“Striving for Global Justice: Faculty Panel on ‘Tackling Gender Oppression, Empowering Women and Thinking Critically about Kristof’s Approach’” just may be the longest, wordiest title possible for an event that lasted less than an hour and a half. Packed into that relatively short interval, however, were numerous valuable and potent insights from five professors of diverse academic backgrounds–insights concerning both the merits and flaws exhibited by journalist Nicholas Kristof’s work in human rights activism and journalism. While each faculty member’s remarks were strictly limited to eight minutes, each speaker managed to contribute a novel and unique perspective to a topic that has essentially been saturating intellectual conversations on campus ever since Kristof’s lecture last month.
First to speak was Associate Professor of Sociology Afshan Jafar, who focused primarily on two things: first, that Kristof is undeniably “very good” at what he seeks to do, namely “to shock people and get them to the point where indifference is not an option.” However, the brute force of Kristof’s tactics, Professor Jafar argued, often conceals an essential “lack of nuance” to his arguments. One statistic cited in Half the Sky, co-written by Kristof and his wife Cheryl WuDunn, provides a particularly clear example of how Kristof tends to make his point while failing to tell the whole story. A passage states that “Only 25% of Egyptians think there should be a woman president,” all the while neglecting to mention that polls on similar questions taken in the United States seldom show significantly higher percentages of support for a female president.
The next presenter, Professor of Government and International Relations Tristan Borer, agreed with this explanation of Kristof’s strategies, but questioned whether, at the end of the day, these methodologies actually catalyze any behavioral changes on the part of privileged Westerners. In fact, hinted Professor Borer, excessive immersion in sensational words and images can even “desensitize” audiences and lead to “compassion fatigue.”
Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies Mab Segrest responded to this suggestion that Kristof’s work is ultimately ineffective by describing her belief that Kristof’s writing “co-opts and mischaracterizes 150 years of women’s movements.” In what could be seen as a bizarre twist on the Horatio Alger template, Kristof’s desire to transform “brothel slaves into successful” professional women assumes that fulfilling modern capitalist values ensures liberation for women, while ignoring the fact that “Women have always fought back”—in grassroots movements, the political arena and individual rebellions.
Professor of Human Development Sunil Bhatia (who was, interestingly enough, the only male professor on the panel) began his talk with the bold assertion that, by making himself the protagonist in his activist narrative, Kristof actually undercuts his work’s overall efficacy. Professor Bhatia then proceeded to identify what he sees as problematically pervasive symbols in Half the Sky: a “barbaric culture doing horrible things,” “mutilation to powerless brown or black women” and a white savior who portrays “entire non-European cultures in terms of Orientalist language.” According to Professor Bhatia, such one-sided representations ignore the fact that in many cases, these apparent issues were either created or worsened by Western powers’ colonizing activities.
Professor Julia A. Kushigian from the Hispanic Studies Department concluded the series of speakers with her look at how interventions on behalf populations in developing countries can be aligned to cultural values and, thus, can be made more effective than Kristof’s frequent choice to simply tell “a single story from a … single perspective.” The answer, Professor Kushigian said, is to “bring out the many different voices.” She cited the Rotary Club’s service worldwide as one positive example, noting that their “grant ideas come from research from the country.” For instance, Rotary-sponsored agricultural innovations in India have enabled local children to return to school because resulting displacements in carbon dioxide led to a tripling in crop production.
Idealists aspiring to somehow change the world must be innumerable among those Americans who are educated (or currently in the process of being educated) and financially stable. Having achieved a sense of security in one’s daily life and worldview, it seems only natural to then ask how one can chip in to “help the less fortunate.” However, as last Thursday’s faculty panel repeatedly emphasized, those of us who seek to make a positive difference would do well to think critically before rushing in to “save the world”—for our methods and our galvanizing ideologies may prove disastrously hostile to a society’s cultural and ethical reality.
