linkspam: the "for crying out loud white people" edition

[forthwritten]

Oh dear, oh dear. Not been a good couple of weeks, has it? Yesterday I was linked to someone on twitter who insists she's GREEN not WHITE, she's TRANSCENDED RACE and all the WoC pointing out that privilege doesn't work that way are RACIST BULLIES. I rolled my eyes so hard they almost fell out of my head.

Ani DiFranco
For fsck's sake Ani, I want to like you. I've seen you live. I had a poster of you up in my bedroom. And then you want to hold a wildly expensive retreat on a former slave plantation.

Autostraddle: Out of Rage: Ani’s Not-So-Righteous Retreat
For Harriet: Dear Ani DiFranco Supporters: You Cannot Reclaim an Oppression You Have Never Experienced
Art that's smarter than its artist
Make Them Apologize: Ani DiFranco Says Sorry For Plantation Retreat But Many White Fans Still Won’t
The Toast: A Note From Ani DiFranco

For reference: Righteous Retreat cancelled and from ani - personally, the phrase "i have been thinking and feeling very intensely" makes me laugh and laugh but whatfuckingever.

Other race, feminism & social justice stuff
Reni Eddo-Lodge: On the Fallout from Women's Hour
Flavia Dzodan: Intellectual gaslighting or “Feminism needs a new intellectual voice”
Reni Eddo-Lodge: A Year in Black Feminism
"Whiteness" in Europe & Tumblr’s US-centric SJ Discourse
Black People Don't Go To Galleries: the reproduction of taste and cultural value

To finish with, let me link to Sara Ahmed's Living the consequences:

It can be difficult to have experience of being a feminist killjoy in the world and then to become part of feminism and be perceived as killing feminist joy! And this is how many women of colour experience feminist spaces. When you talk about whiteness, or mention race or racism as structuring your own experience, you get in the way of an occupation. You are accused of hurting white women’s feelings, and of causing divisions because you talking about divisions.

[...]

And as feminists most of the time we do not inhabit feminist spaces, which is probably why encountering the same problems in feminist spaces that we encounter in the world at large is so exhausting. And depressing: the walls come up in the places we go to feel less depleted by walls. Perhaps part of the difficulty of pointing out how power operates within feminism to structure who has access to feminist spaces is that those points are received by those who have more power. And that is quite a reception: you end up challenging people’s self-perception of themselves as critical of power.

Comments

[liseuse]

Wait, what? Insisting they are green? What?

[jae]

Exactly my reaction. Explanation, please?

-J

[forthwritten]

Here's a sample.

[sara]

The piece about whiteness in Europe vs. the US seems to me, sadly, to miss that there are degrees of whiteness in the US as well. Whiteness is a very granular thing...and yes, I know people (hell, I am related to quite a few people) who have spent their whole lives in the U.S. and are quite sure that people of southern and eastern European origin aren't white. Not white-white, anyhow.

Or: if you don't think white people are just as bigoted here as they are anywhere else, you didn't hear my aunties when my cousin got pregnant out of wedlock by an Italian guy. Hoo boy.

I wouldn't call it racism, but it's certainly bigotry.

[forthwritten]

I absolutely agree it's important to understand there's a granularity in whiteness (witness the "no dogs, no blacks, no Irish" pubs in England).

At the moment I'm thinking about how it important it is for someone to visually pass as white-white or whether they're read as Other based on appearance. I don't really have any conclusions, but what that tumblr seems to be saying to me is that not only is there bigotry against the "wrong kind" of white, but different cultures are sensitised to different facial features etc and would read them as the "wrong kind" of white.