When White's Not Right: A Substantive Challenge to the White Bloggers at Rad Fem Hub

image is from here

Revised and edited on the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th of July 2011. With apologies for the on-going changes. Dear women at Rad Fem Hub, I write to you with congratulations and concern. First, I am impressed to see so many women bloggers come together declaring yourselves unapologetically radical feminist, putting forth a woman-centered and woman-first politic and practice. My concern is with the significant white-centeredness and unacknowledged white supremacist entitlements and privileges put forth by the white members of the group. Not just that, but the radical political meaning of whiteness and the real harm it causes to women of color around the world, isn't discussed on your blog, at least in the places I visited. If such a critique of whiteness is present, I surely welcome you to alert me to where that exists. Given how many white women you have as part of the group, I was hoping that some of you would make identifying and calling out racist-misogyny a focus or at least a part of the political practice there so that other whites who come to the blog as a central source of information about radical feminism will have a good example of how this is done responsibly among whites. In my experience, whites rarely bring to one another's attention how our whiteness shows up in racist-misogynist ways in our perspectives, values, and practices. It is my genuine hope that this letter is received by you not at all as an attack or as an act of aggression, but as a statement of concern and challenge brought forth with the desire to see more accountability among whites and less burden on women of color to call out white racism. I'm very open to discussing this matter of white dominance, white exclusivity, white supremacy, and white- and euro-centrism that I see existing structurally at Rad Fem Hub. (You of course may disagree that some or any of that is present; I'm willing to publicly put forth why it is I've come to that conclusion and if you're unclear about anything that follows, I'll do my best to be clearer and appropriately responsive in ways that further explicate my statements.) I hope you will address writings by women--of color and white--that I didn't see linked to or referenced on your blog's resources pages. If they are new to you, please take to heart and mind what they say, so that your politics and practice might indeed be radical with regard to race. As it currently exists, what I see on your blog is liberal to conservative with regard to race. For this reason, I don't know any Black or Brown radical feminist women of color who would want to join such a white-dominated, white unconscious, and white-protected space.  Black, Brown, and white radical feminist writers I hold myself accountable to or regard as significant feminist theorists and practitioners have presented a very clear and cogent critique and analysis of white supremacy as it is manifest in white radical and feminist discourse and other behavior. Two of the women I got to know through their posts as bloggers, who have brought forth a critique of white privilege and entitlements showing up in white women's spaces or in white women's writings are brownfemipower, formerly of La Chola and currently the host of flipfloppingjoy, and dedgurl of The Vagina Conspiracy. Bev Jo, a long-time white radical Lesbian activist and blogger has also clearly articulated what's white supremacist and oppressively misogynistic about white racism in feminist spaces. I have read her challenges on some of your individual blogs; she has also courageously challenged some of you on anti-Lesbian and heterosexist practices. I appreciate the work of all of these women. Over the last thirty years, I have only encountered a small number of Western white radical feminists who have carefully examined what their own whiteness means. Perhaps the best known and most published of these women is Marilyn Frye, who has written explicitly on this subject. I hope you will consider including her excellent books of theoretical essays, The Politics of Reality and Willful Virgin, in which she discusses whiteness, in your reading resources list. While you do recommend one of Audre Lorde's books of poetry, Cables To Rage, I was saddened to not see listed her extremely important and classic radical lesbian feminist book of essays and speeches, Sister Outsider. Several of those writings are excellent learning resources for white women. I'll link to those at the end of this letter. I'm concerned that you also made no mention of the books by the extraordinarily prolific radical feminist bell hooks. She has written a great deal on the subject of white women's racism being an obstacle to women's liberation. Her first book on this subject was Ain't I A Woman? Her writings cover so many topics relevant to radical liberation struggles across gender, race, and class. I hope you get to read a lot more of what she has put forth for serious consideration. *Here is a link* to many of her books. I also recommend adding the work of Andrea Smith, an Indigenous radical feminist. A book that greatly impacted me was Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. In Deals With the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot, Pearl Cleage deals superbly with interpersonal politics and the importance of whites and men maintaining a posture of listening, not defensiveness, when challenged on racism or sexism by women of color.  Of all the many radical feminist books that are available in English for white women to learn about and be responsible with their white power and privileges, not one book, essay, or speech makes your recommended readings and resources lists. This deeply concerns me because without such perspectives and challenges white radical feminism stays stuck in a tradition of entrenched white-centrism which while not always intentionally harmful, is always effectively oppressive in misogynist-racist ways. I'm curious to know if you believe the white-only or white-majority lists you promote speak for all women and to all women's struggles in patriarchal societies? Is this form of white supremacy something you are wanting to perpetuate? Regardless of matters of intention or oversight, it is unacceptable and not at all radical in my view, if women of color matter to you as women.  For an astoundingly superb understanding of whiteness and white supremacy, I strongly recommend all of you who are white at Rad Fem Hub reading Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, by Marimba Ani, which has one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated analyses of euro- and white-centrism of any book written in English. I also recommend that you list the many books of the radical and feminist writer-activist Angela Davis, including the feminist classic, Women, Race, and Class. More of her books are listed *here*. Vandana Shiva is a radical feminist whose books, in my opinion, ought not be ignored or passed off as something other than radical feminist. Whether or not she identifies as a radical feminist, I truly believe radical feminism needs her contributions of experience, perspective, and values, in order to thrive and address the many problems killing women. *Here is a comprehensive list of her many books*. Do you see your own unacknowledged and unexamined collective whiteness—among those of you who are white—as a significant political obstacle to radical revolutionary action and community-building? How could it not be a seriously oppressive obstacle given that whiteness-in-action is always an obstacle to liberation for women of color? I entirely respect you setting up your blog to be woman-only. I wish there were more woman-only spaces on- and off-line and in an era when women's space is disrespected by so many people, I will defend your right to create woman-only spaces as you define them. I therefore welcome you to visit me here on my blog, to discuss how white feminists historically and presently practice conservative to liberal racist-misogyny. I welcome engaging with you on the matter of whiteness and how white-majority spaces regulate what can be expressed within them, just as majority-man spaces determine what women can say and do there. I believe that the very fact of being white-majority and white-centric means that many radical feminist women who are not white are not likely to feel at home at Rad Fem Hub. Does that concern you in terms of your own collective objectives for the kind of space the blog is and will become? In my experience, as long as any blog or social space is unaccountably or unconsciously white-dominated, white-led, white-majority, and white-centric, it cannot be effectively radical and revolutionary. One of the first radical feminists who drew my attention to this was a woman I know many of you admire, Andrea Dworkin: you can read her challenge to white, class-privileged women in the introduction to her 1974 book, Woman Hating. There she discusses the exemplary revolutionary feminism of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, noting that revolutionary feminism will not succeed if white and middle class women do not contend with and responsibly negotiate the power of their privileges. I'm wondering if you believe that the forms of unacknowledged whiteness that are replicated at Rad Fem Hub are any less oppressive, hurtful, and lethal to women of color than men's male supremacy? Marimba Ani and many other radical women detail how whiteness, including that practiced by white women, is very destructive. It's not that I think your blog is in any way lethal to anyone; it's that I think it participates in a history of unconscious and/or willful white behavior that is very harmful and exclusionary to women of color and racistly possessive of the term "radical feminism". It's those structures and practices, globally, that are indeed grossly oppressive and commonly lethal. I hope you will consider making your blog a place where those structures and practices are not present. It seems to me that one of the ways for those of us who are white to invisibilise and deny the racism so often embedded in white radical feminism is to only take up issues that appear to be free of it. For example, your blog may appear to some privileged folks to not be overtly racist and classist; I'd argue these forms of oppression are blatantly present in the views you present to the readers. Narrow, while importantly anti-patriarchal, views of prostitution, pornography, and some forms of heterosexist sexuality may be discussed at (or linked to from) Rad Fem Hub without recognising how the discussions themselves are imbued with and shaped by white and class privilege and entitlement. When we who are white and class-privileged deal also with immigration, economic class warfare, imperialism, colonialism, genocide, and globalisation, there is a greater opportunity to witness ourselves as the structural and institutional oppressors of women of color internationally. If and when prostitution, pornography, some trans politics, and PIV sex are spoken about, discussed, analysed, and challenged only on the grounds that they perpetuate patriarchal oppression of women-unraced, we lose both the opportunity to know how women (and trans people across gender) of color have different experiences of those oppressive systems and practices and how white women have their own experiences as well. What tends to happen a lot in white radical feminism is that the white experience gets turned into a "human experience" as if whiteness isn't particular and partial in its political location. We have all seen how many times white het men frame up their sexed experiences as "human experience, ungendered". Obviously the point isn't that whites and males aren't fully human; it's that whites and males are not all humans and ought not speak as if we are. Another way I've heard white women dismissing and discarding any radical feminist theory and analysis that is white-critical is to turn away from an intersectional understanding of oppression and to view intersectionality itself as entirely located within a seemingly unraced liberal academic post-modern politic. In my view, such a (de)valuation is blatantly and unabashedly white supremacist, anti-radical, and anti-feminist, if the intersectional work being turned away from belongs to women like Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Barbara Smith, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and bell hooks, to name just a few US radical feminists. I hope you support intersectional analysis at your blog. If you do not, could you please explain why you don't. If you do, can you please explain why no texts utilising this analysis appear in your recommended reading list? Why, for example, doesn't the excellent and tremendously important philosophical and sociological work of Patricia Hill Collins not make your list? I believe Black Feminist Thought and Black Sexual Politics ought to be on any radical feminist reading list. And it seems to me that any white, class-, and education-privileged English-speaking women who identify as radical feminist have no excuse if they are unfamiliar with the works of Lorde, Walker, hooks, Collins, and so many other US and international feminists who are both intersectional and radical, and not at all "post-modern" in the sense in which that term and tradition is critiqued by some radical activists. You also don't appear to acknowledge radical feminism's past and on-going debt to Indigenous feminists. The blog in its current form appears to firmly hold to a white- and euro-centric view that radical feminism rises primarily out of European Marxism. Do you see how erroneous and racist that is, given that most women's lives are not historically rooted in Western political philosophies or conditions? I recommend directing your readers and colleagues to read Sally Roesch Wagner's history of white appropriation of Indigenous feminist practice in her book, Sisters In Spirit, or to Andrea Smith's "Without Bureaucracy, Beyond Inclusion: Re-Centering Feminism". I'll close by recommending some of the writings of one of the women who is most responsible for shaping my understanding of deeply ethical, woman-loving radical feminism: Audre Lorde, "An Open Letter To Mary Daly", and "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism", and "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference", which may be viewed *here at Google Books*, in the astoundingly brilliant radical lesbian feminist text, Sister Outsider. From the latter essay: “…white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial “otherness” is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women there is wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools.” I look forward to your answers to these questions, and to hearing your own questions and concerns. I wish you well. In the struggle, Julian with dedgurl

Resources for Inquiry into the Politics of Being White, and the Limits of White Feminism

image of book cover is from here

For more on the above book, please see *here*.

image of book cover is from here

For more on the book above, please see *here*. 

image of book cover is from here

For more on the book above, please see *here*.

Feminism isn't whites-only--or unraced, but if you judge by some blogs that don't identify their race you might think "Radical Feminist" means all-white all the time. (The blogs that don't identify their race are almost always white because white folks, arrogantly and annoyingly, think of ourselves, quite mistakenly, as unraced). You, dear reader, might have been misled to believe that "radical feminist" means whites-only. Not so.

I've been making a rather well-evidenced case for years that radical feminism is comprised of the experiences, analysis, and justice and liberation struggles of women across the globe--and always has been, even before the term "radical feminism" came into existence in the English language. Yes, white radical feminism has its own history, but in my opinion it shouldn't be conflated with "radical feminism" generally.

I have welcomed discussion among white women about the meaning of being white. I have expected and unsurprisingly found it to be the case that most discussions of whiteness do not take place among white people. Similarly, most discussions of heterosexuality do not take place among heterosexuals, in my experience. Often enough the outsiders are the inquirers, and radical interrogators, and justice-seeking activists. The outsiders are made to feel and are forced to be outside the mainstream because of the unquestioned power, position, and privileges of the relative insiders.

White women and men of color in the United Rapes of Amerikkka do not hold powers of absolute authority and prestige to nearly the extent that white [het] men do. This tends to produce mixed alliances, with each group vying for some attention from and status given from WHM, while WHM give up nothing at all to maintain their own status. Both men of color and white women are known for one thing, among others: the systematic betrayal of women of color in justice-seeking efforts and liberation struggles.

Primarily through friendships, I have witnessed how often this occurs. It is painful to see it happening--especially so frequently; I know it is far more painful to live it than merely to observe it happening in the lives of people close to me. I have lived variations of this, but not this exactly. I have seen, for example, how white Jews jockey for position to achieve the same levels of status, recognition, and reduction of stigma as that which occurs more easily and "naturally" (meaning, structurally, without dominant cultural or political opposition) among white Christians in the US. I have seen white gay men do the same thing. In each case, Jewish white women across sexuality and lesbian white women across ethnicity, respectively, are often betrayed.

Left out of such observations, curiously, is how being Jewish and white, or gay and white, positions oneself to be a better or worse ally to women of color across sexuality. It is uniformly hoped among oppressed people I know that knowledge--emotional, intellectual, and visceral--of being marginalised or oppressed in at least one way (such as by gender, race, religion, ethnicity, economic class, sexuality, disability, age, language, or region) will make understanding the marginalisation and oppression of other people more possible. By "understanding", I mean experienced by proxy to the point of being actually felt in the hearts and minds of those with fewer experiences of being structurally below the top of social hierarchies.

I have little doubt that me being Jewish and gay, as well as white and male, has made identification with some of what women of color--Jewish or not, lesbian or not--endure regularly and routinely, as a matter of course living one's life in a racist-misogynist environment.

I don't know the full brunt of misogyny, but get to feel some of its sting when degraded for being "feminine"--as het men define and determine such arbitrary qualities of human existence. I don't know the full force of racism from whites, but I know how it feels to be seen as Other by white Christians and white Gentiles; to be deemed someone who is not "one of us", where "us" means "better than you and your people".

I have wanted my blog to be a place where intersectional realities come to life. Where stories about abuses and forms of endurance experienced by people across many social divides (divisions in status and stigma, power and privilege, position and location), are made existent and are not hidden or turned into something else, like trivial, an interference, or beside the point.

Part of this discussion involves analysing the meaning and experience of being a white woman. Most of my experiences of white women happened while growing up and throughout my early adulthood. In those years white women were "women" (unraced). My feminist mentor, a white lesbian, was the first person to highlight for me how being white can lead the white person to think they are unraced, or, rather, how it is allegedly only women of color (and men of color) who are raced or shaped profoundly by racism.

Proponents of Liberal Humanism interfere with deeply understanding and challenging how we are all shaped by racism by making anti-radical proclamations such as "racism goes both ways" and "we are all oppressed in a racist system". I disagree strongly with both contentions. I've written about why that is elsewhere on this blog. If interested, please do a search on the right side using the keywords "white supremacy", "whiteness", or "When White isn't Right" for more.

The first person I encountered who discussed whiteness in depth in published work, was Marilyn Frye. She, along with my mentor, also a white feminist and lesbian, gave me hope in the 1980s that being white didn't necessarily mean being in gross denial about the force and fury of white supremacy.

I will be discussing writings by white feminists in future posts. For now, I want to link you, the dear reader, to some resources for further reading. To understand, from reading materials, what whiteness is and does, I recommend reading the work of women of color. I'd say read the work of people of color but in my experience men of color do not sufficiently comprehend how whiteness shapes and insults the lives of women of color. So, do read the work of people of color--who are women.

Here are those links. The source website for these is *here* at feministreprise.org. With hugs thanks to them!!! (I only wish there were more essays and articles by women of color, for whites to read and learn from. There's plenty by Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and so many more writers, theorists, and activists.)

Feminism and Whiteness

Identity Politics and Race: Some Thoughts and Questions by Elliott batTzedek, from Rain and Thunder Issue #5, Winter Solstice 1999.

White Woman Feminist by Marilyn Frye, from Willful Virgin: essays in feminism (Crossing Press, 1992).

On Being White: Thinking Toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy by Marilyn Frye, from The Politics of Reality: essays in feminist theory (Crossing Press, 1983).

Anthropology by Chrystos, from the "Dyke Humor" issue of Lesbian Ethics (Vol 3 No 3 Summer 1989).

From Practice to Theory, or What is a White Woman Anyway? by Catharine A. MacKinnon. From the excellent anthology Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed. This article is a must-read, a direct challenge to those who would assert that there's no such thing as a woman.

Please see also these articles at other sites:
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
Detour-Spotting for White Anti-Racists by jona olsson (pdf)

I am interested in reading the response essay to MacKinnon's above, called "Whiteness and Women, in Practice and Theory: a Reply to Catharine MacKinnon" by Martha R. Mahoney. Just below is a link to the first page of it. I'm also curious to know if C. A. MacKinnon has responded to this:

http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/yjfem5&div=13&id=&page=

A friend of mine is trying to locate the whole of it. We'll see what we get.

In the mean time--sometimes far too mean time, here's to more community-building forms of discourse. As someone once remarked to me, "Radicals eat their young." This was meant as a caution about how vicious people can be when defending their own intellectual and political turf. It appear to also be the case that the young do their level best to ignore or dismiss their elders.

The masters of these and other, far more deadly, games are those with the most structural power in society. And in this society of mine, that isn't radicals. But I have noticed, among white radicals in particular, an odd kind of meanness that seems to not understand the meaning of care and compassion at all.

You Can't Inspire, Sustain, or Spell Revolution Without LOVE

photo of James Baldwin is from here

photo of Audre Lorde is from here

photo of Andrea Dworkin is from here

What follows is written with gratitude and love to James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987), Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992), Andrea Dworkin (September 26, 1946 – April 9, 2005), and Chrystos (born November 7, 1946), whose photo appears below.

And to She who speaks wisdom, whether I listen to Her or not.

One my deepest frustrations about white and male people--including myself--is our inability or unwillingness to ground our political actions in radical love. Radical politics must have a root spiritual base, because the struggles will always been more challenging than we can endure. And so we need forces beyond our individual selves to access when we are feeling or are beaten down.

photo of Malalai Joya is from here

photo of Yanar Mohammed is from here

photo of Vandana Shiva is from here

I've seen revolutionary activists who act with love. Malalai Joya and Yanar Mohammed are among them. So too is Vandana Shiva. I call upon the love found in the work of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Audrea Dworkin; I keep their spirits and their work in my heart. They transformed rage into a deep loving regard for humanity. It was still rageful, at times, but not without love as its base. I'm not saying they didn't hurt, exploit, or abuse anyone. I know better. But in their life-long radical political practice, they made sure to keep a profound respect and deep regard for humanity as a foundational revolutionary value.

Sometimes I wonder if part of the pact whites and men make in order to maintain their whiteness and manhood (or whatever I, as intergender, hold in myself) is that we give up our capacity to love, deeply, radically, and in ways that will support and sustain revolutionary action. Because what I see is that we whites, for example, too often use disagreement as a way to disconnect. And there's too little love to be found in the oppressive institutions we passively and actively support.

There will always be compelling reasons to part company. And we will always have reasons to turn away from one another, in hurt, in anger, while triggered, when too tired to speak what needs to be said to move forward towards healing. But we cannot afford to not move forward, more deeply into ourselves, in community, if we are to create a movement that can resist the forces of the white Master. When we are using  and holding tight to all the most anti-humane tools of the white Master, we can be sure he will continue to rule our lives and destroy the lives of those of us with fewer privileges and dominant social visibility.

In North and Central America, African American, Caribbean, Latina, Asian, and Indigenous women are systematically disappearing without regard or notice from whites and men. This gross human destruction is due, often enough, to men's and whites' violence and our refusal to join forces with Black and Brown women globally to intervene and stop the atrocities which appear in many forms.

Girls and women across ethnicity are incested, battered, raped, trafficked, and enslaved by men--of all races. Why do men, collectively, care so little about this? Is it really because men need some women to be tortured and terrorised, exploited and violated, in order to have a good life as men define it?

This is not to say that people of color have some God/dess-given ability to love. To survive being oppressed and abused, we often absorb society's messages about us, too often open- or close-hand delivered by our alleged loved ones--family members and people in our communities. This lack of love may be delivered with looks and tones of voice that lack compassion, care, regard, and respect. And internalised oppression and self-hatred are viciously successful means through which the oppressor maintains his rule.

But class and race privileged do make disconnection into a kind of sign of righteousness, I find. I see that in the white blogosphere, and offline also. If you're REALLY radical, you'll shut up, shut down, or shut out those who disagree with you. You'll cut people out of your life so swiftly because, well, you can afford to do so.

I know from some of the women of color in my life that this "deleting" of people is a luxury many women of color cannot afford. To cut people out is, often enough, to be entirely without support--however uneven that support is. And with no friends there is also no institutional support. In a society that is founded on your invisibility or that requires your slavery, imprisonment, destruction, or death, without human contact there isn't much else. There's no summer home with a room of one's own in which to write and gaze out at the sea. There's no police force that isn't terroristic. There's no court system that wants to see you and justice meet. Every white-man-made institution is designed to make women of color do the hardest work of all people for the benefit of the very few who do not ever have to work so hard, collectively. Exhaustion and exasperation doesn't make love easy.

So why is it that whites and men are so versed in uncompassionate action when we are disproportionately cared for and about by other people? When we have more social resources with which to take care of ourselves? When we make all kinds of pacts to stick together when challenged by women of color but not so much when we challenge each other?

Watching the news, seeing the revolutionary struggles that have been occurring with amazing bravery and compassion for one's citizens being oppressed, I am reminded of how much love is missing from the more privileged classes of people who might join forces with the most disenfranchised among us.

I'll pray to the Goddess that somehow, She will lead us to each other across difference, across disagreement, and across the divides that become chasms and mass graves most often for those of us who are neither white nor male.

photo of Chrystos is from here

Chrystos once said to me, after an embrace, "Make beautiful things."

Disrespect and disharmony aren't all that beautiful, are they? While honesty requires telling truths that can be unintentionally hurtful, it ought not require any willfully harmful action. Goddess help me understand the difference, with what I do and what I receive that others do.

Goddess be with me and help me through my triggered states of being. Goddess bless me, and those working for a better, more beautiful world. Goddess inform my choices about how to act towards my enemies, my friends, and all our relations.