Losing our sisters, gaining grace

There are so many ways to mourn girls and women whom we've lost to violence, chronic and terminal disease, or just dying before their time. However, as I sit in Southern California at a conference preparing a panel presentation with scholars and social justice practitioners generations younger than I, there is the possibility of renewal, hope, and humility. I really need to see myself reproduced before I retire, but the realities of gender inequality are clear. From birth to death, it's a risk to be born a woman of color in both the Global North and South. Makiya Walls, the 12-year old 

California girl shot on Wednesday inside her home, the ‘Highway of Tears’ (the 18 young Indigenous women murdered/disappeared along the Trans-Canada Highway in British Columbia since 1969), and Maryam Mirzakhani, the 40-year old prize-winning Iranian American mathematician who died of breast cancer in July. Who knows but Makiya might have been the future research scientist whose independent investigation of truth might have uncovered a cure for cancer redeeming Mirzakhani’s death or been a social policy advocate for violence against women. Can we remember them and the legions of women and girls who have been devalued in female infanticide, gang raped in country after country, women activists, journalists, and politicians who've been murdered, preadolescent girls who have died in child marriages to grown men, and the millions of girls who've been trafficked, prostituted, become victims of STDs and died. This is an impossibly long list, a never-ending list that documents the girls and women we will never know, the girls deprived of childhood and choice, those women imprisoned for defending themselves against chronic abusers, and the perpetrators we are never able or motivated to bring to justice.  We can, at another time, chronicle the resilience of women who have resisted, innovated, sacrificed, raised children in the face of poverty and natural disasters through female austerity practices, and been warriors for social justice. That girls survive birth, childhood, adulthood and grow to become wise elders, we are witnesses to your empowered lives whatever you may have achieved and wherever on earth you live and breath. But today we need to decide to turn this corner at which misogyny, human devaluation,  beatings, educational underdevelopment, dysfunctional laws and policies, and psycho-social intransigence playfully ignores women as  sidebar of history. We also call out in praises, the men and boys who love us, work with us, fight for us, and see us as their spiritual partners in building spaces in which the equality of men and women is hammered out with love and an ethic of caring for one another. It will  not be easy.  We need more men, those who see themselves as decent, to step up their game, and play to win the race to social justice that leads to peace. The spiritual and emotional damage to all of us, women and men alike, so systematically perpetuated and socially sanctioned through violence against women and the patriarchal traditions that have falsely mythologized gender roles will one day lead to the true grace of a transformed masculinity when America 'leads all nations spiritually.' I leave you with this guidance as a promise of gender equality: "If long-cherished ideals and time-honored institutions, if certain social assumptions and religious formulae have ceased to promote the welfare of the generality of mankind, if they no longer minister to the needs of a continually evolving humanity, let them be swept away and relegated to the limbo of obsolescent and forgotten doctrines. Why should these, in a world subject to the immutable law of change and decay, be exempt from the deterioration that must needs overtake every human institution? For legal standards, political and economic theories are solely designed to safeguard the interests of humanity as a whole, and not humanity to be crucified for the preservation of the integrity of any particular law or doctrine." [Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah:41-42]