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#race and class
isaacsapphire · 11 months
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The poisoned Skittle problem, from the perspective of a non poison Skittle
The metaphor of the bowl of Skittles, some percentage of which are poison, and how many of those Skittles you want to eat, has been used by feminists about men, and republicans about immigrants. I'm increasingly devoid of shits to give about what kind of vile things I'm going to be called, so what the heck, I'll use it too for this.
With class and housing in the US, there is a poisoned Skittle problem; the lower income you go, the higher the percentage of assaults George type people are in the mix. (Please note now that I am Not claiming that the elite are not prone to being assaults Georg, or that there's no assaults Georg in higher income brackets) For added fun, the poorer you are, the more you have to be in physical proximity to others who live in your area, while walking to the store or taking public transportation, increasing your vulnerability to being assaulted, etc. In the suburbs, a lot of the time, the guy who lives three houses down from yours and you have literally never seen each other, so it doesn't matter if he would immediately grab your crotch if he was in crotch-grabbing range, because the two of you have never been that close together. If you live in a more dense environment and travel by foot, your chances of being in crotch-grabbing range are much higher, so a crotch-grabber, etc. in your area is a more concerning problem for you.
Most people very reasonably prefer to live somewhere further away from assaults Georg. The thing is, other people also prefer to live further for assaults Georg, and if you were just living next to assaults Georg, you are a Skittle of indeterminate poison. So when a nice redlined Blue suburb with a great school district is considering if they're going to permit some affordable housing, they are going to look at the income bracket that will be living there and say, "There's too high a percentage of poison Skittles in that income bracket. We don't want to live in a community with assaults Georg, or invite assaults Georg Jr into our nice school, so we don't want affordable housing here."
So now you, as an innocent non poison Skittle are left trying to figure out how you are going to communicate your non poison status so you can get the heck away from the poison Skittles. The current way this information is conveyed is by convincing a higher paid job to hire you, making more money, and buying your way into a better neighborhood. This is a rather lossy way to sort, and shit like constantly disrupted sleep at the weekly hotel from all the shitty people who live there with you doesn't help with better job thing. There's plenty of non poisoned Skittles in that bowl, but how to extract them safely?
The obvious next question is why we as a society don't seem to have any solution to the problem of getting assaulted by assaults Georg other than to individually just try to scramble away from where such folks are statistically and to price the entire category of people who are statistically more likely to be assaults Georg out of certain areas. And now it's a criminal justice system problem and I'll leave that for another day, but overall, the criminal justice system seems a lot more interested in hassling people based on statistical similarities to assaults Georg than doing fuck all about stopping assaults Georg.
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tododeku-or-bust · 9 months
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It's kind of wild reading this book and seeing how these white folk can be dirt poor and still find time to be racist. "Yeah i might have nothing but at least I'm not living in North side next to those dirty n*ggers". You have nothing. You live in abject poverty while your landlord (who looks like you!!) makes half a million a year off your suffering. And that's what keeps you going? The power that is the identity of Whiteness is something else.
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shortangrybi87 · 2 years
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A black billionaire is still a billionaire. Some people think it's unfair to compare black billionaires like Rihanna and Jay-Z to someone like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. And true, Rihanna and Jay-Z may not directly oppress workers the way Gates, Musk, Bezos, etc. do but they are still complicit in it, as they actively benefit from capitalism and from the exploitation of the common folks. To risk sounding repetitive, the job of a celebrity is to sell you a lifestyle that's unattainable for majority of us, to keep you drinking bourgeoisie kool-aid instead of developing class consciousness.
When people like Jay or Diddy throw big lavish private dinners, parties at hotels and such, who do you think has to set the tables, prepare the food, clean up, etc? Workers. Whose reputation gets hurt if these celebrities decide the service wasn't great and they get fired? The Workers. Kanye West's Yeezy sneakers range from $200 to $1K, but the Asian workers who create them, work in poor conditions and get paid just a little under $200 monthly. Same with Air Jordans and Nike. Tyler Perry's films are nothing but modern day minstrel shows, all he does is exploit black trauma for profit.
Of course Rihanna, Tyler Perry, and Kanye pale in comparison to Bill Gates using his money to enslave farmers in India and Africa with his Green Revolution agricultural program and promoting Monsanto, pedophile ass Jeffrey Epstein, the list goes on. But them being billionaires is nothing to be celebrated.
I get it, it's great to see a black person with humble beginnings rise above the odds, I understand how inspiring that is to those who don't have anything. But billionaires shouldn't exist, regardless of their race or ethnicity. You can't be a billionaire without exploiting, outsourcing, and robbing people of their labor. If y'all response to anybody calling out black billionaires is knee-jerk bullshit like 'Y'all want black people to suffer so bad', 'it's always a problem when black people obtain wealth', 'Why don't y'all go after the billionaires who actually oppress people? I have and do. And I don't want black people to suffer....I want liberation for us all, but developing a false consciousness and wanting to obtain wealth won't solve the issues of racism and systemic oppression. I have a problem with black celebrities telling their (poor) base what to do with their money, when it was their money that helped get them to the top. I have a problem with black celebrities telling poor black kids to learn financial literacy, which is for people who already have money and treating poverty as a result of bad decision making and not from a system that's designed for few people to succeed. And y'all can argue about what Jay-Z has done, what LeBron has done. I'm not going to deny what they've done, but most of that shit is for PR work, for tax write offs. Being a black billionaire is not going to liberate us. Black capitalism won't save us.
Off my soapbox.
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repriseofthereprise · 3 months
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On Being White: Thinking Toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy*
By Marilyn Frye
From The Politics Of Reality: Essays In Feminist Theory (The Crossing Press 1983)
I
White feminists come to renewed and earnest thought about racism not entirely spontaneously. We are pressed by women of color. Women of color have been at feminist conferences, meetings and festivals and speaking up, pointing out that their needs and interests are not being taken into account nor answered and that much that white feminists do and say is racist. Some white feminists have been aware of and acting against racism all along, and spontaneously, but the topic of racism has arrived per force in the feminist newspapers and journals, at the National Women’s Studies Association, in women’s centers and women’s bookstores in the last couple of years, not so much because some white feminists urged this but because women of color have demanded it.
Nonetheless, many white feminists have to a fair extent responded to the demand; by which I mean, white feminists have to a fair extent chosen to hear what it was usually in their power not to hear. The hearing is, as anyone who has been on the scene knows, sometimes very defensive, sometimes dulled by fear, sometimes alarmingly partial or distorted. But it has interested me that I and other white feminists have heard the objections and demands, for I think it is an aspect of race privilege to have a choice–a choice between the options of hearing and not hearing. That is part of what being white gets you.
This matter of the powers white feminists have because of being white came up for me very concretely in a real-life situation a while back. Conscientiously, and with the encouragement of various women of color–both friends and women speaking in the feminist press–a group of white women formed a white women’s consciousness-raising group to identify and explore the racism in our lives with a view to dismantling the barriers that blocked our understanding and action in this matter. As is obvious from this description, we certainly thought of ourselves as doing the right thing. Some women of color talked with us about their view that it was racist to make it a group for white women only; we discussed our reasons and invited women of color who wanted to participate to come to the meeting for further discussion.
In a later community meeting, one Black woman criticized us very angrily for ever thinking we could achieve our goals by working only with white women. We said we never meant this few weeks of this particular kind of work to be all we ever did and told her we had decided at the beginning to organize a group open to all women shortly after our series of white women’s meetings came to a close. Well, as some of you will know without my telling, we could hardly have said anything less satisfying to our critic. She exploded with rage: “You decided!” Yes. We consulted the opinions of some women of color, but still, we decided. “Isn’t that what we are supposed to do?” we said to ourselves, “Take responsibility, decide what to do, and do something?” She seemed to be enraged by our making decisions, by our acting, by our doing anything. It seemed like doing nothing would be racist and whatever we did would be racist just because we did it. We began to lose hope; we felt bewildered and trapped. It seemed that what our critic was saying must be right; but what she was saying didn’t seem to make any sense.
She seemed crazy to me.
That stopped me.
I paused and touched and weighed that seeming. It was familiar. I know it as deceptive, defensive. I know it from both sides; I have been thought crazy by others too righteous, too timid and too defended to grasp the enormity of our difference and the significance of their offenses. I backed off. To get my balance, I reached for what I knew when I was not frightened.
A woman was called “schizophrenic.” She said her father was trying to kill her. He was beside himself: anguished and baffled that she would not drink coffee he brought her for fear he had poisoned it. How could she think that? But then, why had she “gone mad” and been reduced to incompetence by the ensuing familial and social processes? Was her father trying to kill her? No, of course not: he was a good-willed man and loved his daughter. But also, yes, of course. Every good fatherly thing about him, including his caring decisions about what will improve things for her, are poisonous to her. The Father is death to The Daughter. And she knows it.
What is it that our Black woman critic knows? Am I racist when I (a white woman) decide what I shall do to try to grow and heal the wounds and scars of racism among lesbians and feminists? Am I racist if I decide to do nothing? If I decide to refuse to work with other white women on our racism? My deciding, deciding anything, is poison to her. Is this what she knows?
Every choice or decision I make is made in a matrix of options. Racism distorts and limits that matrix in various ways. My being on the white side of racism leaves me a different variety of options than are available to a woman of color. As a white woman I have certain freedoms and liberties. When I use them, according to my white woman’s judgment, to act on matters of racism, my enterprise reflects strangely on the matrix of options within which it is undertaken. In the case at hand, I was deciding when to relate to white women and when to relate to women of color according to what I thought would reduce my racism, enhance my growth and improve my politics. It becomes clearer why no decision I make here can fail to be an exercise of race privilege. (And yet this cannot be an excuse for not making a decision, though perhaps it suggests that a decision should be made at a different level.)
Does being white make it impossible for me to be a good person?
II
What is this “being white” that gets me into so much trouble, after so many years of seeming to me to be so benign? What is this privilege of race? What is race?
First, there is the matter of skin color. Supposedly one is white if one is white. I mean, one is a member of the white race if one’s skin is white. But that is not really so. Many people whose skin is white, by which of course we don’t really mean white, are Black or Mexican or Puerto Rican or Mohawk. And some people who are dark-skinned are white. Natives of India and Pakistan are generally counted as white in this country though perhaps to the average white American they look dark. While it cannot be denied that conceptions of race and of whiteness have much to do with fetishes about pigmentation, that seems to me not to be the Heart of Whiteness. Light skin may get a person counted as white; it does not make a person white.
Whiteness is, it seems pretty obvious, a social or political construct of some sort, something elaborated upon conceptions of kinship or common ancestry and upon ancient ethnocentric associations of good and evil with light and dark. Those who fashion this construct of whiteness, who elaborate on these conceptions, are primarily a certain group of males. It is their construct. They construct a conception of their “us,” their kindred, their nation, their tribe. Earliest uses of the word ‘race’ in English, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, make this clear. The people of one’s race were those of a common lineage or ancestry. People of like coloring could be of different races. The connection of race to color was a historical development and one which did not entirely eclipse the earlier meaning. Race, as defined and conceived by the white male arbiters of conceptions, is still not entirely a matter of color. One can be very pale, and yet if there are persons of color in one’s lineage, one can be classed as Black, Indian, etc.
On the other hand, it is the experience of light-skinned people from family and cultural backgrounds that are Black or another dark group that white people tend to disbelieve or discount their tellings of their histories. There is a pressure coming from white people to make light-skinned people be white. Michelle Cliff speaks of this in her book Claiming An Identity They Taught Me To Despise.1 Cliff is a light-skinned woman who looks white to most white people. She encounters among white people resistance, even hostility, to her assertion that she is Black. In another case, a friend of mine to whom I have been quite close off and on for some fifteen or twenty years, noticed I was assuming she is white: she told me she had told me years ago that she is Mexican. Apparently I did not hear, or I forgot, or it was convenient for me to whitewash her.**
The concept of whiteness is not just used, in these cases, it is wielded. Whites exercise a power of defining who is white and who is not, and are jealous of that power.2 If a light-skinned person of “colored” kinship claims to be white, and white people discover the person’s background, they see that a person who might be a marginal case has decided what she is. Because the white person cannot allow that deciding, the decision must be reversed. On the other hand, when someone has been clearly and definitively decided to be white by whites, her claim that she is not white must be challenged; again because anyone who is even possibly marginal cannot be allowed to draw the line. To such a person, a white person is saying: I have decided you are white so you are white, because what I say about who is white and who is not is definitive.
To be white is to be a member of an in-group, a kin group, which is self-defining. Just as with fraternities or sororities, the power to draw the membership line is jealously guarded. Though a variety of traits and histories are relevant to whether one will be defined into or out of that group, one essential thing is that the group is self-defining, that it exercises control of access to membership. Members can bend the rules of membership anytime, if that is necessary to assert the members’ sole and exclusive authority to decide who is a member; in fact, bending the rules is an ideal expression of that authority.
A particularly insidious expression of this emerges when members of the self-appointed “superior” group tend casually to grant membership by “generously” giving people “the benefit of the doubt.” If the question does not arise, or does not arise explicitly or blatantly, one will generally be assumed by white people to be white, since the contrary assumption might be (by white judgment) insulting. A parallel to this is the arrogant presumption on the part of heterosexual people that anyone they meet is heterosexual. The question often must be made to arise, blatantly and explicitly, before the heterosexual person will consider the thought that one is lesbian or homosexual. Otherwise, even if some doubt arises, one will be given the dubious benefit of the doubt rather than be thought “ill” of, that is, suspected of “deviance.”
The parallelism of heterosexuality and whiteness holds up in at least one more respect. In both cases there are certain members of the dominant group who systematically do not give the benefit of their doubt. They seem on the lookout for people whom they can suppose want to pass as members of their club. These are the sorts of people who are fabulously sensitive to clues that someone is Mulatto, Jewish, Indian or gay, and are eager to notify others of the person’s supposed pretense of being “normal” or “white” (or whatever), though the person may have been making no pretense at all.*** This latter type is quite commonly recognized as a racist, anti-Semite or homophobe, while the other type, the one who “graciously” lets the possibly deviant/dark person pass as normal/white, is often considered a nice person and not a bigot. People of both types seem to me to be equally arrogant: both are arrogating definitional power to themselves and thereby asserting that defining is exclusively their prerogative.
I think that almost all white people engage in the activity of defining membership in the group of white people in one or another of these modes, quite un-self-consciously and quite constantly. It is very hard, in individual cases, to give up this habit and await people’s deciding for themselves what group they are members of.
The tendency of members of the group called white to be generously inclusive, to count as white anybody not obviously nonwhite, seems to be of a piece with another habit of members of that group, namely, the habit of false universalization. As feminists we are very familiar with the male version of this: the men write and speak and presumably, therefore, also think, as though whatever is true of them is true of everybody. White people also speak in universals. A great deal of what has been written by white feminists is limited by this sort of false universalization. Much of what we have said is accurate only if taken to be about white women and white men within white culture (middle-class white women and white men, in fact). For the most part, it never occurred to us to modify our nouns accordingly; to our minds the people we were writing about were people. We don’t think of ourselves as white.
It is an important breakthrough for a member of a dominant group to come to know s/he is a member of a group, to know that what s/he is is only a part of humanity. It was breathtaking to discover that in the culture I was born and reared in, the word `woman’ means white woman, just as we discovered before that the word ‘man’ means male man. This sudden expansion of the scope of one’s perception can produce a cold rush of awareness of the arbitrariness of the definitions, the brittleness of these boundaries. Escape becomes thinkable.
The group to which I belong, presumably by virtue of my pigmentation, is not ordained in Nature to be socially and politically recognized as a group, but is so ordained only by its own members through their own self-serving and politically motivated hoarding of definitional power. What this can mean to white people is that we are not white by nature but by political classification, and hence it is in principle possible to disaffiliate. If being white is not finally a matter of skin color, which is beyond our power to change, but of politics and power, then perhaps white individuals in a white supremacist society are not doomed to dominance by logic or nature.
III
Some of my experience has made me feel trapped and set up so that my actions are caught in a web that connects them inexorably to sources in white privilege and to consequences oppressive to people of color (especially to women of color). Clearly, if one wants to extricate oneself from such a fate or (if the feeling was deceptive) from such a feeling of fatedness, the first rule for the procedure can only be: educate oneself.
One can, and should, educate oneself and overcome the terrible limitations imposed by the abysmal ignorance inherent in racism. There are traps, of course. For instance, one may slip into a frame of mind which distances those one is learning about as “objects of study.” While one is educating oneself about the experiences and perspectives of the peoples one is ignorant about, and in part as a corrective to the errors of one’s ways, one should also be studying one’s own ignorance. Ignorance is not something simple: it is not a simple lack, absence or emptiness, and it is not a passive state. Ignorance of this sort–the determined ignorance most white Americans have of American Indian tribes and clans, the ostrichlike ignorance most white Americans have of the histories of Asian peoples in this country, the impoverishing ignorance most white Americans have of Black language–ignorance of these sorts is a complex result of many acts and many negligences. To begin to appreciate this one need only hear the active verb to ‘ignore’ in the word ‘ignorance’. Our ignorance is perpetuated for us in many ways and we have many ways of perpetuating it for ourselves.
I was at a poetry reading by the Black lesbian feminist, Audre Lorde. In her poems she invoked African goddesses, naming several of them. After the reading a white woman rose to speak. She said first that she was very ignorant of African religious and cultural history, and then she asked the poet to spell the names of these goddesses and to tell her where she might look for their stories. The poet replied by telling her that there is a bibliography in the back of the book from which she was reading which would provide the relevant information. The white woman did not thank the poet and sit down. The white woman (who I know is literate) said, “I see, but will you spell their names for me?” What I saw was a white woman committed to her ignorance and being stubborn in its defense. She would convince herself that she cannot use this bibliography if the Black woman will not spell the names for her. She will say she tried to repair her ignorance but the poet would not cooperate. The poet. The Black woman poet who troubled herself to include a bibliography in her book of poems. ****
In Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man3 (a book of considerable value to feminists), one can see the structures of white ignorance from the side of the ignored. Nothing the protagonist can do makes him visible. He wants nothing so badly as to be seen and heard. But he is frustrated by an opaque and dense veil made up of lies the white men tell each other about Black men. He is ignored nearly to death.
There is an enlightening account of some structures of white ignorance also in a story called “Meditations on History,” by Sherley Ann Williams.4 In the story, a man who is writing a book about how to manage slaves is visiting a place where a slave woman is being held until her baby is born so that, when they hang her for running away and killing a white man, her owner will at least have the baby to make up for his loss. The writer is interviewing the woman to find out why she killed the slave trader, and why and how the slaves got loose. (His ignorance is, of course, already showing, along with some of the structures which both motivate and support it.) He is irritated by her humming and singing, but it never occurs to him that it means anything. By way of her songs, the woman is able to conspire with the other slaves around the place; she tells them that her friends will come to rescue her and notifies them when the time is at hand; they cooperate with her, and she escapes. The hapless interviewer is totally baffled by her escape. His presumptions have closed out knowledge; his ignorance has been self-constructed. His ignorance has also been both encouraged and used by the slave woman, who has deliberately and reasonably played on it by pretending to be stupid, robotic and disoriented. It was certainly not in her interest to disabuse him of his assumptions that her singing was mindless and that she was too mindless to be plotting an escape. Ignorance works like this, creating the conditions which ensure its continuance.
White women can dip into our own experience as women for knowledge of the ways in which ignorance is complex and willful, for we know from our interactions with white men (and not necessarily only with men who are white) the “absence” imposed on us by our not being taken seriously, and we sense its motivation and know it is not simply accidental oversight.
If one wonders at the mechanisms of ignorance, at how a person can be right there and see and hear, and yet not know, one of the answers lies with the matter of attention. The man in Williams’ story constantly daydreams about what a great success his book is going to be; he has compelling fantasies of his own fame and recognition–recognition by white men, of course. He is much more intent upon the matter of whom he will please and impress than he is upon the matter at hand. Members of dominant groups are habitually busy with impressing each other and care more for that than for actually knowing what is going on. And again, white women can learn from our own experience a propos (most often, white) men. We do much of what we do with a great anxiety for how we will be received by men–by mentors, friends, husbands, lovers, editors, members of our disciplines, professions or political groups, tenure-review committees, fathers. With our attention focused on these men, or our imaginings of them, we cannot pay attention to the matter at hand and will wind up ignorant of things which were perfectly apparent. Thus, without any specific effort these men can turn white women to the work of falsification even as we try to educate ourselves. Since white women are almost white men, being white, at least, and sometimes more-or-less honorary men, we can cling to a hope of true membership in the dominant and powerful group, and if our focus is thus locked on them by this futile hope, we can be stuck in our ignorance and theirs all our lives. (Some men of color fall into the parallel trap of hoping for membership in the dominant and powerful group, this time because of their sex. With their attention focused on power and money, they cannot see women, of their race or any other.) Attention has everything to do with knowledge.
IV
White women’s attachments to white men have a great deal to do with our race privilege, with our racism and with our inabilities to understand these. Race and racism also have a great deal to do with white women’s attachment to white men. We need to look at these connections more closely. Within the span of a few days, a little while back, I encountered three things that came together like pieces of a simple puzzle:
I heard a report on the radio about the “new” Klan. It included a recording of a man making a speech to the effect that the white race is threatened with extinction. He explicitly compared the white race to the species of animals that are classed as “endangered” and protected by laws. He also noted with concern the fact that ten years ago the population of Canada was 98 percent white and it is now only 87 percent white.#
2. In a report in the feminist newspaper Big Mama Rag, it was pointed out that “they” are making it virtually impossible for white women to get abortions while forcing sterilization of women of color both in the United States and around the world.
In the feminist magazine Conditions, No. 7, there was a conversation among several Black and Jewish lesbians. Among other things, they discussed the matter of the pressure on them to have Black or Jewish babies, to contribute to the survival of their races, which are threatened with extinction. ##
I think on all this. For hundreds of years and for a variety of reasons, mostly economic, white men of European stock have been out, world-wide, conquering, colonizing and enslaving people they classify as dark, earning the latter’s hatred and rage in megadeath magnitudes. For hundreds of years, those same white men have known they were a minority in the population of the world, and more recently many of them, have believed in the doctrine that darkness is genetically dominant. White men have their reasons to be afraid of racial extinction.###
I begin to think that this fear is one of the crucial sources of white racism even among the nonrabid who do not actively participate in Klan Kulture. This suggests a reading of the dominant culture’s immense pressure on “women” to be mothers. The dominant culture is white, and its pressure is on white women to have white babies. The magazine images of the glories of motherhood do not show white mothers with little brown babies. Feminists have commonly recognized that the pressures of compulsory motherhood on women of color is not just pressure to keep women down, but pressure to keep the populations of their races up; we have not so commonly thought that the pressures of compulsory motherhood on white women are not just pressures to keep women down, but pressure to keep the white population up.
This aspect of compulsory motherhood for white women–white men’s anxiety for the survival of their race####–has not been explicit or articulate in the lifetimes and lives of white women in my circles, and the pressure to make babies has been moderated by the pressure for “family planning” (which I interpret as a project of quality control). But what is common and overt in primarily white circles where the racism runs deep and mostly silent is another curious phenomenon.
In the all white or mostly white environments I have usually lived and worked in, when the women start talking up feminism and lesbian feminism, we are very commonly challenged with the claim that if we had our way, the species would die out. (The assumption our critics make here is that if women had a choice, we would never have intercourse and never bear children. This reveals a lot about the critics’ own assessment of the joys of sex, pregnancy, birthing and motherhood.) They say the species would die out. What I suspect is that the critics confuse the white race with the human species, just as men have confused males with the human species. What the critics are saying, once it is decoded, is that the white race might die out. The demand that white women make white babies to keep the race afloat has not been overt, but I think it is being made over and over again in disguised form as a preachment within an all-white context about our duty to keep the species afloat.
Many white women, certainly many white feminists in the milieux I am familiar with, have not consciously thought that white men may be fearing racial extinction and, at the least, wanting our services to maintain their numbers. Perhaps here in middle America, most white women are so secure in white dominance that such insecure thoughts as whether there are enough white people around do not occur. But also, because we white women have been able to think of ourselves as looking just at women and men when we really were looking at white women and white men, we have generally interpreted our connections with these men solely in terms of gender, sexism and male dominance. We have to figure their desire for racial dominance into the equations.
Simply as females, as mere women in this world, we who are female and white stand to be poor, ill-educated, preyed upon and despised. But because we are both female and white, we belong to that group of women from which the men of the racially dominant group choose their mates. Because of that we are given some access to the benefits they have as members of the racially dominant male group–access to material and educational benefits and the specious benefits of enjoying secondhand feelings of superiority and supremacy. We also have the specious benefit of a certain hope (a false hope, as it turns out) which women of subordinated races do not have, namely the hope of becoming actually dominant with the white men, as their “equals.” This last pseudo-benefit binds us most closely to them in racial solidarity. A liberal white feminism would seek “equality”; we can hardly expect to be heard as saying we want social and economic status equal to that of, say, Chicanos. If what we want is equality with our white brothers, then what we want is, among other things, our own firsthand participation in racial dominance rather than the secondhand ersatz dominance we get as the dominant group’s women. No wonder such feminism has no credibility with women of color.
Race is a tie that binds us to men: “us” being white women, and “men” being white men. If we wish not to be bound in subordination to men, we have to give up trading on our white skin for white men’s race privilege. And on the other hand, if we detach ourselves from reproductive service to white men (in the many senses and dimensions of “reproduction”), the threat we pose is not just to their male selves but to their white selves. White men’s domination and control of’ white women is essential to their project of maintaining their racial dominance. This is probably part of the explanation of why the backlash against feminism overlaps in time and personnel with renewed intensity and overtness of white racism in this country. When their control of “their” women is threatened, their confidence in their racial dominance is threatened.
It is perfectly clear that this did not occur to many of us in advance, but for white women a radical feminism is treacherous to the white race as presently constructed and instituted in this country. The growing willingness of white women to forego the material benefits and ego supports available through connections with white men makes us much harder to contain and control as part of the base of their racial dominance. For many of us, resistance to white male domination was first, and quite naturally, action simply for our own release from a degradation and tyranny we hated in and of itself. But in this racial context, our pursuit of our liberation (I do not say “of equality”) is, whether or not we so intend it, disloyal to Whiteness.
I recommend that we make this disloyalty an explicit part of our politics and embrace it, publicly. This can help us to steer clear of a superficial politics of just wanting what our white brothers have, and help us develop toward a genuine disaffiliation from that Whiteness that has, finally, so little to do with skin color and so much to do with racism.
V
In a certain way it is true that being white-skinned means that everything I do will be wrong–at the least an exercise of unwarranted privilege–and I will encounter the reasonable anger of women of color at every turn. But ‘white’ also designates a political category, a sort of political fraternity. Membership in it is not in the same sense “fated” or “natural.” It can be resisted.
There is a correct line on the matter of white racism which is, in fact, quite correct, to the effect that as a white person one must never claim not to be racist, but only to be anti-racist. The reasoning is that racism is so systematic and white privilege so impossible to escape, that one is, simply, trapped. On one level this is perfectly true and must always be taken into account. Taken as the whole and final truth, it is also unbearably and dangerously dismal. It would place us in the hopeless moral position of one who believes in original sin but in no mechanism of redemption. But white supremacy is not a law of nature, nor is any individual’s complicity in it.
Feminists make use of a distinction between being male and being “a man,” or masculine. I have enjoined males of my acquaintance to set themselves against masculinity. I have asked them to think about how they can stop being men, and I was not recommending a sex-change operation. I do not know how they can stop being men, but I think it is thinkable, and it is a counsel of hope. Likewise I can set myself against Whiteness: I can give myself the injunction to stop being White.
I do not suggest for a moment that I can disaffiliate by a private act of will, or by any personal strategy. Nor, certainly, is it accomplished simply by thinking it possible. To think it thinkable shortcuts no work and shields one from no responsibility. Quite the contrary, it may be a necessary prerequisite to assuming responsibility, and it invites the honorable work of radical imagination.
Footnotes
* This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk I delivered to general audience at Cornell University, sponsored by the Women’s Studies Program, the Philosophy Department and the James H. Becker Alumni Lecture Series, October 29, 1981. In the revision process I profited from the comments and criticisms of Nancy K. Bereano, Michele Nevels, Carolyn Shafer, Sandra Siegel, Sharon Keller and Dorothy Yoshimuri This piece, more than any other in the collection, directly reflects and is limited by my own location, both culturally and in a process of change. The last thing I would want is that it be read either as my last, or as a complete, account of what whiteness is and of what that means to a white feminist. I do not for a moment take it or intend it to be either.
** As Ran Hall pointed out: “the definition of ‘whitewash’–a concealing or glossing over of flaws–does not imply improving or correcting an object or situation but the covering of reality with a cheap, inferior disguise (whiteness).” See “dear martha,” in Common Lives Lesbian Lives: A Lesbian Quarterly, No. 6., Winter, 1982, p. 40.
*** I have not generally included Jews in my lists of examples of “racial” groups because when I did, Jewish critics of this material said that the ways in which anti-Semitism and other sorts of racism are similar and different make such simple inclusion misleading. I include Jews among my examples right here because with respect specifically to these questions of being allowed or not allowed to “pass” (whether one wants to or not), anti-Semitism and other kinds of racism are similar. Although many Jews are politically white in many ways in this country, when they “pass” as non-Jewish, what they may get is the treatment and reception accorded to ordinary “white” Americans. Paradoxically, though Jewish is not equivalent to nonwhite, passing still seems to be passing as white. My thanks to Nancy Bereano for useful discussion of these matters.
**** I do not mean to suggest she provided the bibliography specifically or primarily for the education of white women; but it is reasonable to assume she thought it would be useful to whatever white woman might happen along with suitable curiosity.
# This report went by quickly and I had no way to take notes, so I cannot vouch either for his statistics or for the absolute accuracy of my report of his statistics, but these figures do accurately reflect the genera magnitude of “the problem” and of his problem.
## Many Blacks in this country have a global perspective which reveals that though white racism here has its genocidal aspect, Blacks in America are certainly not the whole Black race. For such people, the idea that their race is threatened with extinction may not have the force it would have for those with a more “american” perspective.
### Edward Fields, a principal ideologue and propagandist for the Klan, was asked if homosexuals are a threat to the white race. He replied that they are, and went on to say: “Our birthrate is extremely low. We are below population zero, below 2.5 children per family. The white race is going down fast, we are only 12% of the world population. In 1990, we’ll be only 10% of the population worldwide. We’ll be an extinct species if homosexuality continues to grow, interracial marriage continues to take people out of the white race, if our birthrate continues to fall.” (quoted in “Into the Fires of Hatred: A Portrait of Klan Leader Edward Fields” by Lee David Hoshall with Nancy A. F. Langer, in Gay Community News November 6, 1982, p. 5.)
#### Male chauvinism makes the men think of themselves as the white race. In this context it is appropriate to call it their race, not “our” race.
Endnotes
Persephone Press, Watertown, Massachusetts, 1980.
Cf., “The Problem That Has No Name,” in this collection, for discussion of the speciousness and of the effectiveness of such power.
Random House, New York, 1952.
In Midnight Birds, Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers, edited by Mary Helen Washington (Anchor Doubleday, New York, 1980).
Feminist Reprise thanks KY for her assistance in readying this article for the site.
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tonyming · 1 year
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Paula Farmers Annual Race in America Series At Book Passage, Marin
Join Us - - in Person or on the Book Passage Website
Paula Farmer is force of nature. Looking for a guide to reading and watching relevant new literature. Paula Farmer is a one stop shopping on paper, brick and mortar book store (Book Passage Marin), film commentary, regular Instagram shows with noted Authors and Activist in their films. And I’m not biased because she supports all of my creative work — but cause she’s really good at what she does.
I’ll be there virtually — join us— 3 Days of RACE IN AMERICA She has for several years done a major review of new books and dialog —with authors and readers, live or online. This includes a number of pop up type Instagram shows monthly — you can join in person , or often the chats available after online on the Book Passage website. This is already one of hardest few months of violence in my lived history related to race and class… and its only January. You don’t wanna go there? It means you really should Join us.
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imethirdperson · 2 months
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What I like most about farcille is that I think its a perfect encapsulation of Ryoko Kui's signature mixture of the cozy and the horrific. Overall Marcille has this clean pristine aura that she breaks only for Falin's sake. She's uppity, rigid and idealistic almost childishly, then she shows this immense drive, gets her hands dirty, and bends and bends. Dungeon Meshi is about how all beings become objects of consumption, and Marcille wouldn't have arrived at that conclusion if Falin hadn't died. She also wouldn't have if she hadn't befriended her in the first place. The course for Marcille's life was set when she was just open-minded enough to follow the weird girl to the cave in the woods. Forever cursed to eat wildlife
It's that contrast between cleanliness and filth that interests me, the interactions between the comfort and the horror, the uncanniness of the familiar and the familiar in the uncanny.
Every bit of Marcille's characterization points to a type of immaturity (the picky eating, the detached romance obsession, the failure at foreseeing the obvious consequences of her actions, the ridiculous plans to equalize all lifespans, the death crisis). Even in her dream she appears as stuck in childhood due to her loss trauma. Her development throughout the manga consists of coming to terms with grime and disgust, learning where food comes from, learning her limitations, coming to terms with death and decay... And it's all powered ironically by her drive to save Falin
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olliecoded · 3 months
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im actually really surprised how polarizing and controversial saltburn has been?? because it seems like the reason a lot of people really hate it is that it's a shallow, pretentious analysis of class and wealth and like. i agree. but i also don't think that the POINT of saltburn was class or social mobility or anything. i think the point of saltburn was an unflinchingly sincere portrayal of obsessive all-consuming desire and, rather than analyzing the movie through a strict lens of class relations or "eat the rich" aspirations, we should be analyzing it through a lens of toxic devotion (especially when it's queer). like saltburn is about the relationships it presents. i'm a little shocked that everyone thinks the main takeaway was what it said about class
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the-nothing-maker · 9 months
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And I'll see you And you'll see me And I'll see you in the branches that blow In the breeze
(a drawing of my D&D PC, Lieudi, holding the body of Gilligan the Moribund)
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bbygirl-aemond · 5 months
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hotd's commentary on patriarchy is so much more interesting when you allow yourself to acknowledge the differences in privilege and power between the various women we see. aemma, alicent, laena, rhaenys, rhaenyra- they all have varying levels of privilege that come to them either indirectly or directly. rhaenyra is, ofc, undisputedly at the top. and this doesn't sideline or villainize rhaenyra in any way, because no amount of privilege will change the fact that she is not a man. like otto said: she could be jaehaerys reborn, could be as wise and powerful and mighty as any human being could be, and at the end of the day society would still see her as a woman. as the most powerful woman, sure, but as a woman. and i think that's just a much more salient point- that no amount of power within a system will allow you to breach the confines of that system. no matter how much influence these woman gain within the system of patriarchy, they're never able to be free of it.
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libraryjones · 8 months
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Another reason to see Barbie in theaters: everyone collectively lost their shit at the part where Ken plays guitar at Barbie for 4 hours and that's an experience I don't want anyone deprived of
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ivan-pilled · 5 months
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"Being poor is a choice, you can get out of it if you work hard."
I live with 4 people, one of which is a child. I work a full time job. So does another. And the third works two part times.
We have no heating. Our electric keeps getting shut off. We didn't have anything AT ALL to drink for 3 days.
You REALLY fucking think we choose to live like this? You think I want to fucking FREEZE right now as I type? FUCK all the out of touch lucky people saying this shit.
Is it possible to get out of a poor family? Yes. But the majority of the time your area of living is what predicts your wealth.
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thottybrucewayne · 8 months
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The way nonblack leftists speak about Black leftists is interesting, to say the least. Yall know nothing about Black liberation or self-determination politics or pretty much ANY Black leftist thought but you feel secure enough to call us overly identitarian and dismiss our concerns about how pervasive antiblackness is within yall spaces (online AND offline) as idpol nonsense. You don't even hold community with Black people. The single drip of knowledge yall possess of Black leftist theory has been run through a filter of at least 15 white and nb breadtube discord voice call conversations and at least one vaush stream before it got to your ears and yet, STILL, you have the gall to tell Black people that WE are the ones who don't read. Okay
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svankmajerbaby · 2 months
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she's her own means of production!!! she's the mother and the child! she's the woman and the infant! shes the teacher and the student! she's innocence and experience all in one! shes a monster and is also infinitely human!!!!!!
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repriseofthereprise · 3 months
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White Woman Feminist
By Marilyn Frye
From Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism (The Crossing Press 1992)
Introduction
This essay is the latest version of something I have been rewriting ever since my essay “On Being White” was published in The Politics of Reality. In a way, this is that first essay, emerging after several metamorphoses.
“On Being White” grew out of experiences I had in my home lesbian community in which I was discovering some of what it means for a woman, a feminist, to be white. These were very frustrating experiences: they played out and revealed the ways in which the fact that I am white gave unbidden and unwanted meanings to my thought and my actions and poisoned them all with privilege.
An intermediate version of this work, delivered at various colleges and universities around 1984-86, began with the following account of my attempts to come to grips with the fact of being white in a white-supremacist racist state, and with some of the criticism my first effort had drawn.1
Many white feminists, myself included, have tried to identify and change the attitudes and behaviors which blocked our friendly and effective comradeship with women of color and limited our ability to act against institutional racism. I assumed at first that these revisions would begin with analysis and decision: I had to understand the problems and then do whatever would effect the changes dictated by this understanding. But as I entered this work, I almost immediately learned that my competence to do it was questionable. The idea was put to me by several women of color (and was stated in writings by women of color) that a white woman is not in a good position to analyze institutional or personal racism and a white woman’s decisions about what to do about racism cannot be authentic. About conscious raising groups for white women, Sharon Keller said to me in a letter, “I think that there are things which white women working together can accomplish but I do not think that white women are in the best positions usually to know what those things are or when it is the right time to do them. It would go a long way …for white women to take seriously their [relative] helplessness in this matter.” White women’s analysis of their own racism has also often been heard by women of color as “mere psychologizing.”…To be rid of racism, a white woman may indeed have to do some introspecting, remembering and verbalizing of feelings, but the self-knowledge which she might achieve by this work would necessarily produce profound change, and there are many reasons why many white women may not want to change. White women’s efforts to gain self-knowledge are easily undermined by the desire not to live out the consequences of getting it; their/our projects of consciousness-raising and self-analysis are very susceptible to the slide from “working on yourself” to “playing with yourself.” Apparently the white woman herself is ill-situated for telling which is which… All of my ways of knowing seemed to have failed me–my perception, my common sense, my good will, my anger, honor and affection, my intelligence and insight. Just as walking requires something fairly sturdy and firm underfoot, so being an actor in the world requires a foundation of ordinary moral and intellectual confidence. Without that, we don’t know how to be or how to act; we become strangely stupid; the commitment against racism becomes itself immobilizing. Even obvious and easy acts either do not occur to us or threaten to be racist by presumptuous assumptions or misjudged timing, wording, or circumstances. Simple things like courtesy or giving money, attending a trial, working on a project initiated by women of color, or dissenting from racist views expressed in white company become fraught with possibilities of error and offense. If you want to do good, and you don’t know good from bad, you can’t move.2 Thus stranded, we also learned that it was exploitive and oppressive to ask for the help of women of color in extricating ourselves from this ignorance, confusion, incompetence and moral failure. Our racism is our problem, not theirs.3 Some white women report that the great enemy of their efforts to combat their own racism is their feelings of guilt. That is not my own experience, or that is not my word for it. The great enemies in my heart have been the despair and the resentment which come with being required (by others and by my own integrity) to repair something apparently irreparable, required to take responsibility for something apparently beyond my powers to effect. Both confounded and angry, my own temptation is to collapse–to admit defeat and retire from the field. What counteracts that temptation, for me, seems to be little more than willfulness and lust: I will not be broken, and my appetite for woman’s touch is not, thank goodness, thoroughly civilized to the established categories. But if I cannot give up and I cannot act, what do Will and Lust recommend? The obvious way out of the relentless logic of my situation is to cease being white.
The Contingency of Racedness
I was brought up with a concept of race according to which you cannot stop being the race you are: your race is an irreversible physical, indeed, ontological fact about you. But when the criteria for membership in a race came up as an issue among white people I knew, considerations of skin color and biological lineage were not definitive or decisive, or rather, they were so precisely when white people decided they should be, and were not when white people wanted them not to be. As I argued in “On Being White”4, white people actively legislate matters of race membership, and if asserting their right to do so requires making decisions that override physical criteria, they ignore physical criteria (without, of course, ever abandoning the ideological strategy of insisting the categories are given in nature). This sort of behavior clearly demonstrates that people construct race, actively, and that people who think they are unquestionably white generally think the criteria of what it is to be of this race or that are theirs to manipulate.5
Being white is not a biological condition. It is being a member of a certain social/political category, a category that is persistently maintained by those people who are, in their own and each others’ perception, most unquestionably in it. It is like being a member of a political party, or a club, or a fraternity–or being a Methodist or a Mormon. If one is white one is a member of a continuously and politically constituted group which holds itself together by rituals of unity and exclusion, which develops in its members certain styles and attitudes useful in the exploitation of others, which demands and rewards fraternal loyalty, which defines itself as the paradigm of humanity, and which rationalizes (and naturalizes) its existence and its practices of exclusion, colonization, slavery and genocide (when it bothers to) in terms of a mythology of blood and skin. If you were born to people who are members of that club, you are socialized and inducted into that club. Your membership in it is in a way, or to a degree, compulsory–nobody gave you any choice in the matter–but it is contingent and, in the Aristotelian sense, accidental. Well then, if you don’t like being a member of that club, you might think of resigning your membership, or of figuring out how to get yourself kicked out of the club, how to get yourself excommunicated.
But this strategy of “separation” is vulnerable to a variety of criticisms. A white woman cannot cease having the history she has by some sort of divorce ritual. Furthermore, the renunciation of whiteness may be an act of self-loathing rather than an act of liberation.6 And disassociation from the racegroup one was born into might seem to be an option for white folks, but seems either not possible or not politically desirable to most members of the other groups from which the whites set themselves off.7 This criticism suggests that my thinking of disassociating from membership in the white fraternity is just another exercise (hence, another reinforcement) of that white privilege which I was finding so onerous and attempting to escape. All these criticisms sound right (and I will circle back to them at the end of the essay), but there is something very wrong here. This closure has the distinctive finality of a trap.
In academic circles where I now circulate, it has become a commonplace that race is a “social construction” and not a naturally given and naturally maintained grouping of human individuals with naturally determined sets of traits. And the recognition of race as non-natural is presumed, in those circles, to be liberatory. Pursuing the idea of disassociating from the race-category in which I am placed and from the perquisites attached to it is a way of pursuing the question of what freedom can be made of this, and for whom. But it is seeming to me that race (together with racism and race privilege) is apparently constructed as something inescapable. And it makes sense that it would be, since such a construction would best serve those served by race and racism. Of course race and racism are impossible to escape; of course a white person is always in a sticky web of privilege that permits only acts which reinforce (“reinscribe”) racism. This just means that some exit must be forced. That will require conceptual creativity, and perhaps conceptual violence.
The “being white” that has presented itself to me as a burden and an insuperable block to my growth out of racism is not essentially about the color of my skin or any other inherited bodily trait, even though doctrines of color are bound up with this status in some ways. The problem then, is to find a way to think clearly about some kind of whiteness that is not essentially tied to color and yet has some significant relation to color. The distinction feminists have made between maleness and masculinity provides a clue and an analogy. Maleness we have construed as something a human animal can be born with; masculinity we have construed as something a human animal can be trained to–and it is an empirical fact that most male human animals are trained to it in one or another of its cultural varieties.8 Masculinity is not a blossoming consequence of genetic constitution as lush growths of facial hair seem to be in the males of many human groups. But the masculinity of an adult male is far from superficial or incidental and we know it is not something an individual could shrug off like a coat or snap out of like an actor stepping out of his character. The masculinity of an adult male human in any particular culture is also profoundly connected with the local perceptions and conceptions of maleness (as “biological”), its causes and its consequences. So it may be with being white, but we need some revision of our vocabulary to say it rightly. We need a term in the realm of race and racism whose grammar is analogous to the grammar of the term ‘masculinity’. I am tempted to recommend the neologism ‘albosity’ for this honor, but I’m afraid it is too strange to catch on. So I will introduce ‘whitely’ and ‘whiteliness’ as terms whose grammar is analogous to that of ‘masculine’ and ‘masculinity’. Being whiteskinned (like being male) is a matter of physical traits presumed to be physically determined; being whitely (like being masculine) I conceive as a deeply ingrained way of being in the world. Following the analogy with masculinity, I assume that the connection between whiteliness and light-colored skin is a contingent connection: this character could be manifested by persons who are not “white;” it can be absent in persons who are.
In the next section, I will talk about whiteliness in a free and speculative way, exploring what it may be. This work is raw preliminary sketching; it moves against no such background of research and attentive observation as there is to guide accounts of masculinity. There is of course a large literature on racism, but I think that what I am after here is not one and the same thing as racism, either institutional or personal. Whiteliness is connected to institutional racism (as will emerge further on in the discussion) by the fact that individuals with this sort of character are well-suited to the social roles of agents of institutional racism, but it is a character of persons, not of institutions. Whiteliness is also related to individual or personal racism, but I think it is not one and the same thing as racism, at least in the sense where ‘racism’ means bigotry/hate/ignorance/indifference. As I understand masculinity it is not the same thing as misogyny; similarly, whiteliness is not the same thing as race-hatred. One can be whitely even if one’s beliefs and feelings are relatively well-informed, humane and good-willed. So I approach whiteliness freshly, as itself, as something which is both familiar and unknown.
Whiteliness
To begin to get a picture of what whiteliness is, we need to invoke a certain candid and thoughtful reflection on the part of white people, who of course in some ways know themselves best; we also need to listen to what people of color perceive of white people, since in some ways they know white people best. For purposes of this brief and preliminary exploration, I will draw on material from three books for documentation of how white people are as presented in the experience of people of color. The three are This Bridge Called My Back9, which is a collection of writings by radical women of color, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center10, by Black theorist bell hooks, and Drylongso11, which is a collection of narratives of members of what its editor calls the “core black community.”12 For white voices, I draw on my own and on those I have heard as a participant/observer of white culture, and on Minnie Bruce Pratt.
Minnie Bruce Pratt, a feminist and a white southerner, has spelled out some of what I would call the whitely way of dealing with issues of morality and change.13 She said she had been taught to be a judge–a judge of responsibility and of punishment, according to an ethical system which countenances no rival; she had been taught to be a preacher–to point out wrongs and tell others what to do; she had been taught to be a martyr–to take all responsibility and all glory; she had been taught to be a peacemaker–because she could see all sides and see how it all ought to be. I too was taught something like this, growing up in a small town south of the Mason-Dixon line, in a self-consciously christian and white family. I learned that I, and “we,” knew right from wrong and had the responsibility to see to it right was done; that there were others who did not know what is right and wrong and should be advised, instructed, helped and directed by us. I was taught that because one knows what is right, it is morally appropriate to have and exercise what I now would call race privilege and class privilege. Not “might is right,” but “right is might,” as Carolyn Shafer put the point.14 In any matter in which we did not know what is right, through youth or inexpertise of some sort, we would await the judgment or instruction of another (white) person who does.
Drylongso:
White people are bolder because they think they are supposed to know everything anyhow. (97) White men look up to their leaders more than we do and they are not much good without their leaders. (99) White people don’t really know how they feel about anything until they consult their leaders or a book or other things outside themselves. (99) White people are not supposed to be stupid, so they tend to think they are intelligent, no matter how stupidly they are behaving. (96)
Margin:
The possibility [they] were not the best spokespeople for all women made [them] fear for [their] self-worth. (13)
Whitely people generally consider themselves to be benevolent and good-willed, fair, honest and ethical. The judge, preacher, peacemaker, martyr, socialist, professional, moral majority, liberal, radical, conservative, working men and women–nobody admits to being prejudiced, everybody has earned every cent they ever had, doesn’t take sides, doesn’t hate anybody, and always votes for the person they think best qualified for the job, regardless of the candidates’ race, sex, religion or national origin, maybe even regardless of their sexual preferences. The professional version of this person is always profoundly insulted by the suggestion that s/he might have permitted some personal feeling about a client to affect the quality of services rendered. S/he believes with perfect confidence that s/he is not prejudiced, not a bigot, not spiteful, jealous or rude, does not engage in favoritism or discrimination. When there is a serious and legitimate challenge, a negotiator has to find a resolution which enables the professional person to save face, to avoid simply agreeing that s/he made an unfair or unjust judgment, discriminated against someone or otherwise behaved badly. Whitely people have a staggering faith in their own rightness and goodness, and that of other whitely people. We are not crooks.
Drylongso:
Every reasonable black person thinks that most white people do not mean him well. (7) They figure, if nobody blows the whistle, then nothing wrong has gone down. (21) White people are very interested in seeming to be of service …(4) Whitefolks can’t do right, even if there was one who wanted to…They are so damn greedy and cheap that it even hurts them to try to do right. (59)
Bridge:
A child is trick-or-treating with her friends. At one house the woman, after realizing the child was an Indian, “quite crudely told me so, refusing to give me treats my friends had received.” (47)
Drylongso:
I used to be a waitress, and I can still remember how white people would leave a tip and then someone at the table, generally some white woman, would take some of the money. (8)
Bridge:
The lies, pretensions, the snobbery and cliquishness. (69) We experience white feminists and their organizations as elitist, crudely insensitive, and condescending. (86) White people are so rarely loyal. (59)
Whitely people do have a sense of right and wrong, and are ethical. Their ethics is in great part an ethics of forms, procedures and due process. As Minnie Bruce Pratt said, their morality is a matter of “ought-to,” not “want to” or “passionately desire to.” And the “oughts” tend to factor out into propriety or good manners and abiding by the rules. Change cannot be initiated unless the moves are made in appropriate ways. The rules are often-rehearsed. I have participated in whitely women’s affirming to each other that some uncomfortable disruption caused by someone objecting to some injustice or offense could have been avoided: had she brought “her” problem forth in the correct way, it could have been correctly processed. We say:
She should have brought it up in the business meeting. She should have just taken the other woman aside and explained that the remark had offended her. She should not have personally attacked me; she should have just told me that my behavior made her uncomfortable, and I would have stopped doing it. She should take this through the grievance procedure.
By believing in rules, by being arbiters of rules, by understanding agency in terms of the applications of principles to particular situations, whitely people think they preserve their detachment from prejudice, bias, meanness and so on. Whitely people tend to believe that one preserves one’s goodness by being principled, by acting according to rules instead of according to feeling.
Drylongso:
We think white people are the most unprincipled folks in the world… (8) White people are some writing folks! They will write! They write everything. Now they do that because they don’t trust each other. Also, they are the kind of people who think that you can think about everything, about whether you are going to do, before you do that thing. Now, that’s bad for them because you can’t do that without wings …All you can do is do what you know has got to be done as right as you know how to do that thing. White people don’t seem to know that. (88) …he keeps changing the rules …Now, Chahlie will rule you to death. (16)
Authority seems to be central to whiteliness, as you might expect from a people who are raised to run things, or to aspire to that: belief in one’s authority in matters practical, moral and intellectual exists in tension with the insecurity and hypocrisy that are essentially connected with the pretense of infallibility. This pretentiousness makes the whitely person simultaneously rude, condescending, overbearing and patronizing on the one hand, and on the other, weak, helpless, insecure and seeking validation of her or his goodness.
Drylongso:
White people have got to bluff it out as rulers… [they] are always unsure of themselves. (99) No matter what Chahlie do, he want his mama to pat him on the head and tell him how cute he is. (19) …[I]n a very real sense white men never grow up. (100) Hard on the outside, soft on the inside. (99)
Bridge:
Socially …juvenile and tasteless. (99) No responsibility to others. (70)
The dogmatic belief in whitely authority and rightness is also at odds with any commitment to truth.
Drylongso:
They won’t tell each other the truth, and the lies they tell each other sound better to them than the truth from our mouths. (29) As long as they can make someone say rough is smooth, they are happy …Like I told you, whitefolks don’t care about what the truth is…It’s like when you lie but so much, you don’t know what the truth is. (21) You simply cannot be honest with white people. (45)
Bridge:
White feminists have a serious problem with truth and “accountability.” (85)
And finally, whitely people make it clear to people of other races that the last thing the latter are supposed to do is to challenge whitely people’s authority.
Bridge:
[W]e are expected [by white women] to move, charm or entertain, but not to educate in ways that are threatening to our audiences. (71)
Margin:
Though they expected us to provide first hand accounts of black experience, they felt it was their role to decide if these experiences were authentic. (11)
Often in situations where white feminists aggressively attacked individual black women, they saw themselves as the ones who were under attack, who were the victims. (13)
Drylongso:
Most white people–anyways all the white people I know–are people you wouldn’t want to explain anything to. (67)
No wonder whitely people have so much trouble learning, so much trouble receiving, understanding and acting on moral or political criticism and demands for change. How can you be a preacher who does not know right from wrong, a judge who is an incompetent observer, a martyr who victimizes others, a peace-maker who is the problem, an authority without authority, a grownup who is a child? How can someone who is supposed to be running the world acknowledge their relative powerlessness in some matters in any politically constructive way? Any serious moral or political challenge to a whitely person must be a direct threat to her or his very being.
Whiteliness and Class
What I have been exploring here, and calling “whiteliness,” may sound to some like it is a character of middle class white people, or perhaps of middle class people whatever their race; it may sound like a class phenomenon, not a race phenomenon. Before addressing this question more deeply, I should just register that it is my impression, just looking around at the world, that white self-righteousness is not exclusive to the middle class. Many poor and working class white people are perfectly confident that they are more intelligent, know more, have better judgment and are more moral than Black people or Chicanos or Puerto Ricans, or Indians, or anyone else they view as not-white, and believe that they would be perfectly competent to run the country and to rule others justly and righteously if given the opportunity.
But this issue of the relation of whiteliness to class deserves further attention.
Though I think that what I am talking about is a phenomenon of race, I want to acknowledge a close interweaving and double-determination of manifestations and outcomes of race and of class, and to consider some of the things that give rise to the impression that what I’m calling whiteliness may really be just “middle-class-iness.” One thing that has happened here is that the individual who contributed to the observations assembled in the preceding section as a “participant observer” among white people (viz., the author of this analysis) is herself a lifelong member of the middle class. The whiteliness in which she has participated and about which she can write most vividly and authentically is that of her own kin, associates, and larger social group. This might, to a certain extent, bias that section’s description of whiteliness toward a middle-class version of it.
Another reason that what I am calling whiteliness might appear to be a class character rather than a race one is that even if it is not peculiar to whites of the middle classes, it is nonetheless peculiarly suitable to them: it suits them to their jobs and social roles of managing, policing, training and disciplining, legislating and administering, in a capitalist bureaucratic social order.
Another interesting point in this connection is that the definition of a dominant race tends to fasten on and project an image of a dominant group within that race as paradigmatic of the race.15 The ways in which individual members of that elite group enact and manifest their racedness and dominance would constitute a sort of norm of enacting and manifesting this racedness which non-elite members of the race would generally tend to assimilate themselves to. Those ways of enacting and manifesting racedness would also carry marks of the class position of the paradigmatic elite within the race, and these marks too would appear in the enactments of race by the non-elite. In short, the ways members of the race generally enact and stylistically manifest membership in the race would tend to bear marks of the class status of the elite paradigmatic members of the race.
I do not think whiteliness is just middle-class-ness misnamed. I think of whiteliness as a way of being which extends across ethnic, cultural, and class categories and occurs in ethnic, cultural, and class varieties–varieties which may tend to blend toward a norm set by the elite groups within the race. Whatever class and ethnic variety there is among white people, though, such niceties seem often to have no particular salience in the experience people of other races have with white people. It is very significant that the people of color from whose writings and narratives I have quoted in the preceding section often characterize the white people they talk about in part by class status, but they do not make anything of it. They do not generally indicate that class differences among white people make much difference to how people of color experience them.
Speaking of the oppression of women, Gayle Rubin noted its “endless variety and monotonous similarity.”16 There is great variety among the men of all the nationalities, races, religions and positions in various economies and polities, and women do take into account the particulars of the men they must deal with. But when our understanding of the world is conditioned by consciousness of sexism and misogyny, we see also, very clearly, the impressive and monotonous lack of variety among “masculinities.” With my notion of whiteliness, I am reaching for the monotonous similarity, not the endless variety, in white folks’ ways of being in the world. For various reasons, that monotonous similarity may have a middle-class cast to it, or my own perception of it may give it a middle-class cast, but I think that what I am calling “whiteliness” is a phenomenon of race. It is integral to what constructs and what is constructed by race, and only more indirectly related to class.
Feminism and Whiteliness
Being whitely, like being anything else in a sexist culture, is not the same thing in the lives of white women as it is in the lives of white men. The political significance of one’s whiteliness interacts with the political significance of one’s status as female or male in a male-supremacist culture. For the white men, a whitely way of being in the world is very harmonious with masculinity and their social and political situation. For white women it is, of course, all very much more complicated.
Femininity in white women is praised and encouraged but is nonetheless contemptible as weakness, dependence, feather-brainedness, vulnerability, and so on, but whiteliness in white women is unambivalently taken among white people as an appropriate enactment of a positive status. Because of this, for white women, whiteliness works more consistently than femininity does to disguise and conceal their negative value and low status as women, and at the same time to appear to compensate for it or to offset it.
Those of us who are born female and white are born into the status created by white men’s hatred and contempt for women, but white girls aspire to Being and integrity, like anyone else. Racism translates this into an aspiration to whiteliness. The white girl learns that whiteliness is dignity and respectability; she learns that whiteliness is her aptitude for partnership with white men; she learns that partnership with white men is her salvation from the original position of Woman in patriarchy. Adopting and cultivating whiteliness as an individual character seems to put it in the woman’s own power to lever herself up out of a kind of nonbeing (the status of woman in a male supremacist social order) over into a kind of Being (the status of white in white supremacist social order). But whiteliness does not save white women from the condition of woman. Quite the contrary. A white woman’s whiteliness is deeply involved in her oppression as a woman and works against her liberation.
White women are deceived, deceive ourselves and will deceive others about ourselves, if we believe that by being whitely we can escape the fate of being the women of the white men. Being rational, righteous, and ruly (rule-abiding, and rule enforcing) do for some of us some of the time buy a ticket to a higher level of material well-being than we might otherwise be permitted (though it is not dependable). But the reason, right, and rules are not of our own making; the white men may welcome our whiteliness as endorsement of their own values and as an expression of our loyalty to them (that is, as proof of their power over us), and because it makes us good helpmates to them. But if our whiteliness commands any respect, it is only in the sense that a woman who is chaste and obedient is called (by classic patriarchal reversal) “respectable.”
It is commonly claimed that the Women’s Movement in the United States, this past couple of decades, is a white women’s movement. This claim is grossly disrespectful to the many feminists whom the label ‘white’ does not fit. But it is indeed the case that millions of white women have been drawn to and engaged in feminist action and theorizing, and this creative engagement did not arise from those women’s being respected for their nice whitely ways by white men: it arose from the rape, battery, powerlessness, poverty or material dependence, spiritual depletion, degradation, harassment, servitude, insanity, drug addiction, botched abortions and murder of those very women, those women who are white.17
As doris davenport put it in her analysis of white feminists’ racism:
A few of us [third world women] …see beyond the so-called privilege of being white, and perceive white wimmin as very oppressed, and ironically, invisible… [I]t would seem that some white feminists could [see this] too. Instead, they cling to their myth of being privileged, powerful, and less oppressed…than black wimmin… Somewhere deep down (denied and almost killed) in the psyche of racist white feminists there is some perception of their real position: powerless, spineless, and invisible. Rather than examine it, they run from it. Rather than seek solidarity with wimmin of color, they pull rank within themselves.18
For many reasons it is difficult for women (of any intersection of demographic groups) to grasp the enormity, the full depth and breadth, of their oppression and of men’s hatred and contempt for them. One reason is simply that the facts are so ugly and the image of that oppressed, despised and degraded woman so horrible that recognizing her as oneself seems to be accepting utter defeat. Some women, at some times, I am sure, must deny it to survive. But in the larger picture, denial (at least deep and sustained denial) of one’s own oppression cuts one off from the appreciation of the oppression of others which is necessary for the connections one needs. This is what I think Cherrie Moraga is pointing out when she says:
Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place.19
If white women are not able to ally with women of other races in the construction of another world, we will indeed remain, defeated, in this one.
White women’s whiteliness does not deliver the deliverance we were taught it would; our whiteliness interferes with our ability to form necessary connections both by inhibiting and muddling our understanding of our own oppression as women, and by making us personally obnoxious and insufferable to many other women much of the time; it also is directly opposed to our liberation because it joins and binds us to our oppressors. By our whitely ways of being we enact partnership and racial solidarity with white men, we animate a social (if not also sexual) heterosexual union with white men, we embody and express our possession by white men.
A feminism that boldly names the oppression and degraded condition of white women and recognizes white men as its primary agents and primary beneficiaries–such a feminism can make it obvious to white women that the various forms of mating and racial bonding with white men do not and will never save us from that condition. Such a feminist understanding might free us from the awful confusion of thinking our whiteliness is dignity, and might make it possible for us to know that it is a dreadful mistake to think that our whiteliness earns us our personhood. Such knowledge can open up the possibility of practical understanding of whiteliness as a learned character (as we have already understood masculinity and femininity), a character by which we facilitate our own containment under the “protection” of white men, a character which interferes constantly and (often) conclusively with our ability to be friends with women of other races, a character by which we station ourselves as lieutenants and stenographers of white male power, a character which is not desirable in itself and neither manifests nor merits the full Being to which we aspire. A character by which, in fact, we both participate in and cover up our own defeat. We might then include among our strategies for change a practice of unlearning whiteliness, and as we proceed in this, we can only become less and less well-assimilated members of that racial group called “white.” (I must state as clearly as possible that I do not claim that unbecoming whitely is the only thing white women need to do to combat racism. I have said that whiteliness is not the same thing as racism. I have no thought whatever that I am offering a panacea for the eradication of racism. I do think that being whitely interferes enormously with white women’s attempts in general to be anti-racist.)
Disaffiliation, Deconstruction, Demolition
To deconstruct a concept is to analyze it in a way which reveals its construction–both in the temporal sense of its birth and development over time and in a certain cultural and political matrix, and in the sense of its own present structure, its meaning, and its relation to other concepts. One of the most impressive aspects of such an analysis is the revelation of the “contingency” of the concept, i.e. the fact that it is only the accidental collaboration of various historical events and circumstances that brought that concept into being, and the fact that there could be a world of sense without that concept in it. The other very impressive thing about such analyses is what they reveal of the complex and intense interplay of construction of concepts and construction of concrete realities. This interplay is what I take to be that phenomenon called the “social construction of reality.”
In combination, the revelation of the historical contingency of a concept and the revelation of the intricacy of interplay between concept and the concrete lived reality give rise to a strong sense that “deconstruction” of a concept simultaneously dismantles the reality in whose social construction the evolution of the concept is so closely involved. But things do not work that way. In the first place, analyzing a concept and circulating the analysis among a few interested colleagues does not make the concept go away, does not dislodge it from the matrix of concepts in the active conceptual repertoire even of those few people, much less of people in general. In the second place, even if the deconstructive analysis so drains the concept of power for those few individuals that they can no longer use it, and perhaps their participation in the social constructions of which that concept is a part becomes awkward and halting (like tying your shoelaces while thinking directly about what you are doing), it still leaves those social constructions fully intact. Once constructed and assimilated, a social construct may be a pretty sturdy thing, not very vulnerable to erosion, decay, or demolition.20 It is one thing to “deconstruct” a concept, another to dismantle a well-established, well-entrenched social construct. For example, Foucault’s revelations about the arbitrariness and coerciveness of classifications of sexualities did not put an end to queer-bashing or to the fears lesbians and gay men have of being victims of a witch-hunt.
I am interested, as I suggested earlier in this essay, in the matter of how to translate the recognition of the social constructedness of races into some practice of the freedom these contingencies seem to promise, some way to proceed by which people can be liberated from the concrete reality of races as they are determined by racism. But the social-constructedness of race and races in the racist state has very different meanings for groups differently placed with respect to these categories. The ontological freedom of categorical reconstruction may be generic, but what is politically possible differs for those differently positioned, and not all the political possibilities for every group are desirable. Attempts by any group to act in this ontological freedom need to be informed by understanding of how the action is related to the possibilities and needs of the others.
I have some hope that if I can manage to refuse to enact, embody, animate this category–the white race–as I am supposed to, I can free up my energies and actions from a range of disabling confinements and burdens, and align my will with the forces which eventually will dissolve or dismantle that race as such. If it is objected that it is an exercise of white privilege to dissociate myself from the white race this way, I would say that in fact this project is strictly forbidden by the rules of white solidarity and white supremacy, and is not one of the privileges of white power. It may also be objected that my adoption or recommendation of this strategy implies that the right thing to do, in general, for everyone, is to dissolve, dismantle, bring an end to, races; and if this indeed is the implication, it can sound very threatening to some of the people whose races are thus to be erased. This point is well-made by Franz Fanon in a response to Jean-Paul Sartre, described by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Reading Sartre’s account of Negritude (as an antithesis preparatory to a “society without races,” hence “a transition and not a conclusion”), Fanon reports “I felt I had been robbed of my last chance”…”Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal… “21
The dynamic creative claiming of racial identities (and gender identity) that arose as devices of people’s oppression has been a politically powerful and life-enhancing response of oppressed people in modern and contemporary times. For members of oppressor groups to suddenly turn around and decide to abolish races would be, it seems, genocide, not liberation. (I have a parallel unease about the project of dismantling the category of women, which some feminists seem to favor.)
But I am not suggesting that if white women should try to abandon the white race and contribute to its demolition, then women of other races should take the same approach to their racial categorization and their races. Quite the contrary. Approaches to the matter of dismantling a dominance-subordinance structure surely should be asymmetrical–they should differ according to whether one has been molded into its category of dominance or its category of subordination. My hope is that it may contribute to the demise of racism, if we upset the logical symmetry of race–if Black women, for instance, cultivate a racial identity and a distinctive (sexually egalitarian) Black community (and other women of racialized groups, likewise), while white women are undermining white racial identity and cultivating communities and agency among women along lines of affinity not defined by race. Such an approach would work toward a genuine redistribution of power.
Growing Room
The experience of feminists’ unlearning femininity, and our readiness to require men to unlearn masculinity shows that it is thinkable to unlearn whiteliness. If I am right about all this, then, indeed, we even know a good deal about how to do it.
We know that white feminists have to inform ourselves exhaustively of its politics. We know we have to avoid, or be extremely alert in, environments in which whiteliness is particularly required or rewarded (e.g., academia). We know we have to practice new ways of being in environments which nurture different habits of feeling, perception, and thought, and that we will have to make these environments for ourselves since the world will not offer them to us. We know that the process will be collective and that this collectivity does not mean we will blend seamlessly with the others into a colorless mass; women unlearning femininity together have not become clones of each other or of those who have been valuable models. As feminists we have learned that we have to resist the temptation to encourage femininity in other women when, in moments of exhaustion and need we longed for another’s sacrificial mothering or wifing. Similarly, white women have to resist the temptation to encourage whiteliness in each other when, in moments of cowardice or insecurity, we long for the comfort of “solidarity in superiority,” or when we wish someone would relieve our painful uncertainty with a timely application of judgments and rules.
Seasoned feminists (white feminists along with feminists of other races) know how to transform consciousness. The first break-through is in the moment of knowing another way of being is possible. In this matter of a white woman’s racedness, the possibility in question is the possibility of disengaging (on some levels, at least) one’s own energies and wits from the continuing project of the social creation and maintenance of the white race, the possibility of being disloyal to that project by stopping constantly making oneself whitely. And this project should be a very attractive one to white women once we get it that it is the possibility of not being whitely, rather than the possibility of being whitely, that holds some promise of our rescuing ourselves from the degraded condition of women in white men’s world.
Notes
The working title during that period was “Ritual Libations and Points of Explosion,” which referred to a remark made by Helene Wenzel in a review of my Politics of Reality which appeared in The Women’s Review of Books, Vol.1, No.1, October, 1983. Wenzel said:“Even when white women call third world women our friends, and they us, we still agonize over “the issue.” The result is that when we write or teach about race, racism and feminism we tend either to condense everything we have to say to the point of explosion, or, fearing just that explosion, we sprinkle our material with ritual libations which evaporate without altering our own, or anyone else’s consciousness.”And, coming down to cases, she continued: “Frye has fallen into both of these traps.”
For some critical reflection on “wanting to do good,” and on “not knowing how to act,” see “A Response to Lesbian Ethics: Why Ethics?” in this volume.
Actually, what I think women of color have communicated in this matter is not so harsh as that. The point is that no one can do someone else’s growing for her, that white women must not expect women of color to be on call to help, and that there is a great deal of knowledge to be gained by reading, interacting, paying attention, which white women need not ask women of color to supply. Some women of color have helped me a great deal (sometimes in spite of me).
Frye, The Politics of Reality (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1983), pp.115-116.
It is easy for a white person who is trying to understand white privilege and white power in white supremacist states to make the mistake of (selfservingly) exaggerating that power and privilege, assuming it is total. In this case, I was earlier making the mistake of thinking that white domination means that white people totally control the definition of race and the races. Reading bell hook’s Yearning (Boston: South End Press, 1990), I awoke to the fact that afro-americans (and other racialized people) are engaged also in the definition of Black (and other “race” categories); white people have the power to enforce their own definitions in many (but not all) situations, but they are not the only people determining the meanings of race categories and race words, and what they determine for themselves (and enforce) is not necessarily congruent with what others are determining for themselves.
I want to thank Maria Lugones, whose palpably loving anger on this point made me take it seriously. See “Hablando Cara a Cara/Speaking Face to Face: An Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism” in Gloria Anzaldua, editor, Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras: Critical and Creative Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: aunt lute foundation press, 1990).
Singleton, Carrie Jane, “Race and Gender in Feminist Theory,” SAGE, Vol VI, No. 1 (Summer 1989), p.15.
I am not unmindful here of the anxiety some readers may have about my reliance on a distinction between that which is physically given and that which is socially acquired. I could immensely complicate this passage by shifting from the material mode of talking about maleness and skin colors to the formal mode of talking about conceptions or constructions of maleness and skin colors. But it would not make anything clearer. It is perfectly meaningful to use the terms ‘male’ and ‘white’ (as a pigment word), while understanding that sex categories and color categories are “constructed” as the kinds of categories they are, i.e., physical categories, as opposed to social categories like lawyer or arithmetic categories like ordinals.
Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua, editors, This Bridge Called My Back: Writing By Radical Women of Color (Brooklyn, NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981). I quote from writings by Barbara Cameron, Chrystos, doris davenport, and Mitsuye Yamada.
hooks, bell, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1985).
11. Gewaltney, John Langston, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (NY: Random House, 1983). I quote from statements by Jackson Jordan, Jr., Hannah Nelson, John Oliver, Howard Roundtree, Rosa Wakefield, and Mabel Lincoln.
The people speaking in Drylongso were responding to questions put by an interviewer. The narratives as published do not include the questions, but the people clearly were asked in some manner to say something about how they see white people or what they think white people generally are like. Most of them but not every one, prefaced or appended their comments with remarks to the effect that they did not think white people were “like that” by birth or blood, but by being brought up a certain way in certain circumstances.
“Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” in Yours in Struggle, edited by Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Barbara Smith (Brooklyn: Long Haul Press, 1984).
For more exploration of some of the meanings of this, see “Response to Lesbian Ethics: Why Ethics?” in this volume.
Cf. Balibar, Etienne, “Paradoxes of Universality,” translated by Michael Edwards in David Theo Goldberg, editor, Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 284-85, extracted from “Racisme et nationalism,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Classe (Paris: Editions La Decouverte, 1988).
“The Traffic in Women,” Toward An Anthropology of Woman, ed., Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), p.160.
Carolyn Shafer is the one who brought to my attention the fact that there is a certain contradiction in claiming both that this stage of the women’s movement was created by and belongs to white women and (on the grounds of the generally better material welfare of white women, compared to women of other races in the U.S.) that white women are not all that badly off and don’t really know what suffering is about. If white women were as generally comfortable, secure and healthy as they might appear to some observers, they would not have participated as they have in an enormous movement whose first and most enduring issues are bodily integrity and economic self-sufficiency.
“The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Wimmin,” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, ed., Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981), pp. 89-90.
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981), p.21.
My lover Carolyn was explaining what I do for a living to our coheart Keyosha, and included an account of “deconstruction.” Keyosha, a welder and pipefitter in the construction trades, said that wasn’t a real word and offered “demolition” as the real word for this. Carolyn then had to admit (on my behalf) that all this deconstructing did not add up to any demolition, and a made-up abstract word was probably suitable to this abstract activity.
21. “Critical Remarks,” Anatomy of Racism, ed., David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p.325.
Feminist Reprise thanks KY for her help in readying this article for the site.
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daybreaksys · 6 months
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Neighbourhoods of poor vampires in the lowest, ever-dark parts of fantasy cities, vampires who aren't wealthy because they're a racial minority and the system was designed to keep poor people poor.
Poor vampires who are functionally disabled because they can't take sunlight in the only hours services are open and have to fight stereotypes of them being all snob nobles.
A nonprofit program immersed in the neighbourhoods paints portraits of vampires for free so they can see themselves for the first time because they can't use mirrors or cameras. Some cry, some don't recognise themselves, some are weirded by their unexpected appearances.
Mixed-race vampires who struggle to navigate their neighbourhoods having to advocate for themselves reminding people they are vampires as well as their other ethnicities.
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piratespencilart · 1 year
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I love the evolution of Laura and Taliesin's characters... They got married in c1 and their characters have matched ever since.
Bonus Mighty Nein reunion doodle:
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