"When will white feminists take collective responsibility for educating themselves? When will they understand the power at play that sings in their skins? We don’t exist in a vacuum and women of colour don’t exist to hold their hands and explain in painful detail why their behaviour continues to hurt us. Intersectional feminist politics are not for white women to co-opt as their own.
Amazing, amazing article on Autostraddle by Kesiena Bloom on we have to follow through on our claims of intersectionality. Not only do we need to educate ourselves on all issues of the multifaceted female experience, we have to stop shaming Black women for protecting themselves through violence, actually listen to them since they are the authorities on racism, and call each other out when we make offensive remarks. Some of my favorite quotes:
When I was younger and coming to terms with my sexuality I was convinced that I couldn’t be gay. I thought that lesbianism was a white woman’s game. I didn’t know of any Black lesbians; Audre had not yet become my Lorde. Intersectionality gives us the framework to understand the multiplicity of lived experience.
Feminism and LBT rights have been hijacked by the white woman’s experience, and that has led to so much blindness about who can fit into either of those groups (the answer is: all women). Exclusion is hypocrisy.
To be feminist is to be aware of our interconnected struggle as women, but to also see that not every struggle is our own.
I want to paste this on my forehead. I want to write this on the walls of my shitty college dorm room in Sharpie. We need to fundamentally respect the lives of women that are especially different from ours.
This is how whiteness operates; it is insidious and sly. It lets white women feel that they have the coolness and collectedness of reasoned, dispassionate logic on their side and thus they reign righteous over women of colour’s understandable anger and frustrations.
THIS. THISTHISTHISTHISTHIS. Speaking from experience, this “dispassionate logic” is like a disease where you’re overwhelmingly convinced you’re making a well-informed statement based on a rational evaluation of all sides of the discussion, only you’re making that judgment based on your whiteness and how the world has valued your opinion because of that whiteness, plus the disease is your fault and you need to fucking fix that pronto.
Anyway, you should just read the article.
