Tag: Race

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10961 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-18 19:09:53 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-18 19:09:53 [post_content] =>

As the genre continues to diversify, it's time for K-pop to reckon with its relationship to Blackness.

BTS’s long-awaited comeback was controversial from the start.

In March, following a year-and-a-half hiatus to fulfill their mandatory Korean military service, the seven-member boy group reunited with a short animated trailer teasing their new album Arirang. Inspired by a nationally beloved and UNESCO-recognized folk song of the same name, the album was positioned as somewhat of an homage to the group’s Korean roots. In the trailer, the group spotlights the “profound cultural significance” of the original song—believed to be over 600 years old—through a “modern reimagining” of the seven Korean students at Howard University who first recorded it in 1896.

But many fans noticed something strange: For a few seconds, BTS can be seen portraying the students while singing, on campus, to a mostly white audience.

“Who are [these] white folks at a historically Black college built so Black Americans could actually go to college because white people would not allow them into their schools?” one fan commented on YouTube. Others followed suit.

Upon release, the 14-track album followed the standard K-pop formula: a mix of Korean and English songs with a bit of AAVE slang thrown in, and a slew of high-profile Western producers and writers, including Mike-Will-Made-It, Tezzo Touchdown, and Diplo. In short, Arirang was less an homage to an unofficial national anthem than it was a catchy hip-hop album—a nod to the group's cultural influences, but not necessarily their Korean ones. Only the leading track (“Body to Body”) sampled parts of the historic song.

This wasn’t unusual: Over time, as the genre has diversified, K-pop groups have made music with expanding influences, ranging from house to trap. In recent years, the genre has only further loosened, often following global trends rather than strictly adhering to what’s popular in Korea.

It’s an identity crisis that’s been plaguing the genre since the beginning of the decade. While the earliest iterations of K-pop groups (also known as first generation K-pop) occasionally produced songs in English, such tracks didn’t determine a group’s popularity, nor did they dominate the genre like they do now. As K-pop reaches a critical mass of popularity among international audiences, with groups not only sometimes singing exclusively in English, but also branding themselves as “global groups” with members from around the world, the lines have started to blur on what specifically makes K-pop, K-pop. It’s also why it’s become increasingly necessary for the genre as a whole to reckon with its relationship to Blackness, both historically and today.

The word K-pop itself was a bit of an accident. Dr. Stephanie Choi, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that the label was “coined by outsiders, not by the K-pop industry itself.” Popularized in the 90s by Japanese and Chinese media, the term was used to refer to the global popularity of Korean dance pop, before Western media began using it throughout the decade. “Only by the early 2000s was the term introduced to Korean media,” says Dr. Choi.

It was around this time that Lee Soo-man, the architect of what's known as contemporary K-pop, created the idol trainee system that now defines the genre. Inspired by the assembly line approach of 60s Motown, Soo-man brought the same model to Korea, founding SM Entertainment in 1995, carefully crafting and turbocharging each trainee’s talents in dance, vocals, and visual identity through bootcamps notorious for their intensity.

This tradition has endured, eventually evolving into idol trainee reality TV-style competitions that have since produced some of the biggest K-pop groups in the world, including TWICE and Stray Kids. Like the rest of the genre, the success of these shows has now moved beyond Korea to the international stage, which is where The Debut: Dream Academy—the hit show behind the global girl group Katseye—was born.

In addition to commercial success, equally pivotal to defining K-pop is the loyalty of its fandoms, something that’s endured even as the genre has continued to diversify. All K-pop groups thrive on the intimate relationship fostered between idols and their fans, and through social media, this relationship has only intensified. But as the genre has globalized, this intensity has also proven to be a double-edged sword for idols of color. While there's, of course, virtue in national and ethnic representation, for idols, this has often manifested as overexposure to racism and bigotry—sometimes including from fans of color who project themselves onto what they believe an idol of their culture should look like.

It’s a part of why in late February, when Manon Bannerman, the only Black-identifying member of the global girl group Katseye, announced a temporary hiatus from group activities for unspecified reasons, the internet was abuzz with shock, confusion, outrage, and genuine concern on her behalf. Others, meanwhile, were suspicious.

“Definitely some anti-Blackness going on behind the scenes & you can’t tell me otherwise,” one fan commented on Reddit amidst all the speculation. “It’s very textbook.”

For an industry that has roots in Black entertainment, you’d think Black idols would be more common in K-pop. But while K-pop groups have always had members from other East Asian countries, having visibly non-Asian members is still rare. Alexandra Reid of girl group BP Rania was the first Black idol in K-pop history, debuting in 2015. After BP Rania disbanded and re-debuted as Blackswan in 2020, Senegalese-Belgian member Fatou joined her in the lineup. In 2025, Girlset (formerly known as VCHA) rebranded into a multinational four-person girl group, including a Venezuelan-Trinidadian member. But otherwise, Katseye remains the exception rather than the rule when it comes to racial diversity.

The Katseye girls hail from three continents and several different ethnicities and nationalities. Sophia, the group leader, is from the Philippines. Manon is Ghanaian and Swiss. Lara, Daniela, and Megan are all from the States, representing Indian, Cuban-Venezuelan, and Chinese-Singaporean heritages respectively. The only member born and raised in Korea is Yoonchae, who is also the youngest of the six. Their diversity has long been their strength—carefully engineered to capture the hearts of millions of fans, starting from their debut on 2023’s The Debut: Dream Academy, then in 2024, through their intimate Netflix docu-series Pop Star Academy. Following multiple successful commercials for Jollibee, Glossier, and The Gap (the latter of which went viral as a perceived response to Sydney Sweeney’s rather tactless American Eagle ad), the group became seen by fans as a paragon of what the future of K-pop could be.

“I found it interesting that there was a member with the same name as mine who also has Venezuelan ancestry,” says Daniela Bottini, a self-identified Eyekon, as the group’s fans are known. “It was refreshing to see that when they said global, they really meant it. They took the best parts of the K-pop training system, but also recognized that the rigid rules that govern it couldn’t work in a group mainly comprised of young Gen Z women raised in more liberal countries.”

Indeed, on paper, Katseye checks off every K-pop box: rooted in the trainee system, with a deeply interpersonal fandom, challenging choreography, and catchy songs perfect for a 30-second TikTok. Unfortunately, their success has also shed light on the uncomfortable ways global groups are still perceived—and treated—in K-pop compared with their all-Korean peers.

Unlike her Korean contemporaries, Bannerman has not been offered the same grace nor protection she might otherwise have found from fans, even before she announced her hiatus. Throughout her trainee days and well into her debut, she received online hate and death threats and was often called “lazy” and “ungrateful” for someone in her position. It’s an unfortunate reality that all idols, Korean or not, have to go through; but coupled with xenophobia and racism, often rampant against non-Korean idols within fandom spaces, the insults compound.

While anti-Blackness is a worldwide phenomenon, it feels especially glaring in an industry that has long been inspired by Black American culture. Historically, the genre has borrowed heavily from Black aesthetics and practices while divorcing them from the bitterness of Black history, thus turning them into something more “palatable” for a broader audience to enjoy. Across the genre, Black culture is simultaneously commodified while its originators go unrecognized—something increasingly harder to ignore when Black idols like Bannerman exist. Katseye and other global groups, then, present an interesting tension point within the genre, ultimately forcing K-pop’s global audience to reconcile its conflicting ideas of fetishized exotic orientalism—its own form of racism—with its disdain for Black people. It's also what makes BTS’s Arirang trailer snafu—intentional or not—so glaring.

As the genre continues to diversify and to innovate, we’ll likely see more attempts at recreating Katseye’s success, and songs that are not just in English, but in Spanish, French, and other languages, too. Maybe there will be a K-pop group that only produces house music and dance. Perhaps the next trend in K-pop will be country guitar riffs. Jeff Benjamin, a K-pop contributor at Billboard, made the prescient prediction that 2026 will be a defining year for how the genre shifts and how global audiences perceive K-pop overall.

“At this year's Grammy Awards, we saw Katseye as well as Rosé of Blackpink perform; additionally, KPop Demon Hunters won an award—but the bodies of work that these three acts were nominated for aren't traditional K-pop,” says Benjamin.

It’s likely we’ll see a shift happen sooner rather than later. As of June 2026, the Grammys have introduced a new award: Best Asian Pop Music Performance, a category recognizing pop music performances originating from or widely known in Asian markets. It isn’t limited to just K-pop, but J-pop, C-pop, and music from other countries across the Asian diaspora, too. Shortly after the category was announced, BTS said they would not submit Arirang for consideration in the 2027 awards.

“We hope our music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language,” reads a statement from all seven members of the group, explaining their decision. “We thank Army [the group's fandom] and everyone who has always stood by us.”

As barriers between cultures and languages break down on our screens, and the world as we know it inevitably changes, it’s clear that K-pop has the potential to be a bright spot in a new world order. It’s already crossed the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and language to become an international genre. Its music resonates and inspires millions of fans across the world. But if the genre wants to reach its full cultural potential, it will also have to reckon with its relationship not only to idols of color, but xenophobia towards idols outside of Korea, once and for all.

As of today, Katseye is a de facto four-member girl group with Bannerman’s hiatus ongoing, and Sophia's recent announcement she would be stepping back from the group until September. Prolonged hiatuses aren’t uncommon in K-pop groups, usually due to illness or injury or just the need for a mental health break. But whether Bannerman comes back to the group or not, one thing is for certain: the issue of anti-Blackness in K-pop remains, and it’s up to both the industry and its fans to dismantle it.

[post_title] => The Globalization of K-Pop [post_excerpt] => As the genre continues to diversify, it's time for K-pop to reckon with its relationship to Blackness. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => globalization-k-pop-music-genre-anti-blackness-katseye-manon-bannerman-idols [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-19 12:34:00 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-19 12:34:00 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10961 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 18, 2026August 19, 2026

The Globalization of K-Pop

by Niya Doyle

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8185 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-04-17 20:59:49 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-04-17 20:59:49 [post_content] =>

Under Trump, the ideology is on the rise. But ultimately, eliminating eugenic beliefs from our shared society may require dismantling the United States itself.

In a moment when the experiment of the United States is teetering on the brink, the Trump administration is weaponizing deep-seated hatred of marginalized people to exacerbate ideological divides and deepen MAGA’s cult-like relationship with the president. A key component to this is their belief in and use of eugenics—the idea that it’s possible to create an ideal human by eliminating “undesirable traits.” Meaningful resistance to Trump, then, requires a culture shift grounded in understanding the ideology’s history, the tech industry’s role in encouraging it, and the complicity of liberals and the left in conversations about whose life has value. It also means acknowledging just how deeply baked the ideology is into modern American culture.

Many people associate eugenics with the Nazis, comparing what’s happening in the United States today—the disappearing of immigrants without due process, the erasure of anything considered DEI, the destruction of archives—to the Nazi movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Nazi policy called for the extinction of unwanted communities via any means possible, including forced sterilization, social control, and, of course, “euthanasia” and mass murder. Yet in this pursuit of an improved “Aryan race,” the Nazis didn’t just want to populate the world with nondisabled blue-eyed blonds: They also viewed circumstantial, socially-mediated experiences such as criminality and poverty as genetic and therefore targets for elimination via breeding, an idea fundamental to the broader eugenics movement.

But the movement didn’t start there: The U.S.-based eugenics movement of the early 20th century was a tremendous influence on the Nazis, as was the work of British eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Julian Huxley. In the U.S., Charles Davenport, Henry Goddard, and many others aimed to “improve” humanity by fighting “dysgenic” influences, with prominent corporate foundations bankrolling their efforts. The normalization of American eugenics was also supported on a broader, sociocultural scale: Across the United States, laws encouraged marriage and children (for the right people), while simultaneously promoting the institutionalization and mass sterilization of disabled people, poor people, and Black, Indigenous people of color. “Better Babies” contests at county and state fairs promoted eugenic beliefs, alongside “fitter family” lectures and informational pamphlets.

Eugenics in the United States didn’t stop in 1945 with the fall of the Third Reich, and is very much still reflected in standing policies from both major parties in the U.S. today. Laws across the country still criminalize poverty. A growing number of states take eliminationist approaches to unhoused people and use poverty alone as grounds for removing children from their families. The state still promotes the use of sterilization and long-acting reversible contraceptives, disproportionately using both in some communities more than others. As recently as 2010, the California prison system sterilized incarcerated women without consent. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently released guidance justifying the use of permanent contraceptives in children and youth with intellectual disabilities, in which the authors simultaneously acknowledged the heinous past of permanent sterilization while suggesting permanent contraception without the capacity for consent is “respecting their inherent reproductive rights.”

The normalization of these policies across the U.S. has directly fed the rise of Trumpism, and the return of eugenics to the mainstream. The president’s support of this ideology is also explicit: Trump, throughout his campaigns and now in the White House (again), has made comments about “immigrant bloodlines,” implying Black and Brown immigrants are inherently animalistic, criminal, subhuman. This, despite the fact that Trump himself is the child of a Scottish immigrant, and the fact that he has been married to two immigrants himself—collectively, the mothers of four of his five children. The only difference, of course, is whiteness.

We’ve already seen Trump’s belief in race science—and eugenics more broadly—reflected in his administration’s actions so far. His Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, has proposed prioritizing funding for areas with higher marriage and birth rates, a directly eugenic project echoing the “marriage incentives” long promoted by the right. The administration is attempting to write trans people out of existence, both in the sense of stripping all references to the community from federal reporting, documents, and initiatives, and attacking transition care. And while abducting and trafficking people to high security foreign prisons without due process, Trump has simultaneously begun offering “golden visas” to more “desirable” (re: rich, white) immigrants to take their place, including offers of a “rapid pathway” to immigration for white South African farmers, whom he claims are subjects of “reverse racism.”

The goal of the current administration is clear: Advancing whiteness and eliminating marginalized and variant bodies. And the administration is acting quickly. Musk’s slash and burn approach to “cutting government spending” is targeting a variety of agencies and efforts that fund research and treatment of disease; an open eugenicist is heading the Department of Health and Human Services, promising to “Make America Healthy Again” by dismantling the vaccination apparatus and attacking mentally ill people; Trump has withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization; and the CDC just announced a plan to study (YET AGAIN) the thoroughly debunked connection between vaccines and autism. They’ve allegedly done all of this in the name of reducing government waste. But not coincidentally, the “waste” they’ve decried in government is often associated with programs that keep people alive, attempt to make the nation more equitable, and protect people from discrimination, all of which ties back to eugenics under a cloak of “meritocracy” and “fighting reverse discrimination.”

Enter the tech industry, whose belief that it’s superior to representative democracy isn’t anything new. Eugenics has always been a component of big tech ideology, and unsurprisingly, its cited goal of “human improvement” has only made this more explicit. The transhumanist movement in particular is rife with disablism, with disabled culture critic Anna Hamilton noting that under transhumanist frameworks “certain disabilities can, and should, be fixed for the good of humanity.” The biotech industry may be behind critical advancements, but these advancements have also come with complex implications: CRISPR, for example, makes it possible to edit the human genome, but has also allowed for tailoring embryos beyond targeting issues such as lethal fetal anomalies, and well into designer babies.

Silicon Valley is also obsessed with Great Replacement Theory—the idea that the “white race” is somehow under attack—a particular interest of the right. Musk is notably fixated on having as many (white) children as possible to do his part for the cause, seeding the world with what he describes as his superior genetics (often, allegedly, via IVF), with his daughter Vivian Wilson claiming that Musk and her mother Justine even engaged in prenatal sex selection. Fellow technocrat Mark Zuckerberg also longs for a “tribe” of children. The technofascism is on full display as a growing number of tech companies publicly move right, sometimes actively repudiating former progressive stances, while the billionaires who run them move to control the media and government.

Disabled people; Black, Indigenous people of color; low-income people; Jewish people; trans people; and others very familiar with navigating a hostile United States in undesirable bodies have been warning about this for a very long time. And while liberals and those on the left may think of eugenics as a rightwing ideology, it’s also baked into some of their attitudes, in part because eugenics is so core to U.S. culture. Recognizing that some lives are valued more than others, and the ways in which this interacts with liberal and left praxis, is challenging, especially with the external pressures of fascism and capitalism. But shying away from our own complicity in these systems only perpetuates them, and leaves some marginalized people feeling like perennially conditional members of these social movements and society at large.

This is on particular display for the disability community, which has repeatedly expressed concerns about being left out, and is tired of being told to wait its turn for liberation. This frustration is rooted in the community’s continued dehumanization, and a general sense that disabled lives are somehow more expendable than others, that disabled bodyminds do not have a role to play in the collective struggle. The long covid community, for example, as an active advocate for masking and other basic measures to prevent the spread of infectious disease, is increasingly shut out of theoretically left organizing spaces. Rhetoric in support of abortion raises the specter of a “disabled” fetus as grounds for ensuring continued access to reproductive health care. Conversations about medical aid in dying often revolve around the idea of being a “burden” on family members, or assumptions about quality of life that are rooted in solvable problems, for those with the money and the will to solve them. There is a sense that some disabled people are “unfit” for political struggle, and therefore “unfit” for existence—echoing the rejection of “the unfit” throughout the history of eugenics.

This isn’t just about disability, but about a larger lack of support for marginalized people in the midst of a project to eliminate them. This includes the sidelining of trans people at a time when they are under active assault; the prevalence of respectability politics for Black, Indigenous people of color; and the dehumanization of red states and their most marginalized residents—all of which highlight a willingness to leave some communities behind for factors entirely out of their control. The fundamental implication that life would be more convenient if these populations were to shut up, or simply not exist, is always bubbling below the surface.

Fighting eugenic influences requires challenging racism, disablism, and other discriminatory attitudes that are deeply woven into our society. It requires reckoning with the fact that class does not exist in a vacuum; and acknowledging that a person’s worth should not be dependent on their ability to “contribute to society” through capitalist exploitation. In many liberal and left spaces, this includes eliminating the anti-Blackness that pervades so many conversations, and learning the most basic foundations of disablism, starting with the continued treatment of disability as a medical issue rather than a social identity, and the assumption that disabled people want cures over full social inclusion. Antisemitism in liberal and left environments is also an enduring problem, as is resistance to conversations about how these spaces are falling short.

If it is possible to create some version of the United States that is not inherently morally bankrupt, fighting eugenics is essential, as is truly valuing marginalized people and making a robust case for their defense and inclusion at all costs. Change is possible. During the Occupy movement, for example, organizers fought—with varying degrees of success—for the application of gender and racial analysis to conversations about class. The Disability Working Group at the Democratic Socialists of America, and the increasing number of disability caucuses in other left and progressive organizations, shows that there is a growing understanding of disability’s role in the struggle. Solidarity is also on display in protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, itself a eugenic project, and one Trump very much supports.

Ultimately, eliminating eugenic beliefs from our shared society may require dismantling the United States itself. The first step in that project, however, must involve an engagement with the role of eugenics in political thought, and conscious efforts to acknowledge and make good on the harm done. In the midst of the current political climate, pulling at the threads of eugenics isn’t adjacent to fighting the political right: It’s essential. The nation was founded on a basis of white supremacy, which is now woven deeply through the nation’s legal and popular culture. Whether liberals and the left are willing to continue building momentum, let alone face up to the influence of eugenics on their political values, is an open question and one that needs to be decided quickly. Challenging eugenic influences on political ideology isn’t infighting or purity policing: It lies at the heart of an inclusive political movement that actually strives towards liberation for all.

[post_title] => The United States of Eugenics [post_excerpt] => Under Trump, the ideology is on the rise. How do we finally dismantle it once and for all? [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => united-states-america-eugenics-politics-policy-race-science-disablism-transphobia-racism-xenophobia-trump-immigration [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 23:11:23 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 23:11:23 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8185 [menu_order] => 22 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 17, 2025August 3, 2026

The United States of Eugenics

by s.e. smith

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 6581 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-02-07 19:39:54 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-02-07 19:39:54 [post_content] =>

An interview with the writer-director of "Astonishing Little Feet," a short film about the first documented Chinese woman to come to America.

The first documented Chinese woman to come to the United States was told it would be temporary.

Just 19 years old (or 14, or 16—reports vary), Afong Moy was brought to America not as an immigrant, but as a curiosity, sold off by her father to a ship captain who promised he would return her on his next voyage back to Canton in two years. Moy's father wouldn't be the only one to capitalize off of her: Arriving in New York in 1834, Moy's main purpose would be to help two American merchants, the Carne brothers, sell "exotic" goods—essentially acting as a living mannequin, singing traditional songs, demonstrating how to use chopsticks, and, on occasion, walking for short distances on her bound feet as a way to solicit interest in the brothers' imported Chinese wares.

She would never return home.

Moy would go on to become incredibly famous—so famous she eventually met then-President Andrew Jackson while touring around the country. She would also die in obscurity, no record of her existence after 1850. Very little is known about her today, and even less about how she might have felt about her new life and exploitation. But a new short film seeks to capture a glimpse at both: Astonishing Little Feet, written and directed by Maegan Houang, reimagines what Moy's first experience "performing" for potential investors might have looked like—and the result is harrowing, an uncomfortable exploration of complicity, curiosity, and the history of Asians in America.

Below, we spoke with the writer-director about her film—the title pulled from surviving advertisements that bill Moy as the "Chinese Lady" with "astonishing little feet"—and the importance of not looking away from an ugly past.

The Conversationalist: How did you first decide you wanted to do a film about Afong Moy?

Maegan Houang: I was reading The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee, and there’s one line in it that mentions her. I just couldn’t believe what I was reading. It really struck a chord with me—I felt so connected to the idea that the first Asian woman most people in the United States saw was there to help someone else sell goods, just because she seemed particularly exotic and strange. I immediately thought there was a movie there.

From what I’ve read, it seems like Afong Moy was treated as a “good” herself, as a commodity. I only knew the bare minimum about her before watching your film, and then I went down my own wormhole. What struck me is how young she was. Some reports say she was as young as 14—so to even call her the first documented Chinese “woman” is a misnomer.

She was between 14 and 18—max.

What resonated most with you about her story?

It was what you just said, that she was a commodity. That she was commodified to help other people make money, because she was such an interesting, exotic object. To me, there’s no way there’s not an element of hypersexualization there, which was really resonate to how I felt growing up. For context, I’m half Asian, and I grew up in Michigan, where there were mostly white people at my school. I grew up being perceived as Asian; I also grew up understanding that I was being seen as different—but no one was explaining to me why. To me, that’s a deficit in our education as Asian Americans. I think it’s easy to blame the system, but I think it’s our own parents, who are immigrants, who really don’t—understandably—know the history of the country they moved to, and the history of how Asian Americans have been treated, and therefore have no reason to tell us. So we’re thrown into a system where we don’t really understand all this context and all this history.

In high school, when I was being really hypersexualized and sexually harassed, as many young women are, there always seemed to be a layer of cruelty, of dehumanization. I didn’t understand it, and I felt like it was my fault. As anyone who’s a woman of a minority, we all understand that there’s no one reason for everything. I can't sit here and say it's a hundred percent that I'm Asian. I don't know. But I think what I wanted in this film was—if other people know her story, maybe they'll better understand their own context as young women in our country. Because there’s no way that kind of introduction to Asian women—which continued throughout the 1800s with P.T. Barnum, with different circus acts [including Moy]—doesn’t impact our present day understanding of what and who an Asian American woman is.

Obviously, my life is not nearly as horrific as Moy's. I’m not trying to create a false parallel of trauma, because I actually really despise that. But at the same time, I think it's really important to know that there might be things about our existence and the way we're treated that really have nothing to do with us, so we don't internalize them. And that's why I wanted to make the movie, and why I wanted it to be hard to watch. Because the other thing is, I don't think there's anyone watching the film, including myself, who kind of doesn't want to look at her foot.

I was going to ask—you made the decision to show Moy's bound foot. Why give in to the curiosity of the viewer?

I think we're all ultimately quite complicit in the systems of exploitation and capitalism of even our own bodies and people. As a filmmaker, it was instinctual to some degree. But also, people feel bad at the end of the movie, because they did participate in it. I think that's fine. It's okay to feel bad. It's okay to have to question your own role in the way that we live our lives. I'm not trying to create a false equivalency. Objectively, things are better than they were then. You and I are not people who were trafficked from Asia to make people money.

It's not that our experiences are equivalent, but it is shining a light on the historical origins to certain narratives and how they're baked into Western and American culture on some level. Even though it's not nearly as bad, or as surface level.

Yeah, totally. I do believe in historical consciousness. It was only forty years ago, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. That's not very long ago.

Talk me through what was important to you in portraying the other characters in the film, especially Captain Obear and the Carne brothers.

Sometimes, I think we over-intellectualize, or—it's not a real word, but—evil-ize people, trying to prescribe more evil intention to certain things that I fundamentally don't think is there. All of them just want to rise in class. And it has an abhorrent result. But none of them think they're a bad person. None of them think they're doing something wrong. They're just operating within the rules of our society and our system. I was happy when I would screen it and people would laugh at certain things because that shows a discomfort with the absurdity of the past; we can't imagine being that way. But I think people were. So I wanted them to be realistic, but hopefully inspire people to think about the parallels that we might still have—which is also why I wanted to show the foot from their point of view, because sometimes, when you finally get what you wanted, it's really horrible, but it doesn't change the fact that you wanted it. And that's an uncomfortable space.

So much of what you're talking about is complicity and capitalism; that if you're conditioned to believe that this is the only way to succeed in life, then you become blinded by what you're sacrificing morally or otherwise in the process to achieve it.

Yes.

Which, going back to the choice to show the foot—I do want to discuss the very intense and visceral scene of the unwrapping in a second, but first, I was really struck by your choice to switch back and forth between perspectives in the film, almost as if we're both being perceived and also the perceiver.

In early screenings, I actually got notes from people that it should be more in her perspective. And I was so bummed out by that note—because that's the easy way out. Because if you're aligned with her, you are like, "I'm aligned with the victim, I'm aligned with the person being oppressed." And I think that's trauma porn, a little bit. If it's fully from her perspective, we get to feel okay, and I think that's dishonest.

It was interesting the extent to which this note would mostly come from men. I'm like, why do you need me to spell this out for you? Why is that something you need?

That's interesting, given the scene where her foot is being unwrapped—there are very obviously a lot of parallels to assault, to rape. It feels like a rape, I think, to the viewer. And that felt very intentional. I wanted to just talk a little bit more with you about your decision to approach it that way, and her translator Atung's place in all of it as the one who actually unwraps her foot while the other men watch.

All he does is unwrap her foot, and it feels like assault. I would imagine that's what it feels like to her.

Yes.

It's horrible, but it's also obviously what the men want to see, and then they're also a little bit stunned by it. With the translator, he is trapped. He just has to do what they say—this is how he eats, this is how he lives. Now, it's not enslavement, but it's imprisonment through capitalism, it's imprisonment through just needing to survive. So he doesn't want to do it, but it's what he has to do. Those are just the terms that you accept sometimes when you immigrate to a new country where you're a minority, and they're unpleasant, but they're also just reality. Unfortunately, people don't really stand up to power—but he tries. She tries. Meanwhile, [the merchants] aren't doing their own dirty work. They're observing it.

The voyeurism of it was really striking to me.

Not to be lame, but I'm a student of Hitchcock. And his whole thing was that everyone has a dirty little mind. I was trying to play with that idea, which, again, doesn't work if you're only in her perspective. You have to feel like, oh, I am sort of drawn in to this act, but I know I shouldn't be.

I really loved that the film was in Cantonese, and how that added another layer to her isolation within it.

My family is from Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese.

Mine, too.

It's really painful because Cantonese is the oldest spoken Chinese language, and when going back thousands of years to characters that we don't know how to read anymore, it's Cantonese that helps guide you, not Mandarin. It's also accurate—they would've spoken Cantonese.

It's also another way of feeling othered, being disconnected from the language around you. She couldn't speak English, which means she couldn't understand what was being said if it wasn't translated for her.

A lot of people say, well, women didn't have agency [back then], and that's something I just don't agree with. Women had agency within the confines of their circumstance, and they did employ their agency however they could. It's a myth that we have about women in the past, that they're just sitting there while things happened around them. Moy is deploying whatever agency she has. It just may not work, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't have it and that she doesn't try to use it and that she doesn't feel proud of where she's from in her culture. I imagine her dad was like, you're going to go show people what China's really like; that she was told she was going to help educate Americans. That he told her some kind of fable, because that's what people do to survive. And ultimately, she met Andrew Jackson—which, there's no way when that was happening, she wasn't like, "I'm a badass." That's just the reality of power. It's better to be an oppressed person with status than to be an oppressed person without it.

What do you think Afong Moy dreamed of?

I think she dreamed about home. There are moments even I dream about this, and I am obviously born in America, but I still dream of going back home. It's not to live there, but it's to touch and feel the culture that I don't have as easy access to. It's why I would want to go get dim sum, or why I would want to get Hong Kong breakfast, or—my family's also Vietnamese—why I sometimes just really want a bowl of pho. And I imagine in that time period, all those kind of home comforts, particularly food, would be so out of reach and so inaccessible that I would probably, if I were her, really yearn for some of those things.

On the flip side, I also think if I were her, I would dream of other types of fame, of success within the system that she's trapped within. Or freedom, which in that situation, might have been someone marrying her. I don't know.

Of course, we can't know. I was just curious what you imagined when trying to get in her headspace.

No, no, I love that question. It's so interesting. I mean, you just try to think how it would feel to be so far from home, and so poor—and disabled, which is a whole other thing. Women with bound feet were trapped in their houses basically, because they couldn't really walk. It was a status thing, and people were proud of it, but it's still really fucked up. We've tolerated a lot from the way men have tried to disempower us, and she really embodies a lot of those longstanding trends.

It feels fair to say Moy wasn't just commodified for her ethnicity, she was also commodified for her disability. Although there's overlap between the two.

Yeah. Well, it's clearly stemmed from a fetish in Chinese culture that it was more attractive to have a really small, tiny foot, to the point where everyone was maiming themselves—or each other, with the help of older women—to achieve this strange fetish. You could argue foot binding in China was also a commodification of women, because you're making women into an object that's appealing to men. I think it's a pretty abhorrent custom, in that it limited women's ability and mobility to do so many things. Now the tricky thing is not exceptionalizing or exotifying that custom as morally better or worse than other customs that other people have done to women in other cultures all around the world. It's disgusting, but I also would argue that there's a lot of disgusting things we do to ourselves to make us interesting to men that we'll all look back on in different ways, to different degrees, that become more or less acceptable depending on what's in fashion. You could argue weight loss and disordered eating is a different version of self harm and mutilation for men. Or attempting to stay young. And some people hurt themselves to do that.

I was going to say, binding feet in an attempt to keep them as small as when you were a child—could also be a means of sexualizing youth, in an extreme way.

Yeah, totally. I just view it as another norm that was really brutal, but that still has parallels to norms that we live in at the moment.

What else do you hope people take away from the film?

I just hope people think about Asian Americans in history, and how that pertains today. And also their complicity within a capitalist system of exploitation, and not in a self-flagellating way. There's a bit too much of that in our current society, and I don't think acting out of shame for the past or the present is going to resolve how our system works. We have to shine a light on things that are horrible, but also have empathy for ourselves, and for people in the past—that they're doing the best they can because of systemic factors instead of trying to look at everything so individually. That's not going to be how any of our current crises get solved. Climate change, for example, won't be solved by one person. It's going to require and necessitate collective action to fight back against the system that we live in, and it's going to require sacrifice from a lot of people that don't want to sacrifice, and questioning why do we place some lives above other lives?

I don't know. Those are just the things I thought about while making it, but I'm also fine with people taking away whatever they want, because I do think as artists, we aren't able to really control how our work is interpreted, and we have to let that go. White men love the movie, actually—I get the most compliments from white men, weirdly.

But I mean, I made it for us. People are like, "Who did you make it for?" Other Asian American women.

You can stream "Astonishing Little Feet" on Vimeo here. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

[post_title] => What Did Afong Moy Dream About? [post_excerpt] => An interview with the writer-director of "Astonishing Little Feet," a short film about the first documented Chinese woman to come to America. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => afong-moy-first-chinese-woman-america-astonishing-little-feet-short-film-maegan-houang-interview [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:49:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:49:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=6581 [menu_order] => 65 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 7, 2024August 4, 2026

What Did Afong Moy Dream About?

by Gina Mei

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Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson performed admirably before the Senate Judiciary Committee, despite attacks on her historic nomination to the Supreme Court by Republican conspiracies, racism and sexism.

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the appointment of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be the first Black female justice to sit on the Supreme Court. The hearings were a circus of QAnon conspiracies and racist dog whistles, with little pushback on Republicans from Democrats. This week Executive Director Anna Lind-Guzik highlights recurring themes in the commentary on Jackson's nomination: Republican abuses and complicity, Jackson's unwavering composure and respectability politics, Democrats' abandonment of their nominee, rampant misogynoir (misogyny specifically targeting Black women), and in spite of everything, pride at Jackson's historic nomination, both as a Black woman and a former public defender.

Republican misbehavior, politicization and complicity

So far the only one Republican, Susan Collins, has said she will vote to confirm Judge Jackson. Longtime Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse writes for the New York Times: "every Republican who votes against her confirmation will be complicit in the abuse that the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee heaped on her." She concludes, "the Republicans’ role in the Jackson hearing was not remotely about Ketanji Brown Jackson. It was about concocting a scary version of a Black woman to serve up to their base."

Also in the New York Times, Emily Bazelon refutes Republican attacks on Judge Jackson for her sentencing decisions in child pornography cases, even citing the National Review for calling Senator Hawley's line of questioning “meritless to the point of demagoguery.”

Democrats' failure to support Judge Jackson

Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate about how Democrats stranded Ketanji Brown Jackson at her hearings. "Jackson looked alone fending off the QAnon smear brigade for much of these hearings because she was alone, at least until Sen. Cory Booker took it upon himself in his last colloquy to offer up a powerful corrective to the hatred being leveled at her."

Here is a video of Cory Booker telling Judge Jackson that no one will "steal his joy" at her nomination. When Black women were asked how they felt watching the hearings, many expressed a range from pride and hope, to pain and disgust.

Racism, misogyny, and misogynoir

In Teen Vogue, Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman and Katie Camacho Orona argue that the attacks against Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson mirror those used against Justice Sonia Sotomayor. They compare the disingenuous critical race theory attacks on Judge Jackson to accusations of "reverse discrimination" made against Sotomayor.

In Oprah Daily, legal scholars Madiba Dennie and Kate Kelly speak to the misogynoir Judge Jackson faced at the hearings. "Misogynoir is a term coined by queer feminist scholar Professor Moya Bailey that encapsulates the specific hatred directed toward Black women, who face discrimination on the basis of both race and gender."

In Ms. Magazine, Bonnie Stabile writes about misogyny's gatekeeping role at the hearings.

Composure and respectability in predominantly white spaces

Coming on the heels of Will Smith and Chris Rock's dust-up at the Oscars, Roxane Gay wrote an essay "In defense of thin skin" where she describes her pain watching Judge Jackson's hearing. She notes, "the Senate Judiciary Committee apparently valued decorum over Judge Jackson’s dignity."

For The Nation, Elie Mystal delves into Judge Jackson's pause after Ted Cruz rudely asked her, “Do you agree…that babies are racist?” He writes, "In that pregnant moment, everybody in the whole country who was watching got to see whiteness at work. Everybody knew that Ted Cruz got to stand up there and call Ketanji Brown Jackson whatever he wanted to, and nobody would stop him. Everybody knew that Jackson could not respond in kind if she wanted the job. And everybody knew that, in the same situation, Kavanaugh could and did sneer at his questioners, threaten the Senate with political retribution, and declare his undying love for beer, without hurting his chances at unaccountable lifetime power. Power he now holds."

Celebrating Ketanji Brown Jackson's accomplishments and experience

In the New York Times, Erica Green reports on how Ketanji Brown Jackson reacted to Confederate flag displays in her time at Harvard.

For Teen Vogue, public defender Alexzandria Poole writes about her excitement at seeing a former public defender represented on the Supreme Court.

In Grid News, Chris Geidner writes that Jackson's history of acknowledging people's humanity is precisely what Republicans don't like about her.

Finally, check out Madiba Dennie and Elizabeth Hira's discussion of what Judge Jackson's nomination means to women of color in the legal profession.

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April 1, 2022August 4, 2026

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s road to the Supreme Court

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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We need narratives that explore our shared problems and point the way toward collective liberation, but South Asian stories in U.S. popular culture haven’t kept pace with our new political realities.

Until 9/11, I didn’t feel a strong need to see my ethnicity represented in American pop culture. Growing up in the U.S. as South Asian was an experience in cultural invisibility, but not one that was necessarily undesirable. GenXers and older Millennials came after the hippie era, which convinced mainstream American culture that Indian culture could be summarized with yoga, incense, and kirtans, and there was little in the 1980s and 1990s to dispel those lingering narratives, or to ground South Asians authentically in popular culture. What we did see, whether it was Amy Irving in brownface playing an Indian princess, or Apu in The Simpsons, was often problematic and unrepresentative.

This situation changed over the last two decades. The first film I saw in theaters after 9/11 was Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, which played at New York City’s storied Paris Theater, right outside the Plaza Hotel. Steeped in joyous chaos and vitality, the film, which is set in New Delhi, portrays an exuberant, extended upper middle class family gathered at the home of the bride’s family to celebrate her arranged marriage to a suitably handsome Indian doctor. Tinged with a hint of tragedy and immersed in love for both family and the kind of colorful Desi spectacle Pico Iyer calls a “marigold tapestry,” the film was an escape, a connection, and a salve in the recovering-but-still-desolate city. I hadn’t realized how much I needed it.

The only previous occasion on which I'd had an inkling of this need was while watching Nair's 1991 film Mississippi Masala. This bittersweet and boundary-breaking love story stars Denzel Washington as Demetrius, a Black American man from a working class background, and Sarita Choudhary as Mina, an Indian woman born in Uganda. After Idi Amin expelled all the “foreigners” in 1972, Mina, who at one point in the film says she has never been to India, lives with her family in a small-town Mississippi motel owned by relatives who represent the great wave of migration from Gujarat to the U.S. during the 1980s and 1990s. The film pulsates with the same vibrancy that would be seen in Monsoon Wedding 10 years later.

But while Monsoon Wedding tells a deeply Indian story, Mississippi Masala tells a deeply American one. As Durba Mitra writesin an essay celebrating the film’s 30th anniversary, Mississippi Masala is a “love story wrapped in histories of postcolonial displacement, settler colonialism, and the shadows of Jim Crow, offer[ing] an account of the cruel circuitous routes of displacement and migration to the American South.” The film is one of the first mainstream American artworks to show both the discrimination experienced by the Indian-American diaspora, and the anti-Black racism the community directs at the Black people amongst whom they now live. Even 30 years later, it stands out as a political inquiry that interrogates what it means to seek liberation through young, urgent love across race, class, and culture.

A scene from 'Mississippi Masala,' Mira Nair's 1991 film starring Sarita Choudhury and Denzel Washington.

Mitra notes in her essay, “The Indian diaspora in the U.S. has always been imagined in the American political landscape as a people neither here nor there.” South Asians who were either born in the U.S. or came as children following the 1965 Immigration Act were so few in number—even today there are only 5.4 million—that, Mississippi Masala aside, the microculture of American-born GenX Desis made little more than a blip in popular culture. On the one hand, this environment provided a kind of freedom in which we could try to shape culture and community without a spotlight. We could try to form bonds of solidarity in the face of entrenched political, cultural, religious, national, and caste lines that separated our peers on the subcontinent and were embraced by diaspora members who clung to their xenophobic, racist, or communal ideologies. On the other hand, the community could be insular and, existing in what Shilpa Davé calls “ambiguous racialized space,” both the victim and the perpetrator of discrimination.

Events in post 9/11 America made clear the need for South Asian stories with political and cultural specificity in mainstream culture. The months immediately after that terrible day were a period of intense discrimination, surveillance, violence, and Islamophobic and anti-immigrant policies. As Representative Pramila Jayapal said, “9/11 changed what it meant to be Arab, Muslim, or South Asian in this country.” Jayapal delivered her remarks during the first ever Congressional hearing on Discrimination and Civil Liberties of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities, held over twenty years after 9/11. Finally.

Representation in this political context matters. Rashad Robinson, the prominent civil rights activist, rightly warns usnot to mistake presence for power: Being in a room doesn't necessarily establish a direct line to decision making. None of us relates to the experience of being South Asian in the same way, and none of us should have to represent any or all of the rest of us. But one of the adverse effects of underrepresentation is to convince members of a minority community that they lack power within the dominant culture—that access and opportunity are limited, and their own stories will be unheard or filtered through stereotypes. In an essay about Lisa Ling’s food docuseries on Asian food in the U.S., Marina Fang writes: “Asian Americans often start from the default position of being “the other.” We have to explain ourselves, usually to a white audience.” In this kind of cultural environment, the need to present perfect or one dimensional characters—a pillar of the toxic “model minority” myth—takes root, and division and misunderstanding flourish.

Presence and visibility may not be the entire solution to these problems. They are nevertheless crucial levers toward power. And the years between 9/11 and the 2016 U.S. election—marked by cross-MENASA community organizing to fight discrimination and state violence —gave rise to a mini renaissance of South Asian content that explored and played with the place South Asians occupy in the U.S. cultural landscape.

Rampant xenophobia in the post-2016 world makes the need for solidarity, representation, and narrative shift even stronger. But the South Asian diaspora community has splintered over the past few years. Rising authoritarianism—from Trump to Brexit to Modi—emboldened Hindu nationalists in India and around the world, greatly exacerbating existing caste and religious discrimination. On the international stage, South Asians have been slow to rise in defense of our common humanity. It feels like a fraught time to embrace South Asian identity and a deeply precarious time around the world. We desperately need narratives that explore our shared problems and point the way toward collective liberation, but South Asian stories in U.S. popular culture haven’t kept pace with our new political realities.

I’ll admit to some satisfaction these days at seeing so much South Asian content made by people in front of and behind the camera. South Asian actors are playing a variety of dynamic, complicated, and sexy (but not exoticized) characters in content ranging from the color-blind casting of Bridgerton and The Green Knight, to the coming-of-age stories in Never Have I Ever and Spin, to superheros (that most American of genres) as seen in Eternals and Ms Marvel.

In this landscape, the character that most closely represents me, at least demographically, is Seema in …And Just Like That. Played by Sarita Choudhary (who also played Mina in Mississippi Masala), Seema is a GenX New Yorker, unapologetically sexual, self-made, fabulous, and untethered to familial or cultural expectations. She is refreshing. I understand why the show disappointed many viewers with its portrayals of aging, race, class, consumerism, gender, and sexuality, but a small part of me enjoyed watching a glamorous brown woman of a certain age chewing up the scenery.

But reality these days always creeps in. It's hard to get past what is happening politically in the South Asian community and watch even escapist content with unadulterated joy. As I watched her, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is Seema enough?

Her character comes from what appears to be an upper caste Hindu background and lives the life of a one percenter in Manhattan, with a private driver and a luxurious wardrobe of exceedingly expensive designer clothes, shoes, and handbags. She sits in privilege and has origins in what is now the oppressor class in India. As do I. Not all South Asians are privileged—far from it, especially in terms of race, class, or caste. But for a community that is small in numbers, we have a relatively high level of power and privilege. This is what Seema, as fabulous as she is in some ways, also represents.

In the current state of our world, confronting society from our perspective as South Asians should require us to interrogate where we sit along the spectrum of power. What is our collective responsibility? Where do we have social power, and where do we use it for good? We need rich, complex stories that explore these questions. We need more than a few of these stories every decade.

I want to know what Demetrius and Mina would do in our world. That’s the story I’m looking for now. We are living in monstrous, devastating times. We need lightness, escape, and joy—and a more inclusive roster of characters that will shape the way people perceive one another. Even more so, we need to tell stories of solidarity.

[post_title] => Representation matters: South Asians in American pop culture since 9/11 [post_excerpt] => During the 30 years since Mira Nair's groundbreaking film 'Mississippi Masala,' the representation of South Asians in American pop culture has evolved significantly. But is it enough? [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => representation-matters-south-asians-in-american-pop-culture-since-9-11 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 20:48:04 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 20:48:04 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3963 [menu_order] => 129 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 17, 2022August 4, 2026

Representation matters: South Asians in American pop culture since 9/11

by Lina Srivastava

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Language around migration can be confusing, and the way it’s used can impact meaning. When is someone an immigrant? When are they a refugee?

Immigration. It’s a topic at the heart of political arguments and family dinner table rows all around the world. It drives tabloid headlines. But it’s an issue that’s poorly understood by many people. What makes someone a refugee, and what’s an economic migrant? Why do people leave their homes? How easy is it to cross a border?

This is your immigration cheat sheet — an introduction to how humankind migrates. It’s the why, how, and where. The emotional toll many have to face, and the opportunities others enjoy. The changing policies that are impacted by the world in which we live.

What is immigration?

Language around migration can be confusing, and the way it’s used can impact meaning. When is someone an immigrant? When are they a refugee? Meanwhile, the word migrant is often used as an umbrella term for everybody moving somewhere new, regardless of the reason — it isn’t specific to refugees. Here’s a breakdown of some key terms.

Immigration vs. emigration

The difference between immigration and emigration is about whether you’re coming or going. People immigrating are moving into a new country to live, where they become immigrants. Whereas emigration relates to those leaving.

People might also talk about net migration. This is a calculation to show whether more people are moving into a country, than out of it, affecting the overall population. If there are more immigrants to a country than people emigrating, it’s known as positive net migration.

Immigration vs. migration

Moving into a new place is known as immigration. Migration, on the other hand, is the actual act of moving. It’s when people (or birds) leave one location and journey towards another. People might cross multiple borders, or they might even stay in the same country and migrate to a different area.

Immigration under duress

Not all migration is through choice. Many people are forced to move away from their countries, leaving behind homes and loved ones.

Refugees

There are 84 million people in the world who have been forcibly displaced, either within their own countries or beyond its borders. People forced to flee their home countries for fear of being persecuted are known as refugees, and they’re often at risk due to their political beliefs, religion, race, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or sexual orientation. They might be facing war or violence in their home countries. Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, people are guaranteed the right to seek asylum in another country. They’re also protected from refoulement, where states must not return refugees to places where their lives or freedom would be under threat.

Asylum seekers

Refugees who have made an application to stay in a new country, but have not yet received a decision, are known as asylum seekers. They can only make that application once they’re in the new country. As of 2021, there are 4.4 million people waiting on asylum applications across the world. Some travel through several nations before making an application — there is no obligation for people to seek asylum in the first country in which they arrive. Asylum procedures can be complicated, involving interviews, lengthy legal processes, and even detention-like accommodation.

Trafficked people

Human traffickers take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities. Those escaping risky situations, or deceived into believing strangers can find themselves in disastrous situations. Victims of human trafficking can be forced into sexual exploitation, slavery, marriage, or crime. It happens both across borders and within people’s home countries.

Immigration: a brief history

People have migrated throughout the whole of history, from early human movement out of Africa to periods of colonialism. It’s nothing new. But the ways migrants are treated and the factors that drive movement are ever shifting. Climate change is forcing more people to leave their homes, and technological advances mean those who want to work from anywhere often can. The Coronavirus pandemic forced countries to close their borders, and some governments used it as an excuse to turn away people.

Immigration laws

Here’s a snapshot of how immigration laws have changed in recent history, and the moments that made big impacts:

United Kingdom

During World War II, the UK took in around 70,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. British children from cities and towns, known as evacuees, were sent to live in the British countryside, or even in other nations, away from the threat of bombs.
After World War II, the country needed help rebuilding cities and staffing the healthcare system, and invited people from the Commonwealth to move to the UK. Those arriving from the Caribbean were known as the Windrush generation. They were automatically British subjects. However, in 2017, it became clear that the Home Office had wrongly deported commonwealth citizens, after destroying documentation which would have proved their right to live and work in the UK.
The introduction of the Immigration Act in 1971 put an end to Commonwealth citizens enjoying more rights in the UK than those from other nations.
In 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union. On 31 January 2020, Brexit came into force, putting an end to freedom of movement for British citizens in the EU.

The European Union and Schengen area

In 1951, six European countries joined together with the key aim of preventing further war and furthering economic growth. Through the European Economic Community, workers were eventually given the right of free movement in 1968.
In 1992, the European Union (EU) was created. Freedom of movement for all EU nationals was enshrined in law. Two years later, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Sweden were also included in free movement measures.
The creation of the Schengen Agreement means that citizens can now travel across 26 European countries (four of which are non-EU) without facing border controls. It is a passport-free zone.

United States

The United States has long been known as a country of immigrants. In 1892, the country’s first immigration station opened — Ellis Island.
The Immigration Act of 1924 brought big changes. Fears of communism were spreading, and many Americans wanted to separate themselves from other nations after the horrors of the First World War. Racism and discrimination increased and the new law limited migration based on nationality. In the same year, the US border patrol was established to stop illegal immigrants crossing into the country.
In 1965, the nationality-based quota system finally came to an end with the Immigration and Nationality Act.
During the Trump administration, the environment for refugees became more hostile. People were forced to wait in Mexico, and anyone traveling through other countries before arriving in the US was denied the right to claim asylum. Some refugees are sent to Guatemala in a “safe third country” agreement.

Japan

Japan has a reputation for strict immigration controls. For much of history, the country has been fairly isolated, with little mix of other ethnicities.
Between 1905 and 1945, a large number of people from Japanese territories migrated to the mainland - they were Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese. After World War II, controls tightened.
The 1952 Immigration Control and Refugee Act made it difficult for foreigners who wanted to live and work long-term in Japan.
By the 1990s the aging population was causing labor shortages, and some unskilled workers were given opportunities to move to Japan. Many other visa controls were tightened.
In 2021, the government shelved a bill which would have allowed asylum seekers to be pushed back to their home countries when their applications were under appeal.

Uganda

During World War II, Uganda hosted around 7,000 Polish refugees. From this point, the country continued to welcome groups of people in need of refuge.
Uganda now has the largest number of refugees across the whole of Africa. It has an open-door policy, and people from neighboring East African countries arrive to seek safety. Refugees are given plots of land on arrival, access to healthcare and education, and the right to work - it’s known as a self-reliance model. This isn’t the whole story, and there are many challenges, but Uganda’s refugee policies are largely considered progressive. Nearly 1.5 million refugees now live in Uganda.

Immigration visas

Variations of passports and visas have existed throughout history, but up until World War I people could move fairly freely — although the opportunities might not have been as numerous. Following the war years and subsequent security fears, passports as we know them now came into being.

In 1920, the League of Nations set a global standard for the documents. While Western countries were keen for these identity documents, many other countries were against the idea and saw them as restrictive. With the introduction of passports, came entry visas, with the same goal of national security. Just a year after the League of Nations meeting, the US introduced an act that put a quota on the number of immigrants allowed into the country.

How different nations approach immigration visas is constantly in flux. EU citizens don’t require visas to move to other EU states, while nations like New Zealand, Australia, and Canada are pickier in who they welcome into their countries. There’s a large expat population in Singapore, and depending on which country you come from, getting a visa could be fairly straightforward.

World events impact visa restrictions. The coronavirus pandemic means some countries require anyone entering to be vaccinated. Technological advancements and a rise in working from home have created changes too. Estonia, Cape Verde, and Barbados are just some of the countries offering digital nomad passports, allowing people to enjoy residency in a new place, while their career continues from a laptop.

What immigration is like today

United Kingdom

Immigration laws are in a state of flux in the United Kingdom. Since Brexit, this island nation no longer allows people from the EU to live, study, or work in the country visa-free, as was the case before. In the rest of the EU, citizens can move freely.
Following Brexit, the UK has a points-based immigration system.
The government wants to change the asylum laws and push back people arriving via irregular routes. Many are forced to cross the English Channel on dangerous boats or stowed in lorries, for a lack of a safe alternative.
The UK granted British citizenship to 146,483 people in 2021 and gave residence documents to 10,135 people from EEA (European Economic Area) countries. The nation gave protection to 13,210 asylum seekers in the same year.

United States

People who want to call the United States home must first get an immigrant visa. When they land on US soil, they become a Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR), allowing them to apply for jobs and live in the country. After five years, they can apply for US citizenship.
There are different rules for immediate family members of US citizens, who have to meet certain eligibility criteria. Skilled workers can also get special visas on a temporary or permanent basis.
Refugees can apply to become LPRs one year after arriving or receiving asylum. They go through a complicated system.
707,362 people received permanent residence status in 2020, a figure likely impacted by the pandemic. Previous years have usually exceeded 1 million. 29,916 people arrived in the US as refugees in 2019.

Japan

Japan is facing a labor shortage and a shrinking population. For a country long-averse to immigration, things might be about to change. The country plans to start welcoming skilled workers to stay in the country indefinitely. Until now, their visas have only been valid for five years and didn’t extend to family members. Many of the workers come from Vietnam and China.
The country operates on a points-based system for foreign professionals. Most people need a Certificate of Eligibility, applied for by their sponsor in Japan.
People between 18 and 30 can apply for a working holiday visa, which lasts for a year.
Japan has a low rate of accepting asylum seekers, compared to other wealthy countries.
Japan welcomed 115,000 immigrants in 2018, which was around 15 percent more than the previous year.

South Africa

People who want to emigrate to South Africa can first apply for a temporary residence permit, before looking towards permanent residency.
After working in the country for five years, people can apply for permanent residency. Those partnered with or related to a South African citizen can also apply, as well as some other categories.
South Africa has the largest number of immigrants in Africa — in total about 2.9 million, just under 5 percent of the population. 255,200 of them are displaced people.
Policies have become less welcoming to refugees in recent years, with 96 percent of all asylum cases rejected in 2019.

Sweden

Sweden is a member of the EU, which means that anyone within the Schengen area is free to live and work in the country. Non-EU/EEA citizens need an offer of work to apply for residency.
Different European countries have different refugee policies. Sweden had a welcoming refugee policy until 2016, and offered permanent residency visas to refugees. Since then, the number of applications being granted has declined. In 2021, the new government replaced the offer of permanent visas with temporary ones. However, the country continues to accept 5,000 quota refugees a year, who are people that UNHCR (the UN’s Refugee Agency) select to be housed in safe countries.
Sweden welcomed 82,518 migrants in 2020, which has steadily dropped from double that in 2016. The number is likely to have been impacted further by the Coronavirus pandemic. There were 12,991 new asylum seekers in the same year.

Saudi Arabia

Whether permanent or not, a visit to Saudi Arabia usually requires an in-country sponsor. However, some expats are now able to apply for a Premium Residency Card without a sponsor.
The country does not recognize dual citizenship, so taking two passports could mean you get one confiscated. Anyone who’s visited Israel might face problems entering Saudi Arabia.
Immigrants make up 38.8 percent of Saudi Arabia’s population.
877 people applied for asylum in 2020 and while very few applications have been processed yet, they’ve all been accepted. It’s worth noting that 247 people from Saudi Arabia applied for asylum in other nations.

Why people migrate

Whether choosing to set up home in a new country or forced to make journeys across borders, there are many reasons people migrate. Economic need or opportunity is a huge driver, while war and violence displace millions every year. People move to join family, study abroad, or retire. And throughout history and today, Indigenous communities have been forced from their native lands.

Migrating for economic reasons

Money is a huge driver of migration. Many people are forced to move, because of a complete lack of opportunity to earn a living in their region. Economic migration is often viewed as a choice, but poverty, dangerous working conditions, or food insecurity can mean some people have little choice but to leave their homes. For these people, migration is a case of survival.

Others choose to migrate because they can earn higher wages in other countries, find more opportunities, or follow particular career paths. Professionals from all over the world take opportunities to make homes in new countries.

Some migrant workers face economic insecurity in their own nations. For these people, the jobs on offer when they migrate are often the ones that nationals don’t want to take on. These industries can be unregulated and migrant workers are at risk of exploitation.

Demographic changes also impact migration. Aging populations come hand-in-hand with labor shortages, leaving a need for young workers. As of 2018, Japan is facing the greatest skills shortage in the world, followed by Turkey, Greece and India.

According to the World Migration Report 2020, there are 164 million migrant workers. They make up 70 percent of all migrants.

Migrating for safety reasons

There are 26.6 million refugees worldwide, with a further 48 million people displaced within their own countries, according to UNHCR. More than two thirds of these people have traveled from Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar. In these countries and others, people face war, violence, and persecution. Syrians have witnessed executions in the street and had their towns and villages bombed. Politically-driven violence and food insecurity in Venezuela forces people to leave. The recent fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban has put people in serious danger.

In Ethiopia, the Oromo people face violence and persecution, as do other specific groups of people across the world. LGBTQIA+ people are often forced to leave countries that outlaw homosexuality, or face prison, violence, or even death. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, unrest and fighting between different groups means people are forced to flee. In some nations, citizens face mandatory military service. In Eritrea, that service sometimes becomes indefinite.

In North Korea, human rights barely exist. There is no access to media from outside the country, famine is rife, and citizens are conditioned to devote themselves to the ‘Great Leader.’ Defectors have little choice but to put themselves in the hands of smugglers. If they are caught escaping, they face forced labor camps. China does not recognize North Koreans as refugees, and so those who are caught are returned.

Many people who become refugees for safety reasons are forced to choose between leaving family behind in dangerous situations, or putting their loved ones at more risk on perilous journeys. It is an impossible decision. For those making the journey alone, they may have to wait years for an asylum decision before accessing family reunification channels, where some can be reunited with their families.

Migrating for family reasons

Many people cross oceans to be closer to their families. Some refugees aim for specific countries because they already have family connections, which they hope will make integration easier. Others are the partners or children of migrant workers. Then there are people who have been apart from their families, and choose to reconnect with them: they might be caring for elderly parents, seeking comfort after changes of circumstance, or moving in with different family members. Some have new family ties — through marriage, long-term relationships, or adoption.

Depending on which country they’re applying from, some people with refugee status can go through family reunification channels to bring their loved ones into their new home country.

In 2018, around 1.9 million people moved to OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation) countries for family reasons. Around 40 percent of family migrants live in the US.

Climate migration

The climate crisis is a growing concern. So too is climate migration. As our planet heats up, geography and weather patterns are disrupted. Island nations like Tuvalu are witnessing rising sea levels before their very eyes and people are reluctantly making migration plans. Storms, droughts, and floods are battering communities across the world, forcing people to relocate. To adapt to climate change, people are moving. Most people are displaced within their own countries, others are crossing borders.

Papua New Guinea is one nation under threat from climate change. Between 2008 and 2013, 151,000 people were displaced in the country, and two thirds of those were due to environmental hazards.

In Peru, people’s livelihoods are impacted by climate change. Glacial melting and temperature extremes mean fishers and farmers are facing new challenges — as are the people relying on these food sources. People are forced from rural areas into cities. Many face floods, landslides, cold, and drought.

Australia was hit by bush fires in both 2019 and 2020, forcing thousands of people from their homes and causing huge destruction to the environment.

In 2020, 30.7 million people around the world had to migrate because of disasters. 98 percent of those disasters were caused by weather and climate.

Barriers to immigration

Immigration isn’t easy. Once geographical and emotional barriers have been navigated, there are those conditions imposed by governments. And when people are accepted into countries, they might face new challenges — language and cultural barriers, racism, and finding work. The coronavirus pandemic has put another barrier in the way, causing backlogs and closing borders.

Government paperwork

For people who’ve been forcibly displaced, one of the first barriers to immigration can be a lack of passport. People who’ve fled their homes with nothing have difficulty proving their identity or crossing borders safely. When it comes to accessing jobs and education, it can be hard to prove education levels without physical certificates. Once people have applied for asylum, complicated processes, technicalities, or a lack of support can leave people with rejected claims or facing deportation.

Migrants who have relocated willingly are still at the hands of bureaucracy. Lengthy forms or restrictive visas can dissuade people from migrating, or they might be rejected for visas. For people on temporary visas in certain countries, accessing permanent residency can be a stressful process that takes years. I could mean staying in unpleasant jobs just to hold on to a sponsor, or paying out vast sums of money.

There are other pieces in the paperwork puzzle. Criminal record checks, medical reports, and vaccination certificates, to begin with. Couples and families might need to prove that they’re in genuine relationships.

Language

People applying for citizenship in some countries have to prove their knowledge of language and culture.

Asylum seekers can be acutely affected by language barriers. A lack of suitable translators leads to some claims being misinterpreted. People can be, and are, returned to unsafe countries due to being misunderstood or not being given enough opportunity to represent themselves. Accessing services and assimilating into wider society can also prove tough when people are learning a new language from scratch, all whilst dealing with the impact of trauma.

Financial requirements

Immigration can come with a huge price tag. Aside from the usual costs of moving home (along with flights and international haulage), there might be expensive visa fees.

Beyond this, some countries impose further financial requirements, like the salary that migrant workers need to earn. Those applying for family visas in countries like the UK and Canada might have to prove that they can financially support the people they want to bring over. In Australia, those applying for student visas need to prove that they can financially support themselves. In South Africa, anyone who wants a retired person’s visa needs to prove that they earn at least R37,000 (nearly $2,500 US) per month.

Restrictions on migrants

Migrants don’t always have the same rights as nationals. Asylum seekers in many countries are prohibited from working or studying while their applications are being assessed, which can make supporting themselves difficult, as well as impacting their wellbeing. Even though many have been through traumatic experiences, some asylum seekers are held in detention centers. They can be unsanitary and crowded.

In some countries, immigrants are required to pass a language test, undergo medical tests for things like Tuberculosis, or pay extra to access healthcare systems.

People arriving on some visas might be advised not to leave the country again — for example fiancé(e)s arriving on a family visa before the wedding takes place — or risk having to reapply.

The future of immigration

The climate crisis, a health pandemic, and political tensions are all playing into how migration is changing. People stayed put as borders closed to stop the spread of a virus, while others were forced to flee their homes regardless. Technological advances offer greater opportunities for global citizens, while far right politics threaten freedom of movement. How countries respond to refugees is in constant flux, and there are at the same time both positive and worrying trends.

According to Move by founder of FutureMap, Parag Khanna, throughout history we humans have been driven to migrate by five forces: climate change, demographics, politics, economics, and technology. Climate change, now more so than in recent centuries, is going to have a huge impact on migration. It is already happening.

As the US moves further away from the Trump administration, which was famously hostile towards migrants, the UK closes its borders to many. The effects of Brexit are coming into being. Tension in Russia casts a shadow over Europe and beyond. And people left at risk in Afghanistan are still awaiting the refuge that so many countries have promised.

Whether the world chooses to build more bridges, or more walls, is yet to be seen.

[post_title] => A beginner’s guide to immigration [post_excerpt] => When is someone an immigrant? When are they a refugee? Meanwhile, the word migrant is often used as an umbrella term for everybody moving somewhere new, regardless of the reason — it isn’t specific to refugees. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => a-beginners-guide-to-immigration [to_ping] => [pinged] => http://refugeehome.uk/eritrean-students-forced-into-indefinite-military/ [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3951 [menu_order] => 132 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 10, 2022August 28, 2024

A beginner’s guide to immigration

by Katie Dancey-Downs

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 3943 [post_author] => 2 [post_date] => 2022-03-07 12:11:51 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-03-07 12:11:51 [post_content] =>

Critical Race Theory has become a Trojan horse for discussions about privilege, gender, race, and inequity, and serves as a rally point for conservative politics.

As the debate over Critical Race Theory, also known as CRT, rages across the United States, the foundational principles, values, and aims of the American education system are called into question. The war over CRT amplifies these essential questions: Who gets to tell the stories of this country, whose stories are worth telling, and how do these stories inform our lives today? It is ironic, of course, that these heated controversies are playing out across historic and contemporary Indigenous homelands.

There is a manufactured nature to the controversy surrounding Critical Race Theory. Far from an attempt to make white children feel guilty about atrocities that took place before they were born, or shame for their skin color, as CRT detractors have argued, the scholars who pioneered and practice the theory use it as a tool for understanding systemic oppression.

Academics recognized CRT in 1989, but its roots go back to the 1960s and 1970s, when legal scholars developed critical legal theory as a means of interrogating how the legal system served the interests of the rich and powerful at the cost of the poor and marginalized. Today, teachers use CRT to inform their age-appropriate lessons about discrimination, history, and oppression. Political pundits who claim that teaching the perspective of the marginalized is the same as teaching CRT are simply wrong.

It’s easy to see how the sudden outrage from right-wing politicians over CRT has deflected attention from this moment of racial reckoning in the post-George Floyd era. Virginia’s Governor Glenn Youngkin, for instance, made opposition to Critical Race Theory a centerpiece of his election campaign; on this platform, he successfully secured his place as Virginia’s first Republican governor in more than a decade. On his first day in office Youngkin made good on his campaign promise by passing an executive order to “end the use of inherent divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory, and restore excellence in K-12 public education in the commonwealth. Put simply, Critical Race Theory has become a Trojan horse for discussions about privilege, gender, race, and inequity, and serves as a rally point for conservative politics.

To understand the implications of this political development for Native communities, it is important to consider the larger context of Indigenous peoples within existing school curricula. Long before Critical Race Theory was ever formulated, schools in the U.S. failed abysmally in teaching about Indigenous histories, cultures, and contemporary politics. The effect of this failure is painfully obvious among the college students who sit in lecture halls like the ones in which I teach.

As a university faculty member who teaches both American Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies at a predominately white institution, I often poll students about their knowledge of Native American history and culture, in order to teach effectively. In most cases, their exposure to Native histories is limited to a sanitized version of Columbus’ “discovery” of America, the Thanksgiving myth, and a little bit about the Cherokee Trail of Tears. My students from California often report on their fourth-grade experience of learning about the Spanish mission system—a system of mass death, forced labor, disease, and starvation—by building miniature replicas of the missions out of popsicle sticks and sugarcoating the historical narrative with actual sugar cubes, which they fashioned into mission fixtures.

One of the most striking and disturbing trends I have noticed throughout my years in the classroom and as a public advocate for Indigenous issues is that non-Natives tend to be woefully unaware of the fact that, in addition to the local, state, and federal government levels, there is also the tribal government level. My students are often dismayed to learn that these tribal governments are not marginal, but numerous and powerful—that there are, in fact, 574 sovereign nations with a government-to-government relationship with the federal U.S. governing institutions. The syllabus of my public high school’s civics and government course did not include any lessons about tribal nationhood, self-governance, citizenship, and sovereignty, and this is clearly the case for the vast majority of public schools.

I am deeply concerned to see that our nation’s rising college-educated youth could potentially embark on careers in government without learning that more than 56.2 million acres of this country—for context, only 11 of the 50 states are larger than 56.2 million acres—are under the jurisdiction of tribal governments. Nor are they aware that the largest tribal reservation, governed by the Navajo Nation, is larger than one-fifth of all states, including West Virginia, Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island.

This ignorance is not the fault of the students. The responsibility for ensuring that our youth—our next generation of leaders—receive a historically accurate education and are prepared to go out into the world with a toolbox of knowledge that will carry us all through to the next day falls upon parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers. At a time when Native students are still subjected to racial slurs, nonconsensual haircutting, Indian-themed mascots, and screeching, headdressed mockeries in their schools, the idea that states are passing legislation that will result in teaching even less essential information about Indigenous peoples and our roles in this nation is extremely difficult to accept or understand.

Given the pitiful state of existing education regarding the First Americans, it seems that Critical Race Theory has become the Right’s latest desperate effort to perpetrate a colorblind national narrative. For Native peoples, colorblindness—although not conceptualized as such at the time—can be seen in the pedagogical philosophy of Richard Henry Pratt, the former military officer who, after the Civil War, established residential schools for Native Americans where the guiding pedagogical theory was “kill the Indian, save the man”—i.e., strip Native children forcibly of their culture and language and force them to assimilate into white society.

Pratt ushered in a new policy era that shifted the country’s policies regarding Indigenous populations away from military warfare and physical death, to the new goal of achieving Indigenous cultural and political death through assimilation. Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and hundreds of others that copied his pedagogical model, achieved this aim by separating Indian children from their families and enrolling them in institutions where the children’s hair was cut, their languages and religions forbidden, and all forms of Indigenous community connections disallowed. These are now the sites where hundreds of Native children’s bodies are being discovered in unmarked graves. They are a stain on our national history, an example of the failures of colorblind and assimilationist ideologies, and, indeed, a testament to soundness of the concept of structural racism.

When it comes to the intersection of the current Critical Race Theory debate and Indigenous populations, these continued attempts to silence discussions about the violence endured by Native communities, our strength and resilience in overcoming attempts to wholly eradicate us, and ongoing injustices facing Native peoples today can all be understood within the framework of the attempted erasure our people. But these efforts are not new; various political attempts to “solve” the “Indian problem” have changed and evolved since the founding of the United States.

Those who oppose teaching accurate, representative lessons about Indigenous peoples overlook a fundamental truth that must be reckoned with if we are to continue to grow as a society: Native peoples did not vanish, we are not extinct, and we remain an important part of America’s history and present day. The same is true for Black and other people of color, members of the LGBTQ2S+ community, folks of differing abilities, women, and gender nonconforming individuals, all of whom are represented within the Native population and with whom Indigenous communities are allied in this shared struggle. The very fact that a sizable portion of this nation supports the imposition of legal restrictions on teaching students about race, identity, and history demonstrates the importance of this type of educational instruction.

[post_title] => Critical Race Theory, Native communities, and American education [post_excerpt] => Critical Race Theory has become a Trojan horse for discussions about privilege, gender, race, and inequity, and serves as a rally point for conservative politics. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => critical-race-theory-native-communities-and-american-education [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 20:51:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 20:51:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3943 [menu_order] => 133 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 7, 2022August 4, 2026

Critical Race Theory, Native communities, and American education

by Elizabeth Rule

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[post_content] => Forced sterilizations on detained migrant women is in line with the US's long, sordid history of eugenics.

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) briefed House Democrats on allegations concerning several gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, that a physician performed on migrant women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia—allegedly without their informed consent. The incidents became public knowledge in September 2020, after a consortium of human rights groups filed an explosive report on behalf of Nurse Dawn Wooten, a whistleblower who worked at the detention center.

In a December 3 letter signed by the chairmen of the House Committees on Homeland Security and Oversight and Reform, legislators wrote: “We are concerned that Dr. [Mahendra] Amin may have been performing unnecessary surgical procedures to defraud DHS and the Federal government without consequences.” The letter, which is addressed to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, also requested information on the steps the Department has taken to review treatment Dr. Amin provided and ensure migrants receive proper medical care in the future.

The Conversationalist confirmed a December 15 DHS briefing with two committee staffers, both of whom declined to share additional details about the information presented. A staffer from the Committee on Homeland Security clarified that this was a DHS review of the Irwin County Detention Center and not a general review of migrant detention facilities, although Congress requested the Department to brief them on the matter months ago.

The December 3 letter says, “the Committee on Homeland Security requested a briefing on August 10, 2021, on DHS’s efforts to review the suitability of detention facilities. To date, DHS has not fulfilled this request. We ask that you ensure the Committees receive this briefing without further delay.”

On January 3, the DHS released a report that found “the facility’s chronic care, continuity of care, and medical policies and procedures to be inadequate” but did not find that unnecessary or unwanted hysterectomies had been performed. The report does, however, quote an ICE employee who alleges that there is a systemic issue in the ICE leadership that makes the agency “unwilling to listen to concerns or complaints about detention facilities.”

Nurse Dawn Wooten worked at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) for three years. She says that Dr. Amin, who was referred to as the “uterus collector,” had performed hysterectomies on at least 20 women without their consent. Many of these women did not speak English well enough to consent to the procedures or understand what had been done to them. Thirty-five women are now suing ICE over Dr. Amin’s abuse.ICDC, run by a for-profit prison company called LaSalle Corrections, also came under harsh scrutiny for their botched COVID-19 response, which sparked hunger strikes and protests among detainees early in the pandemic.

The Georgia-based advocacy group Project South filed the complaint, which describes a filthy, insect-infested facility with inadequate COVID-19 safety precautions, where staff refused to test symptomatic detainees and fabricated medical records. Detainees who protested the conditions were punished with beatings, pepper spray, and solitary confinement. Nurse Wooten told The Intercept that she was demoted after raising concerns with her supervisors.

“It is deeply concerning that neither DHS nor the private prison company running Irwin have yet to face accountability for the medical abuse that migrant women faced at Irwin,” Azadeh Shahshahani, the Legal and Advocacy Director with Project South said in an email statement to The Conversationalist. “This is setting an awful precedent. Congress and the Biden Administration must act now.”

The joint committee investigation subpoenaed LaSalle Corrections in November 2020 after the company refused to turn over medical records on the procedures Dr. Amin performed. Dr. Tony Ogburn, Department Chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, reviewed those records. He concluded that Dr. Amin’s care “did not meet acceptable standards.”

“My concern is that he was not competent and simply did the same evaluation and treatment on most patients because that is what he knew how to do, and/or he did tests and treatments that generated a significant amount of reimbursement without benefitting most patients,” Dr. Ogburn concluded in a November 2021 letter to the Georgia Medical Board.

Following pressure from lawmakers, activists, and advocacy groups, DHS Secretary Mayorkas announced he would sever ties with LaSalle Corrections in May 2021, though migrants were not removed from the facilities until September 2021—a full year after Project South filed Nurse Wooten’s whistleblower complaint with the ICE administration.

While these abuses came to light during the Trump presidency the lack of accountability continues under the Biden Administration, with migrant arrests now at a 21-year high. The current administration has ramped up deportations under a Trump-era health policy that allows the government to expedite the process without giving migrants the opportunity to apply for asylum. The government claims the rushed deportations are a COVID-19 safety precaution.

Under Title 42, the Trump Administration expelled 444,000 migrants. Under Biden, this number has already reached 690,000. COVID-19 still runs rampant in migrant detention centers and in prisons such as New York City’s Rikers Island, where more than one-fifth of the incarcerated population has tested positive.

Immigration advocates have been disappointed with the new administration. Since taking office, Biden has filed 296 executive orders on immigration, 89 of which have reversed actions taken by the Trump administration such as the travel ban on Muslim majority nations and construction of the border wall.

When Dawn Wooten stepped forward to make a whistleblower complaint about the medical abuses at ICDC, international headlines about “mass hysterectomies” sparked outrage and comparisons to Nazi Germany. Others placed the story within a long history of American eugenics that targeted Black, brown, disabled, and indigenous women.

“People with Spanish surnames were disproportionately sterilized during the period of peak eugenics in the 1920s through the 1950s,” says Heather Dron, a Research Fellow at the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab at the University of Michigan.

During the twentieth century, U.S. states subjected over 60,000 people to sterilization without consent, with over 30 states establishing eugenics boards. State governments targeted minorities, the disabled, and others who did not fit into “social norms” for forced sterilization.

From 1929 to 1974 North Carolina ordered as many as 7,600 women sterilized— a majority of whom were Black women from low-income backgrounds. Margaret Sanger and Dr. Gregory Pincus exploited government birth control centers in Puerto Rico to subject one-third of the female population to sterilization procedures, often without their consent, purportedly to address “overpopulation” and poverty on the island. Under the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 physicians sterilized an estimated 25 percent of Native American women of childbearing age in a six-year period.

Adolf Hitler writes admiringly in Mein Kampf of eugenics policies practiced in the U.S. “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the United States], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalization, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People's State.”

Heather Dron’s research focuses on eugenic sterilization in California, where roughly 20,000, or one-third, of U.S. sterilizations were performed starting from 1909.

“There was a law on the books between 1909 and 1979 that allowed for the sterilization of institutionalized people housed in psychiatric hospitals, or in homes for what was then called the ‘feeble-minded,’” Dron says. “Sterilization was seen as a solution to all these other social problems. They saw it as a way to keep these people out of institutions.”

While eugenics laws in California have been repealed, sterilizations have continued. A 2013 investigation by Mother Jones revealed that 148 women in two California prisons were sterilized from 2006 to 2010.

“You get a similar dynamic there,” says Dron, referring to the recent ICE cases. “There were a few people who were performing a lot of procedures who seemed like they didn’t have a great ethical practice in general.”

There is no evidence to suggest that Dr. Mahendra Amin was motivated to perform these surgeries for anything other than financial compensation. Last month's letter from House Democrats expressing concerns that Dr. Amin performed these surgeries to “defraud the government” further supports this theory.

“It sounds like there’s some sort of incentive to perform surgical interventions because you’re paid per intervention and some people took advantage of that,” Dron says of Dr. Amin’s case. “But you have to read that with a little bit of skepticism because often we point to these bad actors and say it’s just them as opposed to a system that systematically thinks that people who are incarcerated shouldn’t have kids.”

The breaking news of hysterectomies performed on migrant women in ICE custody barely made it through one news cycle before news of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death broke just days later. Her death was followed by a swift Republican push to nominate a third Supreme Court Justice under Trump just weeks ahead of the 2020 election.

The media might choose to remember the hysterectomies performed at the Georgia ICE facility as a particularly egregious act that happened under a uniquely evil administration. That would be a huge mistake.

According to a December 2021 article in The Texas Tribune, the number of immigrants held in ICE detention centers has increased by more than 50 percent since Biden took office. Moreover, the investigation into Dr. Amin’s medical practice has been conducted on Biden’s watch.

Detentions have been accompanied by a spike in border crossings in 2021. Biden has downplayed this as a seasonal phenomenon while Republicans have pointed to plans to offer 11 million migrants a path to citizenship as cause for the surge. Others say the migrants are motivated by growing instability in their home countries. With less attention on the issue of migration, Biden has gotten away with his continuation of the “remain in Mexico” policy by pointing to Title 42, which has been extended twice by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as a matter of public health.

Under the Biden Administration, we no longer hear overtly fascist rhetoric from the White House aimed at migrants, but detainees at ICE facilities continue to suffer from extreme medical neglect and abuse as COVID-19 cases soar.

In order to prevent us from reliving the past, we need to understand the circumstances that led us to where we are today. Ending Trump’s remain in Mexico policies, fulfilling a campaign promise to offer migrants a path to citizenship, and holding Dr. Amin and LaSalle Corrections responsible for their medical abuses would be a great place to start.

[post_title] => The 'Uterus Collector': The surgeon who performed coerced hysterectomies on detained migrant women
[post_excerpt] => The forced sterilizations are in line with the U.S.'s long, sordid, racist history of eugenics.
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January 27, 2022August 5, 2026

The ‘Uterus Collector’: The surgeon who performed coerced hysterectomies on detained migrant women

by Indigo Olivier

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[post_content] => But can radical inclusion be accomplished without silencing white feminist allies?

I was a first-year student at a prestigious U.S. women's college, back in 1989, when the college's alumnae association invited me to speak at a large event about my experience in coming to America. It wasn't very long into my first semester, and I'd just arrived from Karachi. I was 17 years old.

Karachi had been wracked by ethnic violence for more than a year, with student groups clashing all across the city and the entire province of Sindh. That was a very frightening time, with the media reporting daily death tolls and the military enforcing 24-hour curfews. It is still fresh in my mind.

There were two other speakers at the event, both women: one was a youth organizer and peace activist in her troubled Black urban community; the other had survived a slave camp in Southeast Asia and had been subsequently adopted by an American family. The audience, however, was composed almost exclusively of white American women, many of them rich, older, well-traveled, and educated. Yet for all their worldliness, they seemed unaware that they had propped us up on a stage as though we were exhibits on display.

The three of us stood and told our stories in turn, while the women in the audience looked sad and sympathetic. I don't remember much of what I said: I do remember being in tears as I said I wanted to study and to live in peace, but that my city didn't provide much opportunity for that. Afterward, we joined the audience for dinner. We three speakers were overwhelmed by all the attention from the alums, who came up to us to tell us how "brave" we were. But while I stayed in touch with the other speakers, never again did I hear from any of the alums or from the association.

That I had been asked to perform my story of misery and woe for an audience of white women was a realization that came only years later. Those women meant well and obviously cared about our stories, but they used my life and the lives of my fellow speakers to make themselves feel better about their comfortable American existence. Not only were they more fortunate than a girl from troubled Pakistan, a former child slave from war-torn Southeast Asia, or a Black girl from a rough urban neighborhood, but they were also providing them with a platform to amplify their stories.

Rafia Zakaria's Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption reminded me of this uncomfortable experience, now more than 30 years old. Indeed, the author describes an experience that felt remarkably familiar to the one I describe above: in her case, Zakaria believed she had been invited to a 2012 feminist event in the American Midwest as a speaker—only to be told, upon her arrival, to sit at a stall in a “global bazaar” and sell Pakistani trinkets.

It was a cathartic read, which helped me place my experience at the alumnae association against a backdrop of a white feminist agenda that is oftentimes self-serving, and which leaves behind women of other ethnicities, countries, experiences, faiths, and societies. Beyond just leaving us behind, this type of feminist activism uses us in order to leave us behind: by demonstrating the inferiority of our lives, white feminists continue to play the role of “expert” in the gender development establishment.

Zakaria deftly deconstructs the modern conundrums facing mainstream (white) feminism, with insightful examples, such as the lack of inclusivity at the 2017 Women's March; while the organizers were Black and Brown, the vast majority of attendees were white middle-class women. More broadly, she points to issues of intersectionality and how class and color affect women who struggle to make it out of poverty, but who cannot access essential tools like legal assistance. She also examines the pitfalls of addressing issues like so-called honor killings and female genital cutting/mutilation through a culturally limited white feminist lens.

In the first instance, she draws a parallel between honor killings and “crimes of passion”: while the crimes are similar, she points out, only one serves as an indictment of an entire culture and religion— i.e., Islam, eastern, “foreign.” About female genital cutting, she points out there is no attempt to understand the nuances and complexities of the issue or to distinguish between a ceremonial “nick” and an outright excision of the genitals. Zakaria does not defend honor killings or advocate for FGM. She challenges the idea that there is an innate moral superiority to Western culture, which presents itself as exclusively on the “right” side of these issues.

Zakaria, an attorney and author who lives in Indiana, intersperses these chapters with her own experiences as a young Pakistani-Muslim woman. Born in Pakistan, she consented to an arranged marriage with a Pakistani man in the U.S. when she was 17. It was an unhappy and violent union that she escaped at age 25, fleeing with her toddler to a women’s shelter. She went on to law school and a job with a Black-owned law firm, and to helping immigrant women make their way through the American justice system. With this life story she establishes herself as the opposite of a white feminist, but one who possesses, as the result of her lived experience, a deep understanding of the phenomenon.

Against White Feminism turns middle-class white feminism inside out, like a garment, so that we can view the weaknesses of the seams and the sloppiness of the stitching. It's eye-opening for anyone who identifies as a feminist but has not thought about how strongly its prevailing principles, tenets, and history are rooted in systemic racism and capitalism.

The book is probably strongest, however, in its analysis of how the U.S. justified its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by claiming they were partly motivated to save women from Taliban oppression. American feminists threw their weight behind the war effort, and the ostensible goal of saving oppressed brown women from oppressive brown men. In doing so, they lent their voices to the American military industrial complex, which visited untold suffering upon Afghan women with bombings, drone attacks, massive displacement, and the destruction and displacement of their families.

Certainly, the situation of some Afghan women—i.e., those in urban areas—improved immeasurably after the coalition forces routed the Taliban. Over the past 20 years, a whole generation of women attended university and built careers. But with the Taliban now back in power and female journalists, teachers, artists, and activists having fled or gone into hiding, the long war seems futile. With reports in The New Yorker and from the Brookings Institution showing that the U.S. presence made rural Afghan women’s lives a hell, white feminists are now forced to confront the limitations of their support for the 20 year Afghan project and the putative gains in women’s empowerment that it touted.

A debacle like the invasion and withdrawal from Afghanistan does not happen without important historical context. Zakaria looks at the British suffragist movement of the early twentieth century, pointing out that the women who fought for the right to vote ignored the suffering caused by their country’s colonialism and imperialism in places like India. Zakaria also examines how contemporary white feminists engaged in “development” work abroad design aid programs that ignore activists on the ground who would provide crucial cultural and sociological moorings to any program for lasting, deep-rooted change.

The result of this failure to include local activists: campaigns and interventions that are myopic and deeply racist, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation program that gave sewing machines and chickens to poor women in the Global South. These programs endow women with the white feminist’s fantasy of what a simple livelihood in undeveloped countries looks like, instead of envisioning creative solutions that enable women to access complicated and complex power, as well as agency and respect in their communities.

For the most part Zakaria makes her arguments lucidly; at other times, however, they are a stretch. For example, she dismisses Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom's attempt to introduce feminist foreign policy as empty promises from a disingenuous white feminist. The truth is more nuanced than that: Wallstrom tried very hard to stop Sweden from selling arms to Saudi Arabia because of its poor record on women’s rights, but her government, influenced by powerful arms traders in the Swedish military-industrial complex, overrode her efforts. Zakaria glosses over these facts, perhaps trying too hard to find case studies that conform to her arguments.

In another section of the book, Zakaria refers to a letter signed by Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan back in 2002. However, the source for this claim is a 2015 article that Zakaria wrote for Aeon, in which she made the same claim. The original article on the Aeon website does not have a source, and there is no trace of the open letter anywhere on the internet. This, I suspect, is a consequence of sloppiness rather than malice, but it does not serve the book well in its call for a higher kind of feminist ethics.

Perhaps the most glaring shortcoming, however, is Zakaria’s failure to offer a proper definition of the term “white feminism” until close to the end of the book; she should have laid it out at the beginning, since her entire argument is a response to white feminism. Zakaria describes it as a system that excludes the needs, voices, and expertise of brown and Black women, "a set of practices and ideas that have emerged from the bedrock of white supremacy, itself the legacy of empire and slavery." But there is a danger in using “white feminism” as a shorthand for the entire system Zakaria is calling out. Pitting brown and Black feminists, a minority in America (the book is written very much for an American audience, which is an unavoidable shortcoming), against the "white" feminist majority is momentarily empowering, but, in the long term, dispiriting and exhausting. It can leave everyone feeling like there's no point in trying to come together because the gap created by past divisions is too vast to bridge.

Zakaria’s indignant refusal to make excuses for white feminists is satisfying, but it leaves very little room for allies among white women. It also leaves little room for brown and Black women who want to work in solidarity with white women, or for those who want to access the networks and power structures that white feminists have benefited from for decades. Instead, Zakaria advocates a further splintering of the feminist movement into "Black feminisms, Muslim feminisms, queer feminisms." Will this breakdown into feminist specializations lead to a more effective global feminism— one that accomplishes the goals of women’s equality? Zakaria does not say.

It's important to point out the injustices and weaknesses of the dominant feminist movement vis-a-vis women of color. It’s certainly not the job of non-white women to provide the roadmap to reconciliation, and there is nothing in Against White Feminism to make white feminists feel more comfortable—rightly so. But the balkanization of feminism is hardly a movement from which women of the world, brown and Black, can achieve true gains. Power-sharing between all women, white, brown, and Black, under the current system, seems impossible if we are to take Zakaria’s perspective to heart. Surely we can envision a system where no woman has to step down in order for everyone to step up, together.
[post_title] => Rafia Zakaria's 'Against White Feminism' is a cathartic read for a non-white feminist
[post_excerpt] => 'Against White Feminism,' by Rafia Zakaria, successfully challenges the idea that western culture holds an innately superior attitude to women.
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September 23, 2021August 28, 2024

Rafia Zakaria’s ‘Against White Feminism’ is a cathartic read for a non-white feminist

by Bina Shah

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[post_content] => The meme that was created to inspire Black women is now too often used to oppress them.

In her groundbreaking 1990 monograph Black Feminist Thought, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins argues that certain controlling images of the American Black woman—e.g., Mammy, Matriarch, Welfare Recipient, Jezebel, Unwed Mother—continue to pervade American culture and are still being used as tools of oppression. Social and government institutions in the United States continue to use these images, which work to perpetuate the erasure and oppression of Black women in a multitude of ways, limiting our rights and discrediting our experiences. Recent examples include: the faux right-wing uproar over Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B’s WAP music video; and the previous U.S. president’s demonstrably false claim that the majority of welfare recipients were Black. These incidents crystallize the pervasiveness of the Welfare queen and Jezebel tropes in American public discourse.

In 2013 Satoshi Kanazawa, an American evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, set off an international firestorm with a blog post for Psychology Today, in which he asserted that Black women were objectively less attractive than white women. The magazine deleted the article and ended its relationship with Kanazawa, while the LSE censured him with a ban on publishing articles that were not peer reviewed. But the impact of Kanazawa’s post, excerpts of which were reprinted in other publications, continued to echo. Partly in response to the incident, CaShawn Thompson, a Washington, D.C.-based teacher, activist, and social media influencer, created the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic—to celebrate the value and accomplishments of Black women. “Each one of us,” Thompson said, “needed something that was all the awesomeness that we are.”

#BlackGirlsMagic has since become an American cultural phenomenon. It followed a remarkable trajectory, from a Twitter hashtag to a rallying cry and an aphorism. Today it is cited when referring to accomplishments ranging from the incredible gymnastic feats of Simone Biles to surviving another day in a workplace that is hostile to Black women. Celebrities like ballerina Misty Copeland, Barack Obama, Solange Knowles, and Michelle Obama often use the phrase when referring to the outsize accomplishments of Black women.

More recently, however, the slogan has become something less positive. In its current usage, it often acts to perpetuate the very archetypes—Mammy, Matriarch, Emasculator—that Patricia Hill Collins identified more than 30 years ago. Black Girl Magic now too often provides cover for the continued dehumanization of Black women. It also functions as a means of deflecting attention from the fact that to succeed and be recognized, Black women must still work infinitely harder than their white counterparts.

When Stacy Abrams’s voter registration drive delivered Georgia to the Democrats in the 2020 election, social media users and major media outlets referred to her accomplishment as Black Girl Magic. Similarly, the phrase was used to describe gymnast Simone Biles’s paradigm-shattering athleticism. When Serena Williams won the 2017 Australian Open while pregnant, Black Girl Magic was there. Even in my academic circle of Black women, we use Black Girl Magic to celebrate our publications and invited talks. But even as we celebrate our accomplishments, we fail to grapple adequately with the fact that racist, unjust institutions withhold recognition from all but the superhuman amongst us—and even then, that recognition often comes with insults.

To be sure, there have been waves of support for Biles, Osaka, Abrams, and Williams as they publicly battled racism, misogyny, and the stigma of mental health concerns. Their actions have sparked national conversations, particularly Biles and Osaka’s for their stance on athletic performance and mental health. But the personal cost of being open about their struggles has been high.

In a recent feature about Simon Biles in The Houston Chronicle, for example, the gymnast says she regrets that the artistry in her dance routines often goes unnoticed because the focus is on her strength and athleticism. Also interviewed for the article is Lauren Anderson, a former principal dancer with the Houston Ballet, who expresses her admiration for Biles’s sense of rhythm and movement. But while the body of the article does include several references to Biles’s artistry, the headline describes her athleticism as “beastly.”

Serena Williams, widely recognized as one of the greatest female tennis players in history, has for years had to defend herself against the demeaning accusation that she looks “too masculine.” She has, for example, been called the “n” word multiple times while competing, and she has been dehumanized and belittled in sports news cartoons. In an interview, Serena discussed the toll such comments took her. She said: “It was hard for me. People would say I was born a guy, all because of my arms, or because I'm strong.”

In Georgia, a conservative political group called Heritage Action is suing Stacy Abrams for the $100 million loss of the Major-League Baseball All-Star game, which relocated from Atlanta because she called for a boycott to protest state voter repression. Abrams’s feat of Black Girl Magic was made necessary by the blatant repression of minority voters in Georgia, which cost her a historic victory in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race.

Black Girl Magic marks the discursive transition of Black women from social problems to social saviors. Denigrated since the Reagan years as welfare queens and hoochie mamas, they are also widely identified as an essential element of American infrastructure. And just like all America’s infrastructure, Black women are taken for granted until there is a disaster. Time and time again, they save this country from itself—as Stacey Abrams is often credited with protecting democracy in Georgia. With the voting rights bill currently stalled in Congress, her approach to voting rights protections is one of the few options left to activists who are forced to compensate for the federal government’s incompetence.

Black athletes are celebrated when they bring praise and athletic glory to the United States, but when they show themselves as humans who need self-care, they become pariahs. Serena Williams and Simone Biles are widely praised for their unparalleled athletic strength. But when they seek to defend themselves from harm and own their labor, they face howls of outrage and charges of mediocrity. When Naomi Osaka quit the French Open because she refused to participate in the pre-match press conferences that exacerbate her anxiety and depression, the powerful blowback—from tournament officials and fellow athletes—prompted her to withdraw from competition. The fact that Osaka is one of the highest ranked tennis players and one of the highest-paid female athletes in the world was irrelevant to her detractors. Her refusal to labor for them on the court or in the press room was an affront. Her mental health be damned.

When Biles, whose status as the greatest gymnast of all time is undisputed, cited mental health issues for her decision to withdraw from the team finals at the Tokyo Olympics, right-wing male commentators targeted her with vicious personal attacks. Aaron Reitz, Deputy Attorney General of Texas, tweeted that Biles, who is a native of his state, was a “selfish, childish, national embarrassment.” This is how white men perceive Black women and their labor: Their bodies, their minds, and their work are not their own.

The men tweeting their anger at Biles for wearing the decal of a goat’s head (symbolizing the acronym GOAT for “greatest of all time”) on her leotard show that, to them, it is an affront for a Black woman to be not only ambitious, but also to know her power and do with it as she pleases. Simone Biles owes us nothing. And yet, she postponed her retirement because she was the last of Larry Nassar’s victims still on the team, and she believed her testimony would lend weight to the accusations against the since- convicted sports medicine physician who abused female gymnasts for decades. While mental health is an important and overdue discussion in athletics more broadly, we must realize that Black women’s ownership of their labor is an equally important issue.

Once a paradigm to help Black women reclaim their power, Black Girl Magic has become the newest controlling image for Black women. When hard work is described as “magic,” our education, training, preparation, and labor are demeaned. Our femininity is questioned. Or, worse, refusing to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of capitalist productivity is perceived not as our right to exercise personal choice, but as an affront.

Since the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, institutions and businesses from Apple to McKinsey, the global management consulting firm, have championed and turned to diversity and inclusion initiative. Yet across social media, Black women have lamented the labor of participating in such diversity clinics, explaining to their white coworkers how to be “anti-racist,” or publicly displaying and discussing the trauma of their oppression—allegedly for their own benefit. These requests are predicated on a flaw in ally logic: Teach us how not to be racist toward you, or it is your fault we are racist. Dr. Marc Lamont Hill’s recent interview with Robin DiAngelo about critiques, including Balck critiques, of her work speaks to the general feelings of Black women about the labor diversity requires. The Twitter responses depict the greater issues of the monetization of anti-racist work Black people have been doing, for free, for decades.

I often wonder how we as Black women can reclaim what the aphorism originally meant to us. Biles and Naomi Osaka have given us public permission to say “no” as a complete sentence. To say “no” to the corporate diversity committee. To say “no” to leading the White Fragility reading group. Black women: Do and refuse to do what you choose. Imagine if every Black woman took a day to herself at the same time. Atlas shrugged.

Those who say they are allies need to understand that one of the best ways to value Black women is to do the work. If people were listening to and learning from Black women, the demands on our time and labor would decrease. The onus on saving democracy in the United States, of winning an Olympic gold medal, and of grappling with racism in academic departments should not rest solely on the shoulders of Black women. We, as a country, must hold institutions—Olympic, government, educational, and media—responsible for how they portray Black women and for the demands they project onto us. To be an ally to Black women is to recognize the numerous burdens we carry and to tackle them with us—or, even better, to use your privilege to confront the structures that continue to do harm. “Listen to Black women” echoes across social media, yet it must be more than just a meaningless slogan.

Fannie Barrier Williams, the Black suffragist and educator who lived from 1855-1944, wrote in an essay for The Voice of the Negro (1905) that, “As meanly as [the Black woman] is thought of, hindered as she is in all directions, she is always doing something of merit and credit that is not expected of her.” More than a century later, Black women continue to surpass expectations. But as Biles, Williams, and Osaka have shown us, we must do an accounting of the incredible costs of these feats. Our accomplishments seem like magic because of the obstacles we must overcome to realize them. Now we are tired. We are disregarded. We are taken for granted. Yes, the tide is clearly changing. Let us hope that Black Girl Magic becomes our term not only for the accomplishments of Black women, but also the term for their decision to embrace radical self-care and claim ownership of their humanity.
[post_title] => Black women shouldn't have to assert their right to self care
[post_excerpt] => Once an inspiring hashtag that spawned a movement, #blackgirlmagic now too often perpetuates stereotypes that diminish Black women
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September 10, 2021August 28, 2024

Black women shouldn’t have to assert their right to self care

by Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon

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    [post_content] => Government inquiries have exposed Canada's systemic racism toward Indigenous people.

In September 2020, Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw woman from Quebec’s Manawan community, livestreamed a Facebook video that showed her screaming in pain while hospital healthcare workers openly mocked her. “You’re a fucking idiot,” “only good for sleeping around,” and “you are better off dead,” were just some of the comments recorded. Joyce passed away shortly after posting the video, which was shared widely online; the collective shock and shame at her death galvanized a movement to force Canadians to come to terms with the racism and colonialism in their medical system.

During the public inquiry that followed, witnesses and hospital staff testified to long-standing prejudice from healthcare workers and hospital administrators who neither knew nor cared that Indigenous patients were receiving inadequate care. Advocates for First Nations communities pointed to this incident not as an isolated tragedy, but as one more example of a medical system that continues to see Indigenous peoples as less deserving of equal treatment and respect.
A culture of anti-Indigenous racism
Among those testifying at the inquiry was Dr. Samir Shaheen-Hussain, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University and a Montreal pediatric emergency physician, who spoke about medical colonialism as "a culture or ideology, rooted in systemic anti-Indigenous racism, that uses medical practices and policies to establish, maintain or advance a genocidal colonial project.”

While not many people are familiar with the term, Dr. Shaheen-Hussain has written a book on the subject. Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada (2020, McGill-Queens University Press) shines a light on the decades-long cruel practice of separating children from their families during emergency medevacs from northern and remote regions of Quebec.



Working as a pediatric emergency physician, Dr. Shaheen-Hussain saw the cruel consequences of the non-accompaniment practice first-hand in 2017, when he treated two young patients who were undergoing stressful medical procedures without their loved ones by their side. Quebec pediatricians had been demanding the end of this heartless practice for decades, but successive governments refused to change the policy, making Quebec an outlier in Canada. When a citizen confronted him about the matter at a public event in 2018 , Quebec’s then-Health Minister, Gaétan Barrette, made comments that basically amounted to propagating “drunken Indian” and “freeloader” tropes. Calls for his resignation went unheeded, but the practice of preventing parents from accompanying their children on medevac flights was finally discontinued later that year, on the back of a campaign called #aHand2Hold.
Confronting the truth of past horrors
The same week that Dr. Shaheen-Hussain testified at the Quebec inquiry on Echaquan’s death a grim discovery on the other side of the country, in Kamloops, British Columbia, stopped Canadians in their tracks. A mass grave containing the remains of 215 Indigenous children at the site of a former residential school provided physical confirmation of what thousands of survivors of these forced-assimilation centres had been saying for years.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) a nationwide commission on the evils of these government-sponsored, church-run schools that operated between 1831 and 1996, concluded that thousands of children had been mistreated, physically and sexually abused, and knowingly left vulnerable to outbreaks of disease, resulting in thousands of deaths.

[caption id="attachment_2749" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Kamloops Indian Residential School in 1937.[/caption]

In addition, highly unethical nutrition experiments under the care of two physicians (one of them was a former president of the Canadian Paediatric Society and one of three inventors of Pablum infant cereal) working for the Department of Indian Affairs of Canada had been conducted on many of these children without their knowledge or consent. They were purposefully denied adequate nutrition or dental care, as part of these experiments, eerily reminiscent of the Syphilis Study conducted on Black men by the U.S. Public Health Service at Tuskegee and the medical experiments Nazi doctors performed on concentration camp survivors during World War II. Even when children died, the experiments continued.

[caption id="attachment_2741" align="alignleft" width="300"] A Black man is tested during the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.[/caption]

The TRC commission made a number of recommendations, among them a request for the federal government to “acknowledge that the current state of Aboriginal health in Canada is a direct result of previous Canadian government policies, including residential schools” and to “establish measurable goals to identify and close the health outcomes between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginal communities […] via efforts [that] would focus on indicators such as: infant mortality, maternal health, suicide, mental health, addictions, life expectancy, birth rates, infant and child health issues, chronic diseases, illness and injury incidence, and the availability of appropriate health services.” Out of a total of 94 recommendations or calls to action made in 2105, only eight have since been implemented.
A lack of compassion and respect
Dr. Arlene Laliberté, a psychologist  who is Algonquin from the Timiskaming First Nation, completed her PhD on suicide in Indigenous communities. She sees the effects of medical colonialism and the intergenerational and multigenerational trauma caused by the residential school and child welfare systems (often manifesting as structural violence and self harm) daily in her work. She also sees the indifference to it.

“Collaboration and communication are always difficult with hospitals and healthcare institutions,” she says. “When I accompany patients of mine who are going through crises or mental health issues, I often observe a lack of compassion, a lack of understanding, an unwillingness to follow up with the patient or the patients’ family. They aren’t taken seriously or believed when they disclose symptoms, and their pain is minimized or dismissed.”

Dr. Laliberté says that Indigenous patients are often treated as second-class citizens, with no respect for their own traditional healing methods, not being seen beyond the stigma or cliches of being “a bunch of drunks” and “savages.” As a result they tend to mistrust the system or delay treatment for serious physical or mental health issues, often until it’s too late.

Attempting to bridge this ignorance gap, the TRC commission called upon medical and nursing schools in Canada to require all students take a course dealing with Aboriginal health issues, including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, and Indigenous teachings and practices. According to the commission, this would require “skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and anti-racism.”

“As far as I know, this still isn’t part of the curriculum,” says Dr. Laliberté. “While I was teaching at the university, I thought of how overrepresented Indigenous children are in the foster care system (a whopping 52.2 per cent of children in foster care in Canada are Indigenous, although they account for only 7.7 percent of the child population), and I took it upon myself to educate future psycho-educators who will be working in the DPJ (Quebec’s Youth Protection system). Some of my peers voiced strong opposition to this and weren’t interested in anything that wasn’t part of the status quo.”
Forced sterilization of Indigenous women
Unwanted medical procedures are not only part of our colonial history –they continue to be part of the present. This past May, a local Métis (person of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry) lawyer in British Columbia alleged that he knew of Indigenous girls— some younger than 10 years old—who had been forced by social workers to have IUDs inserted by doctors because they were at risk of being raped in foster care.

These disturbing allegations came on the heels of the final report of the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), which included a section on the forced sterilization of Indigenous Women in Canada. It reminds us that commonplace medical procedures are often used without consent to decrease or limit the Indigenous population.

There are parallels here with similar coercive sterilization tactics implemented in the United States. The Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 enabled the mass sterilization (some say more than 25 percent) of Native American women of child-bearing age. Back in Canada, the province of Saskatchewan is currently facing a class-action lawsuit from women alleging they were coerced into getting tubal ligation as recently as 2014. A similar lawsuit has since been launched in Alberta.
“Medical colonialism killed Joyce”
This colonial mindset and the systemic discrimination that deeply affects issues regarding standards of care, ethics, caregiver policies and practices is often a straight line from the past to today’s medical system, with healthcare staff often making fast and damaging assumptions about Indigenous patients and why they’re seeking medical help. During the inquiry for Echaquan, who died of pulmonary edema, witnesses testified that healthcare staff mistook her debilitating pain and severe myocardiopathy for drug withdrawal symptoms. As a result, they disregarded her cries of pain and left her unmonitored, which was against healthcare protocol. According to the testimony of Dr. Alain Vadeboncoeur, an emergency physician at the Montreal Heart Institute, who examined her autopsy report, the 37-year-old mother of seven “could have been saved with proper care.”

Dr. Shaheen-Hussain shared similar conclusions at the inquiry, stating categorically that “medical colonialism killed Joyce Echaquan and that her death was avoidable.”
Medicine isn’t always healing
Dr. Shaheen-Hussain’s book is a powerful condemnation of medical colonialism, which continues to affect Indigenous communities. The descriptions of forced sterilization, skin grafting, Indian Hospitals (sanatoriums), medical nutritional experiments, and medical disappearances speak loudly to deeply embedded racism in medical culture. No wonder Indigenous communities are suspicious of the Canadian healthcare system and the people who work within it.

“How the government responded to the #AHand2Hold campaign is telling, because if denial stems from the top, one can only imagine what it’s often like on the frontlines,” says Dr. Shaheen-Hussain. “Medical colonialism is rooted in the long-held belief that medicine is benevolent and neutral, but it’s often not, and we need to come to terms with that reality.”

Unconscious bias also manifests in how Indigenous health professionals are perceived by the medical establishment. “We are often seen as less competent,” Dr. Laliberté says. “I didn’t get my PhD in a cracker box, and yet, despite my credentials, I am often seen as less respectable. I have also seen the services offered on a reserve deemed less valuable, even though the registered professionals working there have the same education as everyone else.” The Indian Act and the infantilization of Indigenous peoples as “wards of the state” still unconsciously resonates today with many who should know better.
Joyce’s Principle
After Echaquan’s tragic death, the Atikamekw community drafted Joyce’s Principle, which aims to guarantee all Indigenous people the right of equitable access, without any discrimination, to all social and health services, as well as the right to enjoy the best possible physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. The brief constitutes a reminder and a formal request for a commitment by the governments of Quebec and Canada (and their institutions) to respect and protect Indigenous rights relative to healthcare and social services rights that are recognized internationally. The federal government adopted Joyce’s Principle, but the Quebec government refused because the document makes explicit mention of systemic racism, which the provincial government insists does not exist.

Indigenous academics, advocates, physicians, and the Quebec Nurses' Association (QNA) immediately blasted the government for its stubborn refusal. In a published statement, the QNA said, “Without explicit confirmation of the presence of such problems, little changes or actions will lead to positive results.”

The government’s refusal to adopt Joyce’s Principle is, according to Dr. Shaheen-Hussain, “a slap in the face, unconscionable, insulting, and destructive to Indigenous communities’ idea of working together for a better future.”

He finds the government’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge systemic racism “jarring.” “It’s like trying to provide treatment for a diagnosis you refuse to name,” he says. “This refusal is so perplexing to me, because, contrary to accusations that it puts ‘all Quebecers on trial,’ if you accept systemic racism, you’re actually doing the exact opposite. You’re in fact acknowledging that you’ve inherited a system that you’re simply part of and should be actively working to dismantle.”
Gaslighting government
The minister responsible for Indigenous Affairs in Quebec insists he doesn’t want to get tangled up in semantic debates and prefers to take concrete action. But advocates insist that a government denying precisely what those it seeks to re-establish trust with are asking for is, once again, gaslighting their concerns.

Dr. Shaheen-Hussain makes it clear this isn’t a semantic debate to those affected. “Systemic racism and medical colonialism are why infant mortality is four times higher for Inuit children than average childhood mortality rates in Quebec. It’s why it’s twice as high for Indigenous children ages 10-19 than the Canadian average and five times as high for Indigenous teenage girls living on a reserve. It’s because of an entire system, not because of a few racist people.”

He insists that throwing money at a problem the government isn’t even willing to recognize in any meaningful way is pointless. “There’s no tangible commitment to eradicate systemic racism at its root.”

Quebec’s response is to casually point to the federal government and blame the Indian Act of 1876 for all the ills that have befallen Indigenous communities over the years. This is convenient deflection and denial, according to Dr. Shaheen-Hussain. “There is a fair amount of historical proof that proves the contrary,” he says. “Quebec is complicit in systemic racism and colonialism too.”

First Nations and their best interests are often caught in the middle of a power struggle between both of Canada’s colonizing forces (the English and the French) as the Quebec and federal governments often engage in a push and pull over jurisdictions and territory. When much-needed federal legislation was finally adopted in 2019, allowing Indigenous groups to take over their own child welfare systems, which would prioritize the placement of Indigenous children within their own communities, the Quebec government challenged it because it saw the new legislation as a threat to its provincial jurisdiction. The move understandably angered the Indigenous community, which called it “shameful.”
A complicit medical system
Chronic underfunding of health services and social services and the unwillingness to relinquish power as a way of redressing social inequities is also medical colonialism. Canadian medical anthropologist John O’Neil, who’s briefly mentioned in Dr. Shaheen-Hussain’s book, writes that “the system of medicine that we now rely on not only assisted that [colonial] expansion, but it was assisted in its development and domination by the colonial process of subjugation and resource exploitation.”

In the book’s afterword, Kanesatake activist Ellen Gabriel reveals that in the Mohawk language, the word for “hospital” is Tsi Iakehnheiontahionàhkhwa, which equates to “the place where people go to die.” It’s quite telling that the medical institutions most of us think of as sources of healing and help are seen as a place of death by those who have suffered—and continue to suffer—under them.

For her part, Dr. Laliberté defines medical colonialism as “living in fear and frustration.” She witnesses the daily struggle by Indigenous communities across Canada for respect and empathy, engaged in reclaiming traditional measures that support their peoples' mental health and wellness, being challenged by a colonial mindset that presumes to know better.

“Living my life as a First Nations professional woman, I am livid most of the time,” she says.
    [post_title] => 'A lack of compassion': Canada’s shameful history of medical colonialism
    [post_excerpt] => At a recent public inquiry following the death of an Indigenous woman, witnesses and hospital staff testified to long-standing prejudice from healthcare workers.
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June 10, 2021August 6, 2026

‘A lack of compassion’: Canada’s shameful history of medical colonialism

by Toula Drimonis

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 2712 [post_author] => 2 [post_date] => 2021-06-08 17:06:58 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-06-08 17:06:58 [post_content] => An assertive new generation of Muslim feminists is disrupting the white feminist narrative of victimhood.

“Too many religions are patriarchal and imbued with misogyny. Because of this I am often asked how I can be a Muslim feminist. My response is that I am both of Muslim descent and a feminist, and the two identities are not connected. One does not depend on the other.” — Egyptian-American feminist and author Mona Eltahawy, in her recently published book of essays, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls.

The West has for too long related to Muslim women as though they needed to be saved, lumping them all into a single, victim focused narrative. In recent years, a vocal new generation of Muslim feminists, of whom Mona Eltahawy is perhaps the best known, seeks to challenge the victim narrative and assert their place in the feminist discourse on their own terms. Saving oneself, as opposed to being saved by others, whether by escaping physically, emotionally or creatively, is a key theme in the emerging Muslim feminist narrative. The plot of Yosra Samir Imran’s debut novel Hijab and Red Lipstick (Hashtag Press, 2020), appears at first to describe a familiar narrative of oppression. Sara, a British Muslim adolescent in London, chafes against the restrictions set by her strict Egyptian father, who forbids her from indulging her passions for makeup, fashion magazines and pop music. His decision to move the family to Qatar, where Sara’s freedom is further restricted by patriarchal social norms and laws, sets father and daughter on a collision course. Imran insists that her story is strictly about an individual—and not a commentary on Muslim society as a whole. [caption id="attachment_2752" align="aligncenter" width="640"]

Yousra Samir Imran with her book, "Hijab and Red Lipstick."[/caption] “I even put an author’s note at the start of my book asking readers not to discredit one woman’s experience just because it’s not their own, and that this book tells only one type of experience,” Imran told The Conversationalist. Still, some Muslim readers complain that the novel perpetuates stereotypes. Their unwillingness to see the book as one woman’s journey reflects a pervasive awareness among Muslims of the lens through which they are perceived—one that they feel distorts their lived experiences. Sabyn Javeri, a Karachi-born academic and novelist (Hijabistan and Nobody Killed Her) who is a professor of Literature and Creative Writing, told The Conversationalist that a major barrier to understanding the diversity of narratives within Muslim communities is the propogation of a single dominant narrative. “I always wonder what we mean by white feminist narrative,” she said, adding: “I believe in plurality, I believe there’s many facades to identity.” She almost wrote Hijab and Red Lipstick as a memoir, said Imran, who now lives in West Yorkshire, but decided to fictionalize her story for reasons of personal safety. Nevertheless, the book is obviously based on her own experiences in Qatar, where she lived from the age of 14 until she returned to the U.K. at 29. Sara, the protagonist, is a practicing Muslim who wears the hijab, but she is also a rebel who tests boundaries. Samir Imran believes that because she wears the hijab, her Muslim readers might have expected her “to present squeaky clean Muslim characters” instead of the complex and flawed characters in her novel. There are, to be sure, some widely reported incidents that seem to support the white feminist narrative about oppressed Muslim women who need to be saved. Princess Latifa of Dubai, for example, has for several years been her father’s hostage, kept in an isolated villa after an unsuccessful attempt to escape the Gulf territory in 2018. Dina Ali Lasloom, then 24, was forcibly returned to Saudi Arabia in 2017 when she was stopped in Manila on her way to seek asylum in Australia. Another highly publicized incident occurred in 2019, when Rahaf Mohammed, an 18 year-old Saudi woman who was granted asylum in Canada after she barricaded herself in a Bangkok Airport hotel room and tweeted that she was in danger of being deported and imprisoned for having renounced Islam (a crime in Saudi Arabia). Via amplification, she grew her Twitter following from fewer than 30 to several thousand within a few hours and gained the attention of the international media. Ms. Eltahawy, who played a critical role in amplifying the then-unknown Rahaf Mohammed’s tweets, writes in The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls that Ms. Mohammed “saved herself.” “Saving oneself” can also mean asserting one’s right to choose how to dress—including whether or not to wear a traditional head scarf. The hijab is a hot topic—and not only in the west. Tunisia, for example, bans women from wearing the niqab, or face covering, in government offices. France and Quebec ban the niqab completely, while the Canadian province recently passed a law that restricts public servants from wearing religious symbols at work, in a move that is widely regarded as singling out Muslim women. But the debate about face and head coverings is taking place without the participation of Muslim women. How do they feel about the issue? “Hijab has been a tool of military and political intervention since colonial days,” said Sabybn Javeri. “People don't want to focus on things which really are oppressive—like violence or assault. It’s easier to target women’s clothing because that’s easier to control. Violence and control takes more work, you need to challenge the system, demand a larger shift,” she pointed out. The characters in Hijabistan, Javeri’s collection of short stories about hijabi culture set in the U.K. and Pakistan, include a kleptomaniac who exploits the anonymity of her burqa to shoplift, and who enjoys flashing the fruit vendor across the street. They include women who feel the hijab liberates them and others who feel it constricts them. The stories highlight the intersectionality and plurality that comes with identities, which are often overshadowed by the debate about the meaning of a scarf on a woman’s head rather than the thoughts inside it. “We have long been defined by what’s between our legs and what’s on our heads,” said Mona Eltahawy. She told The Conversationalist that the title of her first book, Headscarves and Hymens, was inspired by her desire to challenge the binary view of what defines a Muslim woman. Nevertheless, Eltahawy feels now that there is too much talk about the Muslim head scarf. “Whether I should wear the hijab, or whether anyone should wear the hijab, is a difficult conversation about choice. At the end of the day that conversation of wearing and not wearing is limited to women of Muslim descent and no one else,” she said. Our Women On The Ground is a collection of first-person essays by female Arab journalists in the Middle East that reflects the unique challenges Muslim women face when reporting. “I wondered about the fearless Arab women journalists, whose work I’d been following for years,” editor Zahra Hankir told The Conversationalist. “What if we read about their experiences, and about how their lives have been affected by the tumult in the region, in a similar space? The stakes are, without a doubt, so much higher for them. Being a local journalist in the region, particularly a woman journalist, carries with it immense risks and challenges.” Choosing a job that means being in the public eye can be seen as an act of defiance for a woman in Muslim society. Foreign journalists have the privilege of leaving when things get bad, or of turning to their government for help when they are in trouble. Local journalists, particularly in countries where laws or customs restrict a woman’s presence in the public domain, do not have those privileges and are easier for the state to control. Non-Muslim female journalists also face many gender-related challenges when working in the field, although of a different sort; by acknowledging that oppressive systems affect all but in different ways, we see how their identities affect their experiences. For Muslim women, their religion is just one part of that lived experience. The bottom line for most Muslim feminists is that they are more concerned with advancing their own cause than with countering the white feminist point of view. “A lot of my work goes towards complicating the narrative for women of Muslim descent, who are not white, who are from the global south,” said Eltahawy. This is the disruption we need in order to change existing systems. 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June 8, 2021August 6, 2026

Muslim feminists are not interested in the white woman’s gaze

by Anmol Irfan

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