and condoms, to male avenues for procreative control. Truth is, the United States is in the midst of a war on women. And from the look of things, we’re losing.

It cannot be overstated that this war is an unfortunate reality. Conservatives are arguing that women cannot be trusted with physical health, with the power to govern their bodies and to decide the futures of their prospective children. And these attacks are tragically familiar. They borrow from earlier generations, from rhetoric that disparaged of women’s suffrage, access to education, and entry into the workforce.

To add insult to injury, GOP leaders are suggesting that their policies — policies that lay a legal cordon on the female body — are not demeaning. When asked if women are the victims of an ideological war, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus stated, “If Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that the Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we would have problems with caterpillars. The fact of the matter is that it’s a fiction.” His choice of metaphor is inexplicable. In a way, though, it’s telling.

He fixates on the war between parties, managing to skirt the issue. And by plac-

ing women in a rhetorical backseat, he falls into a common trap: equating womanhood with the inconsequential — here, the brief lives of insects.

Still, we can’t overlook that Priebus has zeroed in on partisan politics. Much of the “war on women” is the upshot of an election-year smokescreen, one that’s meant to distract from our economic struggles. But if it’s a strawman issue, why are women suffering its brunt?

Recently, the governor of Pennsylvania, who supports legislation for pre-abortion ultrasounds, suggested that women close their eyes — as if it’d lessen the horror of an unwanted procedure. Fact is, in our political climate, women do not have the luxury of closing their eyes. We cannot blind ourselves to the realization that our bodies are not

our own. They’ve become legislative matter, and our exam rooms — rooms that should be private, free of meddling voices — are seated on the Congress floor.

No, we should not close our eyes.

And if our bodies are not our own, who’s to say that we can? •

THE PROTEST | spring issue 23

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