On Attraction, Sexual Interest, and White Het Male Supremacy

the image above is from here

I chose the chart above to open this post not because it is one that reflects my beliefs, but because I think it does represent some dominant views about how relationships form and progress.

As I noted at the beginning of my last post, I recently submitted two comments to a white transgender feminist's blog. She didn't publish them but did explain that she wouldn't be posting them.

I'd like for the topics to be addressed to allow any of my readers to comment here on these issues. I think each issue is relevant to building respectful, radical, revolutionary community. So I've posted links to her blog's two posts (with my revised comments) here and in my last post, also published today at A.R.P. I've revised my comment quite a bit below to elaborate on and clarify points I'm trying to make.

Thank you to A Radical TransFeminist for promoting and supporting these discussions.

The discussion there, as I understand it, was about challenging our internalised and externalised supremacist attitudes and practices, including the practice of focusing our attention on those atop various hierarchies and leaving out of our vision of attractiveness those lower on various political-social hierarchies.

Related discussions and struggles elsewhere have focused on getting masculinist, pornographic, and predatory values, aesthetics, and practices out of our sexual, romantic, social, and economic lives. This one divided up the white queer community I was part of decades ago. (Masculinism and pornography won out, unfortunately. But with the awareness of the disproportionate number of queer people who are survivors of sexual abuse, particularly in childhood, at least predatory practice has been consistently challenged.) Yet another set of concerns and challenges relates to how lightness of skin, straightness and lightness of hair, and eye shape and color become a measure of attractiveness and value within and without communities of color, including Jewish communities.

Another dimension of this struggle is the one towards decolonial love, something I've heard only a very few white people talk about as an ethical value and political-personal necessity. Novelist Junot Diaz addresses this and intersectionally related matters *here* in a video of a speech he gave last year. This speech generated a very good and deep discussion among many activists and artists I know, which is taking place in email. And, I'll include a link to a critique of his work *here* at the blog QueerBlackFeminist.

On Attraction

http://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/significant-othering-attraction-down-the-privilege-gradient/

Here is a very revised version of my comment.

I’d written something a while back that I’d like to post a link to here as response-piece to what you’ve written above and in your second post on the subject.

Compulsory Sexuality and Asexual Existence

To summarise my reason for linking to it, I experience the perspective above as pro-compulsory sexuality and as pro-sexual, in the liberal sense. I question whether the challenge before many of us, rather than expanding who we find attractive sexually or romantically, is challenging why we find anyone “attractive” in the dominant sense. An argument I read somewhere stated that we ought to see the beauty in everyone. But that sentiment, while admirable on some level, unfortunately puts aside the issue of what ‘beauty’ is in imperialist, racist, colonialist, capitalist, patriarchal societies. I hear a clear demand that we challenge the ways we internalise oppression, writing off classes of people as unattractive.

That makes me uncomfortable. But why?

I get how white singer John Mayer stating that his genital is white supremacist is racist and misogynistic in all kinds of ways. I’m arguing that it wouldn’t be my counsel or charge to him, or wish for him, to find Black or Brown people attractive and to act on that; he’s clearly so bigoted that such interaction flowing from his white and male entitlements to get what he wants would quite likely trigger and oppress anyone of color; it would be my counsel that he interrogate what an attraction to whiteness means and is and see where that leads him.

I live in a dominant culture that requires us to manifest (well, sell and purchase) ‘beauty’ in some form. That requirement comes with the belief and attitude that being not-beautiful is to also be worthless, except perhaps as labor. Implicit in a charge for us to expand the populations of classes of people we find attractive, I see a somewhat anti-asexual charge to be attracted to people in the first place.

I want to support the effort to encourage meaningful, caring, honest, intimate, counter-hegemonic, decolonial mutual relationships among people as a way to build sustainable, healthy, revolutionary community; I just take issue with that being identified as primarily a matter of attraction and sexual interest. I see our struggle as this: to form friendships first–whatever else follows. Friendship, as many feminists and womanists have written over the decades, normally requires and presupposes a kind of equality of interest and needs. Romantic and sexual relating, historically and traditionally, requires and presupposes inequality. This is why sexual relationships are compulsory and institutionalised and friendships, however ubiquitous, are not.

There’s an appeal here in my remarks for people who occupy oppressive positions structurally to stop engaging in the practices that traditionally oppress, and nurture those that traditionally do not, in part because doing something with history and tradition behind it is, I’d say, going to be less exhausting than doing otherwise. Not that ease is a primary value. There's little about challenging and transforming the status quo that is easy. But an argument I hear a lot is how self-condemning it can be for lesbian, gay, het, and queer people to continually interrogate their/our lack of attraction to women or men or transgender people. The process of coming out as lesbian or gay, as I understand it personally and from personal friendships with lesbian women, involves unlearning heteronormative and patriarhcal ways of being, ways of feeling, and ways of acting. It may also lead to challenging ageist, racist, and classist assumptions, among others.

Speaking as a profeminist gay male, radically rejecting heterosexuality and heterosexism means rejecting the ways het men have arranged for people to meet and get to know each other. What het male culture appears to prize is a kind of attractiveness that is directly related to appearance, not substance. Looks are what matter first and often enough, most. Sexual desirability, determined and defined by het men, is what the human objects of het men's attention are supposed to achieve. To reject het men's standards for being "sexy" and "attractive" is to be deemed ugly and worthless--except as labor--by them.

I see the bar and club scenes as doomed to replicate heterosexist and heteronormative standards of appealing to one another as sexy things, as sex objects, as people who must do a whole lot to ourselves before we leave home to go to the bar or club.

So one question is this: in what social spaces are we supposed to challenge ourselves to be attracted to people lower on various social-political hierarchies? In the workplace? In the home? On the street? All of those places are sites of misogynist and racist oppression, and of ageism, of ableism, of classism.

It has been mentioned that if one’s social circle is white, that’s what needs to be challenged. A proposed antidote to someone's all-white circle of potential dates or mates is to bring white folks into potentially romantic or sexual contact with people of color. This, to me, privileges a value of white people expanding our dating pool, but in no way identifies what the benefit would be to people of color, should that pool-expansion occur. So I begin with friendship as a foundation for revolutionary community and affection, not with attraction and sexual behavior as that base. In the realm of friendship, physical and sexual attractiveness isn't a primary value; shared intellectual pursuits, common interests, similar senses of humor, and how people might be helpful to one another are at least as important.

White people, or men, learning to do 'attraction behavior' less oppressively isn't something I hear oppressed people wanting tried out on them. As a survivor of sexual abuse, as an asexual person, as a gay person, and as a Jew in a Christian-dominated country, I certainly don’t want more people smiling at me or approaching me because of ‘attraction’. I’d welcome someone getting to know me in contexts where it is appropriate for us to know each other, due to progressive economic, social, or political work, not in contexts where ‘getting to know someone’ is the sole or primary objective. Not where the reason for people wanting to seek out each other's company is to raise the possibility of obtaining sexual contact or fostering romantic feelings.

I don't want to negotiate social spaces where I'm increasingly put in the position to say no or yes to the advances of het-identified men who are challenging themselves to be open to dating or bedding gay men. Not discussed thus far is the issue of who along the hierarchies ought to be entitled to approach whom? I'd see it as radical if the challenge wasn't for oppressors to find those we oppress more suitable for dating and mating, but rather for us to altogether stop approaching (for the purposes of getting a date or "a fuck") those we oppress.

As I think Catharine A. MacKinnon states in one of her books of essays, consent isn’t all that meaningful a lived concept for women if one only ever is in the position of saying no or yes to the advances of men. One would have to live in a world where such advances are neither compulsory nor anticipated to know what one wants from and with men. I can extrapolate from that to other hierarchies.

I feel that very personally and very strongly, as someone who is gay and a survivor of child sexual abuse and adult sexual exploitation, who unhealthily while normally feels compelled to meet the sexual, emotional, and affectional needs of someone who shows interest in me, especially when they are men. As I contemplate finding someone attractive, and contemplating being found attractive, such imaginings are problematically bound up with racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, misogynist, ableist, ageist, heterosexist, transphobic 'beauty' standards and oppressive interpersonal habits and social customs. Challenging the standards without also challenging and interrupting the oppressive dynamics and habits surrounding them is, for me, a set-up for more oppressive behavior to occur, not less.

To even imagine someone being ‘interested’ in me–when they don’t know me–means that I am led to try and change myself in self-oppressive, self-objectifying, and dehumanising ways. Opting out of the social attraction circuit, like opting out of the social sexual-behavior circuit, can be personally and interpersonally liberatory. I don’t see that course of action identified as valuable and viable in the discussion thus far.

I'm not comfortable with anyone white addressing an audience that isn't only white with a set of demands for what we should do that is deliberately designed to inflict on people of color our own social learning curve. I’ll add that I experience the term “demand” here, in this context, as white or race-superior. Why? Because making demands on readers is something I only experience whites and men feeling entitled to do--and doing regularly. In other words, it demonstrates having enough racial (or, in my own case, also sexual) social power to even proceed in doing it. I believe those of us in dominant structural positions, by race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and so forth, ought not demand something from our political peers that will likely violate and trigger those we oppress.

Also on the matter of race, was the race awareness training session for bi community activists in the UK either white-led, white-organised, or majority-white in attendance? If any of those, I’d then proceed to articulate a critique of such a process for arriving at what terms are most racially respectful and appropriate. Recognising that there are some significant differences between U.S. and UK dominant society that I might not be sensitive-enough to, I’ll add that I prefer the term 'racially oppressed', to 'minority-ethnic' when discussing who is subordinated, marginalised, and imperiled by race. For me, the latter term problematically reinforces whiteness as normal-majority and race-neutral. It also pretends that whites aren’t a global minority. It also conflates race with ethnicity.

While this comment contains challenges, I want that to be held in the context of me strongly encouraging you to keep up the great work. I’m thoroughly enjoying reading your deeply thoughtful pro-radical posts. I find you, a white blogger, to be deeply and sincerely committed to complex, intersectional, counter-hegemonic practice and that’s as rare in my experience as finding a man who does the same.

June Jordan: speaking about the 99% and the 1% in 1995 as if it was today

portrait of June Jordan is from here

[T]he quest for white male supremacy jeopardizes most of America. And, to a horrifying extent, our common enemies need to do little more than stand aside and watch the rest of us sink into mistaken animosities. [...]

Since 1964, race has been redefined by millions and millions of new arrivals who have begged or borrowed their way onto these shores. Black and white formulations have begun to yield, as they must, to demographic facts of a multiplicity of colors, languages, and legacies, brightening our continental landscape, and our horizons. Correspondingly, our definitions of racist convictions and behavior must be re-examined--and expanded as well: Beyond white hatred for people of African descent, the push for white supremacy punishes, and hopes to extirpate, every people that is not "white" and, also, "Christian." Of course, this necessary redefinition identifies most human beings as members of a hatefully composed target population.

That's the down-side. The good news is that we, the undesirable, vastly outnumber what is, in fact, a national and international minority of dangerous, hyperactive true believers.

Since 1964, issues specific to female life have emerged from traditional invisibility and sorry realms of isolated individual pain. Difficult questions about the meaning and the purpose of female identity have surfaced from fearsome areas of our collective consciousness. And a unifying, global awareness may yet ignite into an overdue, a successful, majority crusade for our fully realized, and liberated, human being.

Sexuality has become an openly political battleground. And class considerations increasingly compel our acknowledgement and response, even while Marxist forms of analysis retain very little of their practical and/or theoretical credibility.

As a Black woman living with change and beset by continuing situations of peril, I am the same and I am different, now. For me, winning has become the point. I have known and I have seen too many people dead, absolutely dead and gone, to settle for resistance or struggle: I am working to win.

Thirty-one years ago death did not seem or feel like anything relevant or decisive. But now whenever somebody dies in spirit or in flesh, I have learned to count that as an inconsolable irreplaceable loss. I am fighting to enlighten and protect my life by joining forces with my students, my comrades, and my colleagues for the enlightenment and rescue of all sociable and tender qualities of human life everywhere.

Hatred kills people. Cruelty kills people. Greed kills people. Egomania kills people. Stupidity kills people and trees and water supplies and systems of public education.

But I have come to understand that I am not surrounded by enemies. I teach and I write and I walk and I talk among people who want what I want: Good health, safety, a fair chance at happiness, and a growing environment of friends. I am clear about this: Most folks are really okay, not demonic or heartless or closed. But then it's the powerful few--forever on camera/on microphone--the powerful few who forever keep us inaudible and unknown to each other, or else all the while they disseminate scary information.

[...] [T]here is a hideous, neo-Nazi world view loose on the land. And adherents to that hatred aim to subjugate, or exterminate, everything and everybody who is not Christian and white and male and heterosexual.     -- June Jordan, in the new introduction of her book of essays, Civil Wars, April 27, 1995

Thoughts as the Occupation of U.S. Corporate Public Spaces by Liberal, Progressive, and Radical Protestors continues

What is above is from Democracy Now!

I have also been watching the predictably stupid the self-serving commentary by White Conservatives with a microphone in Corporate Media. And how those bought and sold-out spokespeople serve the 1% well, without sincere, humane regard for anyone less privileged than they are. CNN, not too surprisingly, is rivaling FOX in its propagandistic pro-patriarchal patter. I hope you keep them honest, Anderson Cooper.

I've heard some very thoughtful, concerned, and compassionate remarks from demonstrators and protesters around Wall Street and across the United Rapes of Amerikkka, mostly from people WHM supremacist Corporate Media will not allow to the microphone.

When hard-working while unpaid people speak of the need for "jobs" I hope that there is activist reflection on what those jobs ought to serve to do: should they come into existence, will they support Western Corporate Capitalist racist-misogynist-heterosexist values and objectives?

I hope, against great evidence, that city police forces break with their bosses and start organising with protestors to hold dirty white-collar criminals accountable for their war crimes and economic crimes against the 99%.

I hope cooperative housing, barter economies, and other pro-community anti-corporate work and jobs are vocally identified and supported. While we all struggle to survive in various ways, we don't need to prioritise life-support to a system of gross destruction colloquially known as "Western Civilisation". As one pro-Indigenist slogan reads: "U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA!"

I hope that once and for all, U.S. terrorism against Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous people is named as such, and that Western Corporate Media is held to account for perpetuating an erroneous idea that self-determination, anti-colonial activism, anti-imperialist organising, and ideosyncratic aggression by people who aren't white constitutes "terrorism". It isn't nearly as terrifying as the well-funded, systematic, and on-going aggression perpetrated by rich whites and men, and their thugs and cronies, all over the world.

I hope it is kept in mind and protest action that "class warfare" is what is being waged daily by the richest 1% against the 99%, nationally and internationally. And that getting more power in a murderous, ecocidal system, while often necessary, isn't a humane or sustainable project.

And I hope that out of these protests a new radical anti-heterosexism perspective is fostered and nurtured which doesn't pretend "gender" is  just difference without dominance--by men against women and everyone male not deemed appropriately masculinist in behavior.

And I hope that "peace" is understood to be more than an absence of Empire-reinforcing warfare, gross militarism fused to a sociopathic form of patriotism, although surely it is at least that. And I hope that it surfaces among the white- and male-dominated groups that it is and will continue to be women of color leading us all to a better present and future. Those of us who are either white or male can work to promote and support the activism of Asian, Indigenous, Black, and Brown feminists across the globe. And to assist in the non-imperialistic flourishing of their values and practices.

What I hope doesn't get lost is the perspectives and prescriptions from the most marginalised and oppressed people in the U.S. and in places that U.S. economic domestic and foreign policy negatively impacts. I hope microphones are permanently installed in places that have been completely silenced by CRAP-loaded Corporate Media, including by Indigenous activists addressing how corporate capitalism, white supremacy, and euro-patterned patriarchal practices combine forces to continue a hundreds-years-old genocide. And by women across class and race who speak to the on-going millennia-old gynocide. I expect, however, that those two groups specifically will be marginalised in progressive white- and male-dominated activist venues. I'd love to be wrong about that.

I close, for now, with this, from Democracy Now!:

Individual vs. Collective Opportunity: which do we have in the US? (Answer: neither, really)

image of hurricane Katrina is from here

President Obama responded, in my mind cynically, to a criticism by Professor Cornel West and performer Tavis Smiley (see *here* for more). They charge, quite accurately, that he has ignored and been entirely unconcerned and uncaring, in policy and practice, to the plight of the poor in the US, and in particular to the struggles of African American males.

In the US currently, the reported (as opposed to actual) poverty rate among whites is much less than among African Americans. This is a consequence primarily of white supremacy fused to corporate capitalism. No other possibility exists in opportunity or in present life, than Black people in the US remaining significantly and substantively poorer than whites, collectively. Never mind Oprah Winfrey or Barack Obama: it is not simply “opportunity” that got them where they worked very hard to be. It is also a white dominated society's wish to appease anti-racism critics who use individual successes as “proof” that the system can work for any one of us. It most certainly cannot.

The collective and systemic truth of the truly perilous and dire situation for African Americans, among other groups of color, is one that President Obama, for all his intelligence, seems unable to comprehend or at least publicly declare: his “solution” is to attempt to increase opportunities for individuals, never for the collective. (And however inadequate those proposals are [link to his speech] they will not be supported by Conservative elected politicians—every one of 'em voted into office with the great help of corrupt media and corrupt wealth, neither of which is available to poor US Americans as a group.

Unaddressed by any of them is what Black, Brown, and Indigenous women (especially lesbians) in the US face: the devastating combination of capitalism's cruelties heaped onto the other cruelties of white, male, and het supremacy. To hear most prominent Black men in the US speak, you'd think Black (het) men always have it worse than Black (het) women. But to believe that you'd have to pretend that patriarchy, male supremacy, misogyny, and heterosexism don't exist at all, both within Black communities and in the larger white-dominated society. Every manifestation of male power over and against women impacts the lives of Black women—not just white men's misogyny, for example.

But returning to the concerns of West and Smiley, how is it that a very smart US president—of any color—could not get it that the US is well-organised to ensure that some groups of people are held down and spit on while the same US leaders promote the power and interests of a few—and not a few “individuals” either? How is it that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama don't get it that corporate capitalism exists, deregulated or not, to crush the life out of the poor while exploiting their labor and other human resources?

Far more cynical and cruel than President Obama are the white, male, and het supremacist activists who comprise the leadership of the ultra-ConservativeTea Party movement, an extremist activist political organisation looking out only for the interests and power-protection of the wealthiest, whitest, and most heterosexistly male members of society? Among them is the current early leader in the bid for president, governor of Texas, (P)Rick Perry.

The Tea Party, including Perry, advocates a particular vision of the US in which Social Security and Medicare, as federal programs, no longer exist as humane mechanisms to support the lives of the most dispossessed (read: structurally, systematically oppressed) members of society. Dispossessed by intention and design, not effect and bad luck. Nothing is accidental about who is poor in this country, if we look at groups of people, not individuals only.

What the Tea Party, GWBush and Co., Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all have in common is the downright evil practice of extolling the alleged virtues of a “free” market economy tied to rampant militarism which imprisons most US Americans in debt and despair while horrifically destroying people abroad: particularly the people of Central Asia who happen to live in a region that has oil resources under what remains of its topsoil. The policies of these and other activist leaders are genocide, gynocide, and ecocide wrapped up in liberal platitudes.

Chief among the platitudes is this idea that our economic and social-political systems exist to offer meaningful opportunity to all US citizens. Contemporary forms of capitalism allowed to exist by the wealthy offer nothing of the kind; neither do contemporary forms of white, male, and het supremacy. All these well-organised and well-protected systems of power ensure that varied forms of gross violence and exploitation will be visited upon people who are not wealthy, white, male, or het.

Consider images brought to you by a weather reporter of a hurricane forming in the Atlantic Ocean as it makes its way toward the Caribbean, Gulf coast, and East Coast of the US. Consider how the weather is described as “a system”, sometimes a ferocious one merciless in its power to destroy what humans have constructed.

Consider how such a system, if well-organised, infused with enough energy, structured to swirl at great enough speeds with enough force, will do great harm. How much harm we cannot predict, as evidenced when Hurricane Irene swept up the Mid-Atlantic coast to the Northeast, cutting inland into New England. Consider how Hurricane Katrina, several years ago, in collaboration with ridiculous urban planning and construction along the Gulf coast, in collaboration with a woefully negligent US government, resulted in horror and pain that was thought to be impossible in the US, even in largely Black areas of the country.

The weather system called “a hurricane” in the US, has a structure—the visible structure is part of what constitutes such a system from other weather phenomena.

Corporate capitalism has a structure and it is hierarchical with a concentration of wealth among an elite few and a base of poverty shared among the many. Using the “right” to ownership of property as a means of control with State power backing it, the wealthy can and do exact great force against the poor and working people, exploiting them while telling them they have “opportunity” to also become as ruthless as they are.

In the US, this economic system with its earlier incarnations has resulted in an on-going genocide and has required on-going forms of slavery to be able to exist at all. Part of its structure is raced with white supremacy as one ruling ideology-in-practice. Male supremacy is another: rape and social subordination are two methods of its production: mass terrorism and submission are its objectives. Between the two is the spirit- and sex-shaming ideology-in-practice known as heterosexism. Braided, enforced, and enacted together, they strangle the power, will, and hope out of many of us, leaving us damaged, degraded, and depressed—if not dead. But—always more than the ruling oppressive forces would like—some of us keep fighting those virulently inhumane systems of domination and destruction with a vision of a world of unmilitarised peace, cooperative living, and mutual respect.

What is often missing in humane resistance movements is sustained, collective, group-based radical activism. Currently, struggles to make the US more humane are more like an occasional gust of wind than a well-formed lasting hurricane.

Using the ocean as a metaphor, single waves of activism can perhaps bring attention to horrible conditions and may shift the shape of a beach-front temporarily. But I look forward to the power of the oppressed forming into great unrelenting waves of revolutionary social, economic, and political transformation until the CRAP-infested shore is entirely washed away, allowing Indigenist ways of living to thrive again on this Earth.

What are the lessons of "9/11"?

image is from here

What, exactly, are we supposed to never forget and what are we supposed to never surrender?

The meaning of significant political acts of terrorism are told to us, formed for us, by media that is controlled by white and male supremacist corporate conglomerates owned by a few white het men in the West, each of whom has some very significant "interests" in how stories get told and who gets implicated as "dangerous". Needless to say, white het men must not ever be implicated as "dangerous", while virtually all other groups of people can be, in media--and every other group has been defined by WHM as diseased, dangerous, invasive, threatening, insane, untrustworthy, deceitful, deceptive, and violent.

Below is one link to what Democracy Now! has to say, which, while progressive, usually steers far clear of naming "white supremacy" and "male supremacy" and "capitalism" as the key forces which created both the conditions that made "9/11" possible, but also the spins of it made into solid, largely unquestioned stories distributed in off-line and on-line media. The Twin Towers, let's not forget, is where gross violence against the world was perpetrated, but was called "commerce" instead. The victims of commerce, who died on every other day than "9/11/2001" and also on that day, are not remembered, named, or honored as heroes--ever.

http://hw.libsyn.com/p/c/6/a/c6aadaf3ada64df8/9_11_11_Radio_Show_part_2.mp3?sid=f081207ff8a29b99312a856ae53e7d46&l_sid=18778&l_eid=&l_mid=2714355

Here are some lessons from my point of view:

1. Corporate capitalism, formed out of and steeped and marinated in male and white supremacy, cannot bring peace to anything. It only brings terrorism to the poor, to the Earth and its non-human beings, and to women across race, sexuality, and ethnicity, and to men who are not white or het.

2. The West, including especially the US, is a terrorist state, a terrorist organisation on a grand, horrific scale, and any claims it makes--ad nauseam--to "goodness" and "greatness" are soaked in the blood of those it destroys to maintain itself.

3. The US is a pro-genocidal, racist, rapist white male supremacist State. Any attacks against it will result in massive military force, rapist force, racist force, deadly force, grossly and inexcusably exceeding the force used in any attack against it.

4. The supremacist structures of the US and other Western countries remain something their media won't discuss. How it is that men continually maintain (and abusively use) tools of power such as military warfare, terrorism against classes of people (such as by men across race,. class, and sexuality against women; such as by whites across gender against people of color; such as by the rich against everyone not-rich; such as by the politically powerful against the Earth)? The means and methods have been documented, experienced, reported on, catalogued, and survived (by some). Yet we are made to re-conceive the horrors of the inner and outer workings of these systems of terror as if they are perpetually "not understandable" or "incomprehensible". They are fully understandable and comprehensible to the perpetrators. They are deeply understood by the victims of them.

5. The US keeps its deadly power alive by scapegoating "foreign" groups as THE Terrorists of the World. Whether it be the Japanese and Germans, Communists, the Vietnamese, Central Americans, Mexicans, women, gay men, the poor on welfare, or Muslims, we can note how the enemy is definitionally, defiantly, and absolutely never "us" if "us" includes white het men from the US.

Liberalism vs. Radicalism: The Invisibilisation of Male Supremacist Power in Liberal Politics, Terminology, and Self-Concepts

image is from here

In this post I will identify distinguishing features of liberal vs. radical points of view on various social justice topics.

First up: “Prostitution”, “Sex Work”, and related terms, experiences, and systems

When I hear liberals discuss prostitution, what I hear most loudly and frequently is a call to advocate for acceptance of prostitutes' rights to sell their bodies for sex to men—or to anyone else. The focus is on the individual in society, not on society's impositions against the individual and the collective. The assumption is that systems of harm and exploitation are a given and that while they are in place, we ought to accept as liberating or a form of freedom the ability of some to sell their bodies for sex to consumers of such “sex”. “Sex” itself isn't especially analysed. Whether men ought to have the right to buy human beings for anything at all—including for sex—is not usually challenged as a “right” that's wrong.

Often enough the gender of the procurers and pimps is erased, rendering prostitution something “some people” do with “other people”. Also not questioned is why it is that “some people” are pimps and procurers, and others are prostitutes and sex workers. I see where the two experiences overlap but not much challenge to why they exist and whose interests and whose power these practices exist to support.

As a radical, my views don't focus on what prostitutes ought to have the freedom to do—other than the freedom to be free from men who sexually abuse other human beings, especially girls and women. I instead focus my attention, analysis, and activism (when opportunities arise for activism to occur) on what anyone ought to have the freedom to not experience: sexual and economic exploitation; sexual abuse including incest, molestation, and rape; harmful impositions of male, white, and Western supremacist values and practices; and the grossest (most invasive and damaging) dimensions of capitalism on classes of human beings.

Starting with the latter, poverty, desperation, and homelessness—each impacted quite significantly by heterosexism, misogyny, and Western white supremacy—are requisite condition for most people engaging in prostitution globally. When I think about and have experienced aspects of the world of sexual exploitation organised into a system of atrocity, I consider whether whole groups of people are more negatively impacted than others, and which groups lead the charge for adoption of methods of making prostitution safer rather than abolishing it as a form of abduction and slavery. If I only listen to the more privileged people (whether class privileged, Western, white, or men) in the system of harm, I might conclude that modifying the system would be a humane course of action. But if I consider how such modifications impact on the less privileged classes and groups of people (such as poor Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous girls and women globally, living inside and outside North America and Europe), such reforms look like cruel dismissals of their experience and suffering.

In any radical form of activism, I believe those who are systematically made to suffer most, to be raped most, to die most, ought to be central in any course of activist action. Given all this, liberal views on prostitution don't hold much water for me, although I don't oppose actions designed to make conditions for anyone, inside or outside systems of sexual exploitation, safer rather than less safe.

A radical feminist position on prostitution interrogates most every aspect of what it means to live in a world where prostitution exists. The most glaring omission in the whiter side of the interrogation has to do with prostitution's relationship to white and Western supremacy, in my experience. But white radical feminists, specifically, bring to the challenge questions about what it means to be human, who decides what “sex” is, and which groups or classes of people are in charge of any system of exploitation that, in my experience, liberals usually ignore and see as irrelevant.

The term “sex work” makes the whole of the system of atrocity and slavery non-existent or distinct as a social-political phenomenon, as if “sex work” can exist independently of sexual slavery. (In the world I see and live in, it cannot and does not.)

Next up: transgender and queer terminology

I find it necessary to discuss this issue here because of my own struggles to understand my own “gendered” experience. Conservative and liberal definitions and concepts flood my social world and shape the names I give myself. With thanks to a radical Lesbian activist, I have been questioning and challenging my own use of the term “intergender” to describe my experiences and feelings. I think the most appropriate challenge to me has been to consider how such a term, or the term, “transgender” impacts those who are most egregiously marginalised and abused by gendered systems of violence. Now, the list of who is harmed by gendered systems of violence is long and may well include just about everyone. But as I see it, there are some groups of people who fare particularly poorly given the status quo, at least the status quo of the West and those groups are, 1. Girls and women, and 2. Lesbians and gay males. Obviously the two groups overlap in the experiences of Lesbian girls and women.

What I've seen happen over the last twenty to thirty years is a systematic marginalisation and stigmatisation in liberal circles of radical Lesbian and radical Gay politics, perspectives, and practices; simultaneously there has been a flourishing of liberal queer and trans politics, perspectives, and practices. Similar to liberal understandings of what prostitution is and exists to do, liberal queer understandings of gender generally ignore or avoid dealing with how and to what degree male and white supremacy are fused to our own personal feelings and understandings of ourselves, including the concepts we use to name what we feel and believe about ourselves. Terms are common now in queer circles that do not make male supremacy, for example, at all visible as an ideology woven into concepts and practices that we may embrace as “liberating”. Just as the term and concept of “sex work” avoids naming the white supremacy, misogyny, and capitalist abuses present in any systematised form of sexual-economic exploitation, terms like “intergender” and “transgender” do the same, quite liberally.

Our feelings and experiences are shaped by the concepts and terms available to us socially. In any given era, only some terms and concepts become socially used, while many others, used before and since, get snuffed out. Such is the case generally with terms used to discuss sex, sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender. None of what is discussed in dominant media places male supremacy or patriarchy near or at the center of discussions about who we are and why we believe what we believe.

What being "Gay" means, as well as what "Lesbian" means, have been scrutinised and critiqued through radical lenses for forty-plus years. To all those who say that trans people are being expected to question things no one else in the LGBTIQA community is made to question, I'll remind you that we ALL have been made to question EVERYTHING, down to our assumptions about the biological (vs. cultural-political) nature of our desires, feelings, and identities. See, for example, Adrienne Rich's writing on Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.

I'll tangentially mention here that I've seen how this has happened in the movements to end intimate, private, relational sexual violence against women. What used to be a movement to end men's battery of women has been re-termed a “domestic violence project”, thereby invisibilising the brutal male supremacy at work in any gendered dynamics, but especially in heterosexist and misogynist ones.

What do concepts and understandings such as “intergender” and “transgender” tell us about ourselves, our world, and what gender is and does? To me, it makes gender into an entirely social, personal, individual, and biological condition, and it becomes political only when people are organised to prevent some het men's rights from being afforded to other people. “Intergender” and “transgender” pretend that “gender” is a social continuum to be expanded, or a biological binary to be explored and respected, not a hierarchy to be overthrown. I see gender as a profoundly political system that is deeply anti-woman, anti-Lesbian, and anti-gay. How do the discourses and activist developments of the last twenty years dovetail with efforts by feminists to derail and demolish the terrifying train of male supremacy? What I see are largely liberal constructions of self and sexuality that in no way implicate male, white, or wealth supremacy as forces shaping our feelings and understandings, which is also to say our experiences of who we are.

In naming myself “intergender” I was attempting to make a statement about how my whole life's experience is one that is outside what is progressively thought of as a dualistic gender binary. It doesn't “fit” with how I saw myself relative to boys my age, across my childhood and into adolescence. Perhaps the only point of familiarity or commonality with other boys was in recognising that my sexual attraction wasn't to “an opposite sex”, physiologically speaking, although as Andrea Dworkin detailed in her book Woman Hating, such an understanding of sex and gender is already distortive and discriminating in oppressive ways. How does “intergender” and “transgender” support radical efforts to end male supremacy? Does it matter if it doesn't?

I'd say the answer to that is fused to the matter of what we understand to be going on, or going down, all around us and in us. For example, if you don't see prostitution as a system that welds capitalism to white and male supremacy, you might view abolition movements to end all forms of trafficking, buying, renting, and enslaving human beings as irrelevant to your cause and condition. But me being gay means my life is fused to the struggles of all people who want to end the tyranny of heterosexuality and masculinism—of heteropatriarchy to use the term which combines those dehumanising and terrifying realities.

It doesn't surprise me that terms like transgender and sex work will fare better than terms like male supremacy and sexual slavery in a liberal social economy which generally refuses to name the extent to which male and white supremacy and capitalism pollute and infect our lives, robbing us of the hope for a freedom that isn't built on systems that require some of us to be sacrificed.

This isn't to marginalise or silence those of us who use those terms; it is, rather, to call on all of us who want something called “freedom” and “liberation” to evaluate, in hopefully loving community, what the deep political implications are of using those terms to begin with. If liberalism is fused to their usage, how might a radical perspective and practice of naming ourselves shift our terminology towards words that don't deny the realities of male and white supremacist and capitalist terrorism.

For the time being, I will not be using the term "intergender" to describe myself. I will, instead, say that I willfully, actively, and imperfectly refuse to behave and "be" as men would have me behave and be in order to fit in with the boys-to-men of patriarchy. And that an awareness of this need to refuse, for my own survival and for the betterment of girls and women, was in me from an early age. This understanding keeps male supremacy central to my own motivations, sensibilities, and feelings without denying or marginalising any of them.

I hope this opens respectful discussion of these and related issues.

Queer, Male, Transsexual, and Het-Enforced Gynocide: The Liberal Destruction of Radical Lesbian Communities of Resistance

image is from here

For this discussion and often on this blog, “Womyn” and “Lesbians” means the following: human beings raised in patriarchal environments to be girls and women; women who, from birth onward, were identified, labeled, and mis/treated as female human beings are meant to be mis/treated according to patriarchal will and ways; women who were mis/treated as girls throughout their childhoods; intersex people who were raised to be girls and women and who were mis/treated as girls and women by men in their communities and the larger societies in which they have lived and died.

As a gay male, I see the destruction of Womyn's and Lesbian community as a key strategy to keep heterosexism strong and powerful. In the last 25 years it is Radical Lesbian community and activism that has been one of very few on-going oases of revolutionary political activity against the male flood of patriarchal hostilities and oppression, including hostilities and oppression organised and maintained by gay men.

Currently, in my experience, elite/privileged het and trans activists control or try and control discussions about what oppression is, what privilege is, and what bigotry is. Nowhere in those discussions do I see any regard or respect for Radical Lesbian or Womyn's community and it's value (the necessity of it) to revolutionary action to end CRAP. I know a few region-, race-, and class-privileged trans and queer people have spoken out about the need to respect Womyn's and Lesbian spaces. But that doesn't go far enough, in my opinion.

One of the most pernicious lies about Radical Lesbian and Womyn-centered community is that it only exists in the US and that it is only or all white. Neither is the case but it may well also be the case that for many reasons having to do with survival, we will not be hearing from most Radical Lesbians. For one thing, most Lesbians do not speak English as a first or only language. For another, Radical Lesbian politics and practice has been so intensely put down and marginalised out of any Western Queer Theory and Practice that it appears to me to be the case that contemporary White and Western Queer Theory and Practice is virulently anti-Lesbian and anti-Radical. Meanwhile, it is positioned or promoted as being anti-human, meaning, anti-male and anti-trans. Why it is that pro-male supremacist and pro-trans activists don't challenge one another's anti-Lesbianism and anti-Womyn practices is a matter of revolutionary significance, in my view.

Anti-Lesbian homophobia, or lesbophobia, and racism, classism, misogyny, and heterosexism are woven into or embedded in contemporary public Queer discussion (academics call this “Discourse”). Het society has never regarded Radical Lesbian Politics as anything other than man-hating and “too extreme”. To write off a key site of political organisation and resistance is one way to ensure that revolutionary political movement won't take root. 

How could it be that less and less Radical Revolutionary Lesbian Politics is “good” for us? If the us is Lesbian and Gay, how does it serve our interests to understand our contributions to Queer discussion and action as “only transphobic”, “too extreme”, and “man-hating”? We already know that the man-hating charge is perhaps the most successful het- and male-privileging and het- and male supremacy protecting political accusation leveled at Womyn and Lesbians.

The charge of “transphobia” in some marginalised groups, has social capital in ways that the charge of being anti-Lesbian and anti-Womyn does not. Why is that? Ought we know why that is? Ought we openly discuss it in Queer groups? 

Hostility to Radical Feminism is as old as Radical Feminism. Hostility to Radical Lesbian Feminism is at least as intense. Het men across race, sexuality, and region, demonstrate an abiding hatred of Lesbians, Womyn, and anyone regarded as a girl or a women, whether or not they are (such as, for example, so-called 'feminine' men and gay men. Het men also demonstrate a virulent hatred of het and 'feminine' and butch women, Lesbian or not.

Where is the organised opposition to this profoundly entrenched misogyny? I can tell you one place it isn't: within and among gay male communities and activists. Needless to say, organised opposition to anti-Lesbian and anti-Womyn misogyny doesn't exist in het-dominated communities either.

I have had the unfortunate and on-going occasion to witness how some grown male family members mis/treat their young male children. A portion of a day does not go by without rigid and oppressive policing of the male children's presentation of their maleness as identified and understood by the older men around them. The boys are publicly and privately ostracised by male family members if the boys do not “man up” properly—according to the standards and practices of homophobic and misogynistic men. So if a boy doesn't firmly and strongly shake a grown male's hand, or flaps his hands by his side as he walks or runs, he is scorned and ridiculed in a systematic effort to get him to be a “proper male” which means, necessarily, being anti-gay and anti-woman (as well as anti-Lesbian and anti-Womyn).

Anti-gay and anti-lesbian practice is like CRAP-affected air: it is all around me and it is a potent pollutant I endure and do my best to ignore. Metaphorically speaking, when I open my eyes and lungs to this toxin, my eyes sting and my chest burns and constricts. It is difficult to convey in words exactly how overwhelming and hateful this heterosexism is. It is difficult but not impossible for me to imagine how hateful the combo of heterosexism and misogyny is. It is difficult but not impossible for me to imagine how hateful the combo of heterosexism, misogyny, anti-Lesbianism, and anti-Womyn attitudes and behaviors are. Add to that racism. Add to that classism. Add to that the oppression by white Westerners of those who are not “First World”, or who are immigrants of color, or who are speakers of ESL. Or elderly. Or disabled.

Nowhere in my dysfunctionally heterosexist family is there any regard or respect for Womyn, for Lesbians, or for anti-patriarchal, anti-het or Womyn- and Lesbian-affirming attitudes and behaviors. Nowhere. Not in any minute of any day. While some lip-service is paid to liberal feminism—rarely—no such respectful acknowledgment of Radical or Revolutionary Lesbian and Womyn-centered community and resistance to woman-hating is noticed. This is only partly because it is not allowed in any dominant media, so my family has no idea it exists. They do know transsexual people exist and while they will demonstrate little else other than misunderstanding and fear, they do not believe transsexual people ought to not exist. They do believe this about Butch women, Lesbians, and Womyn-centered womyn—who they understand to be not much more or less than heretics and pariahs. 

My family is Christian and white. Also poor and working class. Their level of protection and privileging of hetness is so intense, so unrelenting that no one in my family who has considered gay or lesbian existence for themselves has been able to talk about it with anyone other than me—or so they say to me in private. (A publicly het male cousin, for three years, summoned me to have sex with him in motel rooms. I complied and obliged. It's not something that was “not pleasurable”. It's also something that I do my very best to avoid engaging in ever again because it was so invisibilising of me.)

So while I know that within the last three generations there have been non-het and non-feminine women, and non-het and non-masculine men, it is not discussed or tolerated or—whitemaleskygod's heaven forbid—celebrated and actively supported.

The lack of celebration, respect, regard, and support for Lesbianism, for Womyn-centered existence, for Revolutionary anti-patriarchal practice, cannot be overstated. 

My concluding questions for now are these: Why does a similar level of disdain and disregard for Lesbians and Womyn who are politically engaged in the project of protecting and supporting Lesbian and Womyn's space, community, theory, and activism, exist so strongly in contemporary elite/privileged Queer spaces, communities, theories, and activism? Why is there no systematic and on-going elite/privileged Queer opposition to the theoretical positioning, the liberal political practice—of naming Lesbians and Womyn as primarily or only oppressors to Queer and Transsexual people?

Kanye West has a new Defence for his Racist-Misogyny

photo of Kayne West is from here

If someone's mother has passed on, does that excuse their blatant misogyny, distributed for profit? I surely hope not.

But first, anything the AP puts out is in no way designed to challenge either white or male supremacy. Or anything else that might upset the status quo. So let's be clear about that. CRAP-loaded countries like the US are only about perpetuating warfare against poor people and people of color, against women across race and class, and about the dirty little businesses of genocide and ecocide, which are always intimately and atrociously linked. Watching the evening news is an experience of witnessing commercials--between commercial breaks--for racist militarism, corporate capitalism, misogynist and anti-Lesbian heterosexism, and so on.

Second, Kanye West is a sexist, misogynist public figure who is unapologetic in his male privilege and power to oppress and dehumanise women. And in his video Monster, which I've posted about before, he's demonstrating some racist-misogyny too.

I seriously doubt anyone who looks at him the wrong way is implying he's Hitler, but I'm not him and don't know what he's experiencing. And given how white supremacist the US is currently, does he mean to be implying that people are cheering him and encouraging him? Because US foreign and domestic policy is about as racist and genocidal as it gets without publicly declaring a war against specific ethnic groups who are not white. It's racist and genocidal in that the policies-in-practice are committing genocide globally against Asian, Brown, Black, and Indigenous people. Many people in the US do look at images of Hitler adoringly.

Third, Kanye West is a white het male supremacist without the white privileges and power that white het men enjoy and exploit. What really will it take for Mr. West to own up to the fucked up CRAP he's producing, selling, and mass-marketing? Can he really not see the misogyny in his video?

Kayne, please. Be honest with yourself and with us. And stop the misogyny-as-entertainment for the masses.

All that follows is from *here*. Or click on the title just below.

Kanye West Says People Look At Him 'like Hitler'

Posted Mon Aug 8, 2011 8:57am PDT by Associated Press in Stop The Presses!

 

The 34-year-old rapper known for his outbursts was the headline act at the Big Chill music festival Saturday night, where he ranted in the middle of his set about being misunderstood and underappreciated. "I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I'm (expletive) insane, like I'm Hitler," he said. "One day the light will shine through and one day people will understand everything I ever did."

West received light boos from the crowd as a result.

The performer also defended the music video for his song "Monster," which features cannibalism and girls hanging from their necks.

"Who saw the video before it got banned, before they took it down and before women's groups starting saying that a person that lost the most important woman in his life is now against women in some way?" asked West, referring to the 2007 death of his mother Donda West.

West, who started his set roughly 30-minutes late, apologized to the crowd for his tardiness, saying he needed to make sure his performance was great.

"Michael Jordan changed so much in basketball, he took his power to make a difference. It's so much (expletive) going on in music right now and somebody has to make a (expletive) difference," he said.

The multiplatinum-seller is known for his outspokenness, most notably his diss toward Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, where he grabbed the microphone from her as she accepted the award for best female video and said Beyonce should have won it. In 2005 he said "George Bush doesn't care about black people" during a Hurricane Katrina telethon.

At the music festival, West talked about some of his awards show drama, saying some of his sponsorships were canceled as a result.

But West closed his show on a positive note by paying tribute to Amy Winehouse.

West, who said he met the late singer a few years ago during Paris fashion week, played snippets of Winehouse's "Tears Dry On Their Own" and "Back to Black." He said it was "beautiful" to meet the performer and that she was "amazing."

Then, in Kanye fashion, he began to rant.

"Thank you for protecting your artists that are still here," he said to the crowd. "This is for McQueen, for Amy, for Michael and for all the media, can you lighten up on all your artists that are still here?" he asked, receiving a roaring cheer from the crowd and leaving the stage with his 3-man band and 20-something backup dancers.

Photo credit: AP

2 Spirits: Native Lesbians and Gay Men : Osa Hidalgo de la Riva for Royal Eagle-Bear Productions

image is from here

I support Indigenist struggles to regain land and everything else that was and continues to be stolen from Indigenous people worldwide, including the means and methods to name their own experience and struggles without those names and efforts being colonised and controlled by whites. I also think for those of us who are not Indigenous or Two Spirit, it is important to be responsible allies in the struggles of multiply oppressed and genocidally threatened people.

Please click on the link, *here*, to view and listen to a video on Two-Spirited Activists and spokespeople.

When is Critique seen as "Attack" and when is an Attack not seen as such?

image is from here

It has come to my attention that some people may view my challenge to the white women of Rad Fem Hub as "an attack". I find this understanding (or experience) of my actions as worthy of some discussion and care, in part because it is not my intended practice here or offline to "attack" women in any way. I'm surely capable of attacking women in text, or of shaming women, coming down too hard on women, displacing my anger at whites on a few white women, being condescending or arrogant, and so on. I make no claims that I cannot be oppressive in sexist ways (and I don't think my intention is what matters most). I make the opposite claim, actually: I am structurally positioned to do so quite easily, just as I am positioned to be oppressive to people of color: women, men, intersex, and trans.

White radical lesbian feminist critiques of white, class-privileged, trans politics isn't, necessarily, an "attack" against trans people or a fear-based reaction. To position all critique as only an attack, as only transphobic, is to make thoughtful, engaged discussion across difference almost impossible. Sometimes radical lesbian feminist critique of privileged trans people's political objectives is a thoughtful, important critique. Sometimes it's a series of grossly racist/classist generalisations rooted in profound ignorance of who trans people are, however. White, class-privileged trans people's critiques of radical lesbian feminism are not always "an attack" but they can sometimes be grossly anti-radical and anti-feminist, as well as anti-lesbian and pro-status quo.

My point in the recently published and revised challenge to Rad Fem Hub is to note the ways that the white women there, and beyond that site, are also structurally located to be oppressors to women of color--and to men, intersex, and trans people of color too. I don't see how noting this in a blog post constitutes 'an attack' but I am open to hearing from any women in email or through comments here to the blog if they believe or experience my actions are an attack against some white women.

As I consider all the times the term "attack" is used when a critique takes place, what I notice first and foremost is that challenges to the status quo are almost always regarded as an attack, from the point of view of the privileged; men feel "attacked" by radical feminists, for example; whites feel attacked when white privilege, power, and entitlements are called out. There's no way to challenge whiteness or manhood without some members of each group--or many white men who are part of both groups--expressing to the world that they are "under attack". Meanwhile, everything that white men do that is an assault, a violation, an abuse, an act of terrorism, against women across race is never portrayed by those men as "an attack" or as "acts of terrorism".

Indigenous people defending their land is seen as "an attack" on white society. White society's on-going genocide against Indigenous people isn't discussed or even acknowledged by whites at all.

White America is portrayed by corporate media as perpetually "under attack" by Central Asian Muslims. The truth of the matter is that Central Asian Muslims are grossly under attack by the US and NATO forces. Quite literally and not at all figuratively, "under attack". As in bombed, invaded, and occupied.

Men do, in fact, in practice, not in theory alone, assault, attack, subordinate, dominate, and terrorise women in egregious and horrendous ways. Women do not do this to men except rarely on the interpersonal level. Nonetheless, men proclaim, ceaselessly, how often they are attacked by women.

Whites do, in fact, in practice, not in theory alone, assault, attack, subordinate, dominate, and terrorise people of color across gender and class. There's are no such systems or structures in place in the West for whites to be victimised by people of color, despite how victimised and threatened whites say we feel when we encounter people of color who want to be treated as the fully human beings they are.

Fundamentalist Christian hets proclaim the threat to their lives that lesbians and gay men legally marrying, or practicing our sexuality openly, represent to them. I'd say they ought to consider how their arrogance, obnoxiousness, condescension, domination, and terrorism of queer people threatens our lives.

I hope the double and triple standards are apparent. When Black women speak up against whites and men, what I see is that they are swiftly demonised and regarded as emotionally unstable, dangerous, and a threat to all humanity, if not also the world as a whole. The outspoken Black woman appears to be seen as just slightly less (or more) dangerous to the world as, say, nuclear power plants in a process of melting down. We may wish to note that government and corporate leaders are notorious for downplaying the harm of such reactors, while up-playing the alleged danger-to-dominant-society of Black women with a critique of that society.

As a male, I am positioned to easily oppress or assault women. That's why I work so hard not to. And I worked very hard to make sure my language, tone, and content, while hopefully deeply challenging to all the white women at Rad Fem Hub, was not condescending, dehumanising, aggressive, obnoxious, or otherwise oppressive to the women there.

It would be a sorry state of white supremacy if white males could not call out white women's racism. It would mean that only white women are capable of doing so unabusively. And given that it is my long-standing experience that white women will not and often (for many reasons) can not call out other white women on their blatant or less obvious racism and white supremacist standards and practices, I'd hate to think that the burden of the task must fall to women of color--or, even, to men of color, who surely will be accused of being sexist and misogynistic if they call out a white woman. On a similar structural note, I've seen how men of color willfully and obnoxiously refuse to listen to anything white women have to say about men's sexism and misogyny, as if the white women aren't women at all, but are only white.

It appears too often to also be the case that in the minds and actions of white women, women of color are not women, but are, instead, a kind of man. The power white women displace and project onto women of color is often power only possessed by whites and men. As far as I can see, across the globe, no groups of women of color hold such power, structurally, systemically, or institutionally.

One version of my address, my letter, to the white women of Rad Fem Hub went into some detail about the history of racism among white radical feminist women towards radical feminist women of color. It's a very painful and awful history indeed. I edited most of that out as I didn't want to drift too far away from the primary challenge: to ask and recommend that the white women there deal with their whiteness in more conscientious and apparent ways, on their new blog and in their own lives beyond the blogs they are part of. I bring that challenge to them because I've seen white women and women of color challenge several of those white women and how defensive and in denial the white women get in response, often considering the challenge to be "an attack".

If the challenge to you is for you to interrogate your own positions of power over others, I'd argue that's not an attack unless the challenger is assaulting you or pretending you're not a human being. I welcome knowing where and when I assaulted anyone who has less structural power than I do. I generally attempt to respectfully make make amends when this happens. My challenge to the white women at Rad Fem Hub is no exception. I hope to hear from them if they feel comfortable engaging with me.

And if anyone is flagrantly anti-feminist, racist, heterosexist, or anti-trans, I'm likely going to speak up about it. Hopefully responsibly and respectfully to all concerned, with awareness of how I am politically/structurally positioned relative to those I am critiquing.

A Radical Trans Profeminist Politic--just one intergender, asexual, gay white male's views

image is from here

Hi readers,
 
I want to put forth a radical profeminist trans politic, based on my own life experiences and those of most trans folks I know, who do not fit the stereotype of who gets air time on television. For now I'll discuss some of the issues surrounding my identity. One concern is that with such a narrow view of us, those of us out there struggling to find our way will conclude they must not be [fill in the blank] because, well, we don't feel the way trans spokespeople on television describe their feelings and experiences.

Here's what complicates things--television executives and editors will not usually show anyone trans (and few who are non-trans) talking about gender in a political way if it is to critique the hierarchy; we are only allowed only to discuss gender-as-difference, not gender-as-dominance. No one who is trans is allowed to be feminist, on television. Few people who aren't trans are allowed to be "out" as feminist either. It's terribly discouraging to me because I remember when that wasn't at all the case.
 
I feel the same way about lesbians and gay men who are allowed on television, or who are portrayed on television. To this day, butch women--lesbian or not--are not allowed to have major roles on TV. To this day, few to no queer people of color are allowed on television, and if they are, they're likely encouraged to fulfill a stereotype to make the het audience at home comfortable with their own stereotypes of us. Thank gawd for Wanda Sykes, is all I can say.

I don't have pay channels, so I have no idea how diverse the presentations and representations of LGBTIA people are there. But the invisibilisation of Indigenous people who are queer is absolute. I can find no examples of queer, Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, SGL, trans, or intergender Indigenous people on television. And those spokespeople who are white don't appear to me making room at the mic for our other voices.
See this progressive media and note who speaks for us most often:
http://www.freespeech.org/video/gay-usa-june-09-2011

We must remember that one strategy of genocidal corporations and media is to render completely invisible the voices of Indigenous people, so that when the corporations destroy them, it will not be noticed by the masses of non-Indigenous people. See here for more:

Genocidal war against the Tribal people in India – Int’l program in London

समाचार - मुख्य समाचार       The issues that press down our lives are well beyond those discussed in "gender and sexuality" classes in white-dominated, middle-class focused, academic settings. Our issues are genocide, racism, homelessness, war, famine, lack of land, lack of clean water, HIV, cholera, and other preventable disease and illness. Our issues are rape, white supremacy, corporate Empire, and the many layers of oppression affecting most women of color on Earth.

I came up at a time when radical lesbian and non-lesbian feminist writings, by women of all colors, was readily available to me. (Please, please, please don't assume "white" when I write "radical feminist" or "radical lesbian feminist"; if I mean white feminist or white lesbian feminist, I'll write that out that way.) I needed that perspective to help me understand what was going on with me. I didn't feel like a boy, but was a male child. I don't identify as a man, but am an adult male.
 
When I was young, my closest family members were girls not boys, and women not men. (There were no trans people in my family  that I know of. There also weren't any lesbian or gay people either.) No one in my family had anything resembling a non-mainstream perspective on humanity. They were either Conservative or Liberal. That was as broad as their spectrum got.
 
I was off the spectrum in so many ways that using their measuring tools, I couldn't calculate anything at all about myself. "Gay" was around as a term, but it didn't really refer to what I am. I'm a male person who is attracted to men. I'm not a man who is attracted to men. What term most describes that? Certainly not heterosexual! I also was not ever someone who objectified women's bodies or desired sexual contact with women in my dreams. I only dream about erotic contact and affection and intimacy with males--boys when I was a child, and men now that I'm in my adulthood.

I term myself intergender and to let you know how invisible THAT category of being is, it doesn't even exist in our alphabet soup of a moniker! That's partly why I add the "IA" at the end of LGBT, for those of us who are intergender, intersex, and asexual.

Speaking also about my family of origin, being asexual also doesn't fit with anyone's conception of how to be human. Even beyond my family, most people across sexual identities think that if I'm attracted to men and have some dreams of an erotic nature, that must mean I desire to have sex. I don't.

I want there to be more options out there, to validate more complex feelings and experiences of self-in-world. I want more ethnicities of trans and queer people speaking for us, leading our movements, and appearing on television as "us". It's all so white out there right now.

I want trans folks to know you might be intergender and pro/feminist, and to have a place to discuss that online. I want asexual and pro/feminist people to have places to be online. Here is one of those places, I hope.

I want people of color to be central in the discussions of our lives. Here is one of the places I hope that can happen.

Welcome.

On "radical" identities and the consciousness of some white bloggers

image is from here

NOTE: This is not directed at every white woman I know. It is directed at many white women I do not know.

I've been encountering some white privilege, power, and entitlements in my regular encounters with folks. This is nothing new. Recently the whitness is showing up in a variety of ways but it there is one form that I will address right now.

Just so you know--if you're new to this blog, I stand strongly in political and spiritual solidarity with women of color who are, as far as I can see, always fighting at least two institutionalised ideologies: male supremacy and white supremacy, if not also other forms of oppression and domination such as capitalism, heterosexism, anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic violence, anti-Indigenous genocide. I will call out any expression of white supremacy I encounter.

There are some white women online who are calling themselves "radical" who deny that women can oppress women. This is as messed up a viewpoint as men claiming they cannot oppress other men due to race, class, and other conditions. Some men do argue this, of course. Some white het men believe it because they deny there are any systems of oppression, any social-political hierarchies, working at all. Some WHM (white het men) claim they wish to be spoken about as if they are only individuals, not as part of an institutionally protected, privileged group. With that as their request, they then proceed to understand women only as a group--and are numbingly stupid about the diversity of perspective and analysis among feminists.

Especially, patriarchy- and white supremacy-protecting WHM argue that feminists are all man-haters, never bothering to offer up a substantive argument other than throwing around quotes. (They also stay astoundingly silent about all the published men who state quite clearly that men are rapists by nature--a position not belonging to radical feminism.) Their two-dozen favorite quotes (see *here* for more about this) by all-white feminists are allegedly all the proof they need that "those damned feminists hate men so much!" Why they seem so determined to ignore the work of radical feminists of color is beyond me--unless it is because they assume women of color aren't worth paying attention to. Anyone with a computer and a mouse can easily gather up about a thousand times as many quotes online from white het men who demonstrate disgusting levels of misogyny, and racism, homophobia, and general callousness to cruelty committed or controlled predominantly by WHM.

These WHM activists go on and on about Black people as one group, lesbians as one group, Mexican people as one group, and Asian people as one group, Indigenous people as one group--if they care to notice there are Indigenous people at all. This often means that these political WHM cannot comprehend the existence and diversity among lesbian women of color and how their experiences might vary from white lesbian women's. Other men believe, for example, that if men are poor or not white they are not capable of oppressing women. I've heard and seen plenty of arguments by het men of color that they are only oppressed, and are not oppressors to women in their own communities and regions. Bullshit.

The willful ignorance isn't limited to het men, however.

Here's a quick anecdote about a white, class-privileged gay man I once knew through a mutual friend. My friend and this white gay man worked together in retail and I ran into him when going to this store.

The man I didn't know especially well, but who welcoming of getting to know me better, thought he's impress me with his humor. He told me a joke that was racist. I won't repeat it. I was deeply upset by it and he was quite surprised I would be so alarmed. This is often my experience with whites--we assume we're all good with the racism. I'm not. So I didn't laugh and indicated that I didn't find his "joke" funny. When he realised this he went on to explain to me why it was okay for him to tell it. He said Whoopi Goldberg told the joke, and he was gay so he can't be racist. (Because, you know, he's oppressed by sexual orientation so apparently that means he can't oppress anyone else.)

I asked my friend how it could be that this white guy thought I'd welcome hearing that joke. He told me the following: [racist white guy in denial] told me a joke--kind of like the one he told you but not with the racist parts; I told him you would probably like it. So that's how come [racist white guy] thought it would be okay. I told my friend the actual joke shared and he too was shocked. Neither of us are friends with [racist white guy in denial].

Every feminist friend I know would call him out on a bogus argument that gay men can't oppress women because the men are gay.

Enduring one form of marginalisation or subjugation doesn't mean one is positioned socially and structurally to not oppress anyone or any group to which one doesn't belong. Every woman I know personally understands that men who are gay can be oppressive to women--particularly lesbian, in some communities, if we share social spaces. Although the Sheila Jeffreys' book, Unpacking Queer Politics, is being trashed without thoughtful engagement or analysis by many people occupying many different social spheres, it does engage the reader in an important conversation about how gay men's behavior and values oppresses lesbian women. At the time of this writing, I can count on zero hands the number of white gay men who have responded responsibly to her arguments.

Every woman I know also understands that men of color can be oppressive to women across race and sexuality. How does it happen then, that white and het women cannot be oppressive to any other women (or, for that matter, to men of color, and to gay men if the women are het)? With what understanding of social harm and hierarchy, and through what privileged and protected lens does one get to believe that? How convenient for not taking full political responsibility for one's whiteness or heterosexuality, eh? And, what's more, these women have all had plenty of opportunity to learn about their white supremacy and heterosexism as they've been called out on each of these rearing its oppressive head in many social spaces.

To believe that because one is a [white het] woman--with just about every form of privilege and entitlement on Earth--one cannot be an oppressor either individually or institutionally, totally invisibilises how a very central force in many societies works: that force is white supremacy. It also renders white women invisible as whites and women of color invisible as people who are both women and of color, all due to white women's political slight of hand which they summarise as "women can't oppress women". Apparently, for race- and region-privileged women do not have any other structural locations on Earth other than as women: unraced.

When I learned recently that a few radical-identified white het women believed this, I realised I'd heard it before, many times, and that it might help explain why it is that so many white "radical" women do not deal with their racism, their white privilege, and the meaning and forms of their white power and entitlements. I'll press pause on the unacknowledged or blatantly denied heterosexism issue for now. The racism I've witnessed isn't only demonstrated and denied by het white women.

I reflected back on the drag shows co-organised by white lesbians and white gay men. The lesbians called themselves "radical" because they sincerely thought they were. When I challenged them on co-creating spaces that were overtly hostile and insulting to lesbian (and other) women of color, to poor women of color, to men of color also, they pretended my concern was not as important as their need to be entertained by each other. They treated the matter as if it were abstract. To them, it was abstract because they've never taken the time to immerse themselves intimately in the communities and lives of people without race privilege. They don't ever have to live the lives of lesbian women of color and they can believe that white lesbian experience is all they need to consider or show concern about when organising to defend lesbian experience.

I will continue to call out white supremacist queer people who also misuse the term "radical"--according to the radical women of color I know, not primarily according to me. Too often patriarchy protected practices like gender bending are promoted as radical or revolutionary. There are several problems with that viewpoint. One is that their political practice is based on understanding the social problem as "gender" or "the gender binary" and not male supremacy--and white supremacy and heterosexism and capitalism, among other forms of organised harm and horror.

It isn't that difficult to translate dynamics that are male supremacist to those that are white supremacist. One central reason it isn't difficult is because both systems of harm and dehumanisation inform each other, shape each other, and feed off of one another, in white male supremacist societies.

Here are a few clues one, if a blogger, might be acting out of white privilege, power, and entitlements.

--your blog doesn't identify your race as white if you're white
--your blog or identity doesn't include your stated understanding of how and where you step on the backs of others to be where you are. I mean collectively: how your people got to be where they are
--you believe you are radical because you comprehend how white women are oppressed by white men, but don't understand any other form of oppression and apparently don't make it your business to do so
--you feel very entitled to "own" and "define" the term "radical" because you are white; it doesn't occur to you that you're not radical if you promote your own white supremacy by ignoring your white privileges and power
--you put down white trans people because the white trans people you know have liberal political agendas, meaning pro-status quo; you don't consider how being white supremacist is deeply pro-status quo and dangerously conservative

I have similarly called out sexist and misogynist men of color who believe themselves to be radical; often enough, men of color who see themselves as radicals will limit their political consciousness to understanding how white supremacy degradingly effects men of color.

Now, most of the white power I encounter belongs to and is exercised by men; I don't wish to pretend that white women hold more white power than do white men. Intersectional analyses of power means that one benefits in complex ways when one holds more than one position atop a hierarchy. Being white and male, for example--as I am--means something different than being white plus male. It's not only an additive thing to me--this life that is lived in positions of power relative to other groups of people. It's also exponential. This is why I view white men's white power as greater than white women's. Also because if white women exercise any form of power in ways that white men disapprove of, it will be the white men who get their way--institutionally if not always interpersonally. But often enough, white men will kill white women if the men don't approve of how the white women are behaving.

One key way I see white women ignore and deny their own white power is to pretend that violence only happens interpersonally. Typically, white blogs that are pro-feminist deal with issues of rape, harassment, the practices of heterosexuality, and other interpersonal and intimate harm, but not, for example with issues of poverty, racism, HIV, and starvation that isn't only isn't individually experienced but is also politically imposed as a form of genocide.

This is because poverty, racism, and most other forms of atrocity and terrorism are profoundly interlocking institutionalised realities (as is rape; as is sexism). Poverty, in particular, isn't always so easily identified as only something individuals do to other individuals. We can note that rich people don't have to walk down the street harassing poor people individually; they do, often enough, however, work behind the scenes to pass city legislation to ban poor people from congregating or home-making in various parts of a city. The deals are made out of view of the poor people who will be most negatively effected.

I'm not comfortable defining myself as "radical" unless I am open to looking at and working to challenge all areas of my privilege, in collaboration with women who are negatively effected by that privilege; this necessarily means engaging with women of color across sexuality and with lesbian women across race and ethnicity. "Radical" is not primarily a mindset or a viewpoint, to me. What it is, is a commitment to action demonstrated actively. Action to call oneself out, to hold oneself accountable, and--importantly--to be personally and socially available to be accountable--to not hide out in only-white or only-male or only-het spaces for example.

These same white het women promoting ideas that they cannot oppress the women they do, in fact, oppress were also working to silence Lesbian women. It appears they don't see their heterosexuality as a position of power over and against women marginalised by sexual-political orientation--which really means by the het supremacy that women also participate in.

The anti-trans perspectives among some white non-trans women "radical" bloggers is fierce and self-righteous. If only their critiques of whiteness were as rigorous.

Suffice it to say if we work with this as a definition of what radical feminists oppose--"if it hurts women, feminists are against it"--we are left to know, beyond any glare of doubt, that racism is anti-woman if the women are women of color. This means that racism is also a form of misogyny. To any white woman who is against misogyny: are you against the misogyny you promote and protect, that negatively impacts the lives of women of color, by you ignoring your own white privilege and power?

White women, usually, like pro-status quo white men, do not care enough to consider how their lives are not at all like women without race privilege. I've witnessed how women of color are expected to pass white women's litmus tests of whether or not they are radical--such as on pornography or prostitution. They don't consider that their own use of "radical" ought to be up for question if they can't identify what it is women of color face the world over that white women do not.

I call this out as a white male, knowing that if a white woman called out the same stuff she'd be verbally harassed and otherwise threatened for doing so by other white women seeking to maintain the very real power of the White Sisterhood. Both because of my male privileges and power, and because I do not seek solidarity with racist white women, I don't feel as vulnerable to such ostracism as some of my anti-racist white sisters do. So I'm speaking out here because if and when I don't, the task falls, as usual, to women of color. If the white women promoting this racist nonsense don't wish to hear it from a white male because being responsive to me is engaging in sexist practice to them, perhaps they'll listen to white radical lesbian feminist, Marilyn Frye, *here*.

I hope they'll consider the very radical act of believing what radical women of color say about white women's privileges and power to be oppressors. They could start with Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Andrea Smith.

(For more on radicalism and blogging, see *this post*.)