Long-time lurker, first-time poster!
My first Daily Kos diary! I apologize in advance: it's me-search, for one, and a reply to another blog, for another.
But please carry on beyond Orange Flourish if you're interested in debating the term "white feminists" as pejorative and, more broadly, discussions about the use of the word "privilege" in academic and activist circles.
I feel a modicum of guilt using my first post thus, and, not, say, about Bridgegate or Obamacare or some rant about racial coding on Fox, but, if I'm honest with myself, this topic is a big one for me.
I think Ninjacate's post "This is What I Mean When I Say 'White Feminism'" is a brilliant contribution to the growing discussion around #solidarityisforwhitewomen" and as a recap of yet another year of spectacular mishaps and missteps around these issues.
I begin thus because:
1. I genuinely feel that way; and
2. I recognize that what I’m about to say will surely trigger replies of “You really don’t get it” and “You’re the person we’re writing about.”
So here’s a tale from a white woman’s time in an ethnic studies graduate program. The teacher in me screams “Yes! Yes! Yes!” in recognition of these examples in so many white students during a decade of teaching classes on race. The graduate student me, on the other hand, feels more… ambivalent.
I was active in my graduate student union during a year when our contract was up for renegotiation. The most contentious issue for the membership that round was the testing and training of foreign graduate student instructors as a pre-condition for teaching, i.e. an English language test and American acculturation program. Not only were native speakers not subject to any tests of competence for teaching (you merely signed up for courses that interested you), but it also turned out that only graduate students from Southeast Asia were mandated to take these tests. So, if you’re from Brazil, “What would you like to teach?” but if you’re from China? We had arrived at a tenuous consensus as a union that the test should be administered uniformly and that the acculturation program—which many graduate students of color found justifiably presumptuous, colonialist, and offensive—would be optional rather than mandated.
I agreed with this position.
There were, however, three graduate students who were so disheartened by the privilege, unconscious racism, and often overt racism of many a white graduate student in the debates over the issue that they began bullying (yes, bullying) them out of the union. Thus, they would remove those students from volunteer lists for which they had signed up, including lists that had nothing to do with that issue. On that issue itself, they would arrange hidden meetings for which the “white feminists,” to borrow the pejorative, were not invited despite wanting to be part of the discussion. During an executive committee meeting one day when they were reporting their next steps based on those hidden meetings, a disinvited mis-trust-ee voiced their disagreement with their decision, and one of them replied, “If you were not at this meeting you have nothing to say about this issue.”
At that point I had had enough, and I replied, “This is a democratic organization; no one has the right to tell someone else they are not allowed to contribute.”
I became the next target. There were two hints to this effect. The first, hard to miss, was that I became dead to these three people, despite my attempts to speak with them to hammer things out. They were so cowardly that they even took to passing on messages through friends we had in common. The second hint was when an Audre Lorde quote was “delivered” to our paid union staff member to be inserted in our union’s academic planner—its publication was my job in the union at the time—as a comment on how I was a white woman who couldn’t handle anger because it threatened to expose my privilege.
I never disagreed with their position, but, yes, I became unable to sit silent when others—people who I agreed were clueless, racist asshats—were being mistreated and lied to. I thought these three people were bullies, and, like all bullies, ultimately cowards. It was much easier to make me a villain then admit how they were treating people.
Some more brief but illustrative examples from my actual graduate program, and, yes, picking from a mountain of similar examples was a chore:
One graduate seminar featured a book about the history of salsa music. In private conversation with a friend before the seminar began, I remarked that I couldn’t get “Livin’ La Vida Loca” out of my head as I was trying to finish the book before class began. Class began. The professor asked each of us to speak for a few minutes about the book. A Chicana woman on the other side of the table, when it’s her turn: “I would just like to begin by saying that, unlike some other people in this room, I know that Ricki Martin is not salsa music.” “You don’t say!” But imagine how pointless and counterproductive and politically-suspiciously-defensive it would be for me to retort that I too know the difference between Latin pop and salsa. Or, say, mambo, or batchata, or merengue, or cumbia…
Another semester featured a book about the African diaspora and music, tracing how music can simultaneously splinter and solidify those of African descent around the globe as it morphs from continent to continent. The African-American woman leading the discussion wants, instead, to talk about white appropriation of hip hop and the difference between underground, movement hip hop and the commercialized tripe marketed to white suburbanites. As an example of the former, she passes around Black Star, by Mos Def and Talib Kweli. When the CD arrives at my side, I pass it on to the next person. She notices and interjects, “[Me], do you have a problem?” “No, why?” “You didn’t even look at the CD.” This time I bite, “I own that CD.” I refrained, however, from adding, “And, btw? I have a massive crush on Mos Def; his laugh at the end of the first track makes me weak in the knees.”
Grad student meeting. The topic of discussion is funding and our professional plans for the approaching summer. Because it’s ethnic studies, the majority of students in our program are students of color and, as such, they receive fellowships that are specifically reserved by the university for students of color. There are only three whites without masters degrees in my incoming cohort and we thus compete for the generic university fellowship whose barriers to entry are 1. GRE score and 2. Reputation of undergrad institution. All three of us have top-notch GREs, but one is from an Ivy League school. He gets the full generic fellowship, which has less “coverage” (i.e. funding without having to be teaching) than the minority scholarships (which, pause, should exist and continue to exist, amen!). Me and the remaining white woman split the remaining generic fellowship. This means I teach 11 semesters and work 2 or 3 jobs every summer but am expected to finish on the same time-schedule as my peers. I grew up on welfare, my father and stepfather dropped out of high school, shit, I had never even flown before or owned a car and I find myself in a meeting where everyone else is talking about how much they cannot wait until the summer arrives so they can go to a particular archive, or work on a paper, or attend a conference. So I express how worried I am about my time to degree because I have to work to pay rent and bills.
Can you guess? “Sorry, you have white privilege, I don’t want to hear it.” Room nods. “You can only see class; you cannot see race.” (“Well, damn, it’s a good thing I’m not writing a diss on the Civil Rights Movement!”) Mind you, this was not about the “intersectionality” of “competing privileges.” This was not understanding. This was not listening. And this was not the righteous challenge of a person who “just didn’t get it.” This was cruelty, relish, rejection of empathy.
This was “Shut the Fuck Up.”
So, my point. I don’t think a politics of permanent deference for the well-behaved ally will ever work (on any issue: race, gender, sexuality, etc.) because I think every human being, every human being, deserves the right to be heard, the right to debated, the right to be wrong, and the right to contribute. The politics of “real allies will just LISTEN” sounds so noble in theory, but, in practice, it can be abusive and disrespectful to all parties. I have had white allies in my classes insist, even in their graded papers, that they can never disagree with any person of color ever on principle. That’s some condescending, dishonest bullshit. Who would welcome being treated like that? I’ve had a white ally insist that I remove the Civil Rights Movement from a history course on the 1960s because, as she said, “There’s no person of color in the room.” (Are undergrads of color white undergrads’ racial-hall-monitors? Not at all presumptuous!) I’ve been told countless times that I cannot teach race, should not teach race, cannot be trusted to teach race, cannot by definition teach race, and so on. I suppose it goes without saying that no such person who said this to me, much like the bullies in my union, were willing to look at my syllabi, visit my classes, or read my academic writing. It was presumptive. And it was hurtful. And, no, I would never be so clueless as to argue or flatter myself that my hurt is “more important” than, for fuck’s sake, racism, but I also will not abide someone trying to silence me for their own political catharsis or someone telling me that my life’s experience—which they have authorized to presume based on looking at me—is unwelcome to a given conversation. If you’re an asshole, I’ll call you one. I owe you that.
A related point. There is a circular self-protection to these arguments that should trouble an intellectually honest person. “If I say something and you openly disagree, the fact that you are openly disagreeing is proof that what I said was correct.” It sets up a situation where no one can disagree with you from a genuine and legitimate perspective—they are always, from jump, responding from within the blinders of privilege. That’s pretty fucking convenient. And dynamics like this, as I described above, make it ripe for the bullies in the room (there are always are some in any group) to take over the situation.
So, as I said at the outset, I find this piece brilliant save one example: the Lily Allen video. The video’s director, an old white guy, interrupts the black dancers to mansplain twerking. So, I think this video very consciously calls attention to the blindsides of “white feminists” declaring their liberation as they further disrespect and discount women of color. (In marked contrast to, say, the straight-forward racist appropriation of Miley Cyrus or the rape-apologist-no-wait-I'm-the-real-feminist-you-da-hottest-bitch-in-this-place "Blurred Lines.")
Now, does that merely out my “white privilege” or is it a legitimate counter-argument?