Welcome to Women's History Month...
Let us, please, not give Voice to the Voiceless.
“They’re beating the women, Nancy!”
C.J. Cregg’s voice breaks as she locks eyes with the White House National Security Adviser. All day, she’s tried to get her colleagues to rise to her level of outrage at news of an arms deal between the United States and a tiny, oil-rich nation in the Arabian Gulf. Surely a woman, a Black woman, like Nancy McNally would understand — and use her defense credentials to persuade the President to backtrack on sending high-powered weapons and warplanes to a country that brutally abuses at least half its population.
I devoured The West Wing when it premiered during my freshman year of college. Having already fallen hard for D.C. on an eighth-grade school trip, I couldn’t wait to live in a row house like Denzel Washington’s reporter in The Pelican Brief and write about 1600 Penn. a la Woodstein. In the two decades since the show premiered, I’ve rewatched from start to finish maybe five or six times (first via box-set DVDs and later Netflix). There’s still much to love (Josh, “Two Cathedrals”) and much that feels like a very particular relic of that time, namely how smart men wrote about smart women.
Plenty of ink has already been spilled about Aaron Sorkin, the show’s creator, and the cringe-worthy storylines and monologs given to his shows’ female protagonists. I could write an entire essay about the character of Amy Gardner (see: feisty! i.e. She’ll toss your cell phone in a boiling pot of stew if you go up against her on paid family leave — and be enchanting while doing it shaped my own (mis)perception of the ideal woman I wanted to become. But it’s the line, “they’re beating the women,” which has rattled around in my brain for more than a decade. I can hear Allison Janney, playing press secretary C.J., deliver the plea with exhaustive horror. At the time, I’m sure I related to her outrage. After all, smart, enlightened women cared about oppressed women and girls. And, of course, it’s hard to feel anything but disgust at state- or culturally sanctioned violence.
It’s difficult, however, to remember my initial (patronizing, privileged, pejorative) opinion about the fictional Qumar because I would go on to spend part of the intervening years in the tiny, oil-rich Gulf Arab state of Qatar (no relation, wink). I remember being home on leave and sitting on the roof deck of Tortilla Coast with a future colleague who planned to move to Doha in the fall. She mentioned she couldn’t wait to introduce the women in Qatar to The Feminine Mystique. I was offended and annoyed, and I’d like to think I would have reacted this way long before I’d ever lived in the region. I hope so — and yet I look back on this TV show, and I know that my outrage meter was firmly in place. After all, I grew up to become one of those journalists who wanted to “give a voice to the voiceless.”
The West Wing episode in question aired in the middle of the show’s third season (my favorite) on Nov. 28, 2001, little more than two months after 9/11. It was the beginning of Hollywood drawing inspiration from the War on Terror and though it was pre-torture-porn ‘entertainment,’ much of the series shifted to dramatizing the then-liberal fantasy of a Democratic President who refuses to stand for Arab Men’s oppressive bullshit — a truly fascinating and offensive take that necessitates suspending reality in past and present-day America.
Nonetheless, it’s the plea for the women that gets me. It’s the quest to give “voice of the voiceless” that haunts.
Saving women and girls. Apart from the retribution for the lives lost on that September morning, the call to action to free (or at least empower) subjugated women in Afghanistan quickly took on widespread urgency as the U.S. went to war in October 2001. A week before The West Wing episode aired, first lady Laura Bush took over her husband's weekly radio address to draw attention to the plight of Afghan women, calling for international condemnation of the Taliban’s repression. The State Department released a report nearly in tandem, generating widespread coverage, to highlight “the Taliban’s War Against Women.” In fact, this rationale remained so persuasive that for years, successive presidential administrations have latched onto the idea of safeguarding Afghan women’s rights as a significant part of the case for the fight against the Taliban. America has spent more than $780 million over nearly two decades to promote and protect these rights.
Yet the agreement struck between the Trump administration and the insurgents in February 2020 offered zero protections — they weren’t even a footnote. Team Trump considered what’s always been acceptably referred to as the “women issue” an internal matter. Much like the Afghan civilians who had aided the American government at great personal risk, the 45th president expressed no outward obligation to insist the Taliban respect the health, safety and livelihood of Afghan women, or men for that matter. The Biden administration then tacitly blessed the entire thing, opting not to re-negotiate a new or revised deal to guarantee the preservation of women’s rights or civil liberties.
As I first wrote this, news stories and first-hand accounts on social media continue to roll in of Afghan women judges, attorneys and politicians being hunted and killed and girls being prevented from attending school, one of litanies of restrictions and abuses yet the one that gets the most attention. NGOs and advocacy groups are rallying for action. All 24 female U.S. senators sent a letter to President Biden, imploring him to press the Taliban to respect the rights of women and girls.
“They’re beating the women, Nancy.”
Here’s what I know for sure. Afghan women [women women] don’t need saviors. They need actual allies. Reliable partners and co-conspirators who don’t just use their lived experiences for membership drives, political capital and performative outrage.
Most important for the purposes of what I have written and will write: Afghan women have never and will never need me or anyone else to give them a voice. They are speaking. They are screaming. They’re crying. They’re raging in ways we could never comprehend — and ways we could too. They’re addressing the United Nations Security Council, U.S. senators and world leaders.
They have always been crystal clear about their needs and wants and articulated them from both the outside and within the Afghan government. The company line from then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and many others about this being an “internal” and “domestic” issue cynically and mendaciously contradicts the myriad of ways the U.S. and other Western governments have used these women’s safety and stories for their rally-around-the-flag efforts (i.e., securing congressional buy-in and funding to continue military operations). Also, these women didn’t need to ask permission from the Afghan government, which so many in the United States (elected officials included) have always viewed as exclusively (or, worse, effectively) male.
There’s been this persistent and advantageous (for all the reasons identified above) assumption that Afghan women should be put on a pedestal because they’ve been saved from a dungeon.
We mistake headscarves for handcuffs and yet American culture has always treated women who show less skin as more serious and capable. Cover too much and you’re repressed —the treacherous tightrope of existing in these bodies.
But we treat Afghan women in positions of power like tokens because that’s how we really think of them. U.S. officials and the general public would be hard-pressed to believe the first Afghan woman to become governor or ambassador to the United Nations was anything but a figurehead. And it would be ludicrous to think Afghan men in power didn’t pick some (let’s even say all for the sake of this argument) for this reason. Why should they be held to a higher standard than we hold men in this country? But a person can only exist as a placeholder for so long. That, of course, is the real reason to hire women. They open the door behind them even before they sit down in the chair. They immediately hire other women and become mentors to those younger or less experienced.
When we say women and girls in Afghanistan are different now than they were before it’s only in their access to opportunities. The grit, drive and raw talent is inherent. As Ambassador Adela Raz tells me: “It’s like with babies who know how to eat when they’re born. They just know. It’s the same for women as well. We want respect that has nothing to do with our backgrounds. We want access to education, politics and knowledge and we want equal treatment. It’s a natural instinct for us all.”
I could never make right what has been wronged by the 2020 agreement signed with the Taliban or the 2021 withdrawal. But I can own and atone for my own belief that I was ever going to be the one to teach a person how to use their own voice. They speak their stories into existence and sometimes they trust me to take notes — for themselves, for their country, for their ancestors, for their families and for our shared history.
A Programming Note: Thank you for patience and understanding while book-writing took precedence in this space. I’m excited to begin sharing conversations, beginning later today with Christina Hardaway, deputy chief of the Political & Economic Section at the U.S. Embassy Yaoundé in Cameroon.