Yes, folks, it’s that time of year again. It’s Black Feminism Week! One of my favorite times of the year.
This began in 2014 when I heard the cries of despair of black women who relentlessly get attacked online. (Which is why I don’t make a Word Salad featuring Stacey Dash. No matter how foolish that woman can be, I don’t want to dog pile on as a white man. It feels like it’s against what I believe.) I figured as a counter to this harassment, I would begin this project.
If you don’t know who Ella Achola is, she is a brilliant writer and activist who had a Ted Talk last year. She started the Ain’t I A Woman Collective and has been off social media for a while. Or at least what I’ve been following. Both the Ain’t I A Woman Collective and the magazine Hysteria, which at one point she was an editor of, seem to have gone off the grid. (At least on Twitter with Hysteria, their Facebook page is still up to date.) She has also written for the (typically conservative) Telegraph.
Time for an embarrassing admission: I am not very familiar with Sojourner Truth. It makes it worse that I have been living for nearly 3 years in her former stomping grounds when she worked her most famous speeches including “Ain’t I a Woman.” Yesterday, I was literally in the town where she briefly owned property, Florence, MA.
However, that being said, I don’t like seeing the erasure of black women and that aspect of White Feminism™ and White Liberalism™. Recently there was a clip from the Young Turks show talking about the platform committee in the Democratic Party. Even though I was mostly happy who became part of it from the Sander's camp, there was not one mention of Barbara Lee, who was appointed by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. (Or Elijah Cummings, who was also worth mentioning and appointed by Wasserman-Shultz.) Notice how the Young Turks fail to mention this fact:
I might not like Wasserman-Schultz, but to dismiss that she picked one bold progressive (Barbara Lee) and one solid progressive (Elijah Cummings), both members of the House Progressive Caucus, is not fair at all. Then to pretend that online troll, Matt Bruenig, was wrongly fired from Demos ( John Iadarola, in the full version of this video, which is not available to the public, further erases black women. He only alludes to it in this clip.) when Bruenig was a serial harasser of black women online and was fired after his tweets were shown to one of his employers is adding insult to injury. (After he was fired, he started a crowdfunding campaign ignoring that he has another full time job so the loss of his blogging won’t hurt his family too much. This campaign is also mentioned in the part of the video that was cut.)
This is just an example of what White Feminism™ (Which this example is not) and White Progressives™(Which this is) often do to throw black women under the bus.
To erase both progressive African-Americans is a problem because then you have people thinking without researching that all 4 of Wasserman-Schultz’s picks were corporatists. Beyond doing their homework, Cenk and John should have gone after Wasserman-Schultz for picking a former Congressman who works for a law firm with ties to Big Tobacco and who wants to cut Social Security and someone who is a board member of a pro-Zionist lobbying organization.
Until we start seeing more inclusive liberalism and feminism, which would make it less of a “monster” we will continue to have this erasure.
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