For Muslim women life had been getting better. No longer

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Guardian


Muslim women are the most economically disadvantaged group in Britain. They are three times more likely than other women to be unemployed or looking for work, and twice as likely to be economically inactive (ie, not looking for work). Those who have the same educational qualifications and skills as white Christian women are 71% more likely to be jobless.

Cameron 'stigmatising Muslim women' with English language policy



These bleak findings appear in an MPs’ report published today. This is bad news for Muslims, feminists, anti-racists and for the nation. Britain cannot be highly productive, functional, inventive, internationally competitive or properly meritocratic while so much human potential remains dormant or suppressed. Families and communities with unemployed women cannot escape poverty and hopelessness. So why is this happening?

British Muslim women have come a long way since the 1980s. In 1984 the study Black and White Britain was published by the Policy Studies Institute. The author, Colin Brown, is now my husband. He found that though vastly fewer Asian women than black or white women were in the workforce, among those Asian women in employment only 18% were Muslim. Today eight Muslim women are in parliament, and several are peers. More British Muslim women than men are getting degrees.

I am a part-time professor at Middlesex University, where many of my students are feisty young Muslim women. One of them, Saira (not her real name), told me recently: “My mother can’t read or write. They got her married at 12, when she was a child. But she pushed me and my five sisters, stopped my father arranging our marriages. She is like a lioness.” Sharmin was a young, incredibly bright Bangladeshi mum in Bethnal Green. I used to teach her English. After her husband left her and married a younger wife, she enrolled at a further education college. She is now a social worker.

Some Muslim leaders have been calling for these transformative developments for a very long time. Back in 1924, our worldwide imam, the Aga Khan, instructed his believers to educate daughters because they would then go on to raise educated children and, in time, prepare congregations for a future they could not even imagine. As a child in the 60s, I remember the first time I saw women doctors in our mosque surgery in Kampala, Uganda, and teachers clip-clopping in high heels in our schools.

According to the parliamentary report, “the impact of Islamophobia cannot be underestimated” and there is now a “chill factor” stopping women applying for jobs and promotion. What a blow that must be. All that faith, all that education, for what turns out to be a false promise, a chimera. They face a triple penalty: they are female, of minority background and Muslim.

One recommendation in the report is name-blind recruitment. This would help, but not that much. Women who sound “British” and believe they are, turn up at interviews where visceral hostility comes at them. I have experienced it several times in my own life. I started to apply with just “Brown” as my surname, but then felt the air freeze when I arrived at the interview.

Despite these barriers, 45% more Muslim women are in work than were in 2011. That is a remarkable figure. Yet just when things were getting better, they got worse. Attitudes towards migrants, minorities and refugees have noticeably hardened since Ukip and other rightwing politicians moved from the fringes to the heart of British politics.

Jihadi terror cells undeniably have some support from British Muslims. Muslim self-segregation is also an evident and serious issue. So too Pakistani grooming gangs, whose heinous activities were kept hidden for too long. Needless to say, this is not what most Muslims do or approve of. But these behaviours play into the narratives of racists and have also turned fair-minded people against Islam and Muslims.

The most “integrated” of us are insulted, abused or attacked. Muslims can’t fly, walk, talk, or use public transport or public spaces without fear of being seen as a terrorist. Since the late 60s, when the first race relations laws were passed, most white Brits accepted the need to protect minorities against discrimination. Not any more, it seems. TheCommission for Racial Equality was abolished a decade ago and its notional replacement, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is moribund. Race equality has been kicked off the agenda while racism goes up.

However, the report’s authors are completely right when they say the discrimination Muslim women experience “is exacerbated by the pressures that some women feel from parts of their communities to fulfil a more traditional role”. It’s clear that self-segregation is increasing within some communities.Farhat Hashmi, who gained her PhD from Glasgow University, is one of the most influential internet female proselytisers. She orders middle-class women to stay at home and give in to men’s demands.

I receive countless letters from young women. They and my acquaintances tell about oppressive practices now being imposed by their brothers, not their fathers.

Yasmin Weaver of the gender equality group Inspire says that addressing unemployment among Muslims is a priority for government and must be a priority for Muslim communities too. This, I fear, is where we fall flat. Weaver believes strongly that anti-discrimination measures need to go hand in hand with a reform of cultural, parental and religious practices and beliefs.

The parliamentary report recognises that both discrimination and internal oppression keep Muslim women in their airless, hopeless places. Governments can tackle the first, but who in a liberal society would dare challenge the second?

The white man who pretended to be black

John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me Photo: Don Rutledge



By Tim Stanley in The Telegraph

6:58PM GMT 05 Feb 2015

With the release of the movie Selma, a lot of Americans are asking how far race relations have really come in the United States. On the one hand, the movie depicts the success of the Sixties civil rights crusade – its victory confirmed by Barack Obama’s election in 2008.

On the other hand, the recent deaths of young black men at the hands of white cops and vigilantes, and the resulting race riots, suggest that a lot of things haven’t changed at all. Whites may ask, “Why are working-class blacks angry? They have the right to vote and an African-American president – everything Martin Luther King Jr fought for.”

But some of the apparent triumph of black civil rights is a veneer. Racism isn’t just about law but about attitudes. Attitudes that are hard to change because of the gulf of understanding between different communities.

Can a white person ever really understand how a black person sees the world? Back in 1959, six years before Martin Luther King marched for civil rights in Selma, one man tried. A white Texan writer called John Howard Griffin walked into a doctor’s office in New Orleans and asked him to turn his skin colour black. Griffin took oral medication and was bombarded with ultraviolet rays; he cut off his hair to hide an absence of curls and shaved the back of his hands. Then he went on a tour of the Deep South.

The result was a bestselling book called Black Like Me, which is still regarded as an American classic. Griffin wanted to test the claim that although the southern United States was segregated it was essentially peaceful and just – that the two races were separate but equal.

What he discovered tells us a lot about the subtleties of racism. In 1959, unlike today, it was legally instituted. But, like today, it also flourished at the personal level – in hostility, suspicion, fear and even self-loathing.

Griffin was an extraordinary man. Born in Dallas in 1920, he went to school in France and joined the French Resistance after Hitler invaded. Griffin helped Jewish children escape to England before fleeing to America. While serving in the US army, he was blinded by shrapnel.

Griffin took it all in his stride – he married, had children and converted to Catholicism. Griffin’s strong personal faith reminds us that much of the civil rights movement was in fact a Christian mission – made possible, in this instance, by what seemed like a miracle.



The orginal cover of Black Like Me

Walking around his yard one afternoon, Griffin suddenly saw red swirls where hitherto there was only darkness. Within months his sight had returned. And it was a man determined to make the most of his second chance who hit upon the novel idea of crossing the colour line.

Those reading the book today might regard Griffin’s attempt to change his colour as akin to blacking up. Certainly, the transformation was awkward. Griffin may well have had dark skin but he retained his classically Caucasian features, and one suspects that the awkwardness of his encounters with some black people was down to them wondering if he was one of them or just horribly sunburnt.

Griffin did not become black per se but – more accurately – a white man suddenly disassociated from himself and his society. Looking into a mirror for the first time, he wrote, “The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship ... The Griffin that was had become invisible.”

But by very dint of not being white – even if he wasn’t exactly black – Griffin experienced genuine alienation. He was chased down a street by a bored white thug shouting racial epithets. He was told that he was sitting in the “wrong” waiting room and had to move to the “blacks only” one. On buses Griffin boarded via the backdoor, and when he chivalrously tried to offer his seat to a white woman was accused of being “sassy”. Many whites were polite; a few were aggressively rude.

Often it was suggested that black people were dumb or up to no good; Griffin often got what he called “the hate stare”. Some of his encounters with Caucasians were heartbreaking. Griffin sat on a park bench and a white man on a seat opposite got up, walked over and politely advised him that he should leave. Griffin went away saying, “thank you” because he assumed that the park was segregated and the man was being helpful. Later he discovered that it wasn’t segregated at all. The fellow was a well-mannered bigot.

There was a great deal of eroticisation of African-Americans. When hitchhiking, Griffin found that white male drivers ignored him in the daylight yet picked him up in the dark. They asked questions that disturbed him greatly: “all show a morbid curiosity about the sexual life of the Negro, and all had, at base, the same stereotyped image of the Negro as an inexhaustible sex-machine with oversized genitals and a vast store of experiences, immensely varied.”

When working as a shoeshine boy, Griffin noticed that the friendlier a white customer was then the more likely he was to ask if there are any prostitutes working in the area. Every black man was seen as a potential source of sexual transgression.



And Griffin discovered that the victims of abuse can start to regard themselves as deserving of abuse. Riding on a bus, he encountered a young man who, because he was comparatively light skinned, thought he was superior to his darker kin: “He walked towards the rear, giving whites a fawning, almost tender look.

His expression twisted to a sneer when he reached the back and surveyed the Negroes. He sat sideways in an empty seat across the aisle from me and began to harangue two brothers behind him. ‘This place stinks …. Look at all of them – bunch of dirty punks – don’t know how to dress. You don’t deserve anything better.’” Later, this man said to Griffin of his race: “I hate us.”

The story indicates that one of the successes of segregation was to make black Americans feel inferior, to encourage them to think that all they deserved was a seat at the back of the bus. If there is a single reason why the incidence of crime or illegitimacy is unusually high among African-Americans today, it might be that racism can be so pervasive and oppressive that it eventually makes its prejudices come true.

That, at least, offers one explanation for the behaviour of the young black men killed apparently resisting arrest in 2014. Another is anger at constantly being the source of suspicion. Of course, it also doesn’t help that American cops are over-militarised and trained to regard every mild confrontation as another conflagration at the OK Corral.

Griffin published his findings in book format in 1961 and became an overnight sensation. The New York Times hailed the text as an “essential document of contemporary American life”, and in 1964 it was made into a somewhat cringeworthy film starring James Whitmore.

But the residents of Griffin’s hometown in Texas were not impressed; they hanged him in effigy. Black Like Me helped to raise awareness of the evils of segregation and with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Right acts in the mid-Sixties, it seemed for a while as if America was ready to confront that evil.

Griffin died in 1980 after suffering complications from diabetes - not, as rumour had it, as a result of the treatments he'd used to prepare for Black Like Me. In the years leading up to his death, Griffin’s writing had taken on a despairing tone. He had recognised the falseness of his own experiment.

A white man disguised as black could not understand the insecurities and resentments that came with hundreds of years of inherited slavery – nor did he have the right to lecture black people on the need for love and reconciliation. White people had a role to play in civil rights, but it had to be as allies rather than leaders. The movement needed to be for black people, by black people.

This issue is at the heart of a debate about the movie Selma, too. Some critics have complained that it fails to depict white civil rights activists prominently and that it inaccurately suggests that President Lyndon Johnson, a progressive Democrat, wanted Martin Luther King Jr to shrink his ambitions.



The struggle continues: Oprah Winfrey in Selma

Both criticisms miss the point of the movie, which is to tell a black story from the perspective of its subject. It is typical and natural for middle-class white liberals to want to see uplifting the oppressed as a common endeavour.

But the truth is that discrimination is too ingrained in society to imagine that the benign efforts of white leaders can eradicate it entirely, while it is only by establishing their dignity through independent political action that black Americans could ever hope to assert themselves in a society that regarded them as the lowest of the low. For those reasons, Black Like Me is a well-intentioned book but also a hopelessly anachronistic one.

History has shown that the only people who can liberate African-Americans are African-Americans. And that in the course of their efforts, they should expect resentment among their white enemies and some bruised feelings among their white allies.

The Left’s Untouchable

Why was Ambedkar’s critique of caste anathema for Indian Marxists?

Manash Bhattacharjee

It’s an abiding mystery of Indian politics: why the Left has consistently shown an uneasy reluctance to seriously engage with B.R. Ambedkar’s thoughts. When Ambedkar pushed for the Poona Pact in 1932, demanding separate electorates for Dalits, the Indian Left kept its distance from the issue. Symptomatically, E.M.S. Namboodiripad wrote: “This was a great blow to the freedom movement. For this led to the diversion of people’s attention from the objective of full independence to the mundane cause of the upliftment of the Harijans.”

EMS’s reaction to the Poona Pact was in consonance with his reading of Indian history in Marxist terms. Borrowing crudely from Marx’s understanding of the history of slavery, EMS found the caste system, despite its exploitative structure, to be “a superior economic organisation”, which facilitated organised production through a systematic allocation of labour. He didn’t note Ambedkar’s sophisticated distinction between “division of labour” and “division of the labourer” (including the hierarchy within that division) in the casteist relations of production. The eternal fixedness of the labourer with regard to his birth (as the “subject” who “will bear its Father’s name”), and the religious sanction behind such an identity, were deemed unimportant. Being mostly from the upper castes, Left scholars avoided examining the assumptions of caste.

Since before Independence, the mainstream Left framed the class question safely within the nationalist question; for EMS and his comrades, this issue was not a diversion.
Ambedkar had the courage to push for a radical division within the framework of nationalist politics, by asking for separate electorates. By calling Ambedkar’s cause “mundane”, EMS drew a specious distinction between the working class and Dalits, holding the former to be “superior”. Through this, EMS betrayed his predominantly upper-caste mindset. He is an exemplar of progressive casteism in the history of Left politics and thinking in India. This led to lower castes and Dalits not finding a place in the party hierarchy.

The most insidious form of caste solidarity ignores and hides the stark fact that caste is part of what Althusser calls the “apparatus” of ideology and is based in material existence. Every form of social practice (and exploitation) in India is contextually casteist. It creates conditions of multiple prejudice between the bourgeois and the working class (where the scavenging class/caste goes unnamed). And this prejudice becomes part of the relations of production as caste introduces elements of segregation and humiliation within those relations. In the case of untouchables, one might in fact call it relations of waste, where the disposing of sewage, etc, is not accorded even the minimum standard of dignified working conditions.

Ambedkar pointed out how the class system had an “open-door character”, whereas castes were “self-enclosed units”. He gave a brilliant explanation of caste’s forced endogamy: “Some closed the door: others found it closed against them.” The image throws up a phenomenon opposite to the Kafkan idea of law: the (Hindu) gatekeeper of law, in Ambedkar’s explanation, is also the lawgiver, and he allows entry by birth, but no exit. Once entry has been secured in Hindu society, as Ambedkar argued, everyone who is not a Brahmin is an other. Hinduism is a uniquely self-othering social system, whose (touchable) norms are secured by declaring a brutal exception: untouchability.

In his comparison of Buddha and Marx, Ambedkar bypasses Marx’s idea of private property and keeps out the question of capital ownership. He also does not complicate the relation between ‘law’ and ‘government’. These appear to be limitations of the historical conjuncture of Dalit politics. But Ambedkar finds the materialist and non-violent character of Buddhism to be evoking another thinkable historical version of a Marxist society.

Some critics in the Indian Left see the Dalit movement as being merely a ‘politics of recognition’ and having no revolutionary potential. It is a shallow view of the movement against segregated exploitation that seeks to penetrate entrenched hegemony. The politics against untouchability demands more than good wages and working conditions: it asks for a reconfiguration of the socio-cultural space and the elimination of a violated and untouchable ‘bare life’.

Ambedkar had warned that the Indian socialist would have to “take account of caste after the revolution, if he does not take account of it before the revolution”.

In a discussion after the screening of his film, Jai Bhim Comrade, Anand Patwardhan said that even though Gandhi erred on the caste system, he did more against untouchability than the Left. Under the stark light of this observation, the Left must rethink its ideological history. Or else, the crisis of its political legitimacy may not outlive the warnings.