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The Cafe at On The Issues Online Magazine is deepening the conversations by continually adding the insights of progressive writers, thinkers and artists on the topics we address. Check back frequently for new commentary. If you wish to contribute to the Cafe, email [email protected].
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Teens and Indian Health Service: Saving Both
by Resa Crane Bizzaro
Over the years, much of my writing has been in response to news articles. Among stories about Native Americans that have spurred me to write essays is an Associated Press story of another sort: disturbing statistics indicating the attitudes of teenagers about their future lives.
After I saw the story in the Raleigh (NC) News and Observer reporting general research that suggests the hopelessness of young people, I obtained the article the story was based upon from the July 2009 issue of …
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Teens and Indian Health Service: Saving Both
The Next Seven Generations: Reclaiming Healthy Sexuality for Native Youth
by Jessica Yee
I am proud to be Native. I am also proud to be a woman. I am proud to know that I have so much to honor in my ancestors teachings that show me how to live as a young, strong, proud, Native woman in this world. It is something that excites me every morning when I open my eyes, and something I realize I could not live without.
It was not always this way. Like many First Nations youth today, I grew up unaware of my culture and felt disconnected in the big, thriving metropolis of Toronto. I was fed up of people outside the community dictating to Native youth how to be healthy, but not actually involving us as youth on any sustainable level. Information was rarely disseminated …
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The Next Seven Generations: Reclaiming Healthy Sexuality for Native Youth
Healthcare Compromise: Low-Income Women Get Bumped
by Jen Nedeau
Democrats in the Senate got what they wanted this Christmas: a passed health care reform bill.
Low-income women, however, seemed to be the ones with coal in their stocking.
Led by Vice-President Joe Biden, the 60-39 vote along party lines on December 24, 2009 ensured that this historic bill will move forward and potentially become law if the House and Senate can reconcile their two different versions of the legislation in 2010. The House will begin the reconciliation process on January 12, 2010 and the Senate on January 19.
The New York Times …
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Healthcare Compromise: Low-Income Women Get Bumped
Race and Gender: Two Lovers Who Dare to Kiss
by L.A. Bailey
What would happen to America if race and gender decided to unleash their passion and proclaim their undying love, respect, desire and need for one another
What would happen if the two achieved their collective vision and birthed a dream of a world that deconstructs and eliminates barriers that block the progress of women and people of color
What would happen if todays African American leadership followed the convictions of the Civil Rights Movement and didn't settle for the mere replication of hegemonic practices in the black community
Or, what if women created systems of change using a female-driven paradigm instead of believing that the …
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Race and Gender: Two Lovers Who Dare to Kiss
Book Reveals Difficulties of Traditional Chinese Gender Roles
by Angela Poh
Heroines of Jiangyong: Chinese Narrative Ballads in Womens Script, translated by Wilt L. Idema, is the first English translation of the folk literature of Jiangyong County in Hunan, Southern China. This small county is unique because its women penned their songs and poems in womens script (nüshu) up until the middle of the twentieth century.
Idema begins the book with a short introduction to nshu: it is not a language, but a system for writing the local dialect of Jiangyong. These texts directly reveal the voices of peasant women in Jiangyong, and provide a rare opportunity to …
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Book Reveals Difficulties of Traditional Chinese Gender Roles
White Silence and Responsibility
by Clare Coss
What is the role of the artist as we strive to understand issues that divide us How do we recognize and care about the equality of others What is my responsibility as a playwright
As a child I journeyed back and forth between my parents in New Jersey and my grandparents in New Orleans. The collision with Jim Crow laws in the south, made me aware of white privilege in the north. White supremacy became obvious. I began to care about moral survival.
My imagination leads me to women characters who go where the silence is. They are drawn to confront inaction and tyranny, to confront fear, to find the courage to act.
In my new play, Emmett, …
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White Silence and Responsibility
In Peril: North African Freedom Fighter On Hunger Strike
by Cindy Cooper
Editor's Note: Urgent circumstances call for early publication of this story planned for our Winter 2010 edition on women of courage.
Aminatou Haidar, known as the "Gandhi" of the Western Sahara for her advocacy for the human rights of her people, sat on a mattress provided by the Red Cross in the Lanzarote airport in the Spanish territory of the Canary Islands. She declared a hunger strike to the death on November 15 and only takes sugar and water.
Hundreds of people gathered outside the airport to express support for the tall woman with a simple headscarf and glasses. Within days, prominent Spanish actors made their way inside the terminal to be by her …
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In Peril: North African Freedom Fighter On Hunger Strike
Population & environment: a progressive, feminist approach
by Laurie Mazur
In "The 'New' Population Control Craze: Retro, Racist, Wrong Way to Go" ( in this edition of On The Issues Magazine), Betsy Hartmann implies that everyone working on population-environment issues is part of a misogynistic plot to bring back "population control."
I'm here to tell you she is wrong. (See Betsy Hartmann article here)
I am a lifelong, card-carrying feminist and political progressive. I am passionately committed to sexual and reproductive health and rights, to environmental sustainability, and to closing the inequitable divide between men and women, rich and poor. …
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Population & environment: a progressive, feminist approach
Black Abortion: Breaking the Silence
by Maame-Mensima Horne
For years reproductive justice activists have been calling for African American women to break the silence around abortion within our communities. Instead, a new wave of anti-abortionists -- the black religious right -- has been gaining strength, usng a Black Genocide argument. This theory was originally started by Marcus Garvey and members of The Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.) that he founded in 1914. Now, it is used to further the agenda of the black religious right and push African American women into the background.
Many African American women hide, afraid of the stigma that can …
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Black Abortion: Breaking the Silence
Wise Words Cause Fearful Notions
by Serena Garcia
The ascension of Justice Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United States in fall 2009 seemed to hang on hyped reaction to statements that she made in a speech eight years ago, even as much of her impressive record as a judge for nearly two decades was ignored. The most interesting aspect of the "wise Latina" controversy, as it came to be known, may be the amount of fear that the elevation of this talented woman caused for a certain segment of the population.
Sotomayor was vilified for choosing to call herself a woman of color, a proud Puerto Rican, a wise Latina, wrote Liza …
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Wise Words Cause Fearful Notions2 comment(s)
PAST CAFE ARCHIVE. Read all past cafés
Spring 2012 Café --Level the Playing Field: Girls, Women and Sports
Summer 2011 Café --Women, War and Peace
Spring 2011 Café --The Ecology of Women
Winter 2011 Café --The Conning of the Feminists
Summer 2010 Café --EQUALITY...How much further away?
Spring 2010 Café --The Feminist MInd
Winter 2010 Café -- Passion, Freedon & Women
Fall 2009 Café -- Race, Feminism, Our Future
Summer 2009 Café -- Our Genders, Our Rights
Spring 2009 Café -- Lines in the Sand
Winter 2009 Café -- New Revolutions we Need
Fall 2008 Café -- What is Terror for Women?
Summer 2008 Café -- Works Hard for her Money: Feminists and Prostitutes
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