Writ­ten for Hyphen on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2009, and cross-posted at Racia­li­cious.

My last col­umn, about the eth­i­cal dif­fer­ences between char­ity and sol­i­dar­ity, was a heavy-handed cri­tique of NYT Magazine’s “Sav­ing the World’s Women” issue. Good crit­i­cism, how­ever, ought always be tem­pered by prac­ti­cal sug­ges­tions for improve­ment. So, for this week, I’ve dis­tilled the opin­ions of other crit­ics, sug­ges­tions of notable the­o­rists, and my own rich reserve of activist foibles into 3 sim­ple (albeit wordy) tips for doing sol­i­dar­ity work the right way.

Tip #1: Real­ize that, no mat­ter how much you know, you actu­ally don’t know shit.

When Amer­i­cans set out to work transna­tion­ally, we have a ten­dency to assume that our edu­ca­tion, or expe­ri­ence, or even under­priv­i­leged upbring­ing makes us both “insid­ers” into other people’s strug­gles as well as qual­i­fied to tell them how to address it. Please don’t make the mis­take of think­ing that a poli sci major, a back­pack­ing trip through South­east Asia, and/or a stint as the pres­i­dent (and inci­den­tally only mem­ber) of your local Amnesty Inter­na­tional Chap­ter makes you qual­i­fied to be any­thing more than an ass­hole just shy of com­plet­ing an under­grad­u­ate degree.

Third World activists, as well as schol­ars study­ing transna­tional activism, have long decried the West­ern ten­dency to speak for, over, and about peo­ple of the Third World under the seem­ingly benign man­tle of “global sis­ter­hood” or “global cit­i­zen­ship” or some other sim­i­lar ideal that blurs the eth­no­cen­trism of their efforts. The first UN Women’s Con­fer­ence in 1975 is a well-known exam­ple of this con­flict: many Third World par­tic­i­pants took issue with the fem­i­nist man­i­festo drawn up by white Amer­i­can fem­i­nist Glo­ria Steinem, which had been touted as a com­mon frame­work for action, but was crafted with­out input from Third World activists.

Emi­nent post­colo­nial and transna­tional fem­i­nist the­o­rist Chan­dra Tal­pade Mohanty sim­i­larly made waves a decade later, when her 1988 essay, “Under West­ern Eyes,” decon­structed the eth­no­cen­tric and iron­i­cally pater­nal­is­tic analy­ses of Third World women that was (and is) preva­lent in West­ern fem­i­nist schol­ar­ship. Delia Aguilar, another fem­i­nist the­o­rist hail­ing from the Philip­pines, sim­i­larly argues that there is no such thing as “inter­na­tional sis­ter­hood” and talks at length in many of her books about her prob­lem­atic inter­ac­tions with well-intentioned but mis­guided schol­ars and activists who wrongly pre­sume that their expe­ri­ences in the west qual­ify them to speak on women’s issues elsewhere.

If you really want to be effec­tive (as opposed to annoy­ing, use­less, and embar­rassed), get over your­self. Lis­ten before speak­ing, and pause before act­ing. To para­phrase Aguilar, you have to illu­mi­nate these power rela­tions in order to make unity pos­si­ble. Tip #2: Place Your­self

After tuck­ing away your per­sonal ambi­tions and scal­ing back your ego to some­thing both man­age­able and less offen­sive, the next step is to (re)locate your­self — to crit­i­cally recon­sider how your phys­i­cal loca­tion in the United States, as well as your polit­i­cal, social, and eco­nomic con­texts both inform your per­spec­tive as an activist and relate to the place and con­texts of oth­ers. After all, sol­i­dar­ity isn’t about pre­tend­ing that bor­ders don’t exist, but about rec­og­niz­ing what those bor­ders rep­re­sent to you and to those with whom you seek to work. A good frame­work for “plac­ing” one­self involves iden­ti­fy­ing sites of con­flict and connection.

Iden­ti­fy­ing sites of con­flict is about actively rec­og­niz­ing points of dif­fer­ence between you and those with whom you wish to col­lab­o­rate. How are you and your col­lab­o­ra­tors dif­fer­ently priv­i­leged, and how might that impact the way you approach the work? To what sort of inter­ests and out­comes do you feel per­son­ally attached, which might diverge sig­nif­i­cantly from those you wish to sup­port? Iden­ti­fy­ing sites of con­nec­tion, on the other hand, is about find­ing points of agreement/similarity and devel­op­ing objec­tives that are broad enough so that all sup­port­ers and stake­hold­ers can use their var­i­ous resources most efficiently.

Con­sider the exam­ple of GABNET, a Filipina-American sol­i­dar­ity orga­ni­za­tion that sup­ports the mis­sion of the Philippine-based women’s orga­ni­za­tion GABRIELA. In their case, sites of con­flict involved dif­fer­ing pri­or­i­ties, which had to be resolved by fore­ground­ing the imme­di­ate needs of the stake­hold­ers. As GABNET found­ing mem­ber Ninotchka Rosca told me, GABNET “could not move into divorce law advoacy — which it knew over­seas women wanted and needed — for fear that would place cer­tain alliances of its Philip­pines part­ners with reli­gious insti­tu­tions on uncer­tain grounds.” GABNET had to take a step back, com­pro­mis­ing its own inter­ests, in order to serve the inter­ests of it part­ner. More­over, the orga­ni­za­tions are united by a broad focus on anti-imperialism (a site of con­nec­tion), which enabled GABNET to sup­port the move­ment by act­ing locally, while empow­er­ing GABRIELA to use the most advan­ta­geous meth­ods given its own con­text. Anti-imperialism, with its links to both the first and third worlds, is an easy site of con­nec­tion. The point is to iden­tify issues that affect both par­ties, so that both par­ties can act in their respec­tive contexts.

Tip #3: Do not mar­gin­al­ize your partners

Duh, right? Yeah, not so much. I’m prob­a­bly more guilty of this one than most.

Some time ago, I received a rather large seed grant with which I started a non­profit. The goal was to work in sol­i­dar­ity with a women’s coop­er­a­tive in a US-Mexican bor­der town to cre­ate income gen­er­a­tion pro­grams for women in the area. Noble idea. Less than noble out­come.
Our rela­tion­ship with the co-op was com­pli­cated. Not a sin­gle per­son on our lead­er­ship team spoke Span­ish. As a result, com­mu­ni­ca­tion between our team and the co-op was dif­fi­cult, at best, and impos­si­ble most of the time. Given the com­mu­ni­ca­tion bar­rier, an equally sig­nif­i­cant geo­graph­i­cal bar­rier, and the time con­straints of our grant, we were “forced” to make a num­ber of deci­sions on behalf of the co-op — deci­sions that they may or may not have agreed with had they the oppor­tu­nity to do so. In addi­tion, when the coop­er­a­tive mem­bers learned of the size of our grant, many of them (admit­tedly) felt 1) com­pelled to accept the deci­sions we made “in their best inter­ests,” and 2) impos­si­bly indebted to us. While we earnestly wanted to “do good,” our acci­den­tal pater­nal­ism got the best of us, and spread into other areas of our oper­a­tion, includ­ing (but not lim­ited to) delib­er­ately keep­ing infor­ma­tion from the coop­er­a­tive, when we were wor­ried they would dis­agree, not under­stand, or lose faith in us. As a result we were always on guard and seem­ingly always part of an uphill bat­tle to gain their trust (which we never did earn com­pletely). Need­less to say, our lit­tle non­profit didn’t work out. I walked away less than a year into the project, when the lead­er­ship team refused to rec­tify what I saw as uneth­i­cal prac­tices and a modus operandi that vio­lated the spirit of our mission.

That good work rooted in great inten­tions should devolve into some­thing less than equi­table isn’t so uncom­mon when sol­i­dar­ity is built on one party’s money and is char­ac­ter­ized by a plethora of sig­nif­i­cant cul­tural and geo­graph­i­cal bar­ri­ers. Man­isha Desai, co-author of “Women’s Activism and Glob­al­iza­tion,” out­lines a few com­mon prob­lems within transna­tional sol­i­dar­i­ties: 1) a ten­dency within these “sol­i­dar­i­ties” to inad­ver­tently repro­duce exist­ing inequal­i­ties, as evi­denced by the dom­i­nance of First World women in transna­tional work (as we did), and 2) the sus­tained depen­dence of Third World women on First World donors (like that of our part­ners). In other words, what we did with­out know­ing it.

While I decided to use this story to illus­trate tip #3, it’s pretty appar­ent that we broke all three of the above-mentioned tips. A bet­ter approach would have been to get over our­selves, acknowl­edge our weak­nesses and bar­ri­ers, be hon­est about our priv­i­lege and moti­va­tions and — in light of that — act in the best inter­est of the coop­er­a­tive. For exam­ple, putting some peo­ple on the lead­er­ship team who wouldn’t have the same kinds of dif­fi­cul­ties. Peo­ple who spoke Span­ish, for instance. Peo­ple who weren’t white (or, in my case, Asian). Peo­ple who were, in a mil­lion dif­fer­ent ways, more relat­able to the women of the coop­er­a­tive. But we didn’t. Because it was our money and our project, and we were us. What do-gooding over-achiever hasn’t thought like that before? Shar­ing power is never easy, but in sit­u­a­tions like this, it’s usu­ally right.

So before you set out on your cru­sade to “save the world’s women” (or save the world’s any­thing), just try to keep in mind your place, try to be hum­ble, and put oth­ers before your­self, even — espe­cially — if you’re the one with the money.

Pic­ture by Flickr user Toban Black, used under Cre­ative Com­mons License.

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