AJ's Headspace

so-treu:

i don’t know the person who left this comment, but it was in response to Jill Filipovic’s endorsement of Jaclyn Friedman’s white lady bullshit. and i think it sums up #askafeminist perfectly. like at this point? it’s 2012, why the fuck are y’all still *pulling* this shit??

When I was young I used to babysit my friend’s son. She instructed me to, when he acted up, put him in the corner until he said he was sorry and realized what he had done. He was um… high spirited, so he spent a bit of time in that corner, especially since he knew that all he had to do to get out was apologize. In fact, he made up a song about it, and after he thought he’d been in there long enough, he’d sing– “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, ha ha ha ha HAH ha!” and out he’d come. He did, always, say he was sorry… as for the realization of what he had done, though, I have my doubts ;)

Anyway, I don’t think this — “Getting this stuff perfect all the time isn’t possible, and my feeling is that Jill gets it right enough often enough” works anymore. More than that, I don’t think it should. This is not to mean that I think everyone should yell at Jill — this goes far beyond just her. But still…

One of Jill’s problems (or, at least, it’s a problem in this case) is that she likes to support her friends in their endeavors. But another one of her problems is that many of her friends are, if not outright bigots, simply clueless on anything to do with race beyond making mouth noises about “intersectionality” and the like. They, each and every one of them, know the words, know the terms, know even the concepts — but they simply refuse to think beyond that.

A couple of things could have happened here (and in just about any other “internet scandal” or “flame war” incident involving white feminists and women of color.)

1. Friedman could have come up with a “brilliant” idea of a hook for her writing — addressing the issues she had with the parents through a barely week old Black baby. An alternate universe Jaclyn Friedman might then have stopped and examined both the thought and the instinct behind that thought — where did it come from? What, traditionally, has been the relationship between white women and women of color, especially in the area of raising children, sexuality, and beyond? Is the instinct to write to this baby, to sexualize this Black little girl coming from a good grounding in what that might say to women of color?

Or is it coming from the centuries of layers and layers and layers of white supremacy and privilege that white people, including white women, are steeped in from the moment they themselves are born? Then alternate universe Jaclyn might have made a different choice. She might have recognized the pattern she was engaging with. As might have Jill and others, in loving and promoting the piece. That this knowledge was there for white women and men to grasp is evident by the fact that some, in fact, did just that and made those connections before any person of color said a thing.

Anyway, my point is– it’s been years worth of this stuff. Screw ups, mistakes, not thinking, not absorbing, blah blah blah. It’s time for many white feminists, both big names and small, to move out of the “101″ territory they appear to be stuck in. It’s time for some to go beyond “hey, cool thing! look!” and, if it has to do with people of color, with marginalized people of any sort, to stop and think. Stop and ask themselves, or heck even ask someone else, where the instinct to either produce something, or to like what has been produced by someone else, even a friend, is coming from. Is it a place, that deep, deep well, that you want germinating within you, unexamined, ready to pop out like a zit on a nose the night before the prom? Or is it maybe time to grow up, grow out, grow deeper and keep peering into that abyss, sternly and patiently, until it dries up–or, at least, until you recognize its life sounds? It is work, but it can be done — people have and are doing it.

As for me, when Black babies and children are brought into the mix and used in this fashion, sexualized and criminalized as they have been over the centuries, it touches something deep inside me and turns any squishy impulses toward understanding and forgiveness agate hard.

I speak only for myself, of course, but the refusal to think first, to examine first – to instead speak/write first and then go through the never ending (and always waiting) ritual of apology is meaningless to me. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, ha ha ha ha HAH ha” simply does not, and should not, work anymore.

- Nanette, commenting on feministe

(via karnythia)