Daily Archives: August 22, 2021

The City of London will be the target of a new round of Extinction Rebellion protests aimed at highlighting the role of high finance in the climate crisis, starting next week and carrying on for at least a fortnight.

Thousands of protesters are expected to take part in a series of actions in the City, details of which are under wraps. These will target businesses headquartered in the Square Mile financial district, and will include site occupations. There are no plans to disrupt public transport, as has occurred during some previous actions.

Extinction Rebellion said the protests would be joyous and have a celebratory air while highlighting the billions poured into fossil fuels and high-carbon activities by financiers based in Londons financial districts.

Businesses listed on the London Stock Exchange or financed from the UK account for about 15% of global carbon emissions, according to the activist group, and if Londons financial markets were a country they would be the worlds ninth biggest emitter of carbon.

Anneka Sutcliffe, an Extinction Rebellion member, said: We expect the protests to be disruptive. The focus will be on the City, where the power holders are.

She said at least 2,000 people had recently signed up to the group, and she estimated that nearly half of the protesters likely to take part were new to the movement.

Most employees in the City have been working from home throughout the past year owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, but many have been coming under pressure to return to the office.

The protests will start with a rally in Trafalgar Square on Monday morning, 23 August. This is the anniversary of the Haitian slave rebellion of 1791 and the international day for the remembrance of the slave trade and its abolition. XR said its events were also intended to show solidarity with people in the global south who are worst affected by climate breakdown.

Esther Stanford-Xosei, a co-founder of XRs International Solidarity Network, said: [The power of international finance in promoting fossil fuels] is the promulgation of Empire 2.0. We have the responsibility to hold governments and corporations to account, especially corporations registered on the London Stock Exchange. People in the global south have shown the way to live sustainably.

She said the aim was to show how the world could be changed by ordinary people coming together. We are not powerless you have more power than you think, she said. We are the collective power to be the change that we need.

The government and its management of Cop26, the UN climate talks due to be held this November in Glasgow, are also key targets. Jon Lynes, 93, a veteran of Extinction Rebellion protests which have often featured retired people who have said they have more freedom to take part in protests where they may be arrested said: This is a critical moment for our government to do something. But they have cut down overseas aid while increasing armed forces spending, and dithered over a coalmine in Cumbria and new oilfields. It is really a disgrace. This is why now is the moment [for protest].

Tim Crosland, of the pressure group Plan B, who was found in contempt of court for revealing early a supreme court ruling relating to Heathrows third runway plans, said: We are targeting the City because these are the kind of people who are the real contributors to this crisis.

He spoke out against recent claims by members of the Conservative party that reaching net zero emissions by 2050 the governments target, set out in law would cost too much money. Its embarrassing to claim that it is too expensive to save young people and our country and our planet. This is extremist ideology from some parts of the Conservative party, he said. They believe science will have to give way to the market, but it is not going to work that way, its the other way round. The economy will have to adapt to the science.

A City of London police spokesperson said: The City of London police is working closely with the Metropolitan Police Service and British Transport Police to appropriately and proportionately respond to protest activity in London over the next fortnight and a policing plan is in place. There will be a greater number of officers deployed to ensure balance between the right to protest and the rights of Londoners to go about their daily lives.

The rest is here:

Extinction Rebellion targets City of London over climate role - The Guardian

IN JUNE 2021, cycling for the first time to my London workplace in the tailwind of two national lockdowns, I indulged in noting the irony in a banner outside the British Library, advertising its exhibition Unfinished Business: The Fight for Womens Empowerment. The exhibition had been due to run until February 2021 but was extended in light of COVID-19 to run until August. As such, the show itself remained unfinished, yet the irony was more a function of the business implied. Among the pandemics exposures and amplifications had been the limits of Anglo-Americas mainstream feminist project. While feminism thus described is imagined as a story of linear progress, most womens lives in the last 50 years have only been getting worse.

It is true that the freedom to vote and the right to equal pay have been enjoyed by more than the class of women closest to men in the racial-capitalist order, yet the creaking of neoliberal infrastructure under the weight of the COVID-19 crisis has sounded of how women at the intersection of poverty and racialization are progressively trampled by austerity, privatization, and the degradation of labor. Meanwhile, in the Global South, climate change and Western wars have trashed the notion of womens lives as improving toward a point of equality. If feminism, as the dominant discourse would have us understand it, still looks like unfinished business, it is perhaps, as Rafia Zakaria writes in the opening chapter of Against White Feminism, because the women who are paid to write about feminism, lead feminist organizations, and make feminist policy in the Western world are white and upper-middle-class.

The feminism wrought in the interests of such women is, of course, one of selective liberation rather than genuine equality, a reformist approach to hierarchical systems rather than the dismantling our moment requires. Zakaria is not the first to inform feminist readers that interventions that simply add Black, Asian, or Brown women to existing structures have not worked. She is arguably, however, one of relatively few writers to have done so from within the existing structure of mainstream publishing. Much of her work as a columnist is split between the general audience for Pakistans Dawn newspaper and the somewhat more niche readership of the USs left-wing Baffler magazine. Against White Feminism, however, was sold by Zakarias agent to cater to the audiences of both W. W. Norton in the United States and multinational conglomerate Penguin Random House in the United Kingdom. The book attests to a hope that, while the inclusion of Black and Brown women in a hegemonically white media circuit will do nothing to divert its current, it may at least facilitate communication to the widest possible readership of precisely how and why this is the case.

The central four chapters in Against White Feminism function quite successfully in this project of explanation. In a section on the white savior industrial complex, Zakaria demonstrates how the notion of empowerment metamorphoses under the aegis of development from an index of bottom-up resistance to a vacuous incantation. In the 1980s, Indian feminist Gita Sen and the organization DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women in a New Era) inspire scholar-activists such as Srilatha Batliwala to define feminist empowerment as a process of transforming power relationships, one that requires a questioning of the ideologies that [justify] womens subordination. By 2015, however, Bill and Melinda Gates have become convinced that donating chickens to women in the worlds poorest nations will empower them (by making at best $100 a year from the eggs) to realize themselves in the model of the Western entrepreneur. Zakaria aligns such doltish, condescending acts of aid the tossing of chickens and sewing machines at women who have asked for no such bounty with the historic attempts of white suffragists to impose their agendas on the colonized. Indian womens voting rights come not with British largesse, but with freedom from British domination. Indeed, as Zakaria shows, the bargaining of white suffragists leaned everywhere on white womens claims to racial superiority over Black and Brown men. Allegedly empowering gestures of philanthropy, she observes, delink the current condition of women from colonial histories, global capital expansion, transnational investment, and the continued exploitation of feminine labor.

Western benevolence, moreover, is a typical pretext for war, the second of Zakarias empirical foci. Here, she relays the maneuver whereby Americas War on Terror has unrelentingly attempted to present itself as a project of womens liberation. Her delightfully unflattering portrait of securo-feminism, a term borrowed from Lila Abu-Lughod, describes the collusion of feminist discourse with neo-imperial attempts to establish American-style liberal democratic institutions abroad. Coupled with these chapters on NGO- and securo-feminism is another pair that also deals with the consequences of racial-capitalist, heteropatriarchal oppression. First, the ongoing sexual discipline of women from marginalized communities (juxtaposed with a white-feminist discourse of indiscriminate sex-positivity) and second, the racist narratives that circulate around honor killings and female genital mutilation both caches of stories that muffle the capitalist-colonial origins of violence against women whose lives do not conform to the institution of the bourgeois nuclear family.

Yet terms such as bourgeois and nuclear are not Zakarias. The specific intersections of capitalist class relations with those produced by colonialism are not her primary concern. Perhaps the author believes, and she is largely correct, that the scenarios she profiles speak for themselves, indicating a complex system the reader can grasp as whiteness without the need for that systems precise description or analysis. The six discursive chapters that frame the central four, however, offer a different impression. Rather than designating historical engines of privilege-production, whiteness, in these opening and closing sections, is rhetorically cast in near-exclusive terms of white womens privileged behavior. A white feminist, Zakaria writes in her opening lines, is someone who fails to cede space to the feminists of color who have been ignored, erased, or excluded from the feminist movement. To be a white feminist, she goes on, you simply have to be a person who accepts the benefits conferred by white supremacy at the expense of people of color. The story begins in a wine bar where we encounter a group of women whose concession of space to Zakaria is found wanting. The book concludes with the authors desire for this tendency to give way to something altogether more inclusive.

It is odd that, while the kernel of content in this book is formed around a structural critique one that would appear to demand a very specific political response it comes to us cushioned in an equal bulk of light, fleecy padding that draws the attention pleasantly away from such partisan concerns. I want to be able to meet at a wine bar, Zakaria writes, and have an honest conversation about change. It is surely a reasonable wish, but a minimal demand. Zakarias central, well-researched chapters are framed on one side by a series of encounters with obnoxious white women; and on the other by a call to action that reads as an incitement to better etiquette. Despite brief gestures at white supremacys deep political roots, these chapters call for us simply to excise unpalatable behaviors.

The glee to be taken in consuming these vignettes is seemingly harmless in nature. They surely represent, if not whiteness itself, its ugly instantiations. Who really suffers from such writing other than exploiters of the suffering of others? Or those who have wrought that suffering directly through their arrogant or ignorant deeds? And yet, there is something slightly off in this pleasure; something about the book that makes for an uncomfortably comfortable read. It wouldnt be hard for the cheery liberal, perhaps one with red or brown hair, to imagine she is more enlightened than some of these insufferable blondes; to view subscription to whiteness as a matter of pure sensibility; to suppose rejecting complicity might be simple as sitting down.

Occasionally the project of rhetorical excision gets out of hand, the iconoclastic urge appearing to overwhelm critical honesty. In an early chapter oddly entitled Is Solidarity a Lie? Zakaria turns her scalpel on Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoirs goal in the The Second Sex, she writes, is simply this: to carve out for women the position of the universalizable and generalizable subject. But in comparing women to others, she goes on, who include Blacks [sic] and Jews [sic], de Beauvoir reveals herself to be thinking of women as only white women. Referencing Beauvoirs theoretical linkage of race, class, and caste as comparable forms of exploitation, Zakaria infers that she thus sees each of these as discrete systems of oppression that could be compared, but did not overlap. This conclusion is drawn from The Second Sexs introductory paragraphs, in which Beauvoir, rather than concerning herself with whether solidarity is a lie, sets out to ask how it is that solidarity among women has been systematically repressed. If [women] belong to the bourgeoisie, Beauvoir laments in her introduction, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro [sic] women. Rather than denying any possible intersection of identity categories, Beauvoir seeks to unearth the (intersecting) systems that produce such categories in the first place.

When Beauvoir suggests that women, unlike Black and Jewish populations, are unable to trace their oppression to a single historical event, Zakaria again infers the exclusion of Black and Brown women from the philosophical category essentialized. Of course, Beauvoirs landmark legacy is the statement that woman is not an essential category, but rather an idea constructed. Her reference to womens lack of a coherent narrative of oppression is not an insistence on woman as essentially white, nor on any notion that womens oppression could not be historicized. It is instead a characterization of the distinctly capitalist illusion that womens subordination is somehow organic.

Beauvoir brings into view womans inorganic construction as a set of social processes irreducible to mere psychology. By contrast, in framing lack of solidarity as a question of pointed lies, Against White Feminism points to various social-psychological ills: the cult of relatability; the cult of individualism; the mythology of the self-made [white] superwoman, who is cynically clever and egoistic. We can attribute these ills to paranoid beliefs, and to the territoriality of older white feminists in particular. The introduction of a different kind of authority, writes Zakaria, is seen as a threat to the legitimacy of [white womens] contribution to womens rights as if feminist thought and praxis is a zero-sum game, with one kind of knowledge supplanting the other. These accounts of motivated reasoning are entirely plausible, yet are useful only in the context of engagement with certain structuring truths. Most important, under neoliberal capitalism a system whose central organizing principle is competition the truth that most everything, whether we like it or not, is zero-sum. As such, a more interesting question than why white women can be so defensive is the question of why, until directly challenged, they see no wrongdoing to defend. Marx described capitalist ideology as shaping a material world where, to the bourgeois mind, exchange value comes to look like the only kind of value. Similarly, as Beauvoir points out, the social processes through which the figure of woman is made and debased are obscured by a social order that everywhere affirms the natural supremacy of men.

Beauvoirs theory of change in the face of womens systematic division had a lot to do with the theory and principles of socialism. It is a term that appears only once, in passing, in Against White Feminism, a book that invokes the political 93 times and politics 62. Perhaps we are to understand this lacuna in light of the corrupted regimes with which Beauvoir in particular was aligned (Stalinism, for one, and Maoism for another). Yet nor does the idea emerge in relation to histories of Black feminist organizing, which, had they been included, would have spoken to so many of the books central concerns.

Take for instance, the significance of intersectionality. Women of color, Zakaria writes, are affected not simply by gender inequality, but also by racial inequality. A colorblind feminism thus imposes an identity cost on women of color, erasing a central part of their experience and their political reality. This understanding of the intersectional, derived by Zakaria from the writings of legal scholar Kimberl Crenshaw, is notably distinct from the related concepts suggested by Black socialist and communist feminists long before Crenshaws coinage. The triple oppression advanced by activist Claudia Jones theorized not so much the intersection of racial and gender designations, but rather how capitalism deploys the intersecting systems of racism and patriarchy to divide the entire working class. The cost to Black women here (as women, as Black, as workers) is more than one of mere identity.

The reference, moreover to political reality as a matter of pure experience is more than just an oversimplification. It is a framing determined to avoid demanding that the reader hold certain commitments. [E]xperience engenders politics, we learn; we must revitalize the political such that we draw in women whose stories and politics are presently invisible. Experience is indeed vital to the formation of political ideas, yet in this elision of politics and backstory, ideas begin to recede. What matters becomes not what the politics are, merely that they are seen. As such, Zakarias issue with one particular NGO has less to do specifically with neoliberal politics than with failure on the part of its workers to capitalize on [Colombian womens] political identities. Zakaria does briefly get behind the idea of specific political claims, yet she does so without insisting that these claims be transformative or coherent. Resilience, caution, and endurance thereby emerge as her feminist values of choice, not because they reckon with any of the systems predicated by whiteness, but rather because they are shown by certain women of color. They are also, given their relative ideological neutrality, conveniently marketable terms. Individuality, meanwhile, is described as an antidote to politics and solidarity. The strange suggestion that politics might be a kind of poison aside, this statement equally strangely suppresses the politics of capitalism itself.

Antiracist socialist feminisms are concerned with the rejection of the social and cultural arrangements that structure womens oppression: racial capitalism; heteropatriarchy; the carceral imperialist state. These are feminisms cognizant of how, while the abolition of whiteness will not directly follow from the abolition of capitalism and its disciplinary and divisive apparatus, each abolition is a necessary condition of the other. For some white women, alignment with a political project such as this requires a commitment to a collective struggle at odds with their class interests. This is not the same as an individual act of disavowal. White and Western charity donors will eagerly donate money, Zakaria writes, but they will not give up the cheaply produced fast fashion that is sold by major American brands. It remains pragmatically unclear whether such a giving up refers to a consumer choice, to organizing for the overhaul of garment industry dynamics, or to dedicating ones life to a horizon on which exploitative industry would cease to exist. The white liberal reader most likely extends a finger to delete her ASOS app before she is whisked into the next short chapter on a slipstream of affirmative prose.

In order for a better feminism to occupy the popular imaginary, it is indeed necessary, as Zakaria suggests, for powerful white women to eschew territoriality and let go of individual egoism. This, she declares, and admittedly to heart-warming effect, will help us to forge an authentically constructed solidarity. The interests of capital, however, necessarily divide and rule, and it is therefore perhaps unsurprising that solidarity under capitalism is not so readily forthcoming. Authenticity is no more a source of social cohesion than it ought to be its horizon. Like selflessness, solidarity must be built and renewed through sustained political struggle. Feminists must ally with labor unions, migrants and anti-imperialists, radical environmentalists and anti-militarist groups to begin to envision any kind of post-capitalist society. Through direct action and movement politics, coalitions such as these must seek the most expansive transformations.

A post-capitalist society is not, perhaps, at the top of the imagined white readers wish list as she strolls to her local bookshop to educate herself either in feminism or in race. As such, the reader of this book is pulled into an awkward tug of war. Its vital political histories and powerful critique come to us enclosed in the trade nonfiction folds of keyword-heavy flattery. As Baldwin famously wrote of Everybodys Protest Novel, we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all. As Zakaria herself points out, to stand for something inherently means that some will choose not to stand with you. It is hard not to wish that publishers were willing to take such a risk.

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Against White Publishing: The Limitations of Rafia Zakaria's Against White Feminism - lareviewofbooks

Blue Flu

Brooklyn Nine-Nine was bound to have a clumsy re-entry upon its return to a post-2020 television landscape. The NBC years were already occasionally hamstrung by didactic political dialogue and wink-wink references to the zeitgeist that mostly reassured viewers of the shows progressive worldview. This isnt a bad move, per se, or at least it doesnt have to be. Every character basically says the right things (and its obviously better than spewing reactionary rhetoric), but more often than not, these ideas were awkwardly integrated into the action, so it barely lands as drama let alone comedy. It mostly serves to demonstrate that the Nine-Nine are the good guys and nothing more.

Naturally, this is a dicey impulse for a sitcom about cops during a time of heightened awareness around systemic racism, police brutality, and the defund/abolition movements in the wake of George Floyds murder. There was no possible way for Brooklyn Nine-Nine to please everybody, and thankfully it doesnt really try. But after the relatively exposition- and speech-heavy premiere that tried to do too much in the way of lip service and hedging, Blue Flu features a premise that integrates Brooklyn Nine-Nines political consciousness into a novel episodic premise thats funny and compelling. Its a good example of a show adjusting to The Times without getting bogged down in defensive anxiety.

After a uniformed officer plants a dead mouse in a burrito as a publicity stunt to shore up sympathy for law enforcement, the Nine-Nine struggles to maintain readiness when every officer in the precinct stages a mass walkout under false medical pretenses. Captain Holt splits the team into three groups (under a belabored trident analogy that Jake immediately tries to undermine by commenting that Aquaman wields a five-pronged trident): Jake and Boyle set out to prove that the officers doctors notes are fraudulent; Amy and Terry are assigned to keep crime down with no police on the street; and Rosa, being an outside investigator, is tasked to find evidence that the mouse was planted. Meanwhile, Holt must keep Frank OSullivan (John McGinley), the nasty patrolmens union president, at bay before hes forced to cave to his humiliating demands.

Simply put, Blue Flu provides the entire ensemble with their own story that plays to their comedic strengths. Terrys stomach-bug fiasco allows Terry Crews to flex his tough-guy act while also playing feeble. Boyles cancer scare gives Joe Lo Truglio the chance to wallow in terror and misery. Andy Samberg and Melissa Fumero successfully play straight against their characters chaotic situationsBoyles mortality and a sea of Hitchcock and Sullys sent by other captains as a false token of good will, respectivelyand Andre Braugher plays the hits. (Rosa barely factors into the episode, but Stephanie Beatriz plays up her restrained glee at potentially discovering the nature of Holts secret tattoo very well.) After eight years, a show like Brooklyn Nine-Nine knows its strong points fairly well, and watching the cast hit their marks within their wheelhouse has its own pleasures.

However, its elevated by a premise that does a little more than pay lip service to bad cops are bad, etc. Holt and co. are beset by institutional inertia buttressed by ideological rigidity. In his drunken, cheese-riddled state, Holt devises a fresh strategy: he shows OSullivan weekly stats that illustrate fewer police didnt raise rates of major or violent crime, which means the Nine-Nine could serve as a case study for how a police force can work more effectively with fewer police. This scares OSullivan into calling off the blue flu and getting every uniformed cop back to work, but the subtext is damning: the threat of even the slightest positive change that hinges on police absence will force the return of an unproductive, dangerous status quo. That Brooklyn Nine-Nine would rather button Blue Flu with a tattoo gag than underline that idea is a point in its favor.

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Unfortunately, the second episode this week features a tired premise around work/life balance and having it all thats been done better many times before. Jake and Amy struggle to parent their son, Mac, while maintaining the pressures of their respective careers. For Jake, its an opportunity to catch a serial killer that has evaded capture for his entire career, while Amy is set to give a presentation to One Police Plaza for a reform proposal thats suddenly become highly competitive. When Macs daycare shuts down for a couple days due to a lice outbreak, it stretches the new parents to the brink as they try to care for their son and their career.

Its pretty easy to see where this is going. Jake and Amy learn that career sacrifices have to be made in order to be attentive parents and that doesnt have to be a major tragedy. Though Jake doesnt get to make the arrest, Jake helps Boyle uncover the killers identity and instead gets to watch his son pull himself for the first time. Meanwhile, Amy misses the milestone but successfully convinces her bosses to fund her reform proposal. This stock premise would be fine if the jokes were stronger, but aside from a quick scene of Jake and Amy realizing that their lice home remedy (maple syrup in the hair) has led to a swarm of ants in the bed and a montage of terrible babysitter applicants that includes a cheerfully abusive male Mary Poppins, its a bit of a dud.

The B-plot fares slightly better. Holt, still separated from his husband, moves into Rosas apartment, but he drives her crazy by constantly talking about Kevin. When Rosa suggests getting very drunk to take his mind off his marital problems, Holt sends a dick pic to Kevins email address in the wee hours of the morning, sending them both on a mission to break into his house and delete it. Again, another stock premise, but its improved by Braugher and Beatriz, who have proven time and time again to be an excellent duo, playing off each others restrained, yet easily flappable energy pretty well. Sometimes performances raise material and sometimes material confines performances.

Stray observations

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Brooklyn Nine-Nine splits the difference with a novel premise and a tired one - The A.V. Club

The Taliban's rise to power is likely to mean the abolition of women's rights in Afghanistan, writes Johanna Higgs.

I ASK Aclassroom full of young women in the small town of Iskashim, Afghanistan:

"What are your dreams?"

"I want to be a doctor,"says one girl. I want to be a doctor too, says another.

Another girl says:

"I have lots of dreams, but I dont think that any of them are possible."

"But what are they?"I ask.

She answers:

"I want to travel, see the world and be a doctor."

I was in the classroom of a small English school, with a group of young women who were there to study English. I wanted to learn more about the situation of womens rights in Afghanistan and what Afghan men and women had to say about it.

I crossed the border from Tajikistan into Afghanistan and it was like stepping into another world.

It felt extraordinarily remote and the contrasts in the style of dress of both men and women from those in Tajikistan were dramatic. The beauty, however, was staggering. Nestled by a small river on the border with Tajikistan, the village was surrounded by huge snow-capped mountains.

Goats wandered through the village and the call to prayer sounded out over the valley throughout the day, a reminder that we were in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Despite the majesty of the surroundings, there was a strong sense of unease. The dusty streets were filled with mostly men who were garbed in traditional Islamic clothing. The few women that I did seewere covered from head to toe in the traditional blue burka with nothing of them being seen at all.

The highly conservative nature of the country was obvious and as a woman walking alone in the street.

It felt very, very hostile.

At this time the Taliban, I was told, were just 30 minutes away and while they had not attempted to take over for some time and the village was under the control of the Government. The people that I was able to speak with were worried. They were tired of the constant threat of war and wanted peace and stability.

So as I watched in horror as the Taliban entered Kabul and tookover the Presidential Palace, I wondered what was going to happen to the dreams of these young women that I had met in that village that day.

What were the chances now that they were going to be able to achieve their dreams of becomingdoctors and travelling the world?

Even at that time in Eishkasheim, the level of conservatism, and the difficulties facing women and girls as a result of thatconservatism, was something I have never experienced before.

I heard stories of women being forced into marriage as children;of extreme violence against women such as cutting off womens body parts and acid burning; and of fear of returning to the very harsh lifeunder the Taliban.

Even before the takeover of the Taliban, Afghanistan has long been considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world for women. According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Afghanistan is the second most dangerous country in the world for womenafter India.

The danger comes from the highly patriarchal cultural norms and customs, as well as the extreme interpretations of the Islamic religion have been used to subjugate women and perpetuate cycles of violence against them.

Violence against womentakes place in both the public and the private sphere and is usually perpetrated by relatives and has been reported to bewidespread. It can include domestic violence, sexual harassment, early and forced marriages, honour-based crimes and baad, the exchange of girls for dispute resolution and baadal exchange marriages.

Girls are also often prevented from going to school. That was something the young women I met at the school that dayfelt was a serious problem.

One young woman in the classroom explained:

"In Afghanistan, tradition says that women and girls should just stay at home, not go out, work or be educated."

When I asked them how they felt about that, they went quiet for a moment, again seemingly reluctant to share their views.

However, one young woman eventually spoke up:

"Women and girls should be able to go to school."

Gradually, all of the girls in the classroom agreed.

One of the girls said:

"I want things to change. But its going to be difficult."

For one woman working with the Council of Women, she said that the widespread violence against women and girls in Afghanistan had much to do with education.

She explained:

If people are educated, then they will think that violence against women is wrong. However, there are some people who think that violence against women is okay. In areas controlled by the Taliban for example, the opinion is much more towards accepting of violence against women. In Waduj, where the Taliban are, if I tried to work near there, I would be killed.

Though she said that it seemedthe situation was improving.

Now that the Taliban have taken over, what is going to happen to the rights of women and the positive changes that have been made in other parts of the country?

What will happen to the movements made to get girls into school and universities and the growing number of women entering into Afghanistans Parliament? What will happen to the dreams of those young girls?

While the struggle for womens rights in Afghanistan has always been a significant challenge, there is no doubt that with the Taliban takeover, these incredibly important strides that women have made are going to regress.

Violence, blatant discrimination, restrictions on freedom of movement and prohibitingwomen frommakingtheir own choices will no doubt return.

The international community, including Australia,must immediately speak up for the women and girls of Afghanistan.

We must speak up because when a young girl dreams of becominga doctor or travelling the world, this is something that should be able to become her reality.

We must speak up and insist that the Taliban uphold womens rights not just because this is what is right but because all young women and girls everywhereshould always believe that their hopesand aspirations can be fulfilled.

Johanna Higgsis an anthropologist and founder ofProjectMonMa, which advocates for womens rights around the world.

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Afghan women fear for their rights and safety as Taliban reclaims power - Independent Australia

In Puri districts Nathapur village, a barren patch of land, with scattered bamboo houses walls plastered with mud, with an outer layer of coconut leaves and roofs thatched with tarpaulin sheets to shield from rain is now home to 40 families, trying to build their lives from scratch. The families, belonging to the Dalit community, who once led a content life in their village, 20 km from here, were driven away from their houses for allegedly refusing to obey the diktats ordered by upper-caste villagers.

Their home, Brahmapur, a settlement on an island in Chilika, now seems like a distant dream. As per custom, members of the Dalit community were expected to carry the palanquin in wedding processions of upper-caste families and escort the groom or bride around the village, in return for a meal at the wedding. In 2013, young men from the community refused to carry the palanquin. What followed, eventually drove them out of their own homes.

After we refused to carry the palanquin, our access to fish in Chilika was prohibited. For ages, our source of livelihood has been fishing and all of a sudden we were denied our rights of livelihood. This led to the first-ever migration from our community in our village. Young men just out of school started migrating to Chennai, Bengaluru to search for work. Others started working as farm labourers in nearby villages, said 33-year old Sangram Bhoi.

In February 2021, a major brawl between the communities ensued after a 25-year-old man from the Dalit community, in an inebriated state, reached the village to buy sweets from a hawker and was confronted by upper caste men for his drunken state. Following this, a new diktat was ordered and members of the Dalit community were prohibited from entering the village, from carrying out any procession or inviting their relatives to the village. The ration shops were permanently closed for them, access to the only potable well and the village pond for bathing and washing clothes was denied and they were not allowed to ferry in the boats, the only access to the mainland from the small island hamlet.

Their only condition was that we start carrying the palanquin again but with no remuneration. Our generation and the generation after is getting educated. We are trying to redefine ourselves and move ahead, be more aware and stand up for rights. How could we agree to a regressive practice again that would put us back in the position from where we wanted to rise? Sangram said.

Janak Jena, an upper-caste member, reacting to the allegations said, The allegations are not true. They have raised objections to us entering their areas but expect us to be ok that they will fish from Chilka and rob us of our livelihoods. They own no land which is why they have been imposing themselves on us.

The community members claim that despite repeated pleas with the administration, there has been no solution in sight. When contacted Puri District Collector, Samarth Verma said that an enquiry into the matter has already been initiated. The issue is caste-based and also livelihood-based. We have held consultations with the villagers and are looking into the matter. We expect to resolve the matter soon.

Sangram with the support of other young Dalit activists from the entire district, is now putting up a fight to reclaim their right to live in their village. Like Sangram, in the recent past Puri has witnessed a lot of young members of the Dalit community, and other backward castes, associated with various organisations or working individually, but together creating a network, looking for such families driven out of their villages and trying to bring them back.

A lot of people fear that if they return to the village, they will again be subjected to violence, threats and social boycott. We wish to create a safe place for them within their village, which is rightfully theirs. A lot of families are more than willing to return to their village and lead a life of dignity. It will only be possible if we as a community stand together, said Dibakar Barik, 35, another youth activist. Dibakar and his family were themselves driven out of their village two decades ago after his father refused to follow norms established by the upper castes.

I am a graduate, my brother is also studying well, and my sister is a journalism graduate. My father knew that if he wanted his children to pursue and become what they wanted to, he had to give up obeying orders and leading the kind of life he led. Because we had to leave behind our village, a bag full of memories from the place we were born in, I understand the pain that these families go through, when driven out of their own villages for trying to lead a life of dignity, Dibakar said.

Amongst the families which Dibakar is helping to return to their village, is Maheshwar Bariks family who were driven out of their house in March 2019, their houses vandalised. Members of the barber (barik) and the washerman community (dhoba), who fall under the Other Backward Castes (OBCs), continue to face social ostracism for refusing to abide by the age-old bartan system or jajmani system, wherein the members of these communities were expected to be of service to the upper caste, either free of cost or in return of 12-15 kgs of rice a year.

After the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, enquiries were initiated after 2010 into these cases and after thorough enquiry nearly 2,200 people from Puri were awarded a release certificate from the bonded system. Over 2,500 others are still waiting for their release orders.

In 2013, we received a release letter from the administration, we were no longer bound to work in return for paddy. But all these years, there was no peace. We had nowhere to go; so we stayed in the village, but time and again we faced social boycott. In March, our house was vandalised as we continued to refuse to work so we left our village, Maheswar said. Maheshwars family was one amongst three driven out of Manapur village. The familys bondage to the upper caste families involved washing their feet, cutting their nails, picking up leftovers, cleaning a place before and after an event, among other trivial tasks. Maheshwar along with nearly 20 other such families were staging a dharna outside the collectors office last Friday.

There are over 100 such families who wish to return to their respective villages. They can claim what is rightfully theirs only when they are well aware of their rights. Many of them out of fear do not even approach the officials. But we have been trying to apprise them about their rights, about the laws which can protect them, so they can fight for themselves. Education will always play an important role in uplifting them, Dibakar said. For most Dalit and OBC families, such forced migration over decades has rendered them landless, eliminating any prospects for entitlement under housing schemes or even cyclone relief assistance.

Responding to such instances, the Puri collector said no such incident has been brought to his notice. If anyone is being asked to leave their villages or is being discriminated against even after possessing the release certificate, they can approach us and necessary action will be taken. So far, no such information has come to me, Verma said.

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Forced to flee their villages for revolt against a caste custom in Puri, Dalit families head back - The Indian Express