Dumbledore is gay.
Category: Identities and Discriminations
The double helix: racism and gender discrimination
Coincidentally, this post is about the not-so-noble laureate James Watson, widely known, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for the double-helix model of DNA, for which they won the Nobel in 1962.
The Indian Express runs an article saying that Dr Watson has been suspended from his New York based scientific laboratory for allegedly saying, in a Sunday Times interview on October 14, that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” Reuters also reported that he has cut short his book tour – for Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science (how apt) – and returned home to the United States.
While there has been understandable furore over his remarks, his own apology in a statement he issued at the Royal Society on Thursday, adds to the utter ridiculousness of his previous comment, though he does say it has no scientific basis: “To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly […] That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”
His scientific peers are horrified. The trustees of his lab have said they “vehemently disagree with these statements and are bewildered and saddened if he indeed made such comments” while Robert Sternberg, a prominent researcher on race and IQ at Tufts University, called Watson’s statement “racist and most regrettable.”
In the Chicago Tribune, Sternberg, a critic of traditional intelligence testing, comments that intelligence can mean something different for different cultures. In parts of Africa, a good gauge of intelligence might be how well someone avoids infection with malaria — a test of cleverness that most Americans likely would flunk. In the same way, for many Africans who take Western IQ tests, “our problems aren’t relevant to them,” Sternberg said.
Watson has made other extraordinary comments in the past, as this article in the Independent reports.
In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He later insisted he was talking about a “hypothetical” choice which could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that ” stupidity” could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great.”
This sort of prejudice is not new, but when it is demonstrated by someone of Watson’s stature, it gains currency in exceedingly dangerous ways, not least by the way it is portrayed in the media. Cameron Duodo comments in the Guardian about the front page headline in the Independent of October 17, ‘Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, says DNA pioneer’:
[I]n emphasising Professor James Watson’s proficiency with regard to DNA research, without making it sufficiently clear that his work on DNA does not necessarily make him an expert in the determination of human intelligence, Milmo elevated Watson’s racist rant into the semblance of authoritative scientific opinion.
My surprise is at those commentators who see Watson as being ‘an obsolete product of a bygone time’ (Laura Blue in Time.com) and others in the blogosphere who are dismissing his remarks as being ‘senile‘. Watson’s prejudices are not new, and certainly, they can’t be excused as the possible ramblings of old age.
For me, the story that has always been told far too little is that of Rosalind Franklin, the
woman who, if she had been alive in 1962, should have also won the Nobel for her work on DNA. One account tells of how the race was on between the teams of Wilkins and Franklin, working at King’s College, London and Crick and Watson, at Cambridge. Watson attended a lecture of Franklin’s and based on a rather unclear recollection of the facts she presented – while ‘critical of her lecture style and personal appearance’ – created a failed model. Franklin worked mostly alone (another story talks of how even when there was conversation amongst them, it was so patronising that she didn’t take it further), and didn’t want to publish her findings until more confident about her theory that DNA was helical. Wilkins grew frustrated and in January 1953, showed her results to Watson, without apparently her knowledge or consent. This account also quotes Wilkins as admitting, “I’m afraid we always used to adopt – let’s say, a patronizing attitude towards her.”
When Watson and Crick published their paper on DNA in Nature in 1953, they made no acknowledgment beyond the statement: “We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished results and ideas of Dr. M.H.F. Wilkins, Dr. R.E. Franklin, and their co-workers at King’s College London.”
In 1962 Watson, Crick and Wilkins together received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In their Nobel lectures they cite 98 references, none are Franklin’s. Only Wilkins included her in his acknowledgments. Franklin died in 1958 at the age of 37 of cancer. The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, only to living persons.
Much after her death (and presumably, the Nobel), Watson and Crick made it abundantly clear in public lectures that they could not have discovered the structure of DNA without her work. But how much of this was too little, too late, and carefully so? Franklin’s name is hardly associated with work on the DNA model, certainly not in the way Watson’s and Crick’s are, to any school child in most parts of the world. What is even more upsetting is the counter-factual possibilities of her having been acknowledged for her work; would the resulting fame (and some fortune) have helped her in her battle against cancer? Worse still, she never knew that Watson and Crick had accessed her results; she communicated with them till she died.
Even those at Stockholm wonder. Since all archives related to nominees are closed for fifty years after it is awarded, we will know in 2008 – next year – whether Rosalind Franklin was even a nominee for the Nobel prize that her three colleagues – without her knowledge – won based upon her work.
Dr James Watson may still be in our textbooks, but he has been a scientist and a human being of bias and prejudice, and certainly, in Rosalind Franklin’s case, all these and more: a man with tragic, unethical, lack of generosity towards a fellow scientist.
The image of the DNA helix is of a sculpture at the Lawrence Hall of Science, UC Berkeley, taken by Hsien-Hsien Lei. The image of Rosalind Franklin is from the article by David Ardell.
The fear of fundamentalisms
Open Democracy has set up a blog for women’s voices to be represented at the G8 summit, called ‘Open Summit: Women talk to the G8‘. They invited contributions (and are continuing to do so, for those who want to share); this was mine, cross-posted here.
Image courtesy Screen Sifar.
My day (and sometimes night) job is working with police officers in India on issues of violence against women and children; I coordinate a UNICEF partnership with the Karnataka State Police. One of the most critical aspects of this work is, as Anindita so succinctly described elsewhere on this blog, analysing the impact of our socially entrenched gender-based norms. The lack of value for our girl children – and if they’re lucky, for the women they grow up to be – has meant that we have lost, in our female population, the size of a small to middling European country.
But this post is not about genderocide. It is about that and more. It is about asking our governments – particularly the all powerful G8 – that in this context of ‘terrorism’, of an almost universal culture of production and consumption around ‘fear’ and ‘mistrust’, they analyse honestly and courageously their own contributions to a growing set of fundamentalisms: economic, religious, cultural, social and sexual. Women (and children) are often hit hardest by these fundamentalisms.
Identities are complex; we acknowledge that readily but seem willing to sacrifice that complexity for simplified categorisations and easy classification. More than ever, our language of ‘us’ and ‘them’ divides us over and over again, in the conversations we have, the advertisements we watch, the TV series we devour. And our politicians, our priests, our ulemas, our leaders – those who claim to represent us in all our complexity – speak the language of divisions, of fissures, best of all.
A young Muslim friend of mine lives in Gujarat, India. She explores, every day, what it means to be a woman, a Muslim, a young person, an artist, in the maelstrom of fundamentalism that is the Gujarat of today. She struggles with what it means to be a citizen: either of this country or of the globalised world. What does citizenship mean if you live constantly in the shadow of fear? Not just the fear of physical abuse, but worse still, the violence attached to labels? For her, wearing the hijaab is both an act of courage and an unintended performance: she is just never quite sure of her audience or its response.
There is complexity in hate-mongering too. In India, as possibly elsewhere, it seems as though the language of ‘empowerment’ for women has been claimed and reconstructed to mean ‘power’ rather than ‘dignity’ or ‘equality’ or ‘pluralism’. Not all our women politicians are feminist, and not all our fundamentalists are male.
These are not only issues of government. But they are issues for governments; our states are contributing, in no small measure, to these voices of fundamentalisms, of alienation. And worse still: sometimes it is they who create the vocabulary.
Being an ‘Action Hero’
The Blank Noise Project asked for a blog-a-thon on March 8th; a way of celebrating the strengths of those who resist, in some way, street level harassment. A great idea. Yet the words ‘Action Hero’ somehow constrain me: what is Action, and who is a Hero? This March 8th, I was in the middle of a workshop with a group of police officers from States across South India and reiterating – many times over, in different ways – that women are *not* women’s worst enemies (yes, a treatise on that soon). Was that being an Action Hero? I work with men, with law enforcers, with some of the most patriarchal structures in the world, and I do not abuse, I do not indignify, I do not violate. Perhaps more honestly, I do my best not to (there are times when I bite my tongue, hard. It hurts). But certainly I describe, I analyse, I provoke, I persuade. I challenge. Is that being an Action Hero?
Whatever the ways in which Jasmeen, Mangs, Chinmayee and Annie conceived of it, philosophical flimsies are not going to cut it. So let me remind myself – and tell others – of a couple of lessons I learnt early. One was when I was in college in Delhi. Being in the hostel, any kind of travel involved painful hours in a sweaty bus or painfully expensive moments in an auto. The choice was simple, and I learnt more about harassment on DTC (Delhi Transport Corporation) buses than any hi-falutin’ economics. Perhaps (says the philosopher), I did get somewhere after all.
I learnt that anger is not always strategic. It’s a peculiar Delhi phenomenon – and I find it slowly spreading to other cities, including Bangalore – that if you raise your voice in anger against someone who’s harassing you, very few people are likely to support you. However obvious the harassment, however gruesome the details. Someone who’s not just touching you, but who’s conveniently using the lack of interstitial space to slam against every bit of you and rub himself up in perverse joy. What works? Shame. And humour. Humour, you ask in horror? Was it funny, what he was doing? No, it wasn’t. Far from. But what worked was this: I would say loudly, so that as many people around could hear me, in as bored a clarion call as possible, ‘Kya bhaiya, yeh sab aap ghar me nahi kar sakthe, kya? [Why, brother, can’t you do all this at home?]’. There would be titters, some loud guffaws and the slammer-against-body (whose face I couldn’t even see, considering the position I was in) would suddenly ease himself up, and leave the bus at the next convenient moment. Or at least move himself from the parking spot that was my body.
Another moment of self-preservation epiphany. I was travelling from Karwar to Raichur via Hubli (all in north Karnataka). I ended up being in a bus that landed up in Raichur at 2 in the morning [Note to self: try not to travel alone to unknown destinations at odd hours of the night. As far as possible]. On the bus, I had made ample and effective use of a loaded water bottle to preserve my bums from groping fingers and toes belonging to the person sitting in the seat behind me. When I got down at the bus stop, I found the place strewn with sleeping bodies and bags. Luckily for single women, very few public places in India are ‘deserted’. The trouble is, those who are temporarily inhabiting that space may not (as mentioned before) support you in a moment of crisis. Anyhow, no one was awake at the Raichur bus stop; it was deathly quiet and with only one tube light that cast a pool of light over a limited area. Some instinctual common sense made me clamber over the bodies and bags, shift a few of those around gently, and settle into a position right in the middle of the light. Not a moment too soon. A burly man, probably in his mid thirties, came up out of the shadows, and watched me for a while. He circled around the bus stop, over and over again, waiting, I feel with hindsight, for me to move out of the light. I didn’t. I was terrified, but I wasn’t going to run. So lesson number 2: running isn’t always the solution. Stay in the light, and be prepared to scream.
After about what felt like a few hours (but was probably closer to 45 minutes), he realised I wasn’t going to budge. And he left. I stayed awake, clutching my bag, clutching myself, thanking my surprisingly sharp instincts that I hadn’t done something unbearably foolish. Lesson number 3: trust that gut of yours. It is seldom wrong. ‘Rationality’ is judged by outcome.
Beyond saying no: how to fight sexual harassment
So it’s been over a month and a half of silence. Online. A whole lot of words and work and wrath offline. Beyond the holidays and the happy happy, there were the days of listening to stories of women raging, of women exhausted of raging, the nights of waking up thinking about them. Of P who spoke to me only two days ago, from a tiny village a few hours from Bangalore, at the end of her taut and stretched tether, because her husband and his family, not content with abusing her for a mere 2 lakh rupees in dowry, had pushed her into sex work. She is now safe at home with her parents, and a case has been registered against her husband and his family. Of M, who had to suffer being married at 14, beaten and bruised by her husband for the next 14 years, and then finally had the courage to walk out of the marriage, taking her children with her. M is also a poet and a police woman. Hers is a story worth writing about, but not today.
Today’s post is for N. For being the right kind of strong. P, M and N – and all the other women whose stories I hear on an almost daily basis – made me ashamed of my awkwardness around writing about what I know and do most: working with the police (and women’s and children’s organisations) trying to make the system as responsive to violence against women and children as possible. In an earlier post, I spoke about this strange awkwardness, but enough is ’nuff. Diffidence is sometimes stupid, and sometimes it can be downright dangerous. ‘Changing the system’ is as much about changes within, as it is about making us – those without – responsive to, and informed by, these changes.
N’s story is not unusual: she worked in a multi-national corporate, well-known in its sphere. She became progressively more unhappy at work, considering that the General Manager (GM) – and therefore, but naturally, many of the staff – seemed to think that work satisfaction equated with an environment of ‘humour’, of sexual or racist jokes, not even generally directed, but specifically targeted against colleagues. Finally, when the jokes were directed against her, with the GM repeatedly offending and upsetting her, she had enough; she didn’t want to return to the office, she didn’t want to see her GM’s face ever again, she went home in a tumult of rage and disbelief at what was happening to her. What she did next is unusual: she protested.
Continue reading “Beyond saying no: how to fight sexual harassment”
More from Pandit Gangu Hangal
Gangubai once told film-maker Vijaya Mulay, in the initial years of television: “If a male musician is a Muslim, he becomes an Ustad. If he is a Hindu, he becomes a Pandit. But women like Kesarbai and Mogubai just remain Bais.”
Ustad: master/teacher, Pandit: scholar/teacher, Bai: sister.
Caste… untouched.
The horrific massacre of a Dalit family two months ago at Kherlanji. The excruciating social boycott of Dalits in Kadakol for the past four months because they ‘dared’ to take water directly from the village tank (rather than have two intermediate caste representatives pouring water for them, as they have done for centuries). Neither story made the front pages of our national newspapers.
In the midst of it all, Karnataka celebrated its Suvarna Karnataka Rajyothsava (as I’ve said elsewhere, the State’s golden jubilee celebrations), and over this weekend, I finally managed to read The Hindu‘s special issue for the occasion. In it, the first article was by Gangubai Hangal, one of the most extraordinary musicians I have ever had the privilege to hear. In a concert we organised in college, over ten years ago, I remember her voice exploding within and without me, making my fanciful imagination feel that it was capable of bringing the house down, in many more ways than one. What power, I had thought then. What unbridled, untrammeled, ecstatic power.
And yet, the story she told in ‘The Golden Song’ (Gangubai Hangal, The Hindu’s Suvarna Karnataka special issue, Pp 4-8, November 1, 2006) moved me beyond the music. Two stories. One of her mother’s, and the other, of her own.
I was born in pre-Independent India, a period when caste discrimination was rampant. Shukravarapete in Dharwad was a locality full of Brahmins. Even now it’s an area dominated by them. My mother, Ambabai, a devout woman, was conscious of this caste factor, and lived a low profile, quiet life. I still remember how one afternoon an old Brahmin mendicant came to our house asking for water. My mother was in a dilemma. She explained the predicament to him and he remarked, “Does water have a caste? Please give me water to drink…” and my mother duly gave him water and a piece of jaggery. He blessed my mother and left. But my mother reeled under the shock of having given water to an upper caste man and was gripped by fears of social ostracisation for many days to come.
The incident reminds me of another from my own life. I was a young girl and faced a similar predicament right under the nose of the iconic figure who strived to abolish untouchability from this country. It was the Belgaum Congress of 1924 and the Mahatma was to grace the occasion. I was thrilled that I was going to sing before Gandhiji, but also scared stiff that I would be asked to clear all the plantain leaves after lunch, as I belonged to one of the lower castes. I sang. Gandhiji came up to me and blessed me. Pandit Sawai Gandharva was impressed too. On the one hand I was overjoyed by their appreciation, but on the other, I was paralysed by the worst fears. I quietly walked up to my teacher and asked him if I had to sit separately for lunch and clear the leaves. He held me close, and said: “Nothing of the kind, don’t worry…”
They were difficult times. But I’m grateful to music in more than one way. It gave me a unique identity and pushed all other identities to the background.
I wonder what Amartya Sen might say about that; perhaps he needs ‘Identity and Violence – Part 2. What I surprisingly missed out in Part 1‘. There’s much to be grateful for, in that Gangubai Hangal could survive the inherent pain of her genealogy through the genius of her music, but others of more mundane identities and lives continue to struggle with the violence implicitly – and very much explicitly – still alive in the caste system. Caste… untouched?
Should women marry career men?
And if this sounds absurd to you, why doesn’t the opposite sound equally absurd to Michael Noer (he of the infamous Forbes article ‘Don’t marry career women’)… or to many others on this planet?
Bageshree had an interesting piece (which has bits from yours truly, ahem) in the Hindu yesterday, in which she quotes an admirer of ‘Nooyi’s Nintendo strategy’ (!) through which Indra Nooyi allegedly combines “the high-octane energy of her job with the calm, collected demeanour required to manage the equally central responsibility of a mother and a wife.” Bageshree then asks, rather pertinently:
But what happens to slightly lesser mortals who might be doing okay in their careers but may not quite have arrived at what’s called “Nooyi’s Ninetendo strategy”? Those who leave a pile of washing undone or don’t read a bedtime story to the child because there’s a deadline dangling over the head? Or rush off to an emergency surgery without feeding the child hot soup when she returns from school?
Most likely, someone will be whispering into the husband/partner’s ears: “I told you to keep away from these career women, didn’t I?”
The article also profiles Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett’s article, ‘Gasp, I married a career woman!‘ which is well worth a read. They say:
We have just completed a major new analysis of data from our study of dual-earner couples that was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. The data, not yet published, utterly contradict the Forbes thesis that men will be unhappy if they marry career women. Our study–which looks at men’s marital happiness–finds that among dual-earner couples, as she works more, his marital quality goes up. Why so? Probably for a number of reasons.
Men’s wages have been stagnant or declining for nearly 20 years, so her income may be easing financial tensions and making it possible for the couple to pay their bills. Her enhanced earnings may be heightening her self esteem, and so she brings these good feelings about herself into the marriage. He may want to spend more time with the family, and her work eases the breadwinning burden. Research tells us that men today do want more family time and are actually spending more time with their families than they used to.
Lucky I married a feminist. 🙂
Ambassadors of Conscience
In today’s Times of India, an article on an innocent man who spent 11 years in jail for allegedly raping and murdering a six year old girl.
Kounder was released from the Yerawada prison on the directives of the Bombay High Court which took cognisance of a suicide note left by police inspector Iqbal Bargir in 2000 who said that Kounder was not guilty of the crime he was charged with.
The court order said that Kounder, who at the time of his arrest in 1995 was employed as an illiterate sweeper with the Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation, was suspected to have been wrongly implicated in the crime.
And what if Kounder had been given capital punishment? Surely raping and murdering a six year old girl justifies it (after all, the last time a Manila rope was made at Buxar jail was in 2004, for Dhananjay Chatterjee)? The next time I rise in righteous anger against rapists and murderers and shout ‘off with their heads’ in a grotesque imitation of the Red Queen, I will have to remember Armogam Munnaswami Kounder. A poor man, from a family of casual labourers in Tamil Nadu. A family he had lost all contact with in the past eleven years. As I write this, he is on a train – somewhere between Pune and Vellore – wondering whether his wife and son will recognise him.
In the midst of the on/off line (in more ways than one) debate around the death penalty, I think Shivam said it simply and effectively. Dilip quotes Nandita Haksar, the civil rights activist representing Mohammed Afzal Guru:
Can the collective conscience of our people be satisfied if a fellow citizen is hanged without having a chance to defend himself? We have not even had a chance to hear Afzal’s story. Hanging Mohammad Afzal will only be a blot on our democracy.
However, Rahul Mahajan gets into the act, saying he will sit on dharna to register his protest against those seeking pardon for Afzal. Perhaps he feels the Delhi police will then help him get elected.
Collective conscience? I leave you with an excerpt from Seamus Heaney’s extraordinary poem, that asks from us the greatest and deepest responsibility of all time: to be an ambassador of conscience, beyond the platitudes, beyond the politics of expedience. Please read the whole poem on the Art for Amnesty site.
When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway
At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather
The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye
No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared
[…]
I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself
The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen
He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue
Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved
Support Sharmila, repeal the AFSPA
Irom Sharmila has been on a protest fast for the past six years; since 2nd November 2000, when security forces killed innocent villagers in Malom, Manipur. About three weeks later, she was arrested and charged with attempted suicide: the authorities in Manipur have since been force-feeding her through a nasal tube. Sharmila was released on October 3rd from judicial custody, and on Friday, October 4th (last Friday), she was smuggled out of Imphal, and began her protest at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi.
On Friday night, she was moved to AIIMS by the police. This morning, The Hindu carried a report by Siddharth Varadarajan, that the Justice Jeevan Reddy Commission, tasked with reviewing the provisions of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), feels that it should be repealed. The report quotes the Commission as saying:
The Act is too sketchy, too bald and quite inadequate in several particulars.[…]the Act, for whatever reason, has become a symbol of oppression, an object of hate and an instrument of discrimination and high-handedness.[…]It is highly desirable and advisable to repeal the Act altogether, without, of course, losing sight of the overwhelming desire of an overwhelming majority of the [North-East] region that the Army should remain (though the Act should go).
* Announcement: There is to be a peaceful protest in Bangalore, in solidarity with Sharmila, urging the state to repeal the AFSPA. 2nd of November, 2006, at 5pm, at the Gandhi statue, MG Road.