Assignment Prompt & Instructions
Zero AI with plagiarism reports please.
**files (4)**
– ## Jul151.pdf
– ## 1.Beyond_the_pale_Race_in_Silicon_Valley.pdf
– ## 2.Lawnssoftballbourbonandprivilege.pdf
– ## 3.VeilofIgnorance.docx
**## Jul151.pdf**
APA Format for this assignment please
In this assignment, you will write a five-paragraph argumentative essay based on one of the
three topics provided below. Pay attention when developing your arguments and
counterarguments.
Please note that each topic comes with an article that you need to read beforehand. Somewhere
in your essay, you need to cite the accompanying article at least once; if you wish, you can also
cite other articles, but this one is a must. The article assigned to the topic should not be analyzed as
a primary source but should only serve as supporting evidence either for one of your arguments or
counterarguments. The accompanying articles are attached to this assignment, and they also
provide a direct link for the article itself. Please do not quote; instead, you should paraphrase.
According to certain activists, one way of improving diversity in the workplace is through
Affirmative Action measures. Yet California, a traditionally liberal state, rejected Affirmative Action
on their November 2020 ballots. Why might a Democratic supermajority state reject this solution to
diversity issues? Investigate the problem related to increasing diversity and opportunity to people
of all races and ethnicities, and then write an argumentative essay where you propose what you
consider to be the best solution, whether it is Affirmative Action or some other solution, to help
solve this problem long term.
Read the article titled “Beyond the Pale. Race in Silicon Valley.”
2.
In 2020, Black Lives Matter was both a hashtag and an organization; both the hashtag and the
organization were particularly visible during the protests after George Floyd’s death during the
summer of 2020. Some people willingly use the hashtag and support the organization. It is often
stated that all lives cannot matter until Black lives matter. But others support the idea behind the
hashtag #BlackLivesMatter while eschewing any relationship with the organization itself based on
accusations of political extremism. Why would this organization appear extremist to some, causing
them to reject its mission? Is this just a reflection of people’s dislike of the chaos created by the
Floyd protests and riots (93% of which were considered peaceful according to the Armed Conflict
Location & Event Data Project at acleddata.com)? Or is it a symptom of deeper, implicit biases? Is
there some legitimacy to the claims of extremism for the Black Lives Matter group? Consider a
strategy to improve understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement, both including the formal
organization and the idea, and the best way to decrease any potential biases against Black people.
Where would you start? Write an essay argumentative defending your strategy.
Read the article titled “Lawns, softball, bourbon and privilege.”
3.
Choose an artifact that is specific to a particular culture, religion, or other group (like the hijab) and
write an analysis of it. Describe the item, what it looks like, who wears or uses it, and why people of
a particular group wear or use it. You may want to include a personal story of your own encounters
with this artifact or images of it in your analysis, if appropriate. Investigate different ways that
people interpret and react to this artifact, as well as ways that views on this artifact may have
evolved in recent times. Write an argumentative essay where you argue about people’s different
views of this artifact.
**## 1.Beyond_the_pale_Race_in_Silicon_Valley.pdf**
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Beyond the pale; Race in Silicon Valley
Date: June 20, 2020
From: The Economist
Publisher: Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
Document Type: Article
Length: 529 words
Full Text:
The technology industry faces up to its diversity problem
TO GET A sense of diversity in tech, take a stroll on University Avenue in Palo Alto, a city at the heart of Silicon Valley. Before the
pandemic, if you encountered a black person, the chances were they worked in a local shop. African-Americans account for 3% of
workers at America's five biggest technology firms (see chart) and probably less at smaller ones. About one in 50 partners at venture-
capital (VC) firms is black. The figure among VC-financed entrepreneurs is one in 100. Such dismal numbers, and Silicon Valley's
meritocratic pretensions, help explain why tech's response to the killing of George Floyd has been louder even than other industries'.
Will outrage lead to lasting change?
Pushed by a left-leaning workforce, big tech now regularly takes an activist stance on important issues, from immigration to the
pandemic. Yet even by these standards, the reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests has been remarkable. Firms offered
donations to race-related charities, set up funds to finance startups by non-white founders, stopped selling controversial technologies
such as facial recognition and vowed to purge their software of racist language. Apple and YouTube (part of Google) each pledged
$100m to combat racism with educational schemes and support for black artists. On June 17th Google said it would raise the share
of "under-represented groups" in leadership by 30% by 2025.
Yet corporate activism will amount to little if tech firms and their financiers do not change how they operate, says Sydney Sykes, co-
founder of BLCK VC, a group on a mission to swell the ranks of black venture capitalists in America. Companies must make more of
an effort to promote and retain minority employees. VC firms have to examine why they often reject pitches by minority
entrepreneurs; a simple "just can't get excited about this" is no longer enough. They should also broaden their professional networks
beyond the usual lily-white crowd, argues Elliott Robinson of Bessemer Venture Partners, a big VC firm.
Since diversity, particularly on gender, became a hot topic in the tech industry a few years ago, progress has been slow. But Ms
Sykes believes things will speed up now. Customers and employees want it. And the firms have started to twig that lofty statements
and charity do not suffice. Facebook's chief diversity officer, Maxine Williams, now reports directly to Sheryl Sandberg, the firm's
number two (though not to its boss, as some would like). At Reddit, a popular discussion website, a white co-founder, Alexis Ohanian,
stepped down from the board to make way for a black replacement, Michael Seibel, boss of Y Combinator, a startup school. On June
17th Apple said it would replace its diversity chief.
Mr Robinson has long lamented the tech industry's "diversity theatre": grand statements followed by little action. But even he is
somewhat hopeful. Thanks to smartphones, he says, whites can see for themselves how black people are treated–and want it to
stop. He knows all too well: he has been forcibly restrained by police three times in his life, for no reason other than the colour of his
skin. The last time was not far from University Avenue.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
"Beyond the pale; Race in Silicon Valley." The Economist, 20 June 2020, p. 54(US). Gale College Collection,
link.gale.com/apps/doc//GCCO?u=mia56118&sid=lms-GCCO&xid=dcbb4810. Accessed 18 June 2023.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A626946756
[http://store.eiu.com/](http://store.eiu.com/)
**## 2.Lawnssoftballbourbonandprivilege.pdf**
Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our products. This functionality is provided solely for your
convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any
representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS
AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY
AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY,
ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning
Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale College Collection Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated
PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine
generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom.
Lawns, softball, bourbon and privilege: I have feared white
men and I have loved them
Author: Roxane Gay
Date: Oct. 10, 2014
From: New Statesman(Vol. 143, Issue 5231)
Publisher: New Statesman, Ltd.
Document Type: Essay
Length: 1,096 words
Full Text:
I have known white men. I have loved white men. This often surprises people. They read my writing about race and gender and make
assumptions. They think that a passionate desire for equality rises from a place of hatred rather than from an abiding sense of
fairness. They misunderstand equality as the destruction of one group instead of the salvation of another.
There was the first boy I ever loved–golden-haired, blue-eyed–and then he and several other boys who were just like him did
something terrible to me. It would have been easy, I suppose, to imagine that all white men were like that: brute, taking what they
wanted as if it were owed to them. Perhaps I do think that of white men. Some days, I cannot be sure.
I am a child of the suburbs and forgotten rural places. For most of my life, I have lived in areas where I am the exception rather than
the rule. I have known white men. I have watched them mow their lawns and play softball on Thursday nights and drink beer and go
to work each morning in their sensible suits and sensible shoes. I have studied the confidence with which they walk, the shape of
their squared shoulders, the almost unbearable firmness of their handshake. I have seen how they survey a room they enter, knowing
they have an inalienable right to fill that space as they see fit, no matter the circumstance. I have hated such confidence. I have
envied such confidence.
I have seen white men presiding over trials, presiding over corporations, presiding over many countries in the western world. I have
watched as they have made choices that serve, mostly, their own best interests. I have watched as such self-interest has gone
unchecked and even been encouraged.
I have seen white men kill men and women with skin like mine because their fear of difference overcame grace and humanity. It pains
me to realise this but I will continue to bear witness to such disgrace. I will continue to be powerless in the face of it.
When I see a white man ambling towards me on the street at night, or when I am in an elevator with him, or when I see him in the car
next to mine on the interstate, I often think I should be afraid. I know what white men are capable of. Bullets are impervious to
righteousness. I and many others will be forced to mourn Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Eric Garner, Mike Brown,
John Crawford and, and, and …
I have written about white men and how prominently they figure in our culture. I have written about the ease with which they move
through the world. I have written about how far too many white men are unwilling to acknowledge that ease, that privilege. They hate
that word, privilege. They hear it as an accusation rather than a statement of fact. They see it as an attack on their character or an
attack on their way of life. They feel threatened and, perhaps, they should. They know how good they have it. They know what their
lives would be like if they lost that privilege. No one would willingly relinquish such power.
White men have written to me to tell me I am wrong. White men have written to me to tell me their sad stories, as if their suffering,
great or small, were the bridge across which we could find common ground. They are not interested in my sad stories. When these
white men write to me, they are trying to say, "I am more than my skin." They are trying to say, "I bleed, too." I want to write back and
say, "I never said otherwise."
There is the most recent man I loved–the rugged sort, a logger and a hunter. He was persistent. He took me into the woods and
showed me hidden waterfalls. He took me deer hunting in the cold, early morning. He taught me the various parts of a crossbow and
how to hold it properly, braced against the shoulder. He taught me how to exhale as I pressed the trigger. He loved the natural world
and understood it better than people.
He couldn't stand heat and humidity. He kept a beard even though I often urged him to shave so I could see the smooth of his face.
He drove a truck and he had a cabin on a lake and he loved to fish. I would sit on the dock at his cabin reading while he held his
fishing pole, staring at the water like he knew the mysteries lurking beneath the surface. I stared at him over the pages of my book
like I knew the mysteries lurking beneath his surface.
He was conservative and I was decidedly not. When I tried to lure him to my liberal way of thinking, he smiled at me like I still had so
much to learn. 1 loved to argue with him. I loved to make him question his place in the world the way he made me question mine. I
made him happy. He made me happy. We never knew if that was enough.
He was a drinker, beer and bourbon mostly. On weekends, we would go out to a bar or the bowling alley, anything to get out of the
house, hear a little music, dance together. We lived in a really small town. We were never going to be able to hide in plain sight. We
drew attention as an unlikely couple: my brown skin, his skin somewhat paler, me the quiet graduate student, he the outdoorsman
with thickly calloused hands and a calm demeanour until the drink got in him real good.
Small town, middle of nowhere, far from everything–people couldn't keep their opinions to themselves and he couldn't keep his fists
to himself. He was a drinker and he was a brawler. He could not understand why anyone would question his choices, the things that
made him happy. He said he was defending my honour but really he was defending his.
At night, in bed, he would say, "I love your skin," and then he would show me how he loved my skin, how he loved me as more than
my skin. He showed me how to love him as more than his skin.
I have known white men.
Roxane Gay is a professor of English at Purdue University, Indiana. Her collection of essays "Bad Feminist" is published by Corsair
(12.99 [pounds sterling])
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
Gay, Roxane. "Lawns, softball, bourbon and privilege: I have feared white men and I have loved them." New Statesman, vol. 143, no.
5231, 10 Oct. 2014, pp. 36+. Gale College Collection, link.gale.com/apps/doc//GCCO?u=mia56118&sid=lms-
GCCO&xid=dcbb4810. Accessed 18 June 2023.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A388051364
[http://www.newstatesman.com/](http://www.newstatesman.com/)
**## 3.VeilofIgnorance.docx**
**Veil of Ignorance**
Have we gotten the headscarf all wrong?
APRIL 25, 2011, 2:51 AM
In 1955, Albert Hourani, the Oxford historian and bestselling author of
[_A History of the Arab Peoples_](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446393924/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0446393924), published a short article called "The Vanishing Veil: A Challenge to the Old Order." Pointing out that veiling was a fast-disappearing practice in most Arab societies, Hourani gave a brief history of how it was fading from modern society — and why it would soon become a thing of the past.
The trend to unveil, Hourani wrote, had begun in Egypt in the early 20th century, set in motion by the writer Qasim Amin. Amin had argued that "gradual and careful change in the status of women," including women’s casting off their veils, was now an essential step in the advancement of Muslim societies — and "not contrary to the principles of Islam." Although Amin’s ideas had been met with great resistance, Hourani recounted how they gradually gained acceptance and spread among the "more advanced Arab countries," first in Egypt and then "Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq."
By the 1950s, when Hourani was writing, the veil had virtually disappeared in Egypt, except among the "lower middle class, the most conservative of all classes," he noted. It was only in the Arab world’s "most backward regions," and specifically Saudi Arabia and Yemen, that the "old order" — and along with it such practices as veiling and polygamy — "still persists unaltered."
But Hourani’s article has proved spectacularly incorrect. Fifty-six years later, we live in a world where veiling among Muslim women, after steadily gaining ground across the globe in the last two decades, is incontrovertibly ascendant. How did we get it so wrong?
Until recently, I thought, as Hourani did, that the disappearance of the veil was inevitable; I was sure that greater education and opportunity for women in the Muslim world would result in the elimination of this relic of women’s oppression. For decades, in books, op-eds, and lectures, I stood firmly and unquestioningly against the veil and the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, viewing them as signs of women’s disempowerment. To me, and to my fellow Arab feminists, being told what to wear was just another form of tyranny. But in the course of researching and writing a new book on the history of the veil’s improbable comeback, I’ve had to radically rethink my assumptions. Where I once saw the veil as a symbol of intolerance, I now understand that for many women, it is a badge of individuality and justice.
That was not always the case. Not long after I moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1998, I recall walking past Cambridge Common with a friend who was visiting from the Arab world — a well-known feminist whom I will call Aisha. We were shocked to find a large crowd there, the women all in hijab. It was an arresting, unusual sight — and one that made both of us instinctively uncomfortable.
"To them," Aisha said as we stood observing the scene, "we are the enemy."
For Aisha and me, the hijab’s presence meant not piety — for we knew many women who were deeply devout yet never wore hijab — but Islamism, the very political form of Islam that had been gaining ground in Muslim societies since the Islamic resurgence of the 1970s, a religious revival fueled significantly by the activities of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. So for me the sight of women in hijab in America was a disturbing one.
I left Egypt in the late 1960s, by which time the Muslim Brotherhood had almost disappeared, many members having gone into hiding or fled the country because of the Nasser regime’s systematic attempt to eradicate the group. In the late 1960s hardly anyone in such cities as Cairo and Alexandria wore hijab.
But by the 1990s that had all changed. The Islamic resurgence had made extraordinary gains across Egyptian society even as escalating militant Islamist violence was shaking the country in a growing atmosphere of intellectual repression. In 1992, Farag Foda, a well-known journalist and critic of Islamism, was murdered. The following year, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, then a professor at Cairo University, was accused of being an apostate; he was later forced to flee the country with his wife. In 1994, Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate, was stabbed by an Islamist who claimed to be outraged by his blasphemous works. It all seemed a shocking gauge of Egypt’s drastic descent into intolerance, and for me it was very much connected to the spread of Islamism and its signature dress, the hijab.
All of this, then, was instantly brought to mind by seeing the hijab in Cambridge. Was some kind of extremist, militant Islam taking root in the West? Was that what the presence of the hijab signified? Could the Muslim Brotherhood have somehow managed to establish a foothold here and in other Western countries? Where were these young women getting their ideas? And because they lived in a free country where it was quite ordinary for women to challenge patriarchal ideas, why did they feel bound to accept whatever it was that they were being told?
My reading of that scene on the Cambridge street turned out to be accurate in that Islamism has now become a powerful influence in America, and yet it was also a misreading — as I would discover in listening to women who chose to wear the veil. My very first interviews began to unsettle my assumptions. "I wear it for the same reason as my Jewish friend wears a yarmulke," said one woman; the hijab, she said, was required dress that made visible the presence of a religious minority entitled to justice and equality. Another said she hoped her hijab would raise other women’s awareness of society’s sexist messages about women’s bodies and dress. For many others, wearing the hijab was a way of rejecting negative stereotypes and affirming pride in Muslim identity in the face of prejudice.
Clearly, these women have a very different view of the veil here in the West, where they are free to wear whatever they want, than the old notion of the veil with which I grew up, fraught with ancient patriarchal meanings as it was and still is in societies where it is required by law or through ferocious social pressure. Listening to such women, I found it startling and moving to see how the Islamist emphasis on social justice had been transplanted to a democratic, pluralist society committed to gender equality and justice for all. This was certainly not an interpretation of the veil I had heard before, and it reflected a different Islam from the one of my childhood as well.
Indeed, I found that for all the alarmism sparked by episodes like the uproar over the building of a Muslim community center near New York’s Ground Zero, the West is exerting far more influence on Islam than the other way around. Especially after the 9/11 attacks, religiously committed Muslim American women were spurred into active engagement with Islam and women’s rights, propelled to action by the heightened scrutiny of their religion and community. The result, somewhat surprisingly, is that Islamic feminism is alive and well in America. And it is Islamists and the children of Islamists — the very people whose presence in the United States had initially alarmed me — who are now in the vanguard of the struggle for women’s rights in Islam.
I would never claim, of course, not to have heard chauvinistic views expressed among Muslim groups in the United States. But such voices have been drowned out by women like Khadija Haffajee and Ingrid Mattson, the first women to play leading roles in a key North American Muslim group, or Laleh Bakhtiar, whose
[recent translation of the Quran](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1567447503/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1567447503) offers a new and radically different interpretation of one of its key verses regarding women.
These are just the first stirrings of a new era in the story of Islam in the West. Historically, religions undergo enormous transformations as one strain of belief and practice gains ascendancy over another. Living religions are by definition dynamic: Witness the changes that have occurred in the last decades as women have become pastors and rabbis. A similar process is now under way within Islam, as the veil, once an emblem of patriarchy, today carries multiple meanings for its American and European wearers. Often enough, it also serves as a banner and call for justice — and yes, even for women’s rights.
Leila Ahmed is Victor S. Thomas professor at Harvard Divinity School and author of A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America.
[Veil of Ignorance – Foreign Policy](https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/25/veil-of-ignorance-2/)
**## 3.VeilofIgnorance.docx**
**Veil of Ignorance**
Have we gotten the headscarf all wrong?
APRIL 25, 2011, 2:51 AM
In 1955, Albert Hourani, the Oxford historian and bestselling author of
[_A History of the Arab Peoples_](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446393924/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0446393924), published a short article called "The Vanishing Veil: A Challenge to the Old Order." Pointing out that veiling was a fast-disappearing practice in most Arab societies, Hourani gave a brief history of how it was fading from modern society — and why it would soon become a thing of the past.
The trend to unveil, Hourani wrote, had begun in Egypt in the early 20th century, set in motion by the writer Qasim Amin. Amin had argued that "gradual and careful change in the status of women," including women’s casting off their veils, was now an essential step in the advancement of Muslim societies — and "not contrary to the principles of Islam." Although Amin’s ideas had been met with great resistance, Hourani recounted how they gradually gained acceptance and spread among the "more advanced Arab countries," first in Egypt and then "Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq."
By the 1950s, when Hourani was writing, the veil had virtually disappeared in Egypt, except among the "lower middle class, the most conservative of all classes," he noted. It was only in the Arab world’s "most backward regions," and specifically Saudi Arabia and Yemen, that the "old order" — and along with it such practices as veiling and polygamy — "still persists unaltered."
But Hourani’s article has proved spectacularly incorrect. Fifty-six years later, we live in a world where veiling among Muslim women, after steadily gaining ground across the globe in the last two decades, is incontrovertibly ascendant. How did we get it so wrong?
Until recently, I thought, as Hourani did, that the disappearance of the veil was inevitable; I was sure that greater education and opportunity for women in the Muslim world would result in the elimination of this relic of women’s oppression. For decades, in books, op-eds, and lectures, I stood firmly and unquestioningly against the veil and the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, viewing them as signs of women’s disempowerment. To me, and to my fellow Arab feminists, being told what to wear was just another form of tyranny. But in the course of researching and writing a new book on the history of the veil’s improbable comeback, I’ve had to radically rethink my assumptions. Where I once saw the veil as a symbol of intolerance, I now understand that for many women, it is a badge of individuality and justice.
That was not always the case. Not long after I moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1998, I recall walking past Cambridge Common with a friend who was visiting from the Arab world — a well-known feminist whom I will call Aisha. We were shocked to find a large crowd there, the women all in hijab. It was an arresting, unusual sight — and one that made both of us instinctively uncomfortable.
"To them," Aisha said as we stood observing the scene, "we are the enemy."
For Aisha and me, the hijab’s presence meant not piety — for we knew many women who were deeply devout yet never wore hijab — but Islamism, the very political form of Islam that had been gaining ground in Muslim societies since the Islamic resurgence of the 1970s, a religious revival fueled significantly by the activities of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. So for me the sight of women in hijab in America was a disturbing one.
I left Egypt in the late 1960s, by which time the Muslim Brotherhood had almost disappeared, many members having gone into hiding or fled the country because of the Nasser regime’s systematic attempt to eradicate the group. In the late 1960s hardly anyone in such cities as Cairo and Alexandria wore hijab.
But by the 1990s that had all changed. The Islamic resurgence had made extraordinary gains across Egyptian society even as escalating militant Islamist violence was shaking the country in a growing atmosphere of intellectual repression. In 1992, Farag Foda, a well-known journalist and critic of Islamism, was murdered. The following year, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, then a professor at Cairo University, was accused of being an apostate; he was later forced to flee the country with his wife. In 1994, Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate, was stabbed by an Islamist who claimed to be outraged by his blasphemous works. It all seemed a shocking gauge of Egypt’s drastic descent into intolerance, and for me it was very much connected to the spread of Islamism and its signature dress, the hijab.
All of this, then, was instantly brought to mind by seeing the hijab in Cambridge. Was some kind of extremist, militant Islam taking root in the West? Was that what the presence of the hijab signified? Could the Muslim Brotherhood have somehow managed to establish a foothold here and in other Western countries? Where were these young women getting their ideas? And because they lived in a free country where it was quite ordinary for women to challenge patriarchal ideas, why did they feel bound to accept whatever it was that they were being told?
My reading of that scene on the Cambridge street turned out to be accurate in that Islamism has now become a powerful influence in America, and yet it was also a misreading — as I would discover in listening to women who chose to wear the veil. My very first interviews began to unsettle my assumptions. "I wear it for the same reason as my Jewish friend wears a yarmulke," said one woman; the hijab, she said, was required dress that made visible the presence of a religious minority entitled to justice and equality. Another said she hoped her hijab would raise other women’s awareness of society’s sexist messages about women’s bodies and dress. For many others, wearing the hijab was a way of rejecting negative stereotypes and affirming pride in Muslim identity in the face of prejudice.
Clearly, these women have a very different view of the veil here in the West, where they are free to wear whatever they want, than the old notion of the veil with which I grew up, fraught with ancient patriarchal meanings as it was and still is in societies where it is required by law or through ferocious social pressure. Listening to such women, I found it startling and moving to see how the Islamist emphasis on social justice had been transplanted to a democratic, pluralist society committed to gender equality and justice for all. This was certainly not an interpretation of the veil I had heard before, and it reflected a different Islam from the one of my childhood as well.
Indeed, I found that for all the alarmism sparked by episodes like the uproar over the building of a Muslim community center near New York’s Ground Zero, the West is exerting far more influence on Islam than the other way around. Especially after the 9/11 attacks, religiously committed Muslim American women were spurred into active engagement with Islam and women’s rights, propelled to action by the heightened scrutiny of their religion and community. The result, somewhat surprisingly, is that Islamic feminism is alive and well in America. And it is Islamists and the children of Islamists — the very people whose presence in the United States had initially alarmed me — who are now in the vanguard of the struggle for women’s rights in Islam.
I would never claim, of course, not to have heard chauvinistic views expressed among Muslim groups in the United States. But such voices have been drowned out by women like Khadija Haffajee and Ingrid Mattson, the first women to play leading roles in a key North American Muslim group, or Laleh Bakhtiar, whose
[recent translation of the Quran](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1567447503/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1567447503) offers a new and radically different interpretation of one of its key verses regarding women.
These are just the first stirrings of a new era in the story of Islam in the West. Historically, religions undergo enormous transformations as one strain of belief and practice gains ascendancy over another. Living religions are by definition dynamic: Witness the changes that have occurred in the last decades as women have become pastors and rabbis. A similar process is now under way within Islam, as the veil, once an emblem of patriarchy, today carries multiple meanings for its American and European wearers. Often enough, it also serves as a banner and call for justice — and yes, even for women’s rights.
Leila Ahmed is Victor S. Thomas professor at Harvard Divinity School and author of A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America.
[Veil of Ignorance – Foreign Policy](https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/25/veil-of-ignorance-2/)
**## Jul151.pdf**
APA Format for this assignment please
In this assignment, you will write a five-paragraph argumentative essay based on one of the
three topics provided below. Pay attention when developing your arguments and
counterarguments.
Please note that each topic comes with an article that you need to read beforehand. Somewhere
in your essay, you need to cite the accompanying article at least once; if you wish, you can also
cite other articles, but this one is a must. The article assigned to the topic should not be analyzed as
a primary source but should only serve as supporting evidence either for one of your arguments or
counterarguments. The accompanying articles are attached to this assignment, and they also
provide a direct link for the article itself. Please do not quote; instead, you should paraphrase.
According to certain activists, one way of improving diversity in the workplace is through
Affirmative Action measures. Yet California, a traditionally liberal state, rejected Affirmative Action
on their November 2020 ballots. Why might a Democratic supermajority state reject this solution to
diversity issues? Investigate the problem related to increasing diversity and opportunity to people
of all races and ethnicities, and then write an argumentative essay where you propose what you
consider to be the best solution, whether it is Affirmative Action or some other solution, to help
solve this problem long term.
Read the article titled “Beyond the Pale. Race in Silicon Valley.”
2.
In 2020, Black Lives Matter was both a hashtag and an organization; both the hashtag and the
organization were particularly visible during the protests after George Floyd’s death during the
summer of 2020. Some people willingly use the hashtag and support the organization. It is often
stated that all lives cannot matter until Black lives matter. But others support the idea behind the
hashtag #BlackLivesMatter while eschewing any relationship with the organization itself based on
accusations of political extremism. Why would this organization appear extremist to some, causing
them to reject its mission? Is this just a reflection of people’s dislike of the chaos created by the
Floyd protests and riots (93% of which were considered peaceful according to the Armed Conflict
Location & Event Data Project at acleddata.com)? Or is it a symptom of deeper, implicit biases? Is
there some legitimacy to the claims of extremism for the Black Lives Matter group? Consider a
strategy to improve understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement, both including the formal
organization and the idea, and the best way to decrease any potential biases against Black people.
Where would you start? Write an essay argumentative defending your strategy.
Read the article titled “Lawns, softball, bourbon and privilege.”
3.
Choose an artifact that is specific to a particular culture, religion, or other group (like the hijab) and
write an analysis of it. Describe the item, what it looks like, who wears or uses it, and why people of
a particular group wear or use it. You may want to include a personal story of your own encounters
with this artifact or images of it in your analysis, if appropriate. Investigate different ways that
people interpret and react to this artifact, as well as ways that views on this artifact may have
evolved in recent times. Write an argumentative essay where you argue about people’s different
views of this artifact.
**## 1.Beyond_the_pale_Race_in_Silicon_Valley.pdf**
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Beyond the pale; Race in Silicon Valley
Date: June 20, 2020
From: The Economist
Publisher: Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
Document Type: Article
Length: 529 words
Full Text:
The technology industry faces up to its diversity problem
TO GET A sense of diversity in tech, take a stroll on University Avenue in Palo Alto, a city at the heart of Silicon Valley. Before the
pandemic, if you encountered a black person, the chances were they worked in a local shop. African-Americans account for 3% of
workers at America's five biggest technology firms (see chart) and probably less at smaller ones. About one in 50 partners at venture-
capital (VC) firms is black. The figure among VC-financed entrepreneurs is one in 100. Such dismal numbers, and Silicon Valley's
meritocratic pretensions, help explain why tech's response to the killing of George Floyd has been louder even than other industries'.
Will outrage lead to lasting change?
Pushed by a left-leaning workforce, big tech now regularly takes an activist stance on important issues, from immigration to the
pandemic. Yet even by these standards, the reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests has been remarkable. Firms offered
donations to race-related charities, set up funds to finance startups by non-white founders, stopped selling controversial technologies
such as facial recognition and vowed to purge their software of racist language. Apple and YouTube (part of Google) each pledged
$100m to combat racism with educational schemes and support for black artists. On June 17th Google said it would raise the share
of "under-represented groups" in leadership by 30% by 2025.
Yet corporate activism will amount to little if tech firms and their financiers do not change how they operate, says Sydney Sykes, co-
founder of BLCK VC, a group on a mission to swell the ranks of black venture capitalists in America. Companies must make more of
an effort to promote and retain minority employees. VC firms have to examine why they often reject pitches by minority
entrepreneurs; a simple "just can't get excited about this" is no longer enough. They should also broaden their professional networks
beyond the usual lily-white crowd, argues Elliott Robinson of Bessemer Venture Partners, a big VC firm.
Since diversity, particularly on gender, became a hot topic in the tech industry a few years ago, progress has been slow. But Ms
Sykes believes things will speed up now. Customers and employees want it. And the firms have started to twig that lofty statements
and charity do not suffice. Facebook's chief diversity officer, Maxine Williams, now reports directly to Sheryl Sandberg, the firm's
number two (though not to its boss, as some would like). At Reddit, a popular discussion website, a white co-founder, Alexis Ohanian,
stepped down from the board to make way for a black replacement, Michael Seibel, boss of Y Combinator, a startup school. On June
17th Apple said it would replace its diversity chief.
Mr Robinson has long lamented the tech industry's "diversity theatre": grand statements followed by little action. But even he is
somewhat hopeful. Thanks to smartphones, he says, whites can see for themselves how black people are treated–and want it to
stop. He knows all too well: he has been forcibly restrained by police three times in his life, for no reason other than the colour of his
skin. The last time was not far from University Avenue.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
"Beyond the pale; Race in Silicon Valley." The Economist, 20 June 2020, p. 54(US). Gale College Collection,
link.gale.com/apps/doc//GCCO?u=mia56118&sid=lms-GCCO&xid=dcbb4810. Accessed 18 June 2023.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A626946756
[http://store.eiu.com/](http://store.eiu.com/)
**## 2.Lawnssoftballbourbonandprivilege.pdf**
Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our products. This functionality is provided solely for your
convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any
representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS
AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY
AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY,
ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning
Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale College Collection Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated
PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine
generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom.
Lawns, softball, bourbon and privilege: I have feared white
men and I have loved them
Author: Roxane Gay
Date: Oct. 10, 2014
From: New Statesman(Vol. 143, Issue 5231)
Publisher: New Statesman, Ltd.
Document Type: Essay
Length: 1,096 words
Full Text:
I have known white men. I have loved white men. This often surprises people. They read my writing about race and gender and make
assumptions. They think that a passionate desire for equality rises from a place of hatred rather than from an abiding sense of
fairness. They misunderstand equality as the destruction of one group instead of the salvation of another.
There was the first boy I ever loved–golden-haired, blue-eyed–and then he and several other boys who were just like him did
something terrible to me. It would have been easy, I suppose, to imagine that all white men were like that: brute, taking what they
wanted as if it were owed to them. Perhaps I do think that of white men. Some days, I cannot be sure.
I am a child of the suburbs and forgotten rural places. For most of my life, I have lived in areas where I am the exception rather than
the rule. I have known white men. I have watched them mow their lawns and play softball on Thursday nights and drink beer and go
to work each morning in their sensible suits and sensible shoes. I have studied the confidence with which they walk, the shape of
their squared shoulders, the almost unbearable firmness of their handshake. I have seen how they survey a room they enter, knowing
they have an inalienable right to fill that space as they see fit, no matter the circumstance. I have hated such confidence. I have
envied such confidence.
I have seen white men presiding over trials, presiding over corporations, presiding over many countries in the western world. I have
watched as they have made choices that serve, mostly, their own best interests. I have watched as such self-interest has gone
unchecked and even been encouraged.
I have seen white men kill men and women with skin like mine because their fear of difference overcame grace and humanity. It pains
me to realise this but I will continue to bear witness to such disgrace. I will continue to be powerless in the face of it.
When I see a white man ambling towards me on the street at night, or when I am in an elevator with him, or when I see him in the car
next to mine on the interstate, I often think I should be afraid. I know what white men are capable of. Bullets are impervious to
righteousness. I and many others will be forced to mourn Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Eric Garner, Mike Brown,
John Crawford and, and, and …
I have written about white men and how prominently they figure in our culture. I have written about the ease with which they move
through the world. I have written about how far too many white men are unwilling to acknowledge that ease, that privilege. They hate
that word, privilege. They hear it as an accusation rather than a statement of fact. They see it as an attack on their character or an
attack on their way of life. They feel threatened and, perhaps, they should. They know how good they have it. They know what their
lives would be like if they lost that privilege. No one would willingly relinquish such power.
White men have written to me to tell me I am wrong. White men have written to me to tell me their sad stories, as if their suffering,
great or small, were the bridge across which we could find common ground. They are not interested in my sad stories. When these
white men write to me, they are trying to say, "I am more than my skin." They are trying to say, "I bleed, too." I want to write back and
say, "I never said otherwise."
There is the most recent man I loved–the rugged sort, a logger and a hunter. He was persistent. He took me into the woods and
showed me hidden waterfalls. He took me deer hunting in the cold, early morning. He taught me the various parts of a crossbow and
how to hold it properly, braced against the shoulder. He taught me how to exhale as I pressed the trigger. He loved the natural world
and understood it better than people.
He couldn't stand heat and humidity. He kept a beard even though I often urged him to shave so I could see the smooth of his face.
He drove a truck and he had a cabin on a lake and he loved to fish. I would sit on the dock at his cabin reading while he held his
fishing pole, staring at the water like he knew the mysteries lurking beneath the surface. I stared at him over the pages of my book
like I knew the mysteries lurking beneath his surface.
He was conservative and I was decidedly not. When I tried to lure him to my liberal way of thinking, he smiled at me like I still had so
much to learn. 1 loved to argue with him. I loved to make him question his place in the world the way he made me question mine. I
made him happy. He made me happy. We never knew if that was enough.
He was a drinker, beer and bourbon mostly. On weekends, we would go out to a bar or the bowling alley, anything to get out of the
house, hear a little music, dance together. We lived in a really small town. We were never going to be able to hide in plain sight. We
drew attention as an unlikely couple: my brown skin, his skin somewhat paler, me the quiet graduate student, he the outdoorsman
with thickly calloused hands and a calm demeanour until the drink got in him real good.
Small town, middle of nowhere, far from everything–people couldn't keep their opinions to themselves and he couldn't keep his fists
to himself. He was a drinker and he was a brawler. He could not understand why anyone would question his choices, the things that
made him happy. He said he was defending my honour but really he was defending his.
At night, in bed, he would say, "I love your skin," and then he would show me how he loved my skin, how he loved me as more than
my skin. He showed me how to love him as more than his skin.
I have known white men.
Roxane Gay is a professor of English at Purdue University, Indiana. Her collection of essays "Bad Feminist" is published by Corsair
(12.99 [pounds sterling])
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
Gay, Roxane. "Lawns, softball, bourbon and privilege: I have feared white men and I have loved them." New Statesman, vol. 143, no.
5231, 10 Oct. 2014, pp. 36+. Gale College Collection, link.gale.com/apps/doc//GCCO?u=mia56118&sid=lms-
GCCO&xid=dcbb4810. Accessed 18 June 2023.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A388051364
[http://www.newstatesman.com/](http://www.newstatesman.com/)
**## 3.VeilofIgnorance.docx**
**Veil of Ignorance**
Have we gotten the headscarf all wrong?
APRIL 25, 2011, 2:51 AM
In 1955, Albert Hourani, the Oxford historian and bestselling author of
[_A History of the Arab Peoples_](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446393924/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0446393924), published a short article called "The Vanishing Veil: A Challenge to the Old Order." Pointing out that veiling was a fast-disappearing practice in most Arab societies, Hourani gave a brief history of how it was fading from modern society — and why it would soon become a thing of the past.
The trend to unveil, Hourani wrote, had begun in Egypt in the early 20th century, set in motion by the writer Qasim Amin. Amin had argued that "gradual and careful change in the status of women," including women’s casting off their veils, was now an essential step in the advancement of Muslim societies — and "not contrary to the principles of Islam." Although Amin’s ideas had been met with great resistance, Hourani recounted how they gradually gained acceptance and spread among the "more advanced Arab countries," first in Egypt and then "Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq."
By the 1950s, when Hourani was writing, the veil had virtually disappeared in Egypt, except among the "lower middle class, the most conservative of all classes," he noted. It was only in the Arab world’s "most backward regions," and specifically Saudi Arabia and Yemen, that the "old order" — and along with it such practices as veiling and polygamy — "still persists unaltered."
But Hourani’s article has proved spectacularly incorrect. Fifty-six years later, we live in a world where veiling among Muslim women, after steadily gaining ground across the globe in the last two decades, is incontrovertibly ascendant. How did we get it so wrong?
Until recently, I thought, as Hourani did, that the disappearance of the veil was inevitable; I was sure that greater education and opportunity for women in the Muslim world would result in the elimination of this relic of women’s oppression. For decades, in books, op-eds, and lectures, I stood firmly and unquestioningly against the veil and the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, viewing them as signs of women’s disempowerment. To me, and to my fellow Arab feminists, being told what to wear was just another form of tyranny. But in the course of researching and writing a new book on the history of the veil’s improbable comeback, I’ve had to radically rethink my assumptions. Where I once saw the veil as a symbol of intolerance, I now understand that for many women, it is a badge of individuality and justice.
That was not always the case. Not long after I moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1998, I recall walking past Cambridge Common with a friend who was visiting from the Arab world — a well-known feminist whom I will call Aisha. We were shocked to find a large crowd there, the women all in hijab. It was an arresting, unusual sight — and one that made both of us instinctively uncomfortable.
"To them," Aisha said as we stood observing the scene, "we are the enemy."
For Aisha and me, the hijab’s presence meant not piety — for we knew many women who were deeply devout yet never wore hijab — but Islamism, the very political form of Islam that had been gaining ground in Muslim societies since the Islamic resurgence of the 1970s, a religious revival fueled significantly by the activities of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. So for me the sight of women in hijab in America was a disturbing one.
I left Egypt in the late 1960s, by which time the Muslim Brotherhood had almost disappeared, many members having gone into hiding or fled the country because of the Nasser regime’s systematic attempt to eradicate the group. In the late 1960s hardly anyone in such cities as Cairo and Alexandria wore hijab.
But by the 1990s that had all changed. The Islamic resurgence had made extraordinary gains across Egyptian society even as escalating militant Islamist violence was shaking the country in a growing atmosphere of intellectual repression. In 1992, Farag Foda, a well-known journalist and critic of Islamism, was murdered. The following year, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, then a professor at Cairo University, was accused of being an apostate; he was later forced to flee the country with his wife. In 1994, Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate, was stabbed by an Islamist who claimed to be outraged by his blasphemous works. It all seemed a shocking gauge of Egypt’s drastic descent into intolerance, and for me it was very much connected to the spread of Islamism and its signature dress, the hijab.
All of this, then, was instantly brought to mind by seeing the hijab in Cambridge. Was some kind of extremist, militant Islam taking root in the West? Was that what the presence of the hijab signified? Could the Muslim Brotherhood have somehow managed to establish a foothold here and in other Western countries? Where were these young women getting their ideas? And because they lived in a free country where it was quite ordinary for women to challenge patriarchal ideas, why did they feel bound to accept whatever it was that they were being told?
My reading of that scene on the Cambridge street turned out to be accurate in that Islamism has now become a powerful influence in America, and yet it was also a misreading — as I would discover in listening to women who chose to wear the veil. My very first interviews began to unsettle my assumptions. "I wear it for the same reason as my Jewish friend wears a yarmulke," said one woman; the hijab, she said, was required dress that made visible the presence of a religious minority entitled to justice and equality. Another said she hoped her hijab would raise other women’s awareness of society’s sexist messages about women’s bodies and dress. For many others, wearing the hijab was a way of rejecting negative stereotypes and affirming pride in Muslim identity in the face of prejudice.
Clearly, these women have a very different view of the veil here in the West, where they are free to wear whatever they want, than the old notion of the veil with which I grew up, fraught with ancient patriarchal meanings as it was and still is in societies where it is required by law or through ferocious social pressure. Listening to such women, I found it startling and moving to see how the Islamist emphasis on social justice had been transplanted to a democratic, pluralist society committed to gender equality and justice for all. This was certainly not an interpretation of the veil I had heard before, and it reflected a different Islam from the one of my childhood as well.
Indeed, I found that for all the alarmism sparked by episodes like the uproar over the building of a Muslim community center near New York’s Ground Zero, the West is exerting far more influence on Islam than the other way around. Especially after the 9/11 attacks, religiously committed Muslim American women were spurred into active engagement with Islam and women’s rights, propelled to action by the heightened scrutiny of their religion and community. The result, somewhat surprisingly, is that Islamic feminism is alive and well in America. And it is Islamists and the children of Islamists — the very people whose presence in the United States had initially alarmed me — who are now in the vanguard of the struggle for women’s rights in Islam.
I would never claim, of course, not to have heard chauvinistic views expressed among Muslim groups in the United States. But such voices have been drowned out by women like Khadija Haffajee and Ingrid Mattson, the first women to play leading roles in a key North American Muslim group, or Laleh Bakhtiar, whose
[recent translation of the Quran](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1567447503/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1567447503) offers a new and radically different interpretation of one of its key verses regarding women.
These are just the first stirrings of a new era in the story of Islam in the West. Historically, religions undergo enormous transformations as one strain of belief and practice gains ascendancy over another. Living religions are by definition dynamic: Witness the changes that have occurred in the last decades as women have become pastors and rabbis. A similar process is now under way within Islam, as the veil, once an emblem of patriarchy, today carries multiple meanings for its American and European wearers. Often enough, it also serves as a banner and call for justice — and yes, even for women’s rights.
Leila Ahmed is Victor S. Thomas professor at Harvard Divinity School and author of A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America.
[Veil of Ignorance – Foreign Policy](https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/25/veil-of-ignorance-2/)
**## Jul151.pdf**
APA Format for this assignment please
In this assignment, you will write a five-paragraph argumentative essay based on one of the
three topics provided below. Pay attention when developing your arguments and
counterarguments.
Please note that each topic comes with an article that you need to read beforehand. Somewhere
in your essay, you need to cite the accompanying article at least once; if you wish, you can also
cite other articles, but this one is a must. The article assigned to the topic should not be analyzed as
a primary source but should only serve as supporting evidence either for one of your arguments or
counterarguments. The accompanying articles are attached to this assignment, and they also
provide a direct link for the article itself. Please do not quote; instead, you should paraphrase.
According to certain activists, one way of improving diversity in the workplace is through
Affirmative Action measures. Yet California, a traditionally liberal state, rejected Affirmative Action
on their November 2020 ballots. Why might a Democratic supermajority state reject this solution to
diversity issues? Investigate the problem related to increasing diversity and opportunity to people
of all races and ethnicities, and then write an argumentative essay where you propose what you
consider to be the best solution, whether it is Affirmative Action or some other solution, to help
solve this problem long term.
Read the article titled “Beyond the Pale. Race in Silicon Valley.”
2.
In 2020, Black Lives Matter was both a hashtag and an organization; both the hashtag and the
organization were particularly visible during the protests after George Floyd’s death during the
summer of 2020. Some people willingly use the hashtag and support the organization. It is often
stated that all lives cannot matter until Black lives matter. But others support the idea behind the
hashtag #BlackLivesMatter while eschewing any relationship with the organization itself based on
accusations of political extremism. Why would this organization appear extremist to some, causing
them to reject its mission? Is this just a reflection of people’s dislike of the chaos created by the
Floyd protests and riots (93% of which were considered peaceful according to the Armed Conflict
Location & Event Data Project at acleddata.com)? Or is it a symptom of deeper, implicit biases? Is
there some legitimacy to the claims of extremism for the Black Lives Matter group? Consider a
strategy to improve understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement, both including the formal
organization and the idea, and the best way to decrease any potential biases against Black people.
Where would you start? Write an essay argumentative defending your strategy.
Read the article titled “Lawns, softball, bourbon and privilege.”
3.
Choose an artifact that is specific to a particular culture, religion, or other group (like the hijab) and
write an analysis of it. Describe the item, what it looks like, who wears or uses it, and why people of
a particular group wear or use it. You may want to include a personal story of your own encounters
with this artifact or images of it in your analysis, if appropriate. Investigate different ways that
people interpret and react to this artifact, as well as ways that views on this artifact may have
evolved in recent times. Write an argumentative essay where you argue about people’s different
views of this artifact.
**## 1.Beyond_the_pale_Race_in_Silicon_Valley.pdf**
Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our products. This functionality is provided solely for your
convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any
representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS
AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY
AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY,
ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning
Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale College Collection Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated
PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine
generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom.
Beyond the pale; Race in Silicon Valley
Date: June 20, 2020
From: The Economist
Publisher: Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
Document Type: Article
Length: 529 words
Full Text:
The technology industry faces up to its diversity problem
TO GET A sense of diversity in tech, take a stroll on University Avenue in Palo Alto, a city at the heart of Silicon Valley. Before the
pandemic, if you encountered a black person, the chances were they worked in a local shop. African-Americans account for 3% of
workers at America's five biggest technology firms (see chart) and probably less at smaller ones. About one in 50 partners at venture-
capital (VC) firms is black. The figure among VC-financed entrepreneurs is one in 100. Such dismal numbers, and Silicon Valley's
meritocratic pretensions, help explain why tech's response to the killing of George Floyd has been louder even than other industries'.
Will outrage lead to lasting change?
Pushed by a left-leaning workforce, big tech now regularly takes an activist stance on important issues, from immigration to the
pandemic. Yet even by these standards, the reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests has been remarkable. Firms offered
donations to race-related charities, set up funds to finance startups by non-white founders, stopped selling controversial technologies
such as facial recognition and vowed to purge their software of racist language. Apple and YouTube (part of Google) each pledged
$100m to combat racism with educational schemes and support for black artists. On June 17th Google said it would raise the share
of "under-represented groups" in leadership by 30% by 2025.
Yet corporate activism will amount to little if tech firms and their financiers do not change how they operate, says Sydney Sykes, co-
founder of BLCK VC, a group on a mission to swell the ranks of black venture capitalists in America. Companies must make more of
an effort to promote and retain minority employees. VC firms have to examine why they often reject pitches by minority
entrepreneurs; a simple "just can't get excited about this" is no longer enough. They should also broaden their professional networks
beyond the usual lily-white crowd, argues Elliott Robinson of Bessemer Venture Partners, a big VC firm.
Since diversity, particularly on gender, became a hot topic in the tech industry a few years ago, progress has been slow. But Ms
Sykes believes things will speed up now. Customers and employees want it. And the firms have started to twig that lofty statements
and charity do not suffice. Facebook's chief diversity officer, Maxine Williams, now reports directly to Sheryl Sandberg, the firm's
number two (though not to its boss, as some would like). At Reddit, a popular discussion website, a white co-founder, Alexis Ohanian,
stepped down from the board to make way for a black replacement, Michael Seibel, boss of Y Combinator, a startup school. On June
17th Apple said it would replace its diversity chief.
Mr Robinson has long lamented the tech industry's "diversity theatre": grand statements followed by little action. But even he is
somewhat hopeful. Thanks to smartphones, he says, whites can see for themselves how black people are treated–and want it to
stop. He knows all too well: he has been forcibly restrained by police three times in his life, for no reason other than the colour of his
skin. The last time was not far from University Avenue.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
"Beyond the pale; Race in Silicon Valley." The Economist, 20 June 2020, p. 54(US). Gale College Collection,
link.gale.com/apps/doc//GCCO?u=mia56118&sid=lms-GCCO&xid=dcbb4810. Accessed 18 June 2023.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A626946756
[http://store.eiu.com/](http://store.eiu.com/)
**## 2.Lawnssoftballbourbonandprivilege.pdf**
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Lawns, softball, bourbon and privilege: I have feared white
men and I have loved them
Author: Roxane Gay
Date: Oct. 10, 2014
From: New Statesman(Vol. 143, Issue 5231)
Publisher: New Statesman, Ltd.
Document Type: Essay
Length: 1,096 words
Full Text:
I have known white men. I have loved white men. This often surprises people. They read my writing about race and gender and make
assumptions. They think that a passionate desire for equality rises from a place of hatred rather than from an abiding sense of
fairness. They misunderstand equality as the destruction of one group instead of the salvation of another.
There was the first boy I ever loved–golden-haired, blue-eyed–and then he and several other boys who were just like him did
something terrible to me. It would have been easy, I suppose, to imagine that all white men were like that: brute, taking what they
wanted as if it were owed to them. Perhaps I do think that of white men. Some days, I cannot be sure.
I am a child of the suburbs and forgotten rural places. For most of my life, I have lived in areas where I am the exception rather than
the rule. I have known white men. I have watched them mow their lawns and play softball on Thursday nights and drink beer and go
to work each morning in their sensible suits and sensible shoes. I have studied the confidence with which they walk, the shape of
their squared shoulders, the almost unbearable firmness of their handshake. I have seen how they survey a room they enter, knowing
they have an inalienable right to fill that space as they see fit, no matter the circumstance. I have hated such confidence. I have
envied such confidence.
I have seen white men presiding over trials, presiding over corporations, presiding over many countries in the western world. I have
watched as they have made choices that serve, mostly, their own best interests. I have watched as such self-interest has gone
unchecked and even been encouraged.
I have seen white men kill men and women with skin like mine because their fear of difference overcame grace and humanity. It pains
me to realise this but I will continue to bear witness to such disgrace. I will continue to be powerless in the face of it.
When I see a white man ambling towards me on the street at night, or when I am in an elevator with him, or when I see him in the car
next to mine on the interstate, I often think I should be afraid. I know what white men are capable of. Bullets are impervious to
righteousness. I and many others will be forced to mourn Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Eric Garner, Mike Brown,
John Crawford and, and, and …
I have written about white men and how prominently they figure in our culture. I have written about the ease with which they move
through the world. I have written about how far too many white men are unwilling to acknowledge that ease, that privilege. They hate
that word, privilege. They hear it as an accusation rather than a statement of fact. They see it as an attack on their character or an
attack on their way of life. They feel threatened and, perhaps, they should. They know how good they have it. They know what their
lives would be like if they lost that privilege. No one would willingly relinquish such power.
White men have written to me to tell me I am wrong. White men have written to me to tell me their sad stories, as if their suffering,
great or small, were the bridge across which we could find common ground. They are not interested in my sad stories. When these
white men write to me, they are trying to say, "I am more than my skin." They are trying to say, "I bleed, too." I want to write back and
say, "I never said otherwise."
There is the most recent man I loved–the rugged sort, a logger and a hunter. He was persistent. He took me into the woods and
showed me hidden waterfalls. He took me deer hunting in the cold, early morning. He taught me the various parts of a crossbow and
how to hold it properly, braced against the shoulder. He taught me how to exhale as I pressed the trigger. He loved the natural world
and understood it better than people.
He couldn't stand heat and humidity. He kept a beard even though I often urged him to shave so I could see the smooth of his face.
He drove a truck and he had a cabin on a lake and he loved to fish. I would sit on the dock at his cabin reading while he held his
fishing pole, staring at the water like he knew the mysteries lurking beneath the surface. I stared at him over the pages of my book
like I knew the mysteries lurking beneath his surface.
He was conservative and I was decidedly not. When I tried to lure him to my liberal way of thinking, he smiled at me like I still had so
much to learn. 1 loved to argue with him. I loved to make him question his place in the world the way he made me question mine. I
made him happy. He made me happy. We never knew if that was enough.
He was a drinker, beer and bourbon mostly. On weekends, we would go out to a bar or the bowling alley, anything to get out of the
house, hear a little music, dance together. We lived in a really small town. We were never going to be able to hide in plain sight. We
drew attention as an unlikely couple: my brown skin, his skin somewhat paler, me the quiet graduate student, he the outdoorsman
with thickly calloused hands and a calm demeanour until the drink got in him real good.
Small town, middle of nowhere, far from everything–people couldn't keep their opinions to themselves and he couldn't keep his fists
to himself. He was a drinker and he was a brawler. He could not understand why anyone would question his choices, the things that
made him happy. He said he was defending my honour but really he was defending his.
At night, in bed, he would say, "I love your skin," and then he would show me how he loved my skin, how he loved me as more than
my skin. He showed me how to love him as more than his skin.
I have known white men.
Roxane Gay is a professor of English at Purdue University, Indiana. Her collection of essays "Bad Feminist" is published by Corsair
(12.99 [pounds sterling])
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
Gay, Roxane. "Lawns, softball, bourbon and privilege: I have feared white men and I have loved them." New Statesman, vol. 143, no.
5231, 10 Oct. 2014, pp. 36+. Gale College Collection, link.gale.com/apps/doc//GCCO?u=mia56118&sid=lms-
GCCO&xid=dcbb4810. Accessed 18 June 2023.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A388051364
[http://www.newstatesman.com/](http://www.newstatesman.com/)
**## 3.VeilofIgnorance.docx**
**Veil of Ignorance**
Have we gotten the headscarf all wrong?
APRIL 25, 2011, 2:51 AM
In 1955, Albert Hourani, the Oxford historian and bestselling author of
[_A History of the Arab Peoples_](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446393924/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0446393924), published a short article called "The Vanishing Veil: A Challenge to the Old Order." Pointing out that veiling was a fast-disappearing practice in most Arab societies, Hourani gave a brief history of how it was fading from modern society — and why it would soon become a thing of the past.
The trend to unveil, Hourani wrote, had begun in Egypt in the early 20th century, set in motion by the writer Qasim Amin. Amin had argued that "gradual and careful change in the status of women," including women’s casting off their veils, was now an essential step in the advancement of Muslim societies — and "not contrary to the principles of Islam." Although Amin’s ideas had been met with great resistance, Hourani recounted how they gradually gained acceptance and spread among the "more advanced Arab countries," first in Egypt and then "Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq."
By the 1950s, when Hourani was writing, the veil had virtually disappeared in Egypt, except among the "lower middle class, the most conservative of all classes," he noted. It was only in the Arab world’s "most backward regions," and specifically Saudi Arabia and Yemen, that the "old order" — and along with it such practices as veiling and polygamy — "still persists unaltered."
But Hourani’s article has proved spectacularly incorrect. Fifty-six years later, we live in a world where veiling among Muslim women, after steadily gaining ground across the globe in the last two decades, is incontrovertibly ascendant. How did we get it so wrong?
Until recently, I thought, as Hourani did, that the disappearance of the veil was inevitable; I was sure that greater education and opportunity for women in the Muslim world would result in the elimination of this relic of women’s oppression. For decades, in books, op-eds, and lectures, I stood firmly and unquestioningly against the veil and the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, viewing them as signs of women’s disempowerment. To me, and to my fellow Arab feminists, being told what to wear was just another form of tyranny. But in the course of researching and writing a new book on the history of the veil’s improbable comeback, I’ve had to radically rethink my assumptions. Where I once saw the veil as a symbol of intolerance, I now understand that for many women, it is a badge of individuality and justice.
That was not always the case. Not long after I moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1998, I recall walking past Cambridge Common with a friend who was visiting from the Arab world — a well-known feminist whom I will call Aisha. We were shocked to find a large crowd there, the women all in hijab. It was an arresting, unusual sight — and one that made both of us instinctively uncomfortable.
"To them," Aisha said as we stood observing the scene, "we are the enemy."
For Aisha and me, the hijab’s presence meant not piety — for we knew many women who were deeply devout yet never wore hijab — but Islamism, the very political form of Islam that had been gaining ground in Muslim societies since the Islamic resurgence of the 1970s, a religious revival fueled significantly by the activities of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. So for me the sight of women in hijab in America was a disturbing one.
I left Egypt in the late 1960s, by which time the Muslim Brotherhood had almost disappeared, many members having gone into hiding or fled the country because of the Nasser regime’s systematic attempt to eradicate the group. In the late 1960s hardly anyone in such cities as Cairo and Alexandria wore hijab.
But by the 1990s that had all changed. The Islamic resurgence had made extraordinary gains across Egyptian society even as escalating militant Islamist violence was shaking the country in a growing atmosphere of intellectual repression. In 1992, Farag Foda, a well-known journalist and critic of Islamism, was murdered. The following year, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, then a professor at Cairo University, was accused of being an apostate; he was later forced to flee the country with his wife. In 1994, Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate, was stabbed by an Islamist who claimed to be outraged by his blasphemous works. It all seemed a shocking gauge of Egypt’s drastic descent into intolerance, and for me it was very much connected to the spread of Islamism and its signature dress, the hijab.
All of this, then, was instantly brought to mind by seeing the hijab in Cambridge. Was some kind of extremist, militant Islam taking root in the West? Was that what the presence of the hijab signified? Could the Muslim Brotherhood have somehow managed to establish a foothold here and in other Western countries? Where were these young women getting their ideas? And because they lived in a free country where it was quite ordinary for women to challenge patriarchal ideas, why did they feel bound to accept whatever it was that they were being told?
My reading of that scene on the Cambridge street turned out to be accurate in that Islamism has now become a powerful influence in America, and yet it was also a misreading — as I would discover in listening to women who chose to wear the veil. My very first interviews began to unsettle my assumptions. "I wear it for the same reason as my Jewish friend wears a yarmulke," said one woman; the hijab, she said, was required dress that made visible the presence of a religious minority entitled to justice and equality. Another said she hoped her hijab would raise other women’s awareness of society’s sexist messages about women’s bodies and dress. For many others, wearing the hijab was a way of rejecting negative stereotypes and affirming pride in Muslim identity in the face of prejudice.
Clearly, these women have a very different view of the veil here in the West, where they are free to wear whatever they want, than the old notion of the veil with which I grew up, fraught with ancient patriarchal meanings as it was and still is in societies where it is required by law or through ferocious social pressure. Listening to such women, I found it startling and moving to see how the Islamist emphasis on social justice had been transplanted to a democratic, pluralist society committed to gender equality and justice for all. This was certainly not an interpretation of the veil I had heard before, and it reflected a different Islam from the one of my childhood as well.
Indeed, I found that for all the alarmism sparked by episodes like the uproar over the building of a Muslim community center near New York’s Ground Zero, the West is exerting far more influence on Islam than the other way around. Especially after the 9/11 attacks, religiously committed Muslim American women were spurred into active engagement with Islam and women’s rights, propelled to action by the heightened scrutiny of their religion and community. The result, somewhat surprisingly, is that Islamic feminism is alive and well in America. And it is Islamists and the children of Islamists — the very people whose presence in the United States had initially alarmed me — who are now in the vanguard of the struggle for women’s rights in Islam.
I would never claim, of course, not to have heard chauvinistic views expressed among Muslim groups in the United States. But such voices have been drowned out by women like Khadija Haffajee and Ingrid Mattson, the first women to play leading roles in a key North American Muslim group, or Laleh Bakhtiar, whose
[recent translation of the Quran](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1567447503/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1567447503) offers a new and radically different interpretation of one of its key verses regarding women.
These are just the first stirrings of a new era in the story of Islam in the West. Historically, religions undergo enormous transformations as one strain of belief and practice gains ascendancy over another. Living religions are by definition dynamic: Witness the changes that have occurred in the last decades as women have become pastors and rabbis. A similar process is now under way within Islam, as the veil, once an emblem of patriarchy, today carries multiple meanings for its American and European wearers. Often enough, it also serves as a banner and call for justice — and yes, even for women’s rights.
Leila Ahmed is Victor S. Thomas professor at Harvard Divinity School and author of A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America.
[Veil of Ignorance – Foreign Policy](https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/25/veil-of-ignorance-2/)