Longform Links - 2008/04/15
New York Times - Book Review - Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters tend to be immigrants from India and their American-reared children, exiles who straddle two countries, two cultures, and belong to neither: too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped in tradition to embrace American mores fully. These Indian-born parents want the American Dream for their children — name-brand schools, a prestigious job, a roomy house in the suburbs — but they are cautious about the pitfalls of life in this alien land, and isolated by their difficulties with language and customs. Their children too are often emotional outsiders: having grown up translating the mysteries of the United States for their relatives, they are fluent navigators of both Bengali and American culture but completely at home in neither; they always experience themselves as standing slightly apart, given more to melancholy observation than wholehearted participation.
Sepia Mutiny - Book Review - Unaccustomed Earth
Adele Waldman in The New Republic [link] writes, “Jhumpa Lahiri’s books are more about the coastal elite experience than they are about the Indian-American one. … Her tales of marriage, divorce, becoming a parent, and grappling with the death of adult parents are the opposite of exotic; her fiction winds up painting a very intelligent portrait of upper middle class life. They aren’t immigrant stories, not in a traditional sense…”
Maybe that is true on one level, but I don’t think any Indian-American who picks up this book can say that Lahiri’s stories do not reflect nuances of our existence as children of immigrants, as cultural minorities, as the oft-represented “other”; nuances that we rarely encounter in the books that make their way into our hands. I’d venture to say that these are immigrant stories too - stories of a new America where culture and race and tradition collide in unexpected ways and where, at the end of it, we are left with a better understanding of both sides of a story and of the (this is cliche, I know, but I can’t think of any other way to say it), the universal human condition. I think that’s what makes Lahiri’s work genius - she gets at this without going cliche on us.
New York Times - Microfinance’s Success Sets Off a Debate in Mexico
Microlenders, the original and still the most common type of microfinance organization, help the poor start or expand businesses in places most banks shun, like the slums of Calcutta or these impoverished hills in Mexico’s sugar cane country, three hours south of Mexico City. Their efforts are widely considered successful in transforming the lives of developing-world entrepreneurs, particularly women, and their families.
Many microlending advocates, including Mr. Yunus, say that success is threatened by Mr. Danel and Mr. Labarthe’s market-oriented model, with its emphasis on investor returns.
“Microfinance started in the 1970s with a focus on using this breakthrough to help end poverty,” said Sam Daley-Harris, director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, a nonprofit endeavor that promotes microfinance for families earning less than $1 a day. “Now it is in great danger of being how well the investors and the microfinance institutions are doing and not about ending poverty.” He said the situation posed the danger of “mission drift.”
Media Assassin - Sex and the Slain Civil Rights Leader Survivor
Why, for the most part, have the ten children of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. never married?
Resist Racism - The Last Acceptable Prejudice
Does fat prejudice need to be framed as “worse than” racism in order for us to pay attention to it? And how does that type of framework discount the negative effects of racism?
The reality is that as allies we shouldn’t get tricked into buying into the Oppression Olympics. There is no “last acceptable prejudice” because they are all unacceptable.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Foxfire wrote:
Thanks for putting that link about “last acceptable prejudice”. You are totally right. As a Fat Activist, I have heard people say that and it just makes me cringe down to my toes. I know what they are trying to get at, how people often try to overlook or downplay sizeism. But I don’t see how downplaying other discrimination helps us get taken seriously. The same culture that hates fat is also racist, classist, homophobic, sexist, and a bunch of other ists.(But I think y’all already knew that…:-) We can’t dismantle the discrimination against us without taking down the other forms of hatred that our tied into ours. Plus, we are doing the same thing to others that is done to us! How lame is that?
Thankfully many other FA (like the bloggers at Shapely Prose and Tara at Fatshionista) are calling the movement out on this and hopefully we, as a movement, will start cleaning up our shit.
Posted 15 Apr 2008 at 11:52 am ¶
riskynostalgia wrote:
As another person both interested in anti-racism and opposing weight discrimination, I winced when I saw that story. It’s a particularly bad year in terms of trying to hierarchize oppression - if I see one more debate between Hillary and Obama voters about which is facing a harder battle because of their gender/race, I’m going to scream. These are not issues that will be resolved in order by their place on a top-ten list and it’s important to stop trying to prioritize them or make one the ultimate sin.
Posted 15 Apr 2008 at 1:17 pm ¶
Eva wrote:
Sex and the slain civil rights leader? Oh please. Why is it that in 2008 people still believe that everybody should get married and have children? My grandmother was one of nine children and only two of them had children and they had one child each. For some getting married and having children isn’t the end all be all.
Posted 15 Apr 2008 at 1:51 pm ¶
Andre wrote:
This fat activism thing. I’m sorry I don’t buy it. People will like you, if you like yourself. I have a friend that’s big and everybody in our school, including boys are her friend. You want to know why? Because she doesn’t depend on media to tell her about herself. All, this stuff about promote fat , and stuff. It just sounds silly. I’m sorry to say , it just doesn’t compare to the other issues like sexism racism , classism. All those issues are tied in together. They are practically on the same level, and have the same detrimental effect on people. But fat; I know alot of girls who are sought after men, because they like themselves. It’s personality. And who said ,men like skinny women. Ok, I know alot of guys that like big women. They always tell ‘more cushion for the pushing’ or ‘big girls need love too’. There are plenty of good looking big girls. I realize that media does go against being a bigger size. I recognize it. But as far, as having a serious effect on people (not unless you are incredibly fat), I can’t buy it. I just won’t treat it the same way as classism , racism, or sexism, that has dogged us for years. Did you know that in Elizabeathen ( or was it Victorian), England, fat people were considered healthy and more attractive than skinny women? It’s really what you think yourself and if you are willing to define yourself under your own terms. I would say a very small problem indeed. Sorry.
Posted 15 Apr 2008 at 3:41 pm ¶
J.W. wrote:
I also strongly dislike the phrase “last acceptable prejudice”, but for different reasons - if history’s shown us anything, it’s that the prejudices we have are often unknown to us, so it’s best to be skeptical when people declare some prejudice to be the only remaining form of acceptable discrimination.
And to the above poster Andre who reduces ‘fat activism’ down to self-esteem issues that women have about their bodies, do you think these are the only issues big people face?
Sure, no one’s ever been lynched or denied the vote for being overweight (as far as I know), and most people have far more control over their body size than they do over their skin color; but does this matter? Big people are still unjustly fired from jobs for their size, subjected to uninvited touching because of their size, denied proper medical treatment because of their size, made the target of crude humor/harassment because of their size, etc.
I don’t know very much about the FAM, and as a thin person who’s never been the target of that kind of discrimination, I don’t think it applies to me; but I know enough to say that it’s neither accurate nor fair to paint the movement as nothing more than large women who are pushing to be seen as attractive by other people.
You also wrote:
“It just sounds silly. I’m sorry to say , it just doesn’t compare to the other issues like sexism racism , classism.”
Why does it have to? The issues of sexism differ from the issues of racism which differ from the issues of homophobia which differ from the issues of ableism. Some might say that some of these issues are more important than others; but does that mean that the others are “silly” by comparison? I don’t think so.
Also, it’s important to remember that identities and different forms of discrimination can intersect with each other. Just as I’ve been discriminated against for being both black and female, it’s also possible for others to be discriminated against for being, say, both large and gay.
Basically, saying that FA simply ‘doesn’t compare’ to issues of classim, racism, and such implies that FA isn’t very relevant to those issues, and I disagree. Interestingly, the fact that you focused on how FA relates to specifically female concerns and didn’t mention how it relates to large people in general seems to belie that.
Posted 15 Apr 2008 at 8:01 pm ¶