Dr. Chesler, I would hardly claim anything like your knowledge, experience, and perspective in assessing people like Thobani and feminism generally, but I am a bit confused. You seem to believe that academic feminists or for that matter what we might describe as establishment feminists care anything at all about individual women. It’s glaringly obvious that they don’t and what they seek, in common with most leftists, is not the relief from oppression or improvement of conditions that they claim to seek, it’s simply power.
For what it’s worth, I happen to be Ashkenazic through and through (possibly with more Cossack in there than I’d like to admit) and my skin is noticeably darker than hers. Of course, as usual by “race” she means something altogether different from the normal usage of the word and, as usual, it is a professed anti-racist who is obsessed with race.
Dr. Chelser, with respect–and by saying “with respect” I actually mean “with respect”–I have to echo the question above. Why do you still call yourself a feminist, at least without some qualifier like “a traditional feminist” or “a Susan B. Anthony-type feminist” or some such? I kept insisting I was a liberal and then it finally struck me that that the term meant what it meant, not what it used to mean or what I wanted it to mean, and I stoipped calling myself that.
As to multiculturalism, my all-time favorite statement is by someone no doubt Thobani detests, Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Sind. He was the governor of an Indian province, engaged in stamping out suttee, and a local Brahmin protested that this was their custom.
“In my country, too, we have a custom,” Napier replied. “When men burn women alive we hang them. Next to your pyre my carpenters will erect a gallows. Then let each of us act according to his custom.”
