Thoughts on creativity and judgment

On BART last night I was sitting next to a woman who seemed to be writing a blog or journal. I couldn’t help reading what was on her screen, which I realized was incredibly rude on one hand, but on the other, I feel like if you’re going to type on your computer on BART, you can’t necessarily make any special claim to privacy. The thing was that this woman was not a fabulous writer, or better to say that her writing was not that polished, but she was very engrossed in it, spending a lot of time getting it right, and I found the subject matter compelling in a certain way, and I kept sneaking peeks to see if she had written any more.

This experience made me really think about what it means to write “well.” What makes me hunger for this woman’s next rough-hewn sentence, while something much more finely crafted can leave me cold? If I want to know what comes next, isn’t that the most important thing, more important than whether the adjectives are perfectly chosen or the metaphors scintillating?

Earlier today, I was trying to break down, in writing, what I found disappointing in someone’s radio piece. It didn’t challenge me, I said. It raised important issues but didn’t give particular insight into them, or suggest ways of looking at them that listeners might not have thought of themselves. The commentator reported that someone could not find “appropriate” clothing for his daughter, but didn’t delve into what would be appropriate.

I don’t know if the person I gave that feedback to found it at all helpful, but it was helpful to me, to have to get really concrete and specific about what makes a piece work for me. At the same time, I realize how subjective this standard is. Is there such a thing as writing which is objectively “bad” or “good”, or is there only writing one person likes or doesn’t like? This is hardly a new question, but it’s one that’s very much on my mind because I am once again knuckling down to the process of sending out my novel, this time to small feminist or lesbian publishers. As I steel myself for the inevitable flurry of “Thanks, but not right for our list” replies, I can’t help wondering, how many rejections does it take to tell you your book is no good? I know all the stories about John Grisham getting rejected however many times, “Star Wars” getting turned down by every studio, Jane Austen recently being rejected by every agent in Britain. But the fact is, Grisham’s writing is actually pretty bad, though some of his stories are engaging. Really, he could use some better editing. Jane Austen was a genius at capturing the ironies of her time, but despite the obsession with remaking movies based on her novels, it’s not very surprising that in 2009, novels written in that style get a pass.

If I can’t score a publisher, and end up self-publishing online, am I a failed writer? How many people have to read your self-published work before you get to climb out of that particular category? Or is the only failed writer one who stops writing? I know that’s the established answer, but I always get this nagging feeling that writing that is not read by anyone but one’s close friends is fairly useless in the world, that if no one wants to read what I’m writing, my time is better spent doing things people do want – whether it’s making money to give to charities or organizing demonstrations or giving parents a break from their kids.

Okay, but maybe this woman sitting next to me on BART thinks no one wants to read her writing. Yet it’s obviously not true, because I wanted to read it. Maybe she will never post it on a blog or send it to a publisher, because she assumes it’s not good enough. Maybe she will read it at a writing group, and people will gently suggest that it’s not quite there yet; maybe she will send it out and get polite letters from publishers saying it’s not right for them. And maybe she’ll put it away and decide that no one wants to read her writing, so she should spend her time seeing more clients or getting another degree. And the world will be poorer for lack of her writing.

My friend Steve wrote last week that his goal is to write something that approaches the best things he has read. So what if he never gets there? Not to say he won’t, but that’s a high standard. If his writing is only okay, but people who read his book enjoy it – which I did – did he succeed or fail? What if he never tries to publish it because he never thinks it’s ready? A guy I used to work with worked on a novel for something like 25 years, from when he got out of college, or even longer. And he kept revising and refining it, and finally he sent out a few chapters, didn’t get any responses, and then a few years ago, he died. And I swore that wouldn’t be my life, but how can I say that his effort was more wasted than that of someone like James Patterson, who has a factory grinding out a dozen formulaic best sellers a year under his name?

If I spend three hours writing a flier and no one who gets it takes any action, did I waste my time, as well as the people who spent time handing it out? If we hold a vigil to stop U.S. Aid to Israel or shut down Guantanamo, and no one converts to our cause, did we waste our time? For some reason, I can see the usefulness of things like those, despite the objective evidence of their futility, while I can't seem to value my own creative expression independent of other people's judgments. I don't usually make those same judgments about other people's efforts, though sometimes I might seem to. Certainly I feel that Tom, the guy who worked on the same novel for his whole adult life, spent his time better than some of my current coworkers, who spend all their non-working time (and most of their work time) being depressed and wishing they could get it together to write a novel. On the other hand, I can't help feeling like people who garden are using their time better than any of us, but if I published my novel - even if it wasn't any better than the ones people didn't publish - I would not feel that way.

Okay, enough of this not-so-scintillating brooding.

Our Daughters, Our Selves

Last weekend, I went to a Radical Queer Convergence in Chicago. The first day, I went to the women's caucus meeting. There were probably 100 women there, pretty much all of them no more than half my age. Things started out slowly but pretty soon they were sharing stories from their growing up, interactions with their moms, with their friends, with guys. The discussion turned to harassment, and one woman said that whenever she tells her radical friends she's been hassled or grabbed inappropriately on the street or in her building, they ask, "What did you do?" and then proceed to tell her what she should have done. Another young woman said, "I have never told anyone this, but I was visiting in another city, and I was supposed to stay with some friends, but I was locked out. So I ended up going home with a guy and he raped me." She said that if she had had her car, she wouldn't have been hanging out on the street and wouldn't have needed to go somewhere with a guy. Now, she said, she drives her car and her radical biking guy friends rag her about not being green enough.

The next topic was body image. One woman after another talked about how her mom put her in Weight Watchers at 10. Another reported that when she came home from college, where she eats one meal a day for lack of money, her mom criticized her for eating too much at home. A Persian woman said that when she was in high school, her grandmother demanded she get a nose job. My mind immediately went to my sister, who saved up from the day she got her first job to get her nose "fixed" – the Semitic woman's answer, apparently, to cultural dis-ease. (Someone later told me that Iran has the highest proportion of nose jobs in the world.)

A rather square-jawed white woman sitting next to the Persian woman was the next to speak. Her voice trembled a little as she said that when she was fifteen, her parents made her get an operation where they broke her jaw and pushed her teeth back to correct the overbite that years of braces had failed to resolve. Now, she said, she has no feeling in her lower lip. She had taken it for granted, she said, until recently, when she started to wish she could feel her mouth. She didn't want the operation, but her parents insisted until she finally agreed.

I was sitting there thinking, "That's one of the most horrible stories I ever heard," at the same time wondering how it was any different from the other woman's grandmother insisting she get an operation where they broke her nose. And then another woman said quietly, "Oh, my parents made me get that operation when I was fifteen too, after nine years of braces." Doing the math, I thought, "So this girl got braces when she was six? But you don't even have your adult teeth then. Could that possibly be WHY her jaw never developed correctly (if in fact, there is one "correct" way for a jaw to develop)?" She too, she said, couldn't feel her lip; she too didn't want to get the operation. She had never talked to anyone about it, feeling it was her private shame. As I was contemplating the unlikely possibility that two women in the same relatively small gathering had the same rare operation, when the woman next to me mumbled, "I had that too." "Can you feel your lip?" I asked her. She shook her head.

Okay, so this hideous form of child abuse is obviously rampant among a certain class of white people, or maybe more widely than that. Why hadn't I ever heard about it before? Where's the women's movement on this? We scream about clitoridectomy in Africa, and we should, but this barbarism is happening in our own front yards. Did I miss the issue of Ms. and the many Katha Pollitt columns in The Nation where they exposed this epidemic of mutilation? (No, is the answer. I just searched Ms. Magazine online, feminist.com, and kathapollitt.org for "maxiofacial surgery," which this particular travesty is called, and came up completely blank.) And while I was sitting thinking about this, another woman said, "Well my parents made me get an operation when I was fourteen, because I sweated too much." "Oh, yes, I had that too!" came a chorus – two or three other women had had sweat glands removed, presumably so they would only glow as women are supposed to. (When I was young, they used to say, "Horses sweat, men perspire and women glow." But I, who have always been a profuse sweater (not to be confused with a cashmere sweater), thought it was just a saying.)

I felt like an anthropologist, learning about an alien culture. In the past, I've tended to be angry at young women either for not being feminists, or for misrepresenting Second Wave feminism and claiming everything good about it for the Third Wave, or for not knowing or not respecting their history. But hearing these young women talking to each other for the first time about these violations of their personal rights, I felt angry at myself and other Second Wave feminists. I feel we have failed these young women, nearly all of whom seem to identify as feminists; it's their moms who don't.

They are reinventing the consciousness raising group, but they don't know that's what they are doing, because they never heard of consciousness raising groups. They don't know that's how Second Wave feminism got started. We didn't pass it on – we didn't have it to pass on, because we stopped doing it. I, in fact, never got to be in a CR group, because they were already passé by the time I was in college (circa 1977), and these young women's moms are probably just about my age. Nevertheless, I thought that every girl was being taught in school that sexual assault is not her fault, that being pro-sex is not an invitation to rape, that she has the right to control her body. My fifteen years in Women Against Rape, which ended ten years ago, were dedicated to ensuring that in San Francisco, but these young women did not grow up in San Francisco. They grew up in places like Ohio, where I went to college, and Maryland, where my sister raised her two kids. They reported having abstinence only sex education, consisting of a teacher drawing a cartoon condom on the board and explaining how the microbes go through it to give you AIDS.

Of course, this is not all the fault of feminists. Feminism didn't lose ground because of its own failings, any more than the Black, Chicano or Puerto Rican Liberation movements did. Every progressive movement has been pushed back over the last twenty years, and feminism has been subject to an unrelenting backlash nearly since it began. And of course, it is because of feminism and other liberation movements that that women's caucus was happening at all. Perhaps, history is cyclical and these young women, having accidentally unearthed the CR group, will share their discovery with other young women and they will create the Fourth Wave to challenge the particular system of repression bequeathed to them by their mothers, the kind that says you can be president, almost, as long as you don't talk too loud or eat like a normal person.

Where's the Market for Feminism?

Now that the death sentence of our women’s radio show has been temporarily reprieved, we have been thinking and talking a lot about what we want to do with it. Especially, we’re talking about what we can do and want to do to boost our listenership, since management’s main objection to the show is that, as they put it, “no one listens to it.”

Of course, one question that springs to mind is how do they know who is listening and who isn’t? The answer seems to be primarily from hits on the website, and that in itself might skew the results. According to a 2005 study by the Pew Research Center, men are faster to adopt new internet technologies, though women in most age groups spend more time online. In the 2005 study, women made up only 22% of those who downloaded podcasts, which was a very new technology at that time. Women seem to have made up a lot of ground over the last few years, and at least one study has women making up a majority of online listeners to public radio, but if the people I know are any indication – and they are at least a reasonable indicator of who might be interested in the issues that I cover – women are less likely to be in jobs that enable them to listen to the radio all day online. Geeks (otherwise known as IT professionals), for instance, are certainly listening to more internet radio during the day than schoolteachers or social workers. At my job eight of nine staff in IT are men, and the woman is the trainer. I decided that making a generalization based on nine people in one office might be considered a little unscientific, even for me, so I went online to see if my impressions were accurate. The National Center for Women in Information Technology reported that as of March 2008, women accounted for only 27 percent of the U.S. IT workforce, while making up over half of all professionals. In fact, according to the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) Taskforce on Workforce and Education's 2003 study, the gender gap in computer professions is widening, while other gaps are shrinking. “In 1984, 35.8% of all computer science degrees were awarded to women, but only 28.4% in 1996. Looking earlier in the pipeline, the College Board reports that only 17% of those taking the Advanced Placement test for Computer Science were female.” (http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/career/article.php/1564501)

By contrast, 98% of kindergarden and preschool teachers, 79% of elementary and middle school teachers, and 83% of social workers are women.

Okay, so those are some interesting facts to mull over, and in fact maybe do some programming about, assuming we have a program. But in the long run, they are neither here nor there, because if people aren’t going to listen to us, even I have to admit that maybe we shouldn’t be on the air. After all, we’re not doing all this work just to amuse ourselves. If no one wants to hear what we have to say, no matter how brilliant it is, we might as well save ourselves the trouble and do something else.

So I go back to the question, why aren’t people listening to us? And more importantly, what are they listening to? I decided that maybe I should listen to some popular shows to get ideas. So I thought, okay, what are feminist radio or television shows that are popular? And that was when I had the epiphany – there are none! And moreover, there have NEVER been any! Is that possible?

I mean, there are shows that have feminist hosts, including Oprah, Rosie O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow and Ellen DeGeneres. I would guess that even Amy Goodman and Terry Gross consider themselves feminists, though they sure don’t show it in their interviews, more than 70% of which are with men (more on that another time – the Democracy Now! survey 2008 is on the way, along with my survey of the last year and a quarter of The Nation). There are shows like “The View,” that pit conservative women against liberal ones. But there are no shows that focus on women’s issues, even loosely defined, unless you include the cat-fight, nails and hairstyles shows or the pop culture, gossipy ones. Oprah probably does more segments on serious issues of concern to women than anyone, but she also takes care to keep it non-threatening to the guys, and don’t get me started on her obsession with dieting.

The book Women and Journalism, by Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner and Carole Fleming (2 Brits and a Yank, accounting for the strange spellings), contains only this short statement on the subject, “US experiments in feminist radio have been relatively sparse, although the left-wing ‘progressive’ network WBAI [she means Pacifica] has aired feminist programmes, as have assorted college and university radio stations. Many of these have emphasized music and poetry rather than news, and so, strictly speaking, they are not key to the history of journalism….”

So my first reaction is just sheer shock, that in all this time, over 40 years, since the second wave of feminism began, with the explosion of women into nearly every field, that there has not even been one attempt to capitalize on that energy with a regular national broadcast.

My next reaction is to get pissed off at women, who fail each other on so many occasions. I think about all the women’s businesses we used to have here in the Bay, which went under largely because of our fickleness and lack of support. Bookstores Old Wives Tales, A Woman’s Place, Mama Bears; Woman Crafts West, which sold lovely local jewelry, pottery and cards; bars Ollie’s, Amelia’s, Maud’s, Peg’s Place, A Little More; cafes Artemis and the Brick Hut; newspapers Feminist News, Lesbian/Contradiction and Sojourner (which was from the East Coast); I could really go on and on. And I think, well our little radio show won’t be the first or the last casualty of this curious inability to maintain a feminist version of brand loyalty.

Finally I get around to thinking, well what about looking beyond those who identify as feminists, and thinking about women. What would draw women to listen to a show that is not going to do segments on hair and diet, that is not going to be the public radio version of The View? What about this casually mentioned fact, that “many of these” feminist shows have emphasized music and poetry? We have done some shows that had a lot of poetry and they were never my favorites, because I don’t love poetry, but I think they were pretty well received.

The best solutions I can come up with are:

1) that we try to develop ourselves as a kind of Democracy Now for women. That is, we listen to what DN! does and try to do it too, but always looking for women with interesting things to say and a women’s/gendered perspective on the issues of the day. This is what my coproducer Rivian has been saying for a while. We obviously couldn’t do it by ourselves, because we’re a tiny little volunteer women’s collective, while DN has eight or nine full-time producers, plus interns, so we would need to join forces with all the other embattled women’s media projects out there, which I am pleased to say we have already started exploring.

2) that we do more pieces on relationships – not stupid self-help ones, but serious pieces that look at the dynamics of women’s relationships with each other, with men, in lesbian couples, with parents, in the workplace … Just in my casual research for this blog, I discovered a couple things that seem interesting to do interviews about, including a survey about bullying in the workplace which reports, among other things, that 37% of workers have been bullied, 57% of targets are women, 60% of bullies are men but women who bully choose other women as targets 70% of the time. I know that months ago, I mentioned wanting to do a piece about how women who are long-term single (like me) have to make new friends every few years, as our friends disappear into couples. And the women I mentioned it to immediately said, “Oh, yes, I’m really interested in that,” and volunteered their own stories on the topic. More recently, I’ve been thinking about my mom, who was only 54 when my dad died, which is 4 years older than I am now. She has now been single exactly as long as she was married and she’s had to create new circles of friends several times because so many of her friends have died out.

3) that we try to find a way to look at celebrity culture in a way that is not mainstream or mean-spirited. Katha Pollitt, the wonderful feminist columnist for The Nation, mentioned that when I interviewed her as something that women are very interested in, that left media typically won’t devote time or space to. When Eryn (a young African American woman who works with Women’s Mag) interviewed a couple of her friends just before the inauguration, one of the things they talked about was the Obamas’ relationship and contrasted it to Coretta King and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s relationship. Something I would never have thought of, but it was quite interesting and not dippy. I know a lot of really smart, critical, progressive women who are really drawn to celebrity gossip, and I think it’s something we should try to harness.

Okay, enough for now, if you have any feedback on any of this, please let me hear from you.

BTW, the agent I’ve been working with on my novel for the last two years just told me that she can’t do anything with it for the foreseeable future because one of her junior agents is ill and she had to take over all her clients. I’m getting ready to start combing The Writer’s Market again, and sending out queries, but if anyone has any suggestions, they’ll be most welcome.

On the Silence of the Left and the Spectre of Fascism

More than any previous time in my life, I feel like I’m living in a schizophrenic community. Half the people I know are in rapture at what Obama has done in his short time in office. And it’s not just mainstream people who feel that way – some of the fiercest left-wing activists I know fall into that category. They talk about his initiatives in arms control and climate change and softening the embargo on Cuba. Half of the other half are deep in loathing of Obama and everyone around him. Armed with the daily litanies of his failings on KPFA and Democracy Now, they point to his appointments of Clintonites and Bushites to high positions, his failure to do anything to step the tide of corporate looting of everything we have left, his refusal to consider single-payer health care and of course, his stepped-up bombing of civilians in Afghanistan and refusal to condemn even the worst Israeli atrocities.

Then there’s the other quarter, epitomized by my coworker. He sways back and forth like a pendulum, depending on which left-wing talk show he’s listening to at the moment. These are the people whose minds and ideologies tell them one thing, and whose emotions and perceptions point them in another direction. Which is to say, they love Obama, while being ambivalent about his policies. As one friend put it, “I still have a crush on him.”

And then there’s the mainstream news, which is having a love affair both with the man and his beautiful family including now their perfect dog, and even more with the idea of him, and what they believe it says about race in our country.

So while I’m trying to navigate these pretty unfamiliar streets, figuring out where exactly I’m wanting to go, along comes the Tea Party movement and the wave of secessionist bills passed in state legislatures in the last week. Yeah, that’s right. Not just Texas and South Carolina, from whom we expect such things, but 28 states including California, are entertaining bills to declare their “sovereignty.” And it’s being kind of calmly reported in the media, pretty much ignored by KPFA which is busy bringing on Scott Horton and Michael Ratner and others to talk about what we already know about the torture memos, and no one is taking seriously the fact that for better or worse, we have our first Black president and for the first time in 150 years, we have major right-wing protests and secessionist movements across the country.

Now it’s true that none of the tea parties were very big, and it’s true that without Fox News, they would have been barely a blip, but the fact is that we do have Fox News and the mainstream media promoted the tea parties as well. Remember, the first lunch counter sit-in had six people participating.

What am I trying to say here? Just that I fear that while the left is busy convincing ourselves – with plenty of help from Obama and his peeps – that the current administration represents no change from the last, the right is capitalizing on what is widely perceived as a sea change. I remember the coup that brought Schwarzenegger to power in California, and it was a time very much like this. We had a conservative Democratic old-time politician in office, after 16 years of right-wing republican administrations. The left sat on our hands because we rightly hated Davis, who was pro-death penalty and pro-corporate, but we also didn’t believe that the right would actually succeed in removing him from office, and when they did, we didn’t believe it would be as bad as it has been. And now we have a situation where a huge Democratic majority in the legislature can’t pass a budget without giving massive hideous concessions to so-called “moderate” republicans. And I’m really quite worried that the left is going to sit around talking about how Obama is just like Bush while the fascists are mobilizing to prove us very very wrong, and when it’s all over, we’re going to be asking “How did we get here?”

International Women's Day

Sunday was the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, and I asked my friends to do a few simple things to commemorate this special day.

First, I have some good news. Although KPFA management was not willing to put Women's Magazine back on the air before the end of April, they did offer us the opportunity to produce a special which aired Sunday evening from 9:00 to 10:00 p.m. My friend Rivian Berlin and I produced a program on the history of International Women's Day. It includes great interviews with feminist historian Eileen Boris and long-time local activists Aileen Hernandez and Judith Mirkinson. It also presents an excerpt from an incredible documentary by our friend Malihe Razazan on the International Women's Day protests following the Iranian Revolution in 1979 - the first resistance to the imposition of Islamic law in that country, led by left-wing women who had supported the overthrow of the Shah and U.S. imperialism, but were deeply disappointed by the turn toward theocracy.

Please, wherever you are, show KPFA that you appreciate women's programming by listening to the show at http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/49006. And if you like it, ask your friends to listen as well.

The second thing is this: In my writing class last week, a woman told us she was reading The Feminine Mystique. The teacher asked who the author was, and she said she couldn't remember. I said, "Betty Friedan," and it turned out that only two of us in the class had ever heard of her. Then I mentioned that I was doing a show for International Women's Day and the woman who was reading Friedan asked, "When is that?" So I told them and I asked who had ever heard of International Women's Day and only one person had!

So, I asked my friend Lisa, who's a wonderful designer, to make a sticker that says "Today is International Women's Day" with a website for more info, and I'm attaching it. I asked people to wear them on Sunday so people would ask them about IWD, and I printed out a bunch of them to give to people I saw over the weekend. People loved them. I've uploaded it here, so bookmark it for next year. They're formatted for Avery 5196 labels, if you happen to have any lying around, but if not, you can print it on a piece of paper and cut it out and pin it to your jacket.

For those of you who would like to learn more about the history of IWD, go to
www.internationalwomensday.com. Happy IWD!

Chomsky responds:

Thanks for the generous words.

I don't see the disagreement about investment. I just looked at the transcript, and what I said is: "divestment became a proper tactic after years, decades of education and organizing, to the point where Congress was legislating against trade, corporations were pulling out, and so on. That's what's missing: the education and organizing which makes it an understandable move. And, in fact, if we ever got to that point, you wouldn't even need it, because the US could be brought in line with international opinion."

The time-line seems very close to what you sketch below. There was no epiphany, and it wasn't sudden. It was a long-drawn out process, which by the late 70s and early 80s had gained enormous popular support, elite support as well. Pressure for the Sullivan principles was in 1977, but the movement really didn't take off until the 1980s. That was after decades of serious educational and organizing work.

However, there is a fundamental difference between South Africa and Israel. In the case of South Africa, the goal was to undermine Apartheid. In the case of Israel, the goal is to end the decisive military, diplomatic, and ideological US support for Israel -- more narrowly, to bring the US to support the international consensus on a two-state settlement that the US had blocked, unilaterally, for over 30 years. If that happens, Israel will have to go along. So BDS directed against Israel is a very seriously misleading tactic, which absolves the US, the major actor in this affair.

If organizing and education reached the level of opposition to Apartheid, BDS would be beside the point (as well as misdirected), because it would by then be able to shift US rejectionism.

Noam Chomsky

Ask Chomsky to Think Again About Divestment

Dear Professor Chomsky,

I’ve long been a huge admirer of yours, and I remain so. I heard you on Democracy Now this morning and really appreciated how clearly you articulated the gap between what President Obama said and what needs to happen in order to have a genuine and just peace.

On the issue of divestment, however, I really must take issue with your statement. You are right, of course, that education and organizing are necessary for a divestment campaign to be effective and comprehensible. But you are wrong to imply that the movement for divestment from South Africa did not begin until that organizing and education had already taken place. You are helping to perpetuate the myth that everyone in the U.S. and other countries in the global North always opposed apartheid and came to the divestment solution simultaneously, in some kind of epiphany. And this is very harmful to the young people who are now getting involved in the movement for justice in Palestine, making them feel that they are up against insurmountable odds.

I well remember the movement for justice in Southern Africa. I entered college in the fall of 1976, months after the Soweto uprising, and the first wave of campus divestment actions consumed my college years. I remember sitting in lecture halls and listening to well-reasoned, liberal professors explaining why divestment was the wrong tactic, that it would be morally wrong for Oberlin College to divest, that we needed to use constructive engagement. I remember that the U.S. government’s position was that the ANC was a terrorist organization and that Mandela needed to renounce violence before the South African government could be pressured to negotiate.

We were largely unsuccessful during that period, as you will recall. It was not until ten years later, 1986, that colleges began divesting in large numbers – only three years before the fall of the apartheid regime. The struggle for divestment, boycott and sanctions against South Africa took a very long time, and the U.S. government and major U.S. institutions joined it very late.

Yes, we who want justice in Palestine need to do education and organizing, but divestment/boycott itself is a tool for education and organizing. When you ask a church, union or college to divest from Israel, you are of course going to have teach-ins and panels and all manner of activities to educate people about why divestment is necessary. When you ask consumers not to buy L’Oreal or Sara Lee, you are going to hand out fliers and pamphlets and do street theater to show them what the connection is between their hair care products and tanks and checkpoints.

As one of the most influential intellectuals in this country, and one of those who have done the most to bring the issue of U.S./Israeli colonialism into the light, you are in a unique position to influence how people think about this issue. Therefore, I urge you to carefully consider the issue of divestment/boycott and why you are reluctant to embrace what have unquestionably been the most effective pressure and organizing tactics of our time.

A South African friend wrote to me the other day, “here in South Africa, we can’t find any white people who voted for the apartheid ... sometimes I wonder if apartheid was just a figment of our collective imaginations ... inshallah zionsim will suffer the same fate.”

I believe we can make it happen. The first step is reminding people that yes, apartheid did exist and yes, people did support it and yes, people did refuse to oppose it vigorously and yes, all that changed because people refused to be deterred.

With sincere admiration for all you have done,

Kate Raphael