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Human rights require struggles over power and systems of thought-not just fights against individual violators and institutional inequities. A contribution to the openGlobalRights debate on Trump and Human Rights.

While conservative populist nationalism surged in the last year, I do not agree that its ascendance was inevitable. But I do believe that the human rights community writ large-from North and South alike-must grasp this opportunity to turn to a praxis grounded in struggles against abuses of power, of all sorts. The word "praxis" suggests the need to connect philosophical ideas and theory with real-life experience and action in the political world, yet there is a tendency at this time to be defensive or critical of the human rights discourse, and neither of these positions fully captures empirical realities. There are equally tendencies to argue that the way forward is to focus on national, grass-roots movements or, alternatively, to reinforce a rules-based internationalism. I do not pretend to know-or even think that-there is a single path forward. But I do fervently believe that the justified alarm around recent events provides an opportunity for profound reflection on human rights theory and practice that cannot be wasted.

Over the decades, promoters of human rights pushed the bounds of human and governmental agency.

Marx famously said that he was not interested in understanding the world but in changing the world. But now more than ever, we need to understand the world in order to change it, if we are to have any hope of seeing "a social and international order" where everyone can effectively enjoy their human rights. Human rights are, or should fundamentally be, about the regulation of power-as shields from tyranny in the public square and private bedroom; as curbs on public lassitude and private greed that undermine social justice; but also, and urgently, as challenges to the structures of thought that also drive patterns of suffering and indignity across the globe. Over the decades, promoters of human rights pushed the bounds of human and governmental agency; re-interpreted norms in light of different populations' experiences; showed the porousness and arbitrariness of divides between the public and private, and between the political and economic realms in the traditional "liberal state"; and created institutional frameworks and procedures at national and international levels. Throughout, the single most important source of human rights consciousness and energy has come from the diverse people who have been affected by, and collectively struggled against, what Paul Farmer has elegantly termed "pathologies of power."

Yet the nature of power abuses that rights seek to confront has evolved. Struggles against "traditional" oppression and brutality, as well as in defense of democratic institutions, clearly remain pressing. But it is also true the international order for which post-War institutions were built is now "the global order". And a global elite, which conservative nationalists cynically decry for their own interests, has captured this global order. Indeed, neoliberalism has become a hegemonic form of organizing the world, as well as our collective consciousness.

Pixabay (Some rights reserved)

When decisional autonomy is reduced to "consumer choice," it degrades the idea of what being human means.

When everything from health care to genetic information is commercialized, and everything from romantic relationships to politics (the epitome of this being Trump) to the public square itself (as in Facebook) becomes a marketing opportunity, meaning is hollowed out. When decisional autonomy is reduced to "consumer choice," it degrades the idea of what being human means. And human rights depend, more than anything else, on this simultaneously inter-subjective and collective idea of humans as subjects of reason and conscience, members of a polity, and agents of change.

When rights are no longer "the magic wand of inclusion and exclusion, of visibility and invisibility, of power and no power... the marker of our citizenship and our relation to others" that US black feminist scholar Patricia Williams so eloquently described, we need to understand not just why but also what to do. We cannot confront hegemonic power the same way as we have historically confronted domination; as French critical theorist, Henri Baudrillard argues, hegemony is fought not from the outside in but the inside out.

Thus, it is not surprising that responses to this alienating and exclusionary discourse of modernity are fundamentally anti-modernist-from radical Islamic groups to the Christian fundamentalists who mix racist and misogynistic aspirations with legitimate economic frustration in the US and seek to sow uncertainty, chaos and violence to undermine the existing order at national and global levels. Nor is it surprising that in place of the pluralist constitutionalist visions modernism offered, human identity for these groups is reduced to a series of binary adjectives untethered to the complexity of reality-white/black, Christian/Muslim, immigrant/citizen, gay/straight, male/female, etc.

So, what can we do in the human rights community? Of course many in this diverse community are already engaged in collective reflection, as this forum attests. But I believe that we must reach across silos as well as across North/South and academic/activist divides to be able to more effectively deploy rights frameworks and tools to subvert the forms of hegemonic power that so pervasively colonize our consciousness.

The power of hegemony lies in the acceptance of the inevitability of a given set of social structures and processes, to the point where they cease to be seen as mutable political arrangements and become the "way things are". Speaking truth to power requires that the human rights community stand outside the magical circle of belief about the neoliberal understanding of the progress in the world. The ever-greater abdication of responsibility by states (and some institutions of global governance) to private actors, is, after all, a political stance about the role of markets in allocating social goods, and the meaning of accountability. It's not a neutral quest for greater efficiency and innovation.

The way in which knowledge and systems of knowledge are (re)produced can, however, be more subtle. For example, the creation of human rights indicators, has been driven by the very real need to go beyond the symbolism of norms and capture policy efforts and outcomes, especially in economic and social rights. Yet the recent exponential surge in the adoption of such indicators (often quantitative and synthetic, meaning combining two or more measures), by donors, governments and global institutions suggests that only what gets counted, counts.

The goal of enabling objective cross-country comparisons appears naturally desirable, reasonable and neutral. Nonetheless, it is precisely the abstraction from social context-and therefore from complexities such as what legal norms imply in different societies, the meaningfulness of participation and other process concerns-that can cause these crystallized metrics to sometimes obscure more than they reveal about the power dynamics at play. Rather than better capturing reality, such indicators may well come to define reality. And over-reliance on such technocratic exercises may well undermine our consciousness of the need to struggle against the structural obstacles within countries and in the global order.

The human rights community has already developed methods to identify harmful gender stereotypes or inadvertent discrimination, along with criteria for assessing and making inequity in policy and budgetary efforts visible. Now, it needs to develop a praxis for exposing and disrupting the discourses that structure our collective imaginations, as well as destabilizing neoliberal paradigms that impoverish our conceptions of development, democracy, and the meaning of being human.

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"Speaking truth to power:" a call for praxis in human rights

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Human rights require struggles over power and systems of thought-not just fights against individual violators and institutional inequities. A contribution to the openGlobalRights debate on Trump and Human Rights. While conservative populist nationalism surged in the last year, I do not agree that its ascendance was inevitable.

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As writers and have stressed, the news that a viral meme stating that 14 girls of color went missing within a 24-hour timeframe last week in Washington, D.C., turned out to be false does not negate the problem of girls of color in D.C. and other American cities who go missing. The real statistics are clear on that. The actual number of girls who went missing in this particular case, 10, is no less frightening and unacceptable, nor is the fact that the girls reportedly went missing over a span of 10 days instead of 24 hours, as originally believed.

One missing Black and Latina girl is, should be - hell, must be - one too many. It should send us arm-in-arm to the trenches.

So, here's my question: where, oh where, are all the white feminists who were, by their own lights, radicalized into action by Donald Trump? And - not just white feminists, but white feminists of an intersectional persuasion? Is mum the word, or what?

Where are all the liberal and left white women who, just two months ago, put on pink pussy hats and assembled in record numbers on our nation's capital to protest the governmental, capitalist powers that be, and present a mass united front against the forces of patriarchy, misogyny and sexism?

I mean, come on. Ten black girls go missing within 10 days to scant or no media attention? And hardly an intersectional white feminist so much as bats an eye?

Really? Is that how it is? Is that how the majority of white women internalize an intersectional feminist praxis?

Let me make one thing clear: the silence of white intersectional feminists about these missing girls of color is not only worse than that of plain ol' white feminists, but is very fulcrum of un-intersectionality. For, intersectional activism, as I understand it, demands that everyone concerned about the welfare of the species - the theoretician, the activist, the artist, the parent, the educator, on and on - account for the reality and lived experiences of every category of woman and how every mode of oppression forms an intricate matrix that strengthens, interpenetrates and reinforces one another. And intersectional feminism, as I understand it, demands of us the ability to view the world beyond the natural and culturally-imposed circumscriptions leveled on the journeys of different women negotiating the world in different bodies in a multitude of ways.

In essence, what an intersectional position requires of us is to go beyond the physiological and neurological stop signs of our gendered, social selves.

I realize that's tough to do in a world that continues to prioritize the hurts, needs and desires of white bodies in compliance with the dictates of an evolved version of white supremacy. It's tough to do when there are racial and class perks to doing the opposite, behaving in an un-intersectional manner, as, historically, plain ol' white feminists tend to specialize in.

However, if you intend to be intersectional in your feminist praxis, there's no way of skirting around this.

This early national history of white women resisting the patriarchy and invoking women's rights to substantiate their own claims to a top slot in the social hierarchy and accrue protections and entitlements for their group sets the ruthless precedent for the more modern phenomena of white feminism and, from where I'm observing, its intersectional offshoot, like the "missing white woman syndrome," with its ostentatious bias of bringing the cases of missing white girls, like Natalee Holloway and Elizabeth Smart, to the undivided attention of the country.

Meanwhile, missing girls of color like Jacqueline Lassey (15), Yahshaiyah Enoch (13), Antwan Jordan (15), Juliano Otero (15), Dashann Trikia Wallace (15), Aniya McNeil (13), Dayanna White (15), Talisha Coles (16), Morgan Richardson (15), except in certain media and social media spaces, go unspoken of and unwritten about.

Go ahead and blurt "WTF," if you so feel the urge.

It just means that, like me, you understand that the exclusionary politics of white feminism has been the dilution and demise of social justice agendas in the past and, by the look and feel of it, is destined to be the death of this radical moment we presently find ourselves in. That feminist work which turns a blind eye to the problems of women and girls of color is doomed to fail, recycle and repeat the mistakes of the past.

Inserting the term "intersectional" into the name and description of your political position to prove your progressive bona fides, to graduate plain ol' white feminism into something more radical and befitting the times, doesn't mean shit if your actions betray the theory.

Honestly, it's not as if white feminists lack the capacity to digest the accumulated insight that comes with hindsight about feminisms of the past to make better decisions about shaping the form and content of this new chapter of intersecting identities. They simply lack the will.

I continue to remain hopeful and act on the belief that all is not lost. But - this silence certainly adds to the recognition that a lot of white feminists have many more miles to go before they truly grasp what it means to see and exist in a world through an intersectional lens.

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Intersectional White Feminists: Why Are You Silent About DC's Missing Girls?

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Inserting the term "intersectional" into the name and description of your feminism to prove your progressive bona fides doesn't mean shit if your actions betray the theory. As writers here and here have stressed, the news that a viral meme stating that 14 girls of color went missing within a 24-hour timeframe last week in Washington, ...

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Is it possible for activists to manifest the values of feminism and feminist movements under an economic system that prides itself on encouraging individual men and women to amass huge profits on the backs of America's working class?

Is it possible to achieve a feminist world, a full-fledged feminist mode of existence, by promoting free market values like individualism and lifting one's self up by one's own bootstraps?

Is feminism, in other words, compatible with capitalism?
The answer is an incontestable no.
Okay, sure. Some feminists do not go beyond a limited agenda/objective of fighting to end the gender wage gap and enforcing equal pay (significant though these campaigns are within the constraints of a capitalist workforce). And some feminists translate "equality" as the equal right and opportunity, regardless of gender, to exploit and plunder marginalized, "othered" communities, whether one finds or invents them.

However, the highest form of feminist praxis, one uncompromisingly committed to overcoming gender and sexual hierarchy and creating a world where it's possible for members of all genders and sexuality to fulfill their highest potential and form loving relationships, knows in its bones that capitalism and feminism mutually exclude one another. To put it more bluntly: a society based on capitalism destroys any chance or opportunity to realize the values of a feminist orientation.

Of all the various reasons that account for this, we've compiled just a few. Take a look at these five reasons why capitalism destroys the modern feminist movement:

Related: Intersectional White Feminists: Why Are You Silent About D.C.'s Missing Girls

1.Taylor Swift and Emma Watson

Not so much these two particular (white) women, but the political tendencies embodied by the likes of Taylor Swift (singer) and Emma Watson (actor), two influential white celebrity entertainers who, on the surface, appear to hold and support feminists values like sexual agency and female unity across racial and class lines, but appear to backpedal from their positions when they're careers are in question.

Related: Don't Forget Emma Watson's Angry At People Saying The Same Thing She Said About Beyoncé

In fact, capitalism creates and deploys these sorts of iffy feminist personas. You can add the Lena Dunhams and Amy Schumers of the world to the list. And these "feminists," whether they intend to be or not, become capitalism's unwitting agents. Until finally one is forced to ask: with feminist advocates and allies like these folks, who needs enemies?

2. White Feminism Always Wins

Dig deep enough into the historical record and you'll find that capitalism always only benefits white feminists and prefers - nay, prioritizes - a general, global-wide human culture based on white identity.

Going even further, if this record suggests anything, it is that white feminists seem destined to always be the sole beneficiaries of a capitalist society, that in all areas of human life - aesthetics, education, health care, housing, employment, wealth, etc. - white feminists will always, always, find themselves winning, making out big, over their non-white counterparts.

3. When short-sighted movements like #GrabYourWallet and similar "protest with your dollars" campaigns lose their "it" factor.

Is the #GrabYourWallet anti-Trump boycott that targeted Ivanka Trump's bottom line still on, or has it fizzled out yet? It's a legitimate question. For, in capitalism, a system of human behavior that places a premium on the short-term psychic gains of sensationalism, economic boycotts such as #GrabYourWallet become a commodity like any other commodity and are only worthwhile investments when they're "in style."

4. The concept of capitalism is inherently anti-feminist (no one is equal).

If feminism is truly about creating a world based on gender equality - I mean, a genuine, multi-dimensional form of gender equality - then supporting an economic paradigm like capitalism which, in order to exist and grow, and create the conditions for its contradictions to shift and move, must manufacture inequality, is probably not the best idea.

5. Capitalism will never let the feminist movement be intersectional.

Show me a capitalist society that doesn't rely on social divisions and the antagonisms of factions of groups, each of whom view their struggles independently of one another, and I'll show you a rotten, decayed shell of an economic corpse.

As feminist movements today look to evaporate the foul aroma of white feminism and approach the work of modern feminist discourse and activism through an intersectional lens, which means rejecting certain basic divisions within the human species that are fundamental to the functionality of a free market - blacks versus whites; gays versus straights; disabled versus abled; men versus women - fighting against capitalism must become more of a mainstream priority.

Bottom line: The values that modern feminists aspire to - and work tirelessly for - will never be possible, will never be conceivable, under a capitalist regime.

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5 Ways Capitalism Destroys The Modern Feminist Movement - Wear Your Voice

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Is it possible for activists to manifest the values of feminism and feminist movements under an economic system that prides itself on encouraging individual men and women to amass huge profits on the backs of America's working class?

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Campus and Community Society and Culture

Women of Distinction honored at Leadership Conference

The 2017 Women of Distinction Award recipients were announced at the Women's Leadership Conference on April 1 at the Historic Academy of Medicine. The Woman of Distinction Award is presented each year to students, faculty, stuff, and alums who exhibit exemplary leadership (left to right): (not pictured) Errika Mallett, ENW & Associates with Anna Pinder accepting the award; Lea Ikkache, a masters student in music technology; Raksha Muthukumar, a third-year computer science student; Jillann Hertel, academic professional in Literature, Media and Communication; Dr. Rebecca Burnett, professor in Literature, Media and Communication.

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Women of Distinction honored at Leadership Conference

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Skip to content Campus and Community Society and Culture The 2017 Women of Distinction Award recipients were announced at the Women's Leadership Conference on April 1 at the Historic Academy of Medicine.

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Brittany Bryson, left, Sara Fields, and Christi Holmes, with the Jetta Corp., and Teresa Moisant, with Moisant Promotional Products, talk during the Women in Leadership Conference at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City. [Photo by Paul Hellstern, The Oklahoman]

Regardless of what industries they work in or how smart they are, most CEOs cite strong communications as the No. 1 reason for their respective successes.

That's according to a client poll of Charmaine McClarie, an executive coach in Pasadena, California, who keynoted Oklahoma City University's eighth annual Women in Leadership Conference Thursday at the Cox Convention Center.

"Always start with communicating the vision - or the outcome," McClarie said. As practice, she invited attendees to rewrite their job titles for what their goals are.

One woman's "I'm director of an engineering program" became "I place new engineers into jobs upon graduation and help them find internships along the way."

Good communicators also learn to speak in headlines to quickly seduce the eye and ear, McClarie said. "And when they speak - whether it's leaving a voice mail or presenting in a staff meeting - they answer three, must-make points: why listen, what's in it for them, and what to do about it."

Communications tips peppered the various presentations Thursday. Guest panelist and Oklahoma City medical malpractice attorney Emily Nash Kitch urged attendees to join her in eliminating the word "just" from all written and oral communications.

Sandra Quince, panel moderator and human resources lead for Bank of America in Tulsa, recommends drafting important emails with nothing in the "TO:" field in case it's accidentally sent.

"I also stay away from exclamation points and superlatives because readers can't see you or hear your tone," she said.

Quince said she uses bullet points instead of paragraphs, because paragraphs can look onerous on smartphones. And she allows no more than two, back-and-forth emails before she calls a face-to-face meeting.

Pamela Meyer, author of the book "Liespotting," never asks anyone why they did something. It puts them on the defensive, she said. Instead, she asks, "What made you feel like you wanted to do that?"

Other conference take-aways include:

On salary negotiation and more: "If you ever need a job so badly, that you won't ask for what you're worth, you're done." Freda Deskin, CEO of ASTEC Charter Schools, said she learned that from the late Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Alma Wilson. Thanks to Wilson's mentoring, Deskin said she blurted out a six-figure salary when negotiating for a former college dean's position - and she got it.

Another time, Wilson assured Deskin that she'd done the right thing when she, after she was asked to make the coffee and take minutes in a board meeting with all males, included a rotating schedule for future coffee-making and minute-taking in the minutes she subsequently mailed.

"I had second thoughts and went chasing after the mail truck to retrieve the letters, but it was too late," said Deskin, who was relieved the next meeting to be met with fresh respect and the appointed coffee maker and minutes taker doing their respective jobs.

On networking: "If I don't know at least three people in room, I figure I have work to do," Quince said.

On truth-seeking: Liars, Meyer warns, instinctively can pinpoint what victims want most, whether that's money, love, a job or something else. People, she said, need to know someone's baseline speech and mannerisms, and ask harder questions, before they wrongly accuse someone of lying, she said.

But some telltale signs include: Using formal versus informal speech, and distancing language (i.e. Bill Clinton's "I 'did not' have sex with 'that woman.'"); qualifying language such as "In all honesty" or "Believe me;" specific denials (i.e. "I did not take $20 from the cash drawer" vs. "Are you kidding me? I've never stolen anything in my life!"); use of past tense (like when Susan Smith, the South Carolina mom who drove her two young sons into a lake, said, "My children wanted me. They needed me."); soft replacement language (like touch for rape, or take for steal); stories told in chronological order versus relaying the significant things first; answering questions with questions; and going in convince mode - to which interviewers should stay quiet, Meyer said, because they'll undoubtedly hear something helpful.

On goal-setting: When she took the helm of the YMCA 14 years ago, Jan Peery, in dream sessions, encouraged her staff to shoot for the stars. One by one, every dream was reached, or naturally dismissed, she said.

Peery said she later drew inspiration to push for unimaginable heights from her son Chad Peery. A former Oklahoma City police officer, her son was paralyzed in a 2011 fight while trying to escort men from a bar but - through intensive therapy - learned to pull himself up, walk a few steps and raise his arms, before dying in a car accident four years ago.

On changing the trajectory of gender inequality: Analysts predict it will be 68 years before women on are on par with men in leadership positions nationwide and the year 2152 before there's equal pay.

In Oklahoma, for every $1 a man earns, a woman of equal skills earns 73 cents, studies show. But Donna Miller, founder of pursepower.com, says women - as the financial decision makers of their households - can speed up that change now by talking through their purchases and buying from companies where women comprise 20 percent or more of corporate boards.

"It's time for women to help themselves," Miller said. "We have more power than we realize."

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Women's leadership conference attendees learn communications tips, more

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APR 19, 2017 - Regardless of what industries they work in or how smart they are, most CEOs cite strong communications as the No. 1 reason for their respective successes. That's according to a client poll of Charmaine McClarie, an executive coach in Pasadena, California, who keynoted Oklahoma City University's eighth annual Women in Leadership Conference Thursday at the Cox Convention Center.

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bbc us election 2016: which countries ha

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US Election 2016: Which countries have already had female leaders? BBC News

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Throughout its 240 year history, the United States has been ruled by men. Hillary Clinton hopes to change that - but other countries got there first. In 1887 the first woman was elected mayor of an American town, 33 years before women gained the right to vote in the US overall.

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What is Transnational Feminism? | Fistful of Feminism [CC]

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Welcome back to Fistful of Feminism! Today I'm discussing transnational feminism for a student blog project! What is transnational feminism? How does it operate? What are the pitfalls? "Transnational feminism...represents the political and conceptual struggle by feminists to contend with globalization processes and this transcends national boundaries, immigrations, race, class, sexualities and the legacies of imperialism" - Sylvia Tamale, activist, first woman dean in the Law Faculty at Makerere University, Uganda.