Williams, Gendered Global Apartheid

 

this interview (excerpts + references) is from 1993, but is still interesting concerning the topic "gender and world(-)system". GK

 

GENDERED GLOBAL APARTHEID:
women, imperialism and the struggle for civil society
an interview with Dessima Williams

 

...snip>

Dessima Williams is a former Grenadian ambassador and member of the Grenadian New Jewel Movement. From 1979 to the US invasion in 1983, she served as Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States (OAS). She currently teaches Caribbean studies and international relations at Brandeis University. Cindy Duffy spoke with her in January 1993 at a conference on Gender, Justice and Development at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst organized by the Interfaith Hunger Appeal.

 

. . .snip>

Q. You are now teaching and in your teaching you are developing the concept of 'gendered global apartheid.' Could you outline what you mean by this and why you think it is important to develop alternative frameworks?

 

A. The idea of gendered global apartheid is one I came upon in trying to figure out how to understand the gross inequities in the global system. If we look at the work of the UNDP (United Nations Development Program), it has issued reports called the Human Development Report. What they do is instead of looking at the 175 national entities called nation states, they look at the whole globe, five billion of us, as one market, one society and so on, which they break up into [five percentiles, each representing twenty percent of the world's population] and make an assessment of what is happening to the top twenty per cent, the middle sixty percent, and the bottom twenty percent. Out of that I realized that what is happening is, if we accept and understand Apartheid as the institutionalized belief and practice of separate and unequal development, then I see that happening at a global level, for individuals, communities, households, nations and sectors. And I see women as the sector with the greatest amount of inequity -- women everywhere. Now women in the West earn fifty-seven to sixty cents to every dollar that a man makes. There is an inequity there. But women in South Africa or in the Philippines not only make less, but have less of material conditions like social security supports or even dietary intakes.

 

So I am proposing that when we try to understand the crisis in the International system, it is a crisis of apartheid: it's gross inequities at the social and economic level; it has a lot of legal mechanisms to keep that inequity in place whether it is the instruments of the World Bank or GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] regulations and so on; and it also has a high amount of violence. [There is] militarization through arms sales at a macro level of the system, but at the micro level women are coming under more and more violence in the household as well as the violence of being a refugee, the violence of being unemployed and so on.

 

It's a framework that I' m using to try to make a more comprehensive analysis of what is happening and an analysis thaat breaks down the traditiona boundaries of nation states. Because I think the similarities of the poverty in the Philippines and the poverty in Britain, Holland or in Canada, those similarities are very important in understanding how the whole system is on a crisis path. And it's not sufficient just to think about Holland as being in the North and the Philippines as being in the South because there is a South in Holland - Indonesian migrants, Surinamese migrants, the people who are losing their jobs, the working class which is loosing its ability to survive. And you also have a very affluent, greedy, militarized North in the Philippines, best exemplified by the Marcos family and those around them, but also other phenomena [such as] the large plantation owners who maintain a technocratic elite that arose under president Aquino also represent part of the North that is in the South. What I'm suggesting is that, for example, you can't talk about the Third World as a place, you have to talk about it as a condition -- a condition of escalating chaos and inability to survive, of systems that are simultaneously breaking down -- and I think that that is a condition that is more present in southern geographic areas like the southern hemisphere, but is a condition that is more and more present in the Bronx, or present in Northern Ireland, or present in Birmingham and so on.

 

That's what I'm trying to do: to see how conceptually one can understand the globalization of apartheid.

 

Q. You've personally gone through very different ways of making social change, at the diplomatic level, as a revolutionary, and as a teacher at a US university. What brought you to teaching and why is teaching your chosen course of action at this point?

 

A. Well , I'm a Catholic ( laughs). I'm a Catholic in a post colonial society with very ambitious parents. O.K. , you get it? We were given to service; we were raised on self sacrifice. Secondly, I think there is a certain aspiration or ambition that the post colonial subject is taught early, in the home and in the school. I remember seeing poverty around me. My father was a farmer, and so we were not affluent by any means but we never starved. And I could see the conditions that were totally unacceptable. It horrified me as a child and I wanted to be a pediatrician to save the lives of the poor, sick babies that I would see going up and down in front of my house to the clinic. After that I don't know what happened. I came to the States and became radicalized in the student movement supporting the independence and liberation process for Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Guinea Bissau in that period. At the same time the rise of the anti-dictatorship movement in Grenada, and the movements in the Caribbean as a whole, captured my imagination. I joined the New Jewel Movement, as most young people did in those days, and I suppose the rest of it is history.

 

But I don't know that it is so inconsistent. I think I'm just in very different arenas. As I say to my students now, I'm teaching because I'm interested in human liberation. It's an inversion in a sense where I served a nation, so I was working for a large big whole, you know, macro level; now [I work] one on one. I take each student coming into my class and do the best I can to get that person to be engaged in liberation because that's what a liberal education is; to liberate you from ignorance; to liberate you from fear; to bring you into communion with others. I approach education as that, as a way of making better people. I tell them that they can change the world for the better; that there's a passion we must have for each other and a passion for knowledge; and that knowledge must be put to the service of humanity. So I don't know; it's my hobby(laughs).

 

Suggestions for further reading:

 

Brown, Wilmette. Black Women and the Peace Movement. Expanded edition. Bristol, England: Falling Wall Press, 1984.

 

Enloe, Cynthia. The Morning After:Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

 

Epp-Tiessen. "Missiles and Malnutrition: The Links Between Militarization and Underdevelopment." in Jamie Swift and Brian Tomlinson, eds. Conflicts of Interest: Canada and the Third World. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991. pp. 241-265.

 

Ferguson, James. Grenada: Revolution in Reverse. London: Latin America Bureau,1990.

 

George, Susan. The Debt Boomerang: How Third World Debt Harms Us All. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992.

 

Hamilton, Cynthia. "Apartheid in an American City: The Case of the Black Community in Los Angeles." Available through the Labor/Community Strategy Center, 14540 Haynes Street, Suite 200, Van Nuys, CA 91411, USA.

 

McAfee, Kathy. Storm Signals: Structural Adjustment and Development Alternatives in the Caribbean. Boston: South End Press, 1991.

 

Midnight Notes Collective. Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992.

 

Molyneux, Maxine. "Mobilization Without Emancipation? Women's Interests, State, and Revolution." in Richard R. Fagen, Carmen Diana Deere, and Jose Luis Coraggio, eds. Transition and Development: Problems of Third World Socialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986.

 

Sassen, Saskia. "The New Labour Demand in Global Cities." in Michael Peter Smith, ed. Cities in Transformation: Class, Capital and the State. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1984. pp. 139-171.

 

Shiva, Vandana, ed. Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1994.

 

Stoltz Chinchilla, Norma. "Women's Movements in the Americas: Feminism's Second Wave." Report on the Americas, 27:1 (July-August 1993). pp. 17-23.

 

Vickers, Jeanne. Women and the World Economic Crisis. London: Zed Books Ltd., 1991.

 

The preceding interview was produced for Cassette Culture, an independent Canadian audio production group. The current Cassette Culture catalogue Includes 35 half-hour radio programs on popular struggles, alternative agriculture, environmental justice, land rights, the failure of large-scale development projects and the international impacts of structural adjustment and free trade. For a free copy of this catalogue, or for more information about Cassette Culture, write:

 

Cassette Culture,
c/o CFRU 93.3 FM,
level 2, University Centre,
University of Guelph,
Guelph, Ontario
CANADA, N1G 2W1

 

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