Legacy Honors All Contributions

Originally Published on March 30, 2010, in The Centre Daily Times.

The intriguing and ambitious theme for this year's Women's History Month is "Writing Women Back into History." Commemorating this theme could mean different things to different people.
To some, it will mean highlighting women who have succeeded in the public arena by honoring pioneers in politics, sports, science, medicine, arts, literature, public service, government and other domains in the world outside the home. Most people would not contest the place of these eminent women in the recorded annals of history.
To others, celebrating this theme will mean recording the contributions of women in both the public and private spheres. They will write women back into history by accepting the notion that our history is more than the history of conquests or the governing of countries and includes human experience in the public and private realms.
In addition to honoring women in nontraditional roles, they will honor women’s contributions in traditional historic roles as midwives and healers, mothers, farmers, inventors, philosophers, weavers, storytellers, environmentalists, religious leaders, elders, warriors, nurturers, caretakers, wives and daughters. They will recognize women’s pivotal role in nurturing humankind and sustaining traditions that have ensured the survival of our species to this day.
Of course, who gets written back into history depends on the point of view of specific historians and what they consider significant enough to be recorded as history.
Consider the recent example of a video “A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything” that went viral on You Tube a few months ago, with 2.2 million views. Created by Jamie Bell, from the U.K., it illustrates the history of our planet from creation to modern times and chronicles the rise and fall of species and civilizations.
His well-made, entertaining video is a testimony to his hard work and creativity, and earned him an A grade. Yet this17-year-old did not include a single woman in his brief history of pretty much everything. Even more troubling is that this omission of more than half the world’s population is lost on many of the video’s admirers.
The absence of women in Bell’s video is not surprising because including women is still an afterthought in many scenarios around the globe.
For me, writing women back into history requires the same mind-set of respect and sensitivity that made it possible for women to finally, in February, serve on U.S. submarines or to pass the 1990 law requiring women to be included in all federally funded medical research and clinical trials or to start blind auditions for musicians in the 1970s.
Writing women back into history will also mean honoring the contributions of women in our personal histories. For me, it means valuing the role of my homemaker grandmothers as much as the role of my grandfathers, who are identified and valued for the jobs they did outside the home.
It means acknowledging the work my grandmothers did in raising large families and their skills as counselors, financial planners, businesswomen, healers and keepers of history.
We all need to be active witnesses to the myriad ways in which women contribute in today’s world both inside and outside the home, even as we continue the work needed to allow every woman the right to self determination, to live a life free from violence, be head of a household, vote, drive or ride a bicycle.
Writing women back into history allows us the expanding opportunity of recognizing women’s history as part of our collective history and of accepting women’s issues as human issues.
It could also foster recognition of the importance of what is traditionally considered “women’s work” and expand it to be “men’s work” too in today’s world.
If men and women view women’s work and history as our collective legacy, it would be a phenomenal return on the minimal investment of one month focused on almost 50 percent of the population.

On the road to becoming simply Americans

Originally published on January 31, 2010, in Centre Daily Times.

“I forgot Obama was black tonight for an hour,” commented MSNBC’s Chris Matthews last week after the State of the Union address by President Barack Obama.
Apparently for Matthews, this was an indication of how far the country had traveled on race and how post-racial we have become. And he gave credit to Obama’s election and leadership for making him forget such a monumental thing as the president’s race for an hour.
This statement had me contemplating how much further we have to go on race, and how we unnecessarily distort our impressions of people with meaningless adjectives.
Matthews’ statement reflects the newness and uniqueness of having a “biracial” president, and the common practice of tagging adjectives onto others, when they are not the “norm,” such as a “black” senator, a “Hispanic” judge, a “female” CEO, an “American Indian” congressman, and so on.
But we do not use adjectives for the “norm,” which in the U.S. public arena is the white male.
And this “norm” is assumed to have leadership qualities. But if someone from a group other than the norm appears on the public arena, their otherness stands out as a qualifying adjective.
We might describe that someone as a “female astronaut,” “African American doctor,” or “Indian senator,” instead of simply using astronaut, doctor or senator.
Of course, descriptors of otherness are used globally. The labels could vary from words like “foreign” to religious ones like “Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Jew” to ethnic-, tribal-, language-and politics-based ones.
Labeling others is a common human activity, but we can control what we do after we label someone.
And my fellow Americans and I, with origins from all around the world, have a unique opportunity to engage in an exercise of remembering and forgetting such things, not just for an hour, but forever.
We need to acknowledge the accomplishments of those from “minority” groups, by remembering, registering and then forgetting.
When we remember and register, we expand our idea of the possibilities for different groups of people. But then we need to forget, and forget not momentarily, but forever.
When someone enters a room, I wish we could both remember and forget their ethnic origins.
When we meet someone, I wish we could both remember and forget our religions.
When we succeed or fail, I wish we could both remember and forget our gender.
And so on, till we register just the unique individual before us.
I wish we would acknowledge that our physical realities and backgrounds may or may not have any bearing on our thoughts, acts and performance, depending on the context.
In such a world, where we both remember and forget, we would view Obama’s successes and failures as simply the journey of an American politician, who happens to be biracial, and has strengths and failings like the rest of us.
In such a world, Matthews would have remembered and then forgotten Obama’s biracial heritage forever, not just for an hour, and restricted himself to comments on the quality of the president’s State of the Union address.
Just like we remember and forget Matthews’ race.

Women's History or Our History?

Originally Posted in the Common Threads Blog
Centre Daily Times, March 25, 2008

It is March again, and time for another Women’s History Month.

This whole month, schools, colleges, and organizations plan special events to celebrate our focus on women’s realities.

My daughter, who is in fourth grade, has been designing postage stamps along with her classmates, that celebrate women’s achievements. She finally settled on a “Women Save the Earth” theme, focusing on Rachel Carson’s pioneering Silent Spring,that first elaborated how the chemicals we put out into the world seep into our environment. Her classmates focused on many other achievements by women in space, and other frontiers.

Celebrating these pioneers of the past is important for fostering our leaders of the future. It is also important to celebrate ordinary women, who are creating small improvements in the present time, by following their dreams and performing their duties, changing our collective landscape, one step at a time.

On the first day of spring break, my daughter and her friend got to meet one such present day ordinary woman - as they climbed aboard an FA-18 Navy Fighter plane at University Park Airport. They got to ask a lot of questions of the female pilot, one of the two people in the two seater plane, and learn about her job - of both piloting the plane, and dropping the missiles.

The peace-loving part of me was happy that my daughter did not like the “missile dropping part,” but loved the “piloting part” of the job. And I could sense the enormous impact that interacting with this woman had on the two nine year old girls - it expanded the possibilities of women’s roles in their eyes. And I know she would have had the same enormous impact on nine year old boys too.

I thought of that pilot yesterday, as I heard that the US death toll in Iraq has reached 4000. Of these, 95 were women, 2% of the total death toll, which is small compared to the 50:50 male female ratio in the real world, but is the largest death toll of women in any war since WWII.

These deaths of female soldiers are a part of Women’s history, and Men’s history, as much as the deaths of male soldiers are a part of both histories. For each of these soldiers has a family of men and women, whose lives and realities are unalterably changed by the deaths of their loved ones.

Ultimately, celebrating the history of women in March is a useful exercise, if we remember this history is just a vital subset of our collective history – and that if we focus on it throughout the year, we will not need to set aside a special month to celebrate and reflect on it.

How Unbiased are our Judgements?

Originally Posted on the Common Threads Blog,
Centre Daily Times, Feb 27, 2008

The first two months of 2008 have brought us reports about the divisive riots in Kenya, the sectarian rivalries in Iraq, the tensions in Serbia and Kosovo, and the divisiveness of our own election primaries.

As a writer who focuses on the common threads that link us all, it has been depressing to try and figure out why the links between people break down, and why nations fracture along religious, ethnic and tribal lines, and even along gender, age, race, and class lines.

How do we lose the common bonds we share as human beings? When do certain aspects of our identity, be it religion, gender, ethnicity, political ideology become more important than our common humanity? When do our differences begin to matter more than our commonalities?

I don’t know the answers, but know that we lose a lot when we begin to divide up into groups.

I have often seen little kids, separating out into groups of “boys” and “girls” at elementary school. And now, a friend who lives in a major metropolitan area tells me that in the very diverse elementary school her child attends, there are many kids from different racial and ethnic groups, and kids in elementary school play at recess in groups formed along racial and ethnic lines.

Are these groups inevitable, I wonder?

I turn to Blink, the wonderful book by Malcolm Gladwell, in an attempt to understand how we are arriving at these groups - how do we judge who to hang out with? Is it similar to how we judge on who to vote for? Who to hire for a job?

Gladwell uses scientific research to demonstrate how we make “judgments” in the first two seconds of any interaction, via an “unconscious” mechanism. Many a time, these snap judgments, which we may call our instinctive reactions, may be right on the dot.

But they are not always infallible. Many of our prejudices and dislikes towards others can stem from these snap judgments. So that we can pronounce that someone looks a leader, or that someone looks like a terrorist, just on the basis of a snap judgment.

In the last chapter of his book, Gladwell writes about how the number of women in orchestras in the US went up by five times, once the rules for auditions were changed three decades ago, to have musicians auditioning from behind a screen. Once the screen hid the gender of the musician from the selection committee, more women were hired, thus proving the previous existence of bias on the basis of gender.

Perhaps a similar process to select our presidential candidates will help – analyze their records, without giving them any face time with us – in order to make sure we simply vote for the most competent person. Would such “screens” have given us presidential candidates who are more diverse – including more women and more people from all races? And filtered out irrelevant parameters like gender, race, age, religion and so forth?

The data from the classical music world showed us that women were being excluded when no screens were used. And it is not a stretch to say that this has happened, and is happening in other areas too.

After all, women were the last group to get the right to vote, are playing catch up in getting to positions of power, including the presidency, and are judged differently by our society, which includes the media.

I wish there was a way to use such “screens” in the world of politics, like in the world of classical music auditions - "screens" which would help us judge, based only on the records of the candidates, and not based on any other irrelevant factors which can cloud our perceptions.

A helping hand at an MRI

Originally Posted at the Common Threads Blog
Centre Daily Times, on June 20, 2007

Last week, I had to go in for my first ever MRI. A friendly staff attended to the initial paperwork, and I got shown into the procedure room.

I was fine, till I lay down and figured out the reality of the procedure – the length of time, the small space, the stillness expected of me.

The two people there adjusted the headphones for my music – and suddenly I wondered if I could do it. I felt a wave of panic and voiced it.

They were instantly responsive. Would I like to just test it out – go inside and see what it was like?

Yes, I replied, that would be wonderful.

Having done that, I asked some more questions about the procedure. I made a decision of earplugs over headphones, and tried to get comfortable.

But I was still tentative. As I was mentally steeling myself for the procedure, one of the people in the room threw me a lifeline – would it help if he held my hand through the procedure?

You can do that? I heard myself asking incredulously.

Yes, I can, was the reply.

I am sure I can go through with it then, I replied. I asked him his name.

It was Dave.

Thank you, Dave, I said, thank you for doing this.

I got into position in the machine, and Dave held my hand. Five minutes into the procedure, I was comfortably settled, the newness and strangeness of the experience a thing of the past. I can handle this, I thought – this is a piece of cake.

And suddenly, with Dave still holding my hand, and the machine doing its job, I had an epiphany about what life was all about, and the incredible power embedded in that moment – the power of one helping hand holding another, making a difficult time easier.

The differences between us - race, gender, ethnicity did not matter at that instant. It was a simple but profound moment of connection between strangers, based on a common humanity. And on the power we all have to help each other.

So thank you, Dave, and thank you, Jennifer, for using that power well. What you did was all in a day’s work for you – for me, it made all the difference.