In the all-too-real world, what possibly can be done to stop male supremacist power, het supremacist power, and white supremacist power from being exercised in the world against most humans on Earth and against the rest of Life on Earth?
Activism is happening across the globe and has been for hundreds of years and it is to those activists we must look for guidance and wisdom.
Indigenous activists have been resisting and combating the racist invasions and attempts at complete colonisation and genocide for as long as European men have been waging war against Indigenous people.
Women across region and race have been resisting and combatting male supremacist oppression and violence for as long as men have organised power into patriarchal force.
In the last decades, at least, non-het people have organised for rights, dignity, and survival in a world of rampant heterosexuality and virulent heterosexism.
I believe that all of us who are privileged by race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality must look to the activist work done by Indigenous women, and radical feminists across race and region, including radical feminist Lesbian activists. This blog has attempted to highlight some of the herstory and practice of resistance and challenge to oppressive power organised into identities and institutions made to seem completely natural and not at all organised.
Most people do not face one form of oppression only. Indigenous women and most non-Indigenous women of color, for example, even if not involved with daily struggles to combat white people's dominance directly and intimately, are unlikely to be free of it institutionally: economically, culturally, and politically. From white het male military invasion to impoverishment ensured by corporate globalisation to social organisation designed to shut out, shut up, or kill women of color, we live in a world where lethal and atrocious violence is commonplace and is assumed by dominants to be inevitable. The assumption is what we might call "wishful thinking" on the part of those with no heart or soul.
Lesbian womyn necessarily face misogyny and heterosexism aimed at them as "despised others".There is no support beyond Lesbian organisations and networks for Lesbian support, empowerment, and liberation. Even queer communities that I witness or know about are largely anti-Lesbian. Consider the implications of that for on-going Lesbian existence.
I live a life largely removed from the struggles of poor women of color and of lesbians who don't speak English. To know anything meaningfully and deeply, to the bone, I have to be available to and in alliance with people who are not necessarily in my offline life. Most struggles will not be bone-deep real to me because I simply don't know what is going on and am not on the receiving end of the force.
One is led to believe the role of media is to inform us of the important struggles, if not also offer wisdom. In the information era, there is virtually no wisdom coming out of the mouths and corporate boardrooms of rich white het men. And the information spewing forth is utterly and ubiquitously self-serving.
As I type this, Somali women refugees are fighting for survival for themselves and loved ones. The media will report in Western countries what all the good things are that Western countries are attempting to do to participate in relief efforts and how they'd succeed were it not for bad people of color getting the way. The media will make it seem like the (white) US and other (white) Western countries are "good" and that it is lucky for poor women of color globally that the US and other Western countries exist. Lost in the self-congratulatory media blitz is the fact that if the US got out of North America, and if whites all went back to their countries of origin, over time women of color would fare far better than they do now.
Charity efforts don't empower whole groups of people even while they may well save lives. And saving lives of people unjustly targeted for destruction is good to do. But what is not effectively communicated by media is how it will be women, lesbian and not, from the countries where whites dominate and invade, who are most capable of knowing what is wrong and how to correct it. What we see is women across Asia, Africa, and the Americas working to make life more humane and free. Not white men. White men work to destroy life. And white men succeed.
However it is possible in your area, please support the work of women of color globally who are challenging white, het, and male supremacist abuses of power, and other forces seeking destruction, whether interpersonally acted out or done so institutionally and through international systems of harm.
Please don't forget that whites, hets, and men are positioned to be dominant oppressors as whites, as het people, and as men. While each group argues precisely the opposite, they are not structurally positioned to be effective or wise leaders of liberation struggles to end white supremacy, het supremacy, and male supremacy.
At the very least, we can share knowledge, if not also wisdom, and organise our efforts with one another to achieve freedom from WHM supremacist force and the values and practices it calls great.
