The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

by Sarah Kendzior

  Rhetoric is not the same as action. But it is the disparate nature of repressive foreign dictatorships and the comparatively open media environment of the US that make the similarity in rhetoric so striking.

  Does Twitter activism matter?

  What does it mean for Twitter activism to "matter"? Four years ago, I wrote about Kyrgyzstan's use of social media during its 2010 uprising, which was dismissed by foreign commentators as unworthy of note. But it was not social media they were dismissing. Kyrgyzstanis used social media to reach other Kyrgyzstanis, but this focus on their own community made them, to outside commentators, impenetrable and irrelevant. The dismissal of Central Asian social media was in fact a dismissal of Central Asians. Western reception - and approval - was viewed as more important than the relevance of the medium for the community in question.

  "There isn't a neat separation between the online world and a separate place called the 'real world'," write activists Mariame Kaba and Andrea Smith in a thoughtful rejoinder to the Nation piece. "In the 21st century, these places are one in the same. As such the concept of 'Twitter feminism' strikes us as dismissive and probably a misnomer."

  "Twitter activism" is dismissed because the people who engage in it are dismissed - both online and on the ground in Western countries where few minorities hold positions of power. Media is one form of power, and hashtag feminism is an attempt to challenge the narratives that bolster discriminatory practices.

  Hashtag feminism makes visible what was never truly invisible, but what people refuse to see. The simultaneous sharing of personal stories is a revelatory process and a bulwark against gaslighting. Our pain matters, they say, to those who deny their pain ever existed.

  In her history "The Warmth of Other Suns", Pulitzer-prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson describes the migration of African-Americans fleeing the Jim Crow south. She notes that their migration resembled the pattern of those fleeing famine, war, and genocide, despite the fact that African-Americans were moving within their own country. This is not a distant history. The protagonists of Wilkerson's book lived in our lifetime, and the legacy of racial violence, segregation and exclusion they experienced continues into the present.

  It is difficult to confront a complex history. It is painful to acknowledge systematic injustice. It is uncomfortable to hear firsthand accounts that contradict the dominant narrative, or that undermine what many would like to believe.

  But it is easy to blame the internet.

  --Originally published February 4, 2014

  When the mainstream media is the lunatic fringe

  On January 8, 2014, Emma Keller, a journalist for The Guardian, wrote a column about a woman named Lisa Bonchek Adams. Adams has stage IV breast cancer, and Keller was annoyed.

  "As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity," complained Keller. "I couldn't stop reading - I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck - but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism. Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI?"

  Keller’s column inspired outrage among the thousands of people following Adams' Twitter account, many of them cancer patients who find solace in Adams' words. Guardian readers questioned the cruelty of believing the worst thing about pain was that it is too consistently expressed. Why had Keller not simply stopped reading the Twitter account, instead of belittling an ailing stranger? Why would The Guardian sanction a column attacking a cancer-stricken mother of three?

  But the attack on Adams had only begun.

  On January 12, Bill Keller, husband of Emma Keller and the former executive editor of the New York Times, wrote his own column chastising Adams for not dying more quietly. He accused her of "raising false hopes" for other cancer patients, and compared her active online presence unfavorably to his "father-in-law's calm death".

  Writing about cancer is not new. Under Bill Keller's tenure, numerous Times contributors penned articles about their own struggles. But these were different than Adams's Twitter account: they were sanctioned by Keller for print consumption. In Keller's world, mere mortals should not deign to tweet about their mere mortality.

  When Keller was pressed by the Times' public editor to explain himself, he did not apologize for hurting Adams or for using column space to defend his wife's ill-begotten ideas. He blamed his critics for using Twitter: "A medium [that] encourages reflexes rather than reflection."

  Keller's aversion to social media is common among media's old guard, who believe it has eroded standards of ethics and behavior. Outlets like The Atlantic regularly run pieces like "Is Google making us stupid?" or "Is Facebook making us lonely?" (It is not). "Twitter is a poisonous well of bad faith and viciousness", tweeted Nation columnist Katha Pollitt in a typical blanket condemnation.

  "The medium is the message," Marshall McLuhan famously said. In the digital age, condemning the medium is often shorthand for condemning not only the message but the messenger - and their right to speak. Twitter, which is extremely popular among young African Americans, functions as a public gathering space for marginalized groups to rally under common causes - one of which being their terrible portrayal in mainstream media.

  Old viciousness, new visibility

  The condemnation of digital media has two sides. There is a legitimate claim that digital media has given old viciousness new visibility, as demonstrated in Amanda Hess's piece on the attacks women receive for writing online. (Hess's piece neglected to include women of color, who arguably experience more vicious harassment than anyone.) Certain facets of social media - speed, anonymity, the ability to "dox" - have changed the nature of harassment, making it easier to accomplish and less likely to be redressed.

  But is the mainstream media any different in its biases and cruelty? It does not appear to be. Mainstream media cruelty is actually more dangerous, for it sanctions behavior that, were it blogged by an unknown, would likely be written off as the irrelevant ramblings of a sociopath.

  Instead, the prestige of old media gives bigoted ranting respectability. Even in the digital age, old media defines and shapes the culture, repositioning the lunatic fringe as the voice of reason.

  Shortly after the Kellers' debacle - which resulted in the removal of Emma's piece - a journalist nonchalantly announced that he had prompted the subject of his story to commit suicide. In Grantland, a publication associated with ESPN, Caleb Hannan profiled a mysterious inventor known as Dr V. During the course of Hannan's interviews with Dr V, he learned that she was transgender. Hannan threatened to out her against her will. A few days later, Dr V committed suicide.

  "Writing an eulogy for a person who, by all accounts, despised you is an odd experience," wrote Hannan, in a typically heartless and cavalier passage. Much as cancer patients condemned the Kellers, so did transgender activists condemn Hannan, for an act of cruelty most incomprehensible in that it was actually published. A woman died for a story, and that, for Grantland, was okay. A woman suffering from cancer was attacked for suffering the wrong way, and that, for the New York Times, was okay.

  It is not surprising that people lack empathy. What is surprising is that unbridled antipathy toward innocent people continues to be sanctioned in an era where fatuous arguments - and terrible ethics - are called out en masse. For critics of mainstream media cruelty, social media is a means to prevent lunacy from being accepted as logic. To the mainstream, it is mere "snark".

  Mainstream media cruelty targets those who lack power. Their crime is daring to exist. Along with cancer patients and transgender individuals, racial minorities are a frequent focus.

  Over the past year, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has argued that interracial marriage triggers the "gag reflex" of "conventional Americans" and that young black men like Trayvon Martin deserve to be viewed as suspicious (and by association, shot). This is not an unusual position - one can find similar views on white supremacist websites. But when a mainstream newspaper promotes an extreme viewpoint as normal, it he
lps make it normal. It sets parameters - "Are interracial relationships repulsive?" -that most Americans would never countenance, and forces us to take them seriously.

  This tactic is not limited to newspapers or websites. We find it in book publishing as well. Next month, professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld are set to release The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, which ranks groups by cultural superiority.

  Unsurprisingly, Chua and her husband fall into the most exalted categories: Chinese and Jews. The book is peddled as "scientific", but its hierarchy of peoples is racist propaganda with a careful omission of the word "race". Anthropology's theory of culture, which sought to debunk racial stereotypes, is now used by people like Chua to uphold them.

  The most interesting thing about Chua's book is that someone agreed to publish it. This is also the most interesting thing about Cohen, Hannan, the Kellers, or the innumerable mainstream media publishers who trade on biases most find repugnant. Some have attributed this to a search for clicks and traffic - "hate-reading" as profitable pastime. But there is a broader question here: That of legitimacy.

  Disproportionate influence

  Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has called the internet "a public sphere erected on private property". All voices can speak, but only few are heard. Amplification is tied to prestige, meaning that where you publish - and what privileges you already have - gives your words disproportionate influence.

  The terms of public debate are rarely set by the public. "Inequality" has risen to the fore in pundit discourse, but mostly in terms of whether it deserves to be debated at all, as recent columns by the Washington Post's Ezra Klein and the New York Times' David Brooks demonstrate. For a public well aware of income inequality - since they have to live with its consequences every day - such debates reflect an inequality of their own: A paucity of understanding among our most prominent voices.

  In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters. People for whom these problems have no alternative but to matter - for they structure the limitations of their lives - are locked out of the discussion.

  In January 2014, Suey Park, an Asian-American activist, was asked by the Huffington Post to help curate an "Asian Voices" section that would bring prominence to underrepresented Asian-Americans. She was thrilled - until she was informed her contributors would not be paid a dime. Disgusted, Park rejected their offer and took to Twitter with the hashtag #ExploitedVoices.

  The hashtag was meant to highlight how minorities are priced out of journalism but it aptly captures the ethos of our times. In the mainstream media, exploited voices are meant to be seen - and criticized, and chastised, and caricatured for clicks and cash. But rarely are they heard.

  Originally published January 22, 2014

  PART VI: BEYOND FLYOVER COUNTRY

  U.S. foreign policy’s gender gap

  The dearth of women in US foreign policy is a subject of continual interest, mostly because it never changes. According to a 2011 survey by policy analyst Micah Zenko, women make up less than 30 percent of senior positions in the government, military, academy, and think tanks.

  As of 2008, 77 percent of international relations faculty and 74 percent of political scientists were men. In international relations literature, women are systematically cited less than men.

  The majority of foreign policy bloggers and vast majority of op-ed writers - with estimates ranging from 80 to 90 percent - are men. When lists of intellectuals are made, women tend to appear in a second-round, outrage-borne draft. Female intellectuals gain prominence through tales of their exclusion. They are known for being forgotten.

  People talk about the glass ceiling, but it is really a glass box. Everyone can see you struggling to move. There is an echo in the glass box as your voice fails to carry. You want to talk about it, but that runs the risk of making all people hear.

  Balancing career with motherhood

  Before the summer of 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter was best known as an international relations theorist and advisor to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She is now best known for detailing the difficulty of balancing her career with motherhood in her Atlantic cover story "Why Women Still Can't Have It All".

  The essay describes Slaughter's decision to resign her State Department post for her job at Princeton, which allowed her more time with her children, and argues that the inability of women to rise to power has less to do with a lack of ambition than a lack of structural support. It is the most-shared article in the Atlantic's history.

  Obviously the success of the article does not diminish Slaughter's achievements in international relations. But younger women in the field could likely not publish such a personal piece and remain respected. The most radical thing about Slaughter's article is that she wrote it at all.

  Slaughter, the all-star, took one for the team (although who the team is, given Slaughter's elite circles, remains up for debate.)This was possible because her accomplishments already trumped her gender in terms of public reputation, if not in private reality. She was seen as a person, so she could afford to be seen as a woman.

  Slaughter's article resonated with many younger women trying to succeed in competitive fields. But her own field, international relations, remains one of the most lopsided. Year after year, the imbalance is decried.

  What accounts for women's exclusion? There are two problems.

  The first is perception, which translates into respect. The second is money, which translates into opportunity. The first problem is a gender problem (and a race problem). But the second problem is shared by everyone - or almost everyone. It is the "almost" that is itself the problem.

  A self-selecting community

  The foreign policy community is suffering from what national security fellow Faris Alikhan calls "credential creep". Credential creep, he writes, is the stockpiling of prestigious degrees and experiences to differentiate oneself from the increasingly esteemed competition. But these accolades come at a price too high for the average person to pay.

  An MA can run a person tens of thousands into debt, and the expectation of unpaid labor - whether in internships, fellowships or publishing - limits participation. Cities of power like DC have become unaffordable for most people. As a result, Alikhan argues, the US foreign policy community is looking a lot like the Song dynasty.

  "The next generation of foreign policy leaders is socialized in a hyper-competitive bubble, while voices from lower-income and minority groups are seldom heard since they can't afford to compete," he writes. "In essence, those who aspire to affect one of the most important aspects of our nation - our relationship to the rest of the world - are part of a self-selecting community of those whose families are wealthy enough for them to develop credentials and connections."

  Money, not gender, is the biggest barrier to a career in international relations, or any prestige industry. It eliminates the bulk of the talent pool from the start. Building a career in policy often means not only living on little income, but paying your way around the world.

  Nowadays, candidates for internships at the Economist must be able to fly to London merely to interview. Interning at the United Nations means relocating temporarily, unpaid, to expensive cities. Foreign policy was always an elite profession, but the cost of entry has skyrocketed.

  There are ways around this. Writing, for example, is an inexpensive way to get out your ideas and build a reputation. But here a woman runs into the second problem: Perception.

  List of indignities

  Every woman working in an intellectual field has her list of indignities. Mine include being called a "mom blogger" by USA Today, despite having never written about my children; having questions about my research directed to the male scholars sitting next to me at conferences; and the constant assumption that I study "women from Central Asia". (I reply that I study people from Central Asia, and the
n awkwardly explain that women fall into this category.)

  Hiding behind a computer screen seems an effective way to dodge gender bias. Sometimes the reader bypasses your byline and accidentally respects you, culminating in an email of praise.

  But other times you find what political scientist Charli Carpenter described, in the midst of a blogging controversy, as a "power dynamic to engage in actual, deliberate, blatant, sexist, sexualized, public disparagement of me and other female scholars and public intellectuals over the years as a way of dismissing our ideas when we dare to make a mistake or are simply politically unpopular".

  On the internet, everyone knows you are a woman.

  The online atmosphere Carpenter depicts has been commented upon by many female writers, but endured quietly by more. To discuss how you are negatively perceived forces people to see you though your detractor's eyes. To discuss sexism is to invite pity, to be reduced, even in support, to something less than what you are. When you work in the realm of ideas and trade in the currency of respect, this is a tough balance to pull off - and it goes hand in hand with the tough balance Slaughter describes of career and family.

  Parents of both genders are discriminated against in any field that requires unpaid work, inflexible hours and frequent travel. But it is a simple truth that mothers bear these burdens more. They pay the highest financial toll, turning down opportunities as the cost of childcare soars and salaries stagnate. They also endure a greater stigma for discussing it.

  In the glass box, a statement of fact sounds like a complaint. In a tough job market, a complaint can be a career killer. Discussing gender bias can be mistaken as a plea for tokenism. It seems safer to downplay structural problems - and the subjective subtleties of discrimination - for a more uplifting take.

  Breaking down barriers

  What results is an argument that women bring something special to foreign affairs that necessitates their inclusion - not as people, but as women. Arguing that women should be hired because, well, that seems fair, lacks the imperative force needed to undermine gender hierarchies and economic structures. Instead, the grounds for exclusion are marketed as virtue.