According to some white conservatives and moderate liberals, we've either reached or tipped beyond the point of there being a level playing field in "the war between the sexes" and with regard to racism in The United Rapes of Amerikkka.
First, bullshit. Second, let's assess what that might actually look like.
What "the level playing field" would look like is WOC cops, military officers, and FBI and CIA agents tapping phones, bugging homes, pulling over vehicles with privileged white men in them as often as they wish, to profile them for being white male supremacists, including sexual exploiters of women, girls, and boys, rapists, batterers, sexual harassers, procureres or pimps of women and girls, and genocidalists. And should any white man, through any level of investigation and collection of "information" be found to be in any way financing the pornography industry, the military industrial complex, corporate capitalism including mortgage banks and businesses, including racist/misogynist lawyers and their legal system, including patriarchal and racist religions and the practices that make them so, including not giving back stolen land, including destroying stolen land and poisoning land near or on Indian reservations, including causing women to "disappear" to be contolled in any way, including causing Native cultures to disappear in any way, including being part of institutions that contribute to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, including abiding by laws that allow for white men to rule in any way, any where, then white men would be under arrest and face felony charges, held without bail until such time a hearing could be arranged, or, on occasion, using brutal and sometimes lethal force to apprehend such men.
If women of color are approached to be harmed by any man, whether white or of color, why can't women lawfully take him out as an act of self-defense, and how would doing so make a playing field less level? Why does the rape or the next beating have to happen first?
I think one thing that would facilitate the end of patriarchy is to decriminalise any act of self-protection and self-defense--however lethal to men, according to anti-patriarchal understandings of what constitutes self-defense, not a white male supremacist State's understanding of it. The white male supremacist State is clearly going to oppose women taking systematic direct action against perpetrators of sexual violence against them. If this society want to pretend we have a level playing field, why are women not allowed to aggress against men at least as often as men aggress against women? Wouldn't that be a sign there's a level playing field? Wouldn't a level playing field imply that women of color control institutions in every sector of society, the way white men do now? Because if what we have NOW is "a level playing field" re: racist and sexist discrimination and violence, why would it cease to be level if WOC ruled?
When whites are considered dangerous and people of color clutch their children's hands when one of those people gets on an elevator, when white Christo-fascism, Christian fundamentalist terrorism, men's war against women, white's war against people of color, the U.S. government's war against the world, and white male god-worshipping white men are understood as devil-worshiping cult-leaders and cult-followers, will the playing field be level? Not quite.
When white men do not know what presiding over and contolling institutions feels like; when there are no white men serving on any boards of trustees; when the Academy has a White Atrocity Remembrance Month, and a Male Atrocity Remembrance Month, because those atrocities are all in the past; when people's identities are not named for them by a government; when male heterosexuality is, from time to time tolerated, but most of the time made illegal and shameful by queer-dominant society--because it (not the person) is a sin that'll send you STRAIGHT to hell; when white men are in no positions of power over anyone or anything; when every law supporting white male supremacy is wiped off the books; when angry white men are stigmatised as criminally insane or just plain crazy; when white men's stories of bravery and heroism are called out for what they are: savagery, massacre, plunder, murder; when anarchy is seen as peaceful, when gangs are defined only by how many white men are in them; when corporate capitalists and Western imperialists are seen as a the most dangerous bunch of out-of-control lunatics with no moral and no laws they live by; when white U.S. men are deemed illegal aliens who can and ought to be sent back to where they originally came from; when formerly rich white men are the ones walking miles every day to get unclean water; when formerly rich white areas are where all the nuclear and other toxic, cancer-causing waste is stored; when all women get away with doing to men what men get away with doing to women, with no social, legal, or punitive consequences; when lesbian women of color operate ALL the institutions that men now control, when today's predators become tomorrow's prey, THEN maybe, we might consider our playing field level.
Until then, the oppressed ought to officially and legally declare war against their terrorists: white Westerners, Christian whites, heterosexual men, and the rich who ARE THE GANG-BANGERS, PIMPS, AND TERRORISTS perpetrating their evil on the rest of us.
Because if you say the playing field is level NOW--or favors those of us who are marginalised and stigmatised in atrocious ways, with white men in charge of everything in and beyond the West, then surely it will still be level when women of color are in charge of everything, right?
