By Dinah Chung, Grace Lee, and Dawn Philip
MD: Breakthrough is a human rights organization that uses innovative, high impact strategies through media and popular culture to talk about issues like immigrant rights, women’s rights, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS. We currently work in India and in the United States—two of the world’s largest democracies. Our tagline, our motto if you will is “We seek to build a culture of human rights.”
NAPAWF: Breakthrough has been really successful in using popular culture to educate the public. However, you received criticism from parts of the women’s movement for trying to use popular culture and going “mainstream.” Could you talk about your reactions to that?
MD: I’ve been part of the women’s movement for a very long time—for almost 25 years now. We’ve gone through various evolutions including a critique of looking at how mainstream media and popular culture has really objectified, trivialized, and undermined women in all these different ways—that critique has been a very important part of how our understanding of women and media has evolved. At the same time we’ve also had a strand within the women’s moment of seeking to mainstream our issues and make the work that we do resonate with larger audiences and reach larger numbers of people because ultimately gender based discrimination is only going to end if we are able to widen and deepen the base of constituencies that believe in women’s rights. I think of it as two parallel streams of feminist discourse if you will.
About ten years ago, I really began to question how we could use more mainstream strategies to reach larger audiences and how we can move out of a paradigm where we just talked to one another and engage different people in conversation. I started to explore the use of pop culture with the production of the first music album I ever did on violence against women along with a music video on domestic violence when I was living in India. The album and video ended up on the Top 10 and ended up on MTV and generated huge amounts of media coverage. In producing that album and video, I worked with many men—I had a male lyricist, I worked with a male music director and I also worked with a male music video director. Those were some of the pieces that some of my colleagues in the movement raised questions about. There was a sense among some of them that we should only work with women in doing this kind of work. Other people thought that using MTV and other mainstream media undermined women and because of that, we were selling out.
I took the position and continue to take the position that all human rights issues in order to be advanced need to have the constituency that is affected and impacted by these issues speak up and be empowered. But we will not see true change until a much wider constituency buys into that issue so for example lesbian and gay communities of course need to be mobilized and speak out but we need straight allies as well. Similarly, when we’re talking about violence against women or gender based discrimination, we have to mobilize men to really understand the limitations of patriarchy and how we can build a culture of human rights for everybody. So that is Breakthrough’s philosophy. When we say we want to build a culture of human rights, the vision is figuring out how to create a society where everybody who lives in it can enjoy a life of dignity. Part of this is looking at how we reframe our work and get the media to pay more to attention to our issues but I also think it’s important for us to be reflecting on how we can get more strategic and proactive in advancing a progressive agenda.
NAPAWF: Being proactive about creating and advancing a progressive agenda relates on some level to this idea of leadership. One thing NAPAWF talks a lot about is empowering young women, specifically API women & girls, to be leaders in the community and advance a progressive agenda. As someone who founded two successful organizations—Sakhi and now Breakthrough, what’s your understanding of leadership?
MD: I don’t know that I’ve really spent enough time thinking about leadership per se. I think what’s more important to me is how you locate your voice in advancing a progressive or human rights agenda. Locating yourself in advancing a struggle means that you understand that you are not only speaking as a victim—you have a responsibility to challenge the parts of societal oppression that do victimize you—but you also have a responsibility for speaking up and addressing other forms of victimization that may or may not speak to your reality. You need to understand that you may be a victim in one aspect of your life but you may have a lot of privilege in other aspects of your life. So for example to make this more concrete, if I look at myself and how I place myself as a leader in the progressive movement: I am Indian, I’m a women, I am from the global South, I am a lawyer, I went to extremely privileged educational institutions in this country.
NAPAWF: Breakthrough does a lot of work around the stripping of due process rights in the criminal justice system and the immigrant raids that have been occurring. With the current state of affairs, both domestically and globally, how can we use the concept of human rights to combat what’s going on with respect to the increasing deportations, the war, and so many other important issues?
MD: I think one of the challenges that we’ve always faced in this country is that we’ve never really applied a human rights paradigm to what is happening domestically. It’s always civil rights on the one hand in the U.S. and human rights in the rest of the world. And we haven’t really developed the kind of power and organizing around what it means to have human rights in the U.S. Some of the challenges that we are facing today, particularly around what’s happening with Katrina and what’s happening with immigration now and poverty and other related issues, is paying the price for being focused on the civil and political rights paradigm and not constructing a more holistic human rights paradigm. Of course there are historical reasons for why that happened—the cold war, the place of slavery in our history, etc.
It’s only been in very recent years that you’ve seen the burgeoning of a human rights movement—all human rights movements evolve over a period of time. We’ve only started talking about immigrant human rights in the last three years or so and even then we focused so much of our attention on undocumented people coming over the border and not on the due process and the systematic stripping of all constitutional rights of communities in the U.S. So this framework is relatively new and we’ve already seen it getting more traction with communities in the general public. So I think that it’s an evolving movement. I hope we get stronger and better at articulating it especially because in a few months we will have a new president who will be held accountable for changing some of these positions.
NAPAWF: What would you say are some of the biggest lessons learned or some of the biggest challenges you have had?
MD: I see the production of Mann Ke Manjeeree (Rhythm of the Mind) and the music video as defining moment in my life for the following reasons. One is that it made me realize that if you put your mind to something, you can really do whatever the hell it is that you want. We’re taught all these things—that you if you get a degree in something and you follow a particular path, you can then do this or that and that’s the journey you follow. I think I can say with all confidence to everybody out there that you really should follow your dream—and it doesn’t matter what your background is or what your skills are because for me learning the process of making a music video was as alien as trying to get to the moon. There was nothing in my background or skill set that would have enabled me to do something like that but I really believed in the importance of looking at new tools and new ways of advancing women’s rights and I was determined to explore how pop culture could play a role in that. I met with enormous resistance to it—some in the music industry thought I was insane because it was a new idea and people didn’t really understand what I was talking about—wanting to do something about women and domestic violence.
The excitement and gratification came from it not just happening but that it happened and became a huge success winning several awards and I still run into people seven years later telling me they still use it as an educational tool. So for me it was a lesson around dreaming and believing and as jaded and as cynical and as down as one can get doing political work in this country and around the world—it’s really important to always hold on to that idea of finding a pathway to making the impossible real.
NAPAWF: And finally, a very serious question: If you could have one superhero power, what would it be?
MD: Hmm, I’ve never really thought about that. The person who I loved and watched growing up was Samantha the witch but she wasn’t really a superhero. There weren’t that many women superhero’s out there. I think if there was one thing I could do more easily and quickly, it would be to move from one geographic part of the world to another so I guess it would be the ability to teleport myself from point A to point B. Especially because increasingly air travel has become the biggest nightmare!
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