[00:00:58] Host: Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Past Forward present Engaging the World: leading the conversation on gender and sexuality. In this series, we explore how culture, power, institutions, and social structures shape our understandings of gender and sexuality as the sexual mores of society evolve. We engage with doctors, artists, activists, and scholars to examine the increasingly visible spectrum of gender and sexuality and give voice to celebration and against inequality and exclusion. In this episode, we connect with Dr. Adwoa Opong and Dr. Justin De Leon to discuss misrepresentation, feminism, and identity in both Western Africa and Native American communities.

Adwoa, let's start by sharing a little bit about your research and telling us about the history of the National Federation of Ghana Women.

[00:02:00] Opong: Okay, so I'm a historian. I'll start with a story. I did my master's degree in Ghana, and I was very interested in women's history with very little knowledge of how or what I was going to write about. So, interactions with professors and my future PhD supervisor, I got access to these papers of a women's organization, which was the National Federation of Gold Coast Women, which became National Federation of Ghana Women. And at the time, I was writing this thesis around 2009, 2010, 2008, thinking around the idea, and there was a lot of new scholarship, which tended to focus on African women and decolonization. So, and the big arguments that many scholars were making was that African women also participated in independence, they were actively involved in independence. And so I went along that trend with the initial exploration of women's organizations, with the Federation being one of three organizations that I studied, but the volume of the papers of the organization, the scope was so wide and so huge that there was need for more work. So I used that initial exploration to develop a more nuanced understanding of what this group was.

To me, there was much more to the story that I was telling beyond the mere argument that they also contributed to independence. So I started thinking through, you know, who they were, their lives. They're educated, they live in urban areas, they were married, mostly through, they had the wedding, the Christian marriages, they were urban residents who were interested and concerned about the moral fabric of urban areas. And so I realized that there's more to this story, and it is tied to questions of citizenship, it is tied to national identity, and it is also tied to a new form of activism that looks at the urban area as a space to redefine citizenship, as a space to redefine national identity. And also compelling me to think about social work, because they refer to themselves as social workers, right? So the question was, as I was doing my research, the question was, how does this, the history of the organization, introduce new perspectives to how we have thought about African women and decolonization? And then I started thinking through, as I already said, their life histories, and really centering the ways in which they remodel themselves after the Second World War as social workers, and sought to use that new professional identity to engage in the states making process. And their main focus was the moral fabric of urban areas as the site of this post-colonial modernity.

[00:05:19] Host: And this organization is, it didn't have a very long history, it started and then kind of was swallowed up by the CPP. And I know that there's a huge history of what happened in Ghana post-colonial. But give us a little explanation of what they were able to accomplish, and then what happened as they kind of were relegated to obscurity.

[00:05:50] Opong: Right. So, it's, like you said, it seems to have a very short lifespan. It emerged officially in 1953, it was inaugurated in 1953, August 1953. And when the nation transitioned to independence in 1957, then the name changed to National Federation of Ghana Women. And within the timeframe that it existed, so 1953, right up until 1960, which is what I call the first phase of the organization's life, it became, it grew to gain an international reputation for itself. And it formed alliances with the International Alliance of Women, International Council of Women. It also formed alliances with other black women's organizations in the United States. By the time that Ghana became a republic in July 1960, it had this reputation of the dominant women's organization in Ghana, right?

If you wanted to get an understanding of the role and the status of Ghanaian women, this organization will be the people to contact, to talk with. And in the lifespan, in the first phase, they launched many things. One and the most, among the most important things that it accomplished was to take a conversation that was occurring in different spaces to the national level, which is marriage and the, what it called the legalization of customary marriages, to take on custom as a source of the oppression of Ghanaian women. And so obviously that drew a lot of attention. At the same time, the organization also organized what it called an annual ideal home exhibitions, where it had these exhibitions, very big exhibitions of what urban modernity should look like. So on display, you'd have the home, the model homes would have a kitchen, what's supposed to be in a modern woman's kitchen, how a modern home in the city is supposed to be partitioned. So there's a living room, there's the kitchen, which is the woman's space, there's a compound for the children to play in, there are bedrooms, there's a sitting area to entertain guests.

It also, and this ran until 1959, it also initiated a conference and you were always, you know, very much involved in conversations about the status of women and the status of the African woman. And the height of that was the Conference of Women of Africa and African Descent. And so within the short period of about seven years, the organization had really expanded. It had built an international reputation for itself, but the nation and the nation states, in terms of how the nation was defining who had the rights to participate in those conversations were changing. And so the nation decided to, the post-colonial government decided to merge all women's organizations and the Federation decided not to join. Because the Federation decided not to join, it was banned completely.

And so it went from 1960 to 1966, it was not in existence at all. But it's revived itself, the leader revived the organization in 1969 as the Ghana Organization of Women, with the same kind of vision and mission as the Federation that she led. So 1969, there's a lot of events happening internationally with regards to the status of women, which would culminate in the United Nations Decade of Women in 1975. And at that time, these women were no longer, they were no longer social workers per se. They were now non-governmental organizations, the lingo had changed, right, with regards to women's activism. And they were now taking these central roles as organizers of NGOs, like leading smaller NGOs in Ghana to organize themselves. Meanwhile, the nation was also changing. So Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966, military coups all over the place from 1966 to 1992. And the organization kind of fizzled out of existence by the 1980s, when the neoliberal era was really on and there were challenges throughout the nation. So in its existence, we see that it changed, it's accomplished a lot of things, but its long-term goals were also kind of compromised as the nation itself was changing.

[00:10:54] Host: Was one of the elements of this group, I mean, you mentioned that they were, at its inception, mostly educated women, was one of the elements to encourage education through women?

[00:11:07] Opong: Absolutely, yeah. Yes, absolutely. They were interested in education for the less enlightened, that's how they referred to the other non-educated women. And by education, they meant vocational skills. So they did initiate vocational training for young women in the cities to earn a living while they were still advocating for, you know, family, the importance of family. So marriage, you know, even where there's divorce, proper channels of divorce and proper channels of inheritance in succession when there's death and things like that.

[00:11:49] Host: So, Justin, I'd love now for you to talk a little bit about your work with indigenous communities here in the States, how you found that path. And then through that work, how, kind of, feminism plays a role in throughout these communities?

[00:12:07] De Leon: You know, I think from a very early age in my schooling and when I was at university, I always interacted with experiences of being different. My parents were born in the Philippines, came to the United States, I was born here in the United States. And so from an early age, I was always thinking about difference. And so that obviously continued in when I was at the university level. And I'd say what that led me to was trying to understand deeper the roots of conflict and also poverty. It led me all around the world. Immediately after undergraduate, I mainly worked with youth, thinking through these challenges around conflict and poverty, thinking through difference, as I mentioned, took me to parts of East Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, almost, you know, all across the globe. Then I realized that the intervention that I needed to put my energies towards was something deeper. It felt really good. And I tell all my students that, you know, they should always try to work and live abroad or study abroad, at least. It felt very, on the surface level, sort of gratifying to work abroad and to be helping people with your hands. But at the same time, there are these structural inequalities that weren't being addressed.

When I got to graduate school, a few things happened. I was late for the first week. I missed the first week of classes because I was filming a documentary film project working with HIV, AIDS, young women survivors in Uganda, northern Uganda. And what that meant was that by week three, when I had a 20-page paper to write, whereas my cohort was complaining about the level of work they had to do, I sort of said to myself, if this is the challenge that I face, then my life is going pretty well. And so it gave me that context to keep moving. And the second thing is that I remember when I was telling people, they would say, okay, Justin, what are you researching? I said, I'm looking at difference, poverty, and conflict. And they would ask, where? I'd say, in the Philippines. They would kind of give the sense of, oh, yes, that makes sense over there. And they would say, okay, well, you know, and I would say, I'm looking at these things in northern Uganda. And they would say, oh, yes, poverty, conflict, dealing with difference in violent terms happens over there. And that made me feel really uncomfortable, because I knew that my intervention was not over there. My intervention was here in the States. And that's when I really knew that I needed to come back, and I really needed to think about where I'm allowing myself to research and situate myself in order to have the most impact in terms of what my intervention was. And at that time, I had done a summer program with this guy named Tim Patrick. He's a political theorist who was looking at mass violence and the normalization of mass violence. And he chose to work at a meatpacking factory in Nebraska. And he pushed me to say, hey, if you're really thinking about violence and conflict in the setting of North America, then think about how you can do that work here so that your intervention is more clear. And that's when I reached out.

I already had contacts within South Dakota, within the Lakota Sioux Nation, just sort of asking. You know, I called up some family friends that we have and said, hey, here are some questions I have. And they said, well, you know, that sounds really interesting. Come on and visit over spring break, and we'll just see. And that was 15 years ago, and I kept going back and back and back. And while I was at the university, what I found very clearly was that in order for me to ask meaningful questions that were of the nature, not of a Band-Aid sort of nature, but of a deeper, structural, critical nature, the place that I found the ability to ask those questions in political science was within feminist international relations and feminist traditions. And the reason for it, right, if we look at the history of feminism within political science, you could say there's multiple waves. The first wave might have been, hey, we need right to vote, the first wave. And so that was achieved, and that was monumental. But then the question was, well, who is allowed to vote? Which women are we talking about? So the second wave was the sort of, hey, women are very unique, and they have unique standpoints and vantage points, and so let's get more people at the table. That was really important, right?

There's some successes there we saw in the 60s and 70s, even the 80s and 90s. And then around maybe like late 80s, early 90s, there was two important interventions. One was by Kimberlé Crenshaw, where she came up with this notion of intersectionality, which essentially says that we hold many intersecting identities, and that oppression and power flows through and intersects through those identities. So you can't just say a single variable will tell you much about anything. It's sort of this multitude and this convergence. And then also around the same time, Judith Butler came up with this notion of performativity. That is that society gives you a handful of scripts in which you perform gender. It's not necessarily biological, it's social. And around that turn is when you start seeing this third wave of feminism come in from political science, which is really kind of like thinking in this critical theory way, which is this structural intervention that's thinking through gender as performative, identity as intersectional, and so on. And this intervention gave space to critical approaches within political science.

This is also around the time when indigenous feminists started, well, you would say maybe indigenous peoples who would have aligned themselves with feminism started at least opening themselves up to the idea of being aligned with feminism and being called feminists. Because if you think about the first two waves of feminism, the sort of object of intervention was patriarchy. And a lot of indigenous feminists, you could call them now, also felt that patriarchy was a detriment to society, but they knew the origin of which that patriarchy arises, which is colonization. And so when you think of colonization, it has to do with land. So therefore decolonization also has to do with land. And the only way there's space for conversations around land is when you sort of broaden the conversation and it's not just about patriarchy or just about sex or even just sort of a more rigid understanding of gender. So that is the opening for a lot of indigenous folks to start thinking about feminism. And that's also the opening in which sort of invited me into the conversation.

I draw a lot from feminist work when it comes to methodology, when it comes to axiology, which is the study of values and what's important and why you're doing something. A lot of these conversations you can't have in other research spaces that are more, you would say, maybe like more positivist, which is more dominant, more hegemonic. But within feminist spaces, you can, you can have these questions. And so that's how I gravitated towards these two sort of spaces, where I was gravitating towards feminist orientations of values and research, and at the same time, looking about an intervention within indigenous spaces here in the United States, which would say, my intervention has to do with a structural change. And so what that led me to is I started seeing that the way Lakota folks would understand and make sense of a very tumultuous world, filled with colonial violence and remnants of oppression, was to sort of look back and try to reorient themselves in relationship to what has been tried to be erased, their culture. And through looking back, and this isn't a sort of a winding of the clock back, you know, to the first contact in 1804 with Lewis and Clark. It wasn't really that, it was more of a looking back to say, what are the qualities in which our culture has had to hide or put aside in order to survive? What are the strengths of those qualities and how can they be brought into or rejuvenated or revisited in a contemporary context?

And so that led me to start thinking through oral history, the importance of story and storytelling. And I should say, all this time I had been doing film, and I'll sort of rewind back to that first week or two of graduate school where I was told that, you know, where I missed my classes. I was drawn into the office of the graduate advisor, director at the time. And she sat me down and she said, Justin, you have to choose whether you are a filmmaker, activist, or a scholar. At the time, I wasn't as developed as a scholar as I am now. I said, okay, no problem. I assure you I'm here as a scholar, no problem. And then as I got up to walk out the door, I just sort of said to myself, that's great. I just won't invite you to any of my film showings, that's all. And then later down the road, again, when I turned to different forms of feminism, particularly black feminist thought, Patricia Hill Collins, among others, who say there's no separation between thinking and doing. In fact, when you look at how the world has progressed in monumental and, you know, in substantive ways, it's not just through thinking alone. It's always been through folks who are doing things, who are learning, and then applying those learnings in this praxis orientation. So that's what leads me today. I was thinking through storytelling and oral history, I make films, I started making films with indigenous communities. This is the First People's Film Lab, which has been going on for the last 10 years at UC San Diego, and then Thunder Bay, Ontario, and now in South Dakota. And I've gotten a handful of grants, the NIH, National Institutes of Health, National Endowment of the Arts, a few Canadian grants, to keep working on this very feminist in methodology project, which is about seeing people as human beings, contributing to indigenous flourishing and sovereignty, and allowing people to tell their own stories, but also stories that allow us to envision something anew, something different. And that's where I think feminism, as a sort of like academic and theoretical tool, is so generative, because it's one of the only spaces where you can say, hey, what's working is not working. Or, hey, what you think is working is not working. Can we think of something different? Can we think of something that is, in a sense, from this society, but something that brings about something new? And I think that's the added value of a lot of feminist theoretical thought and contributions.

[00:22:54] Host: I want to talk about this. You brought up misrepresentation. And I know, unfortunately, in the West and in America, we're very ignorant about our own neighbors. And that misrepresentation, which you are solving, and we are solving through storytelling, but what are some of those preconceived notions that are held about specifically gender roles throughout indigenous tribes? And the role of the female?

[00:23:31] De Leon: So let me handle this. Maybe I'll talk about two parts here. One is misrepresentation and native peoples. And then the second is sort of some of the important sites of learning when it comes to thinking through gender, when it comes to indigenous peoples here in the States. In order for the United States as a political project to exist, they needed land. And so we know that upon contact, upon arrival here, there's always been native peoples. And roughly 1850 on, they're roughly moved west of the Mississippi. And then all the way up until about 1890 was the end of the Indian Wars. And there's some scholars who said some really interesting things, that in so many other parts of the world, colonialism eradicated whole groups of people. But for some reason here in North America, indigenous peoples did not vanish. They were not fully eradicated, as many of the colonizers wanted them to be. And so what this meant is that in the United States, the government has had to, quote unquote, deal with indigenous peoples, native peoples. And there's been different political approaches from, you know, full-on warfare, to assimilation, to self-determination, to relocation, all these different techniques. But ultimately, you could say that the presence of indigenous peoples here in the United States complicates the American narrative of sort of this birth of a country that came from nothing.

And so how does it deal with it? A lot of the representations of native and indigenous peoples here in the US and in Canada show native peoples as extinct, or soon to be extinct, or dying off. You could just simply look at some of the photographs of Edward Curtis, a really famous photographer around 1900s, who basically took the last images of this dying, you know, group of native people. And even today, when you see depictions on screen and in books, it's often, if they're not dying and soon to be eradicated, they are pathologized. They are poor. They are inflicted with drug use and substance abuse and violence and so on. That is not to say that that's not a reality, but one of the interesting sort of caveats or this interesting nuance around stereotypes, and even, let's go away from stereotyping and just say, representations of pain, suffering, and oppression, however well-intended, if that's the main mode of representation, it becomes singular, right? It becomes the way that people start thinking about a particular group as only being pathologized rather than an actual group where there's knowledge, insight, lessons learned, wisdom, and so on, that comes from that space. So you have this sort of, one, you have this need to eradicate, which leads to misrepresentations because they need to be eradicated. If not physically, discursively, they need to be eradicated. And then even the well-intended who say, hey, we need to have this oppression stop, and you represent that oppression on screen, if that is the only way that you're representing people, inherently, you're going to collapse them into just being pathologized, sick, and needing of help. So that's on the sort of representation front.

In terms of how indigenous communities think of gender, first I will say that there's 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and there's a few hundred more unrecognized. I come from an indigenous region of the Philippines, I make my home here, part of my overall project, is to understand how I can be a product of colonialism, while also producing colonialism. I'm a cisgender male, and I have great limitations because I only work within Lakota communities and maybe some Cree communities up north. So take that, take what I say from that perspective. But we do know one of the interesting things is that there's this notion of two-spirit in a Lakota context. So first off, we know that many, not all, but many indigenous communities are matriarchal, meaning the women were the one in charge, not the men. And on top of that, there's this notion of two-spirit. And it's a really interesting sort of metaphor, but also just an interesting exercise to think about what two-spirit does. So in the Western tradition, we say you're born male or female. And if you have sort of a crossing of that, right, if you're born male, but then you identify as a female or vice versa, largely you're sort of cordoned off to the corners of society. You're sort of seen as a pariah. Well, traditionally, within a Lakota context, if a person was male, they had one spirit. And if they were male who associated as female or saw themselves as female, they had two spirits inside of them. And logically, that tells you that if I'm just a cisgender male with one spirit, someone who has two spirits has more spiritual power, energy, and insight than just a singular person with a single spirit. And so two-spirit folks were actually held in such high regard and as a unique and important part of society that they were sort of embraced and held at the center of society, bringing particular spiritual insight and a space of resource rather than of being a pariah. So just that idea of shifting how you even understand genders to begin with can completely transform how you would think about restructuring or challenging structures of society.

[00:29:05] Host: Adwoa, as ignorant as we are about our own indigenous neighbors, if that's a 10 of ignorance, our understanding of African history and African people is at least a 20. What are some of the misconceptions, these common misconceptions of the female experience throughout West Africa and the gender roles throughout the region as well?

[00:29:32] Opong: Okay, misconceptions. This victimhood, perpetual victimhood of patriarchy, and that characterized the ways in which Western organizations and feminist organizations related with African women and colonial structures also wrote African women into the script of colonialism as victims that needed rescue. So this narrative of the African woman as a being or an object in need of perpetual assistance is something that kind of undergirded the relationship between the state, the colonial state, and African women misrepresentation, and it led obviously to stereotypes of the African woman. What happens in, well, from my research and you just being from the continent is that my study allows me to really deal with this misrepresentation from the perspective of African women. They see themselves as victims of culture, of patriarchy, of their societies in which they really didn't see themselves as victims.

Now the irony is that if African women were in need of salvation, from my research I've seen that these educated women who saw themselves as saviors of the less enlightened were doing something very similar, right? They were following a very similar path in terms of how they were looking at women, working class women, and how they were characterizing working class women. And so from the colonial period into the post-colonial period, you have these educated African women turning development around, right? Turning this intervention around that the African woman is in need, if for the colonial establishment and white organizations, the African woman needed saving or needed to be developed, these Ghanaian women and African women's organizations made development something that they would do for themselves and for their sisters. To them, it was a spiritual duty owed to the nation. An organization dedicated to the betterment of the less enlightened was important. It was so urgent to them that in my work, I see that it really compels us to rethink the activities of the organizations or of African women's organizations. So while development was something meant to be done to Africans, they made development something to be done by African women, for African women.

And then also, when we look at the work of, again, misrepresentation and spaces. So when we look at the engagement of African women on the international platforms at specific times in history and even in contemporary times, many of what their main target is to provide a corrective to this image of the African woman as uneducated, a victim of culture, somebody who needs help and to position themselves as people who are doing it for themselves and do not need, who are not victims necessarily, who are involved in a project to change this narrative and this image of the African woman. So on international platforms, irrespective of the subject and the discussion, the undertone is to present the African woman in a different light as somebody who has agency of herself and her being.

I talked about this conference in 1960, where, you know, Conference of Women of Africa and African Descent, people are coming, Black women are coming to the continent for the first time for some of them to talk about the African woman and her welfare. And the conversations and the speeches of the Ghanaian woman is that Ghanaian woman faces no legal issues. She owns her own property. She doesn't answer to her husband. She has this, she has that. So there's this undertone of a very active being, a very active person who is in charge of her being, who is writing her own life and does not need that kind of assistance as we always, it's not that helpless, passive being as has been put out there. And so in terms of representation, when we follow the path, even in contemporary times, there is, you know, when you look at the spaces in which African women find themselves and the kind of the power dynamics is to, the role, their mission is to shift the power dynamics towards one that recognizes their own agency.

And in contemporary times where this question of sexuality has come up and where, for example, there's this anxiety around the moral fabric of the nation with LGBT rights in the US and this fear that, you know, somehow it is going to contaminate the woman and the men and the young men, there's still this undertone of, there's still this really serious activism by African women intellectuals who are standing up against post-colonial governments and the abuses of post-colonial governments. Obviously they've paid. Some of them have been imprisoned by their governments. Some of them have had their law licenses withdrawn, but they continue to create underground activism against repression. So in terms of representation, there's a lot going on except that, you know, post-colonial governments and criminalization has really driven most of the activism underground. Yeah, but there's a lot, there's a lot of conversation that is initiated by African women around global issues and that really is getting at the heart of representation and this conversation is around misrepresentation of the African woman.

[00:36:12] Host: What are ways that we can kind of counterbalance that misrepresentation? I know, Justin, you talked about having Indigenous people tell their own stories and make their own movies, but how really, it's like, how do we battle ignorance? A really light, easy question for anyone to answer, but what are ways that we can do that with these misrepresentations of African women?

[00:36:39] Opong: I think for me, I do that through my teaching, my class, and I always, there's a level of reflexivity that is needed as a researcher. One of my goals is to have my students come to an appreciation of difference, that it is not always bad, and recognize that they come from a context that has shaped their outlook on the world, right? And so in my class, for example, we have gender, sexuality, and power, 19th and 20th century Africa, African history through film that I just recently taught, early African history before 1800. My aim is to let my students know that, yes, the continent has not developed along the same lines as what you guys know here in the United States, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is bad. So, rid yourselves of all of your preconceived ideas about gender, about sexuality, about culture and other cultures, that is where it becomes a bit challenging, and let's step into this context for the next 15 weeks. For this afternoon, we are going to discuss this issue, and I need you to take this position and to come to this topic with a recognition of how your preconceived ideas, your identity often can influence, and then also to leave the class with a recognition of how these preconceived ideas feed these stereotypes and misrepresentations, right? So that you leave class with tools to help you to question some of the misrepresentations about the continent and its people, and its cultures, and its history, right?

So when we watch films, I like to show them films produced by African filmmakers that take on these questions around gender, around power, around culture, and to tease out what the politics of the filmmaker really is. Why is this so different? When I showed, there's a film called Rafiki. I don't know if any of you have watched it. It's about a lesbian relationship in Kenya. The film was banned. Everybody was up in arms about the fact that the filmmaker was trying to contaminate the youth and introduce lesbianism to the nation. So there's a lot of controversy around Rafiki, but Rafiki is also very contemporary. So it has a lot of, it's very upbeat, very colorful. It's about a love story between these two women. For the first time, it is not a story about same-sex relationship that demonizes them, right? So that was the problem that the state had, that at the end, there wasn't some form of deliverance that happens. But at the end, it's a love story that blooms. So I tell my students, what is the politics of the filmmaker? What's the filmmaker trying to tell us? When you look at the film, when you watch this film, look at the colors, look at the vibrancy of the, just study the film. What do you take away from Kenya? Life about Kenya? What does the life of these characters tell us about youth and youth culture in Kenya? So we leave the class, well, I think, I hope that my students leave the class with a better appreciation that misrepresentations feed stereotypes and stereotypes that I tell them incomplete, right? They are not full stories. There's more to it. So I think I get into these through my work, my work, and then also my research, right? You know, hopefully really introduce some nuance and really complicates these misrepresentations.

[00:40:44] Host: Justin?

[00:40:45] De Leon: Yeah, I would echo a lot of what Dr. Opong mentioned. I like this idea, and I'll pick up off on this idea of this notion of stereotypes are incomplete. Eve Tuck, in a 2009 piece, she has this article called Suspending Damage. And she talks about how stereotypes are incomplete, that Indigenous communities are so much more than pain, grief, damage. They are that, but there's so much more, so much more so that these incomplete stories are acts of violence, that they actually create active harm on people. So thanks for that, Dr. Apong.

The question around how do we capture or how do we move towards better representation, maybe less ignorance? You know, maybe in another day, we would say inclusion, or we would say diversity, belonging. This project isn't just a sort of feel-good practice where, hey, it's good for those people to get them more involved. It's good for those folks to have these better depictions. It's not just that. It is actually a practice of justice. We're all one human family. And in order to sort of progress as we can as humanity, we need to involve all members of society. Let's just think about this really quickly, right? English first speaking countries in the world, there's 8 billion people in the world. 5% of the global population is living in English first language speaking countries. 5%. If you go to any of the major, what, maybe like top 100, maybe even more universities around the world, all of the instruction is primarily in English. All of the canon of almost every major discipline is in English. It's 5% of the global language and how knowledge is disseminated. So just think about that, right? What hubris we must have to think that we as a human species can reach our max, our highest aspirations if we're only drawing upon 5% of global population to sort of generate that insight. That's not even including and talking about the gender dynamics of research and so on.

To sort of loop back again to what Dr. Opong had mentioned, we need to start seeing difference not as bad but as generative. That when you actually are trying to come up with new solutions, you need to involve people and communities that most likely will not agree with you. And I'm not saying like Republican, Democrat, that's not what I'm talking about. We're going beyond these sort of like two to four year political cycles to actually involve people and other people who have different philosophical understandings of what human nature is, of what gender is, as my example was before, to allow for us to make use and to benefit from all of the knowledge that has been developed from human experience, not just a small percentage of it. So difference is generative in a sense, right? In order to make a fire, you need a spark. You get a spark from two stones coming together and hitting each other, right? That's how we get insight. That's how we get new steps forward into places where we've never been.

So first, I would say discursively and sort of framework-wise, sort of in our thought process, we have to start seeing difference as good and not bad. In fact, invite difference because it can be the generative context in which to shape a new world. So that's what I would say sort of on the intellectual, on the discursive side. Then I would say individually, we need to educate ourselves. Of course, clearly, we need to be taking advantage of all of the university resources when you're a student to not just be choosing majors and minors based on what's going to be beneficial for you economically. It's a reality. But a liberal arts education, actual education, the purpose of education, Martin Luther King says it's not just to become civic-minded, but also to have a moral compass. James Baldwin says the purpose of education is to take the theories of our forefathers and put them aside and see the world for your own eyes. That's the purpose of education, is to see with our own eyes. So I would say that we need to do everything we can to educate ourselves, and that doesn't mean it's just when we're young. Also, as we continue to grow and know that the brain plasticity does start hardening as we get older, but it never fully hardens. We can always learn. So on an individual level, how are we learning? For students, and I would say applicable to this conversation, there's a nice framework that I like thinking about, of how do you understand how you intervene and carry your gifts into the world. What I think about oftentimes is, on one hand, we have capacity, which is your skills, your gifts. And on the other hand, you might have opportunity. What are the social spaces you have access to? I'm a professor, so I have a classroom. I'm part of the Filipino community, so I have that space. I might be active in sports or civic organizations or community homeowners associations, whatever. That's opportunity. In terms of capacity, I make films. I like storytelling. I write poetry. I play music.

[00:46:03] Host: Do a podcast.

[00:46:04] De Leon: Do a podcast! You might even just say that I'm really good at mobilizing people through email, whatever it is. So on one hand, you take one of your capacity, and on the other hand, you take one of your opportunities, and you put those two together. And that is a unique space that only you can access. And once you think of that space, you use the things that we've been talking about, the things that you might gain from reading illumined individuals like bell hooks, Audrey Lorde, Leanne Simpson, to name a few, who are feminist and feminist indigenous folks. And you use those insights to either deepen the level of conversation at that intersection, or you uplift the level of conversation at the intersection.

Exactly what we're doing with this podcast, right? We're taking a conversation that's already been well-worn and sort of beat down in the popular spaces, and we're trying to breathe a new life that allows us to see something different, more enlightened, and actually have deeper conversations. And that's how you intervene. That's the reason why I make films with indigenous communities. I love making films. I love telling stories. I happen to be involved with a bunch of indigenous spaces and communities, and I see them as family, and we put those two together, and we use the theory that we learn in books and classes to help drive, deepen the level of conversation, and to uplift those spaces, right? As Dr. Opong had mentioned, it's not about seeing folks as victim or as having less than or less than human, subhuman, stereotype, but it's something different that says these folks have desires. It's human typing, right? As Eve Tuck would say, it's seeing the world with possibility and opportunity. And let me just end this with this notion here. So many of our young students come into the classroom and come into looking at the political sphere with disillusionment, with skepticism, rightfully so. Think about our young people. They've gone through, right, like the 1% Zuccotti Park. They went through all these different failed movements, and we're still ending up where we are. And then you put it in context to say that we only draw upon, let's just say hypothetically, 5% of global human knowledge. That means that there is a huge possibility for something new when it comes to just centering diversity, when it comes to centering representations that are true, when it comes to this notion of, you would say, you know, like inclusion or belonging, comes possibility. I'll go back to my first point. It's not just about a feel-good exercise. It's about what we need to carry on as a thriving, flourishing human body, a unified human body into the future. We need this knowledge that we are harming ourselves by not representing and not making use of or even seeing it as beneficial.

[00:48:54] Host: I want to cap. We're kind of leading somewhat into this, but we've talked about education and how vital it is. And as you are both educators, I know you are seeing this and witnessing this, but we are closing in on a 60 to 40% ratio of women to men on college campuses. Is this alarming at all or exciting? And what does this say about the future of higher education?

[00:49:24] De Leon: I remember a handful of years ago, there was a documentary called Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof, and it was very problematic in many ways, but its main thrust was that education is an equalizer, that education can equalize society, can bring about great things. That's true, but let's caveat that. What type of education are we talking about? When you look at a lot of the setbacks, as it were, that's a nice way of saying it, in sort of human history, genocides and so on, it comes from spaces that you wouldn't necessarily say are any more uneducated than the space next door or so on. Really, one has to ask themselves, what is education? And even when we ask ourselves education now, we're talking, largely in the United States, an education that's based on not only resources, but then also sort of conceptual framings of enslaving bodies and eradication of peoples, right? When it comes to the sort of makeup of what the United States is, it's founded upon that.

What type of education is the question? Are we training people to not only be great thinkers, but also to be compassionate, thoughtful, and deep thinkers in regards to what human experience is and can be? In my spiritual practice, human beings are mind, body, and spirit. In a lot of indigenous communities, it's mind, body, spirit, and heart. Are we training individuals in an education system to be all of those elements, or are we not? One of the examples in Uganda, pre-contact, pre-English contact, British contact, there were these thousands of these sort of Bush University, or not universities, Bush schools. And they were premised on one of these really important cultural value, which is that the child should never surpass the parents in learning. So children and parents would go and study together. When the British came, they said, this does not meet our understanding of what education is. They stopped all of those school systems, and they replaced it with a handful of dozen of what we'd understand as Western-based education systems.

So the question of what is education? Are we training people's hearts? And then the question that we get at is, yeah, 60% now being educated are women, and 40% are men. Do we see any outcomes of that already? And I would say certainly, yes, we do. At first, when we had President Obama take office in 2008 to 16, there was this notion that we're post-racialized as a country, when in fact, there is this large swing back the other way, this sort of rebuke and pushback to say, hey, what you see as equality feels like oppression to those who are the dominant class, which is what Paulo Freire mentions, that to the dominant class, equality often feels like oppression. And so there's this pushback. But it's a particular type of pushback. It's not just a racialized pushback, but it's a racialized pushback that has its foundation in a very problematic, superficial, and unsustainable framing of what masculinity is, and what it should be, and what it can be.

Who are we to say that the way that masculinity is constructed, being about dominance over and being tough, how are we to say that that is the pinnacle and peak of sort of development of gender-based thought or of what human beings can be or should be? And it's not, clearly. I think as a young parent, I know Dr. Opong is also a young parent, that we get to start thinking about how we have inherited certain roles of masculinity and femininity, and we can deviate that path, create a deviation in the path for our children. And if you look around, there's all these sort of conversations that young parents today are spending so much time with their children, that's far surpassing what our parents used to spend with us. And so the hope is, is that when we meet the hearts of our own children, that we allow them to breathe and be as human beings that's not defined by gender, but that are spiritual human beings that carry a gender in this world. And I think when we allow people to start breathing and being themselves, the multiplicity of that, whatever that means, then we can start having real meaningful conversations about what are those little qualities and characteristics around masculinity that are good, that we want to carry with us? And what are some of those that seem like the remnants of the past and relics of an old world that we want to get rid of? And I think this notion of dominance over, the notion of whoever is the sort of loudest and strongest dominates over everything, is antiquated. And I think we see that not only in, you know, in the representation that you point to at universities, we have 60% female and male, but also you see that in a lot of females opting out of marriages in so many countries around the world. Is that sustainable? And I think ultimately we as humanity, but you could say we as men, but you could say we as humanity need to do better. We need to understand that 5% of all human knowledge is not sufficient for us to survive and thrive. We have to understand that this very sort of superficial understanding of what masculinity is that comes from hurt and pain and trauma is not what we need to thrive or survive.

[00:54:34] Host: Dr. Opong, do you have anything else?

[00:54:36] Opong: You know, I don't have anything else. I mean, Justin, you've covered a lot of the things that I struggle with in just my work and, you know, as a young parent and just my interaction with the world. Is education really the great equalizer? I mean, in many ways it forces a self-reflection as an educator of how you are relating with people you call students, what kind of knowledge you are imparting, your teaching style. What is your teaching philosophy? There's this structured, you know, you have to do this, you have to do that, do this, do this. How are you even designing your syllabus? I mean, is it that I am glad documents that how do you build empathy into your work in a way that your class and your students feel so comfortable to kind of get the message and, you know, there's this exchange of ideas, there's the learning that's going on. These are questions that I struggle with all the time and especially this last year. And I started addressing it by kind of gradually rewriting my syllabus. You know, those parts of the syllabus, for example, I say, well, there's different parts of this relationship, this next 15 weeks. I need for you to take some knowledge with you. I also need for you to apply some of the knowledge. So let's look at application in what ways, what do I mean by application of your work is all important, but also your relationship with others. Empathy is very important. I don't want you leaving the class thinking, well, you didn't take anything away, but in your old ways.

And it's not just a life in the classroom or the work that we do, even outside of the classroom as human beings, right? So as you want your students to do, are you doing, right? Are you that example? Are you that individual that is receptive of new ideas that is empathetic? And if you are not, how are you even able to communicate these things to your students? So I think we are in this moment where, as instructors, as parents, as human beings, we are being challenged intellectually. We are being challenged just as mere humans, in terms of how we relate to the changing dynamics. We wanted more women in school. Yes, more women are in school. Fantastic. But we also need the men to be in school as well. We don't want to recreate a system that we critiqued so much and recreate another problem. It's a very important question you've asked, and I don't have one straight answer. But we are living in a moment where I think that this Engage in the World, Chapman University, Wilkinson, history departments, and I'm sure Justin's own program as director, we are all in this process of thinking, of thinking about everything, the implications of what we do when parents commit their students here.

[00:57:48] Host: We'd like to thank Dr. Adwoa Opong and Dr. Justin De Leon. If you'd like to continue the conversation, visit chapman.edu/wilkinson to learn more. To access recommended books from our guests for further learning, and for more socially conscious content, visit us at pastforward.org or follow us at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.