Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Women's Right to Vote

Photos courtesy of Better Days Utah 2020. L to R: Elizabeth Taylor; Alice Kasai; Zitkála-Šá (Dakota); and Hannah Kaaepa (Hawai'ian) with her mother and sister. All fought for women's rights. Source: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/08/16/utah-women-color-were/

“Indigenous women have had a political voice in their nations on this land for over 1,000 years,” Sally Roesch Wagner, historian and editor of the 2019 anthology The Women’s Suffrage Movement, points out. “Women’s rights is not a new concept on this land; it’s a very, very old one. And the clan mothers of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee women, have had political voice for 1,000 years.”

The passage above is from a new Time magazine article, August 18th, 2020: "5 Myths About the 19th Amendment and Women's Suffrage, Debunked": https://time.com/5879346/19th-amendment-facts-myths/

On August 19, 2020 there will be a special discussion about the leadership and strategies of Black women during the long fight for suffrage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAkgz7oYPV8

Description of the webinar/discussion:
In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most Black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. In “Vanguard,” historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women — Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more — who were the vanguard of women’s rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.

The book the conversation emerges from is Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (September 8, 2020), by Martha S. Jones. Link: http://marthasjones.com/vanguard/

Additional new scholarship in 2020 reveals which women and women's organisations took leadership and had influence en route to this tremendous accomplishment a century ago. This sites lists several other new books honoring the Suffrage Centennial:
http://suffrageandthemedia.org/source/books-new-in-2020-for-the-suffrage-centennial/

 

The Problem of "Hate Crime" and Individualism

image above is from here

[An earlier version of this has been deleted.]

An argument in opposition to First Amendment absolutists is that hate speech is antithetical to free speech: the first exists to prevent or silence the second. I agree. Speech acts seeking the continued oppression or destruction of marginalized or subordinated peoples are oppressive and destructive.

My issue in this post is with the terms such as "Hate Speech" and "Hate Crime". Specifically, what the terms imply about how we understand and act to end oppression.

A crucial tool of White Male Supremacy--the straight kind especially--is the use of individualism to misname structural and systemic problems. One key aspect of individualism, as you may well know, is that oppression is reduced to how people feel about each other in the interpersonal realm. So, if only we loved one another; if only we treated each other as we'd have ourselves treated; if only there was no more hate... then we'd have world peace, or lack of conflict, justice. The problem is presented as "prejudice" or "lack of empathy": emotional or psychological dysfunction, problems of upbringing. We were raised with the wrong values. We had bigoted parents. Even if discussed in a more social way, we hear the problem is "bias" and "intolerance". How watered down and drowned is the language that far more accurately describes the maintenance of oppression as essentially political?

It's not that hate isn't present; it's that it is sometimes in service to class-based subordination--and not always. To whatever absurd level whites fear Black hatred aimed up, any speech used to communicate that 'hate' is not a systemic or institutional problem in the least. Political translation: there is no such thing as Black supremacy in the West. The same with an alleged preponderance of "man-hating" by women, particularly feminists.

The co-called good Christian whites who operated Boarding Schools thought they were being loving, as do many white colonialist Christian proselytisers--however ineffectively. Historically, so-called better treatment or a belief in moral motive is one tool of white male supremacy. One way white male supremacy thrives is by giving an appearance of treating people better on the individual front. The perversely over-quoted passage by King about children holding hands. In such a linguistic and social world, we assume a problem is over--or getting better--if oppressors are treating the oppressed in less overtly subordinating ways. In fact, looking at the systemic problem of het husbands and boyfriends battering women, when he moves into a stage of being remorseful and sorrowful, that is the precursor to another period of physical and emotional violence.

Calling someone a threatening and racist name ought not be framed only or primarily as a hate crime. It is an act of white supremacist subordination and destruction, rarely prosecuted as criminal. Rape is also normal, not 'mean-spirited' in the sense that many men would argue they have great affection for the women they rape. Missed is the comprehension, let alone the alleviation, of the structural-political nature of rape. And in fact, their committed rape(s), self-perceived and self-named as "love-making" are not, strictly speaking, acts of 'hate' as much as they are acts of subordination. This is to say, men lovingly rape. That's only a contradiction in terms if we make emotional states a prerequisite to or component of oppressive acts.

Even terms like 'crime' are misleading. The State uses the term 'crime' as an excuse to arrest and kill oppressed people disproportionately. What the status quo has never adequately understood or appreciated is how 'criminal' the criminal justice system is. That is to say, the system is grievously attached to political and economic hierarchies and won't function otherwise. 'Crime' is a political term in service to the status quo. Routinely, what is considered 'criminal' is effectively 'by definition' in practice, 'regular everyday acts by Black people' that wouldn't be 'criminal' if whites did them. Rape and men's sexual violence against women is not even considered a hate crime!

Stopping sexual harassment and other forms of work site threat and violence is an endemic problem requiring a structural solution. Ending capitalism is part of that. Some call it a need for 'culture change' and I'd agree it is that too, but it is also and far more importantly a permanent political rearrangement. The solution is not only an end to the interpersonal abuse.

Even terms like 'misogyny' and 'homophobia' make it sound like hate, fear, and bigotry are the problem. The corporate media will now occasionally use the term 'misogyny' but avoid the term 'male supremacy.' That says it all. If 'white supremacy' replaces 'racism' as the term used by such media, we may be that much closer to eradicating it. Not that such media has any interest in moving that effort along.

The heinous problems before us are not individualistic, or necessarily hateful or criminal. I support using language that reflects the systemic, historic, structural nature of oppression as the foundation of law-making and efforts to radically change society.

From here: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbpm9y/black-lives-matter-cofounder-patrisse-khan-cullors-is-only-getting-started

One of the most striking things I read in the book was how your pre-teenage brothers didn’t complain that it was unfair police had harassed and abused them for doing absolutely nothing. You write, “By the time they hit puberty, neither will my brothers have expected that things could be another way.” They internalized the devaluation of their lives at such a young age. Can you talk a bit about other ways in which young black children receive this message?

For many marginalized communities, we are told from birth that our lives are valueless. We are told that we don’t deserve things. That poverty is our fault. That our parents’ addictions and prison and inability to feed us is our fault. So if you internalize that, if you internalize the ways in which the world has literally shoved you out, then of course as you get older, you’re not going to believe in yourself. And that translates into not being able to do the things that are the most important and most healthy. We have to talk about changing systems first. We live in a culture that wants to talk about individual first, that tells people they need to take personal responsibility for their hardships. Let’s not do that. Let’s change the system that creates the hardships. That’s the work of Black Lives Matter, that’s the work of #MeToo, #TimesUp, the Women’s March, so many other important organizations that have come together in the past few years. [emphasis mine] -- Co-founder of BLM, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, in an interview about her brand new book, When They Call You a Terrorist

12 Years A Slave: Review

Lupita Nyong'o and Chiwetel Ejiofor, featured in 12 Years a Slave

Before getting to the review, I wanted to let you know about a blog I just discovered. The publisher and editor is Kimberly N. Foster. Here's the link: http://www.forharriet.com/

And speaking of Harriet Tubman and the call to end slavery, I also wanted to offer a review of the film and winner of the latest Academy Award for Best Picture, 12 Years a Slave.

This is the cinematic telling of one U.S. man's true story. Solomon Northup was a real person who was born a free man in the north in 1808. He authored the book, 12 Years a Slave, about his capture in 1841 and release in 1853 from a white Southern hell.

What I appreciated was how the opening scenes might allow a white male viewer to see a Black man in 19th century U.S. as a free man, and how his horror at becoming a slave is not told through his abduction from West Africa, which might allow white people in the U.S. to distance ourselves from his plight. Northup, played superbly by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is "us" more than Kunta Kinte is "us". And for the purposes of a film most appropriately aimed at a white audience, this is crucial. Usually this is done by having the protagonist be white, reinforcing the deadly "Great White Man" myth, in such as in films like 1997's Amistad, 2006's Amazing Grace, and 2012's Lincoln.

I'm not saying the film is made (only) for a white U.S. audience: I'm saying that white people need to see and understand what this film is saying about us. And I'm not saying there isn't a collection of Great or Good White Men in this film. Brad Pitt's character, Bass, is one.

To me, the film brilliantly layers insult over injury, over and over. Each scene is another stark example of how whites conspire, on the institutional level and the interpersonal one, to control the bodies and destroy the dignity of Black people, here in the mid-19th century U.S. south. Each scene details the efforts of those enslaved to survive and not allow their humanity to be completely obliterated under the harsh and horrible lash of antebellum slavery.

The movie is brutal, graphically brutal, horrifyingly brutal, and unflinchingly honest in its depiction and portrayal of white men's sadism and savagery against Black people. In particular, it also depicts the complex relationship between white women and Black women, each group owned by white men. This is shown in the character of Mistress Shaw, played by Alfre Woodard.

But far more graphically, it is rendered through the tortured and tenacious humanity of Patsey, astoundingly acted by Lupita Nyong'o, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

A brilliant discussion of the legacy of colonial racist misogyny woven into the relationships of U.S. Black and white women may be read here in a brilliant piece by Michaela Angela Davis titled "12 Years A Slave: Rage, Privilege, Black Women and White Women". Here's the link, followed by an excerpt:

http://jezebel.com/12-years-a-slave-rage-privilege-black-women-and-whit-1452173238

The women in the beautifully brutal film 12 Years A Slave were mangled and maliciously intertwined. The enslaved women lived like beasts and the “free” women behaved like savages, trapped together in a filthy cage of rape, rage and bitter resentment. A resentment so magnificent, it could freshly fester in the psyche of their daughters for centuries to come.

The twisted relationship dynamics between the two lead female characters Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) and Mistress Epps (Sarah Paulson) in 12 Years A Slave are a horror.

The juxtaposition of such naked racist-misogynist sadism with feeble gestures at Southern white gentility is striking to me, reminding me of how fused the two are, and how dependent they are on one another. The white man who is only brutal is uncouth and risks revealing the putrid soul of whiteness to everyone who want to believe it is natural or God-given. The white man who is only genteel is not doing his job. His job is to rule over, exploit, and dehumanise Black people: to treat Black men as worse than non-human plantation chattel; to treat Black women as chattel and also as a rape object: chattel slave and sexual slave both.

We see how white men, more stupid and less stupid ones, are seduced by an unjust and inhumane ability to rule others. We see the gross arrogance, the supremacist self-delusion that he might be better because he is free, even while he is doomed to moral inferiority due to how he treats other human beings.

As you watch the film, or rewatch it, note how each scene carefully reveals another bloody-sharp facet of what U.S. slavery did to people: the rulers and the ruled, the owners and the owned.

I am led to see more deeply how this is still the case, with more slavery than ever, and at least as much denial that it ought to be abolished once and for all.

Trayvon Martin and the on-going Genocide of Black and Brown People

image of the late Trayvon Martin is from here

I suggest we ought to understand what happened to Trayvon Martin--his murder at the hands and gun of known serial criminal son-of-a-judge* George Zimmerman (see here, and here: trigger warning for details of child sexual abuse)--through much broader lenses than those used by white male-owned corporate media.  I view such an injustice and grievous act, another loss added to the millions of others, in the context of seeing how many Black and Brown people around the world are allowed to die an unnatural death from the following:

--gross economic discrimination, violence, and terrorism,

--pollution, theft, and destruction of water systems and other natural resources,

--imperialist invasion and occupation,

--wrongful/unjust incarceration alongside serial and mass murder inside and outside the criminal justice system owned and operated by white men and supported by white women

--willful media and medical abuse, negligence, and neglect,

-- coerced and forced indebtedness and dependence on white/colonial societies,

--sexual trafficking and sexual and economic slavery,

--many other forms of well-organised and institutionalised inhumanity leading to disease, depression, and premature death

I come to the conclusion that what happened to Trayvon Martin, including the injustice his family has to endure from a white-majority jury, is neither accidental, aberrant, or anecdotal. (Not, really, that there was any doubt.)

What happened to him is what happens in many different ways to Black and Brown people globally: being targeted for harassment, assault, and death both one at a time and en masse.

If and to whatever extent Trayvon had the courage and will to fight back, it surely wasn't sufficient to save his own life or to take the life of his stalker. We can only hope Black and Brown people prevail. Chances for survival and success beyond survival would greatly and dramatically increase if whites would organise to release the institutional strangling grip of economic, social, and interpersonal murder.

*Thanks to Carolyn Gage for publicly pointing out the particular political significance of this with regard to why he's never been found guilty of anything he's done that is criminal--including messing with a cop, and more recently this murder of a youth.

May Trayvon Martin, and all the other murdered Black and Brown women, men, and children, rest in a kind of peace not socially offered or available while alive.

I close with this statement about the killer, by bell hooks:

"White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action. Mass media then brings us the news of this in a newspeak manner that sounds almost jocular and celebratory, as though no tragedy has happened, as though the sacrifice of a young life was necessary to uphold property values and white patriarchal honor. Viewers are encouraged to feel sympathy for the white male home owner who made a mistake. The fact that this mistake led to the violent death of an innocent young man does not register; the narrative is worded in a manner that encourages viewers to identify with the one who made the mistake by doing what we are led to feel we might all do to “protect our property at all costs from any sense of perceived threat." This is what the worship of death looks like.

- bell hooks on the Zimmerman verdict    

Why we shouldn't just be offended by Paula Deen's racist remarks

photograph of Paula Deen is from here

The latest trending example of white's racism showing itself on the level of language-use, is white Southern cooking show/merch millionaire, Paula Deen. Here's the transcript of her deposition which is now being widely circulated and critiqued.

A common white liberal response is to be offended. And I'm not sure there's much wrong with being offended. But the problem, if the only response is to feel offended, is that we don't see racism for what it is. We accept it as the 2004 Academy Award-winning film Crash, depicts it: a problem located in how individuals act. We see it as a matter of sensibilities, feelings, and behavior between people. We psychologise and sociologise it because our response is psychological and we reduce it to a social problem.

What is also being discussed with this case is the culture of white Southerners: romantisizing that old, old culture of building an economy on slavery and apartheid and then holding that past in a romantic air. But why the nostalgia for a culture that isn't only "old": U.S. Southern white and Northern white society and its economy is still dependent on slavery. And genocide. Both are on-going and both have never gone away. Apartheid has morphed into different manifestations, but segregation built on violence and discrimination is still part and parcel of how the U.S. operates, economically, educationally, culturally, religiously, and politically.

The danger of targeting Paula Deen's attitudes and language-use (or her acceptance of her family's language-use) as "the problem" is that the deeper, more pernicious, and far more deadly problem is never even named, let alone challenged, let alone eradicated. It stays invisible which is exactly how many white supremacists, who are far more influential and powerful than Paula Deen, like it.

The problem beneath Deen's remarks is white supremacy as a political system that is institutionalised and invisibilised by whites. It simultaneously shapes and saturates, regulates and relies on capitalism, class, and colonialism; militarism, imperialism, and war; dominant forms of Christianity, gender, sexuality, and, of course: race. This is where white supremacy lives and prospers. It also shows up as offensive language, aka actionable hate speech, but according to some rules (which do shift over time).

What are the rules, currently? They include whites making racist jokes on stage and otherwise publicly, sometimes without using the most overly harmful (not just offensive) terms; whites discriminating overtly against Black and Brown people, in hiring practices, in housing decisions, in every area of social and economic life; whites holding onto our deep racism, freely displaying it when with other whites for mutual supremacist validation and as part of a larger project of white power-hoarding. The rules allow for cloaking white supremacy in calls for colorblindness and treating everyone as equal on an unequal shooting field. The rules allow for practicing slavery and committing genocide out of view of the corporate media, which intentionally ignores the atrocities, pretending a fictitious fiscal cliff or a factual revelation of Paula Deen's usually hidden remarks ought to be of central concern.

Identifying the racism problem only as a matter of language, culture, or societal mores means those with race privilege stay dissociated from it as an organised system of power that is foundationally structured into in every political institution we have, including "patriarchy". The problem with white anti-sexists pretending that "male supremacy" is our only problem is that what we know as male supremacy in the West is bound to and dependent on white supremacy. The problem with progressives being anti-capitalist, or environmentalist, or vegan, without working to eradicate male or white supremacy, is that pretending each isn't embedded in what we're fighting against means we're protecting both. Lethally.

Race, Racism, and Online Dating, and The Erotic Life of Racism, by Sharon P. Holland

These two excellent pieces of writing: the article from Racism Review, and the book by Sharon Patricia Holland, speak to the issues raised in a recent post on attraction.

I'll write more soon but wanted to get this up now:

It speaks so much to me about why white folks encouraging other whites to practice being less racist with people of color in dating situations would be a detrimental, dangerous, and disastrous thing to recommend.

Here are the links:

For Valentine's Day: Race, Racism and Online Dating

Sharon P. Holland's book, The Erotic Life of Racism

With warm thanks and appreciation to La Reyna. ((hug))

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.

On Trashing, Calling Out, and Accountability, with thanks to A Radical TransFeminist

portrait of Alice Walker is from here

I recently submitted two comments to a white transgender feminist's blog. She didn't publish them but did explain to me that she wouldn't be posting them, which I appreciate her doing. I welcome finding out what it is about the comments that led her to not post them, at a later date when she feels like communicating more with me.

I'd like for the topics to be addressed here to allow any of my readers to comment here on these issues. So I'll post links to her blog's two posts, with my comments in this and the next post to this blog. I'll revise my comments for clarity and to correct some typos.

I'm putting the initials of people's names in the comments below, as I don't have their permission to use their names here. One exception is the name Joreen, which was a chosen name used in movement work by Jo Freeman, a long-time white feminist writer and attorney. Her work is referenced; she isn't a participant in this discussion. See *this* for more, and see *this* for Jo/Joreen's piece on Trashing which is the foundation for the discussion at the other blog.

On Trashing

http://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/a-space-for-conversation-about-trashing/#more-668

Here is a revised version of the comment I submitted:

I’ve witnessed and experienced a lot of destructive dynamics, also some amazingly life-affirming and spiritually supportive dynamics, in feminist and profeminist spaces. I’ve seen far more positive than negative things happen. And I appreciate you creating this space to talk about this issue. While I’d like to be part of this discussion, I’m not sure I should be a contributor. If the issue is how people treat one another harmfully and abusively in the name of feminism and profeminism, I’d like to comment. If, on the other hand, that is the issue (with a focus on trashing), but only within women-only spaces, then that’s not something I’d feel would be appropriate for me, an intergender male, to be part of.

I nodded all the way through your remarks about Joreen’s piece. As a sexual assault survivor, I felt uneasy about the use of the term “psychological rape”. So thank you, L, and H, for sharing your response to that. I was deeply conflicted about whether to even mention it here, because, as H also stated, I don’t know her own story of physical abuse, and because, well, I’m male. The phrase that also felt deeply problematic to me was this one: “like a thousand cuts with a whip”. For me that phrase references an experience of physical-spiritual-political assault at the hands of white supremacists during U.S. slavery, Jim Crow, and since. I don’t think it is appropriate or respectful to survivors of slavery and those racially targeted for such abuse to appropriate the term even as simile.

That said, I respect Joreen’s bravery in tackling this issue and can hear how painful her experiences were. And I’ve seen how people in radical spaces sometimes want to demonstrate their/our/my sensitivity to issues by immediately and primarily pointing out what feels “off” about someone’s remarks, rather than by first highlighting what feels right on.* I feel for the ways she’s been hurt and rejected in spaces and by people she looked to for solidarity and community. I’ve known women hurt in so many ways, most callously, brutally, and lethally by men, but also hurt emotionally and psychologically by other women. And I’ve experienced, just within my own family of origin and friendship circles, how people closest to me in various ways, are capable, due to conditions of trust, shared history, and vulnerability, of hurting me deeply in ways some of my oppressors, now that I’m an adult, are not.

*I have been thinking about  this. I am aware that in online discourse far more than my offline discourse, criticism is, often, "what people do" without necessarily knowing the people we're criticising. This is dramatically different in my offline life. I'll far more typically withhold criticism if I think it might harm a relationship with someone I care about. The relationship's well-being is preferenced over my critical voice; it's not that I work to silence myself exactly; it's that I don't let criticism become the primary value. I suspect that because online forums make space for critique of writings and disagreement over discourse, that gets valued over the relationships that might otherwise form and flourish among the contributors. I've not found online sites to be a place of forming friendship. I've met people online that I've become friends with offline, or in email. But the nature of the online forums don't, for many reasons, create safe-enough space for friendship to bloom, in my experience.

As part of my own effort to disengage from behavior that I now see as non-constructive and anti-revolutionary, I’ve decided not to engage in “snark”, let alone trashing, because I see it as part of the same cluster of cynical, self-protecting while hostile, anti-revolutionary practices that apparently passes for radical and profeminist behavior in lots of places (feminist and non-feminist). I used to direct snarky comments to white men on and off my blog, and I don’t any longer: a white man just submitted a comment to me, on an old post, about his view that misandry is a serious social problem, not as harmful as misogyny, but not non-existent either. I've heard similar things from so many white men that I've grown weary of responding. Often, in my weariness or my laziness, I might resort to snarky response. Because I'd be tempted to do so with this newest comment-submitter, I won't publish his comment and won't respond at all. His comment also violates some of my comment policy. (I don't publish pro-MRA positions here.)

I value direct, emotionally honest communication. And I also have complex PTSD which means that my feelings and reactions sometimes exceed what’s happening in the present. I can suddenly feel tremendously vulnerable or in danger. How I respond in those instances is sometimes out of proportion to what is happening before me because my history is dredged up and projected into the moment. I've often described this as "my past bleeding into my present". Due primarily to privilege, including access to mental health care workers who regard me as fully human because I’m male, white, and not poor, I have learned to identify when I’m triggered and have learned some methods for re-grounding myself in the present. But that’s not always easy or even possible to do. And I also see how, with my many privileges, I can too often get away with not taking full responsibility for my actions and pretend that other conditions are responsible for how I behave.

I have seen how white supremacy and male supremacy generate and exacerbate complex PTSD for white women, for women of color, and for men of color. I’ve seen how whites and men deny that our actions trigger distress and many other feelings and experiences in people we structurally, systemically, institutionally, and interpersonally oppress. And I’ve seen how, when whites and men are called out by women of color especially–almost always in ways that strike me as profoundly measured and respectful, that Calling Out is named many negative things by whites and men. Most of the things it is called effectively (and often enough willfully) work to further hurt, subordinate, and silence women of color. One of the things such Calling Out is called is “Trashing”.

For example, I’ve known whites who consider being named “racist” by a person of color to be a violent and inexcusable form of trashing. And the politics of what is considered violent is noted quite succinctly by the white male radical Derrick Jensen in his Premises of Endgame: “Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed [by oppressors]. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.” I thought about that as I was appreciating J.M.’s comment.

One of the requests I hear Joreen making is to not talk about someone’s ‘being’ and instead to critique the behavior or what someone is ‘doing’. This is consistent with my own values: challenge the behavior; don’t go after someone personally. And, when possible, try and hold the whole of someone’s humanity in mind and heart when offering critique. My values were learned mostly by studying and being around modes of critical engagement practiced by womanists and feminists. Alice Walker has been a significant role model in this regard. Her open letter to Tiger Woods is an excellent example. Also Flo Kennedy on horizontal hostility ["Women Against Women: Horizontal Hostility," domestic violence; "Sexuality '85" conference; Alabama NOW; Massachusetts; Ohio; Ontario; Wisconsin; Wyoming], Pearl Cleage on the necessity of oppressors listening to the oppressed-as-experts [see pages 32-33 in Deals With the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot], and Andrea Dworkin as evidenced in her address to allegedly anti-sexist men at a men’s conference.

With that in mind, I’ve also heard many times from women of color how whites and men try and control how women of color behave. They/we try and control how women of color speak, how they express their emotions, and, especially, how and to what degree they critique whites and men. Whites and men (and especially white men) also hold the unearned power to allegedly ‘accurately’ name what occurs, to construct and determine which stories comprise truthful history, and be the final arbiters of (white- and male-centric) justice on matters of social and interpersonal wrongs. As I see it, oppressive sexual and racial politics are at work when people with various forms of privilege agree to critique ‘trashing’ without also explicitly putting on the table the issue of how people with structural advantage and power get to name the behavior of those who are oppressed. In that context, Joreen's or my own priority to be critiqued on our behavior not on our personhood, when the person calling us out is structurally oppressed by us, becomes a secondary matter to oppressed people naming what is harming them in ways meaningful and helpful to them. Simply put, Alice Walker's level of grace and compassion in confronting Tiger Woods is hers to determine; it is not for him to require.

I just want to place that perspective front and center, with the intention of fully supporting your own concerns along those lines, L.

Finally, I'm wishing a belated Happy Birthday to Alice Walker! (Her birthday was February 9th.)

Remembering the Rich and Radical Political Life of Rosa Parks. Featuring audio of her, on what would have been her 100th birthday!

All that follows is from Democracy Now! (I only added links to the title of Jeanne Theoharis's political biography of Ms. Parks.) You may link back to Democracy Now! by clicking *here*. 

Happy 100th Birthday, Rosa Parks!

Born on Feb. 4, 1913, today would have been Rosa Parks’ 100th birthday. On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of resistance led to a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would help spark the civil rights movement. Today we spend the hour looking at Rosa Parks’ life with historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of the new book, "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks." Often described as a tired seamstress, no troublemaker, Parks was in fact a dedicated civil rights activist involved with the movement long before and after her historic action on the Montgomery bus. "Here we have, in many ways, one of the most famous Americans of the 20th century, and yet treated just like a sort of children’s book hero," Theoharis says. "We diminish her legacy by making it about a single day, a single act, as opposed to the rich and lifelong history of resistance that was actually who Rosa Parks was." We also air audio of Rosa Parks in her own words. In the midst of the boycott in April of 1956, she spoke to Pacifica Radio about the action she took. [includes rush transcript–partial. More to come. Check back soon.]

Filed under  Civil Rights, African-American History, Author Interviews, Jeanne Theoharis

Guest:

Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. She is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and has written extensively about the civil rights and Black Power movements.

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: A hundred years ago today, civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks was born. It was February 4th, 1913. On December 1st, 1955, when she was 42 years old, she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested, convicted of violating the state’s segregation laws. Her act of resistance led to a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would help spark the modern-day civil rights movement and launch Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We want to go to a clip of Rosa Parks, in her own words. In the midst of the boycott, April 1956, she spoke to Pacifica Radio about the action she took.

ROSA PARKS: I left work on my way home, December 1st, 1955, about 6:00 in the afternoon. I boarded the bus downtown Montgomery on Court Square. As the bus proceeded out of town on the third stop, the white passengers had filled the front of the bus. When I got on the bus, the rear was filled with colored passengers, and they were beginning to stand. The seat I occupied was the first of the seats where the Negro passengers take as they—on this route. The driver noted that the front of the bus was filled with white passengers, and there would be two or three men standing. He looked back and asked that the seat where I had taken, along with three other persons: one in a seat with me and two across the aisle were seated. He demanded the seats that we were occupying. The other passengers there reluctantly gave up their seats. But I refused to do so.

I want to make very certain that it is understood that I had not taken a seat in the white section, as has been reported in many cases. An article came out in the newspaper on Friday morning about the Negro woman overlooked segregation. She was seated in the front seat, the white section of the bus and refused to take a seat in the rear of the bus. That was the first newspaper account. The seat where I occupied, we were in the custom of taking this seat on the way home, even though at times on this same bus route, we occupied the same seat with whites standing, if their space had been taken up, the seats had been taken up. I was very much surprised that the driver at this point demanded that I remove myself from the seat.

The driver said that if I refused to leave the seat, he would have to call the police. And I told him, "Just call the police." He then called the officers of the law. They came and placed me under arrest, violation of the segregation law of the city and state of Alabama in transportation. I didn’t think I was violating any. I felt that I was not being treated right, and that I had a right to retain the seat that I had taken as a passenger on the bus. The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed, I suppose. They placed me under arrest.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Rosa Parks speaking in April 1956 in the midst of the Montgomery bus boycott. She had refused to stand up for a white passenger just a few months before, December 1st, 1955.

Rosa Parks is often described as a tired seamstress, no troublemaker. The fact was, she was a troublemaker, a first-class one. At the time of her arrest, she was secretary of the local NAACP. She raised money to defend the Scottsboro Boys in a rape case that was trumped up, attended trainings at the Highlander Folk School of Tennessee. In fact, she had sat down on the bus before and refused to get up for white passengers. When she died in October 2005, she became the first African-American woman to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

Well, I just recently sat down with Jeanne Theoharis, historian, author of the new book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. She is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College who’s written extensively about the civil rights and Black Power movements. I began by asking her to tell us the story of Rosa Parks.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: This is a story of a life history of activism, of a life history, as she would put it, of being rebellious, right, that starts decades before her historic bus stand and continues decades after. And so, very much what the story I’m trying to tell in this book is the story of that scope. It begins: Her grandfather was a supporter of Marcus Garvey, and so that is really where she gets her start, is with her family, her mother and grandparents. And they sort of inculcate her in a sense of pride and a sense that you demand and expect respect from people around you. And so, it is that spirit that she then brings into the world. She marries Raymond Parks, the first real activist she ever met.

AMY GOODMAN: Marcus Garvey was?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Marcus Garvey headed the Universal Negro Improvement Association. He was a Pan-Africanist and also a proponent of sort of black nationalism and black pride. And her grandfather was a supporter.

So, she meets her husband, Raymond Parks, and he is working on the Scottsboro case. This is 1931. And the Scottsboro case, these are nine young men, ages 12 to 19, who get arrested riding the rails. Right? This is the Great Depression. And very quickly, the charge turns to rape, and very quickly, they are all sentenced to death, except the youngest one. And so, a support movement grows up—

AMY GOODMAN: These are black boys—

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Black boys.

AMY GOODMAN: —teenagers, and white young women.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Girls.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Basically, these young boys are riding the train, like many people did. When they get arrested, it is discovered there are two young white women riding the train. And it is that moment where these nine young men—again, ages 12 to 19—where the charge then turns to rape. They were not originally arrested for rape. And so this support defense committee, this grassroots defense committee, grows to defend these nine young men. And Raymond Parks is part of that movement, and that’s what he’s doing when she meets him. And so, he’s sort of the first activist she met, and in many ways, that—her political development as an adult starts with sort of being a newlywed with Raymond and working on the Scottsboro case.

AMY GOODMAN: And what happened to the Scottsboro Boys?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Ultimately, they are not—they are not executed, and that movement really prevents that travesty of justice from happening.

So then, in 1943, she sees a picture of a classmate attending a local NAACP meeting, and she realizes that women can be part of the NAACP, and so she decides to go and attend a Montgomery NAACP meeting. And she’s the only woman there. And they’re having branch elections, and so she is elected branch secretary at her very first meeting in 1943. And that begins a decade of activism, right, before her bus arrest, where she is working with the NAACP.

And she’s working with a man by the name of E.D. Nixon. And E.D. Nixon is a sleeping car porter, and he’s active in the union of sleeping car porters. And he and Rosa Parks want to transform the branch into a more activist branch, and so he actually runs for president and wins in 1945. And he and Parks set about to investigate cases of white brutality, work on black voter registration. And this is very controversial. And in fact there is controversy in the branch. There are many middle-class members who oppose this. They try to unseat Nixon and, to a certain extent, Parks. But that does not work.

And so, for this decade before her stand, she is doing this very dangerous work. You know, I think we say NAACP today, and it sounds not so dangerous. But to be a NAACP activist in the '40s, doing what she's doing—she’s traveling the state, she’s taking testimony of people, she’s trying to get them to sign affidavits—that is extremely courageous work. And there’s sort of only a small handful of people in Montgomery, you know, sort of committed to doing that work.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how does this moment happen? Actually, as you point out in the book, it wasn’t the first time Rosa Parks sat down on the bus and refused to get up. But explain what was different, when she tried it the first time and when she tried it in 1955.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: So there’s a—right, as you mention, there is a longer history of bus resistance in Montgomery. There had been numerous cases sort of in the decade after World War II, before her arrest in '55, of people getting arrested on the bus. And she's very familiar with many of these cases, so she knows what can happen. A neighbor of hers in 1950 is arrested, thrown off the bus and killed by police. The young Claudette Colvin, in March of 1955, is manhandled by police when she is arrested for her refusal to move. Parks herself had made various stands on the bus. She abhorred the practice that many bus drivers insisted on, where black people would have to pay in the front, get off the bus, and reboard in the back of the bus. And she refused to do that. She had been kicked off the bus by this very same bus driver a decade earlier for refusing to do that. She had had trouble with other bus drivers. She describes some bus driver passing her by because he didn’t—you know, he felt like she was a trouble—you know, she raised trouble. So she had this sort of history of bus resistance. There is this larger history of bus resistance in Montgomery. And then we get to December 1st, 1955.

One other thing is, that summer in August, she had gone for a two-week workshop to Highlander Folk School. They were having a workshop on school desegregation. This is 1955. So, we have the historic decision in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education, but then the Supreme Court comes back in '55, right, and refuses to put a timetable on it, right? It's the historic words: "with all deliberate speed." And so, activists, like Parks, like Myles Horton and Septima Clark, who were running the Highlander workshops at the time—

AMY GOODMAN: In Tennessee.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: In Tennessee. This is a—this is a workshop to bring together people who want to push for and make a plan to implement school desegregation, because the court is clearly not going to press it forward. So she attends this workshop in August, and it is a very important and transformative time for her. She describes it as the first time she felt like she could discuss things with white people and not feel hostility. She’s obviously—there are 48 people attending this workshop. These are all people committed to this work of school desegregation. So, both—her own spirit really lifts. She talks about loving Myles Horton’s sense of humor, getting to just eat and be in a interracial space, that was a matter-of-fact interracial space, that just—that people just ate together, they shared rooms together, they sat outside together, that that freedom was also transformative, personally.

So she comes back, and then, in some ways, the atmosphere of the segregation in Montgomery, the conditions become harder to bear, I think. So, the evening of December 1st, 1955, she’s gotten off work. She actually decides to wait for a less crowded bus, so she goes to a drugstore, buys a few things and boards the bus around 5:30 at night. She sits in the middle section, right? One of the myths is that she was sitting in the white section; she was not. She was sitting in the middle section. The middle section was sort of a no-man’s land, in that the bus driver could ask you to move from that section even though Montgomery city code at the time said black people were not—did not have to get up out of their seats if there was no seats available. But bus drivers routinely violated that city code. So, that night, she’s sitting in the middle section. There are four black people sitting in this row. And at the third stop, the bus fills up, and there is one white man standing. And by the terms of Montgomery segregation, all four people will have to get up so that one white man can sit down. And the bus driver, James Blake, who, like all bus drivers in Montgomery, is carrying a gun, orders them to move. And she refuses.

He says, "I’m going to have you arrested." She says, "You may do that." He gets off the bus, and he first calls the supervisor, his supervisor. And the supervisor says, "Well, get her off the bus." The supervisor—I want to repeat that—just says, "Get her off." He does not say, "Have her arrested." Blake calls the police. The police come and evict her from the bus. And she believes the police don’t want to arrest her. It is Blake who sort of takes that sort of final historical step and says—

AMY GOODMAN: And he’s a white driver.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: He’s a white driver. All the drivers in Montgomery are white. I think one of the less-known facets of the Montgomery bus boycott is that it’s also pressing for black bus drivers. So, yes, he is a white driver. The police—she describes also, in those moments, while Blake is off the bus calling, people grumbling—right, people are clearly nervous. What’s going to happen? The police, you know, take her off the bus. Blake says he wants to sign a warrant. He’s going to come after his run to sign the warrant. And they take her to jail.

And she describes the moment in various ways. She describes it as she had been pushed as far as she could be pushed and that to get up meant that she consented to this, and she did not consent. But one of my favorite passages is also that she talks about finding her arrest annoying. And I think this speaks to how she does not necessarily believe that some movement is going to happen, right? She’s taking this stand because she thinks it’s important. But she finds it annoying because she’s actually working on this youth workshop for the weekend, and she sees this sort of as a distraction, and now she’s gotten herself arrested, right? And who knows how long this is going to take? And who knows what’s going to happen? And who knows if some sort of violent thing is going to happen to her? And so, in that moment, it’s a very hard moment, and then it’s also a moment where she in no way can see what’s about to happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeanne Theoharis is the author of the new book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. On this hundredth anniversary of the birth of Rosa Parks, we’ll continue our conversation in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Pete Seeger singing "We Shall Overcome." He wrote it with others, the enduring anthem of the civil rights movement, at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where Rosa Parks trained. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to our conversation with historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of the book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. I asked her about the fateful day, December 1st, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to obey a white bus driver, James Blake, who ordered her to give up her seat to a white passenger. I asked how long Rosa Parks was detained and what she did next.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: She’s held there about three or four hours. She calls home, and her mother is terrified. "Have you been beaten?" She says, "No." And so, her husband starts to get money together to come get her. Meanwhile, someone on the bus goes to tell E.D. Nixon. And E.D. Nixon calls, can’t find out any information, and then calls a white civil rights kind of couple in town by the name of Virginia and Clifford Durr and gets Clifford Durr, who is also a lawyer, to call and find out what’s happened to her. So, both Raymond Parks and Nixon and the Durrs all come to—down and bail her out. And they all go back to the Parkses’ apartment.

AMY GOODMAN: And the Durrs are white, famous civil rights activists.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: The Durrs, famous, whites, activists, leftists. So they all go back to the Parkses’ apartment that night to talk about what happens next, because Nixon, once he knows that she’s OK, is, in a measure, delighted, because she’s exactly the kind of person that is both respected in the community, she’s middle-aged, she’s 42, she’s super tough, right? so he knows—he trusts that she’s not going to flinch under the kind of pressure that’s going to be brought to bear. And so he really wants her to be a test case. And at first, her husband is very nervous both for her safety and their safety, but also because people hadn’t necessarily stayed together around other cases. So he’s worried. But they decide that she is going to go forward with this case.

So she calls a young lawyer and friend of hers, a black lawyer by the name of Fred Gray, to ask him to represent her. And Fred Gray calls Jo Ann Robinson, who’s the head of the Women’s Political Council, a professor at Alabama State. And the Women’s Political Council had been very active around these issues. And Jo Ann Robinson mobilizes that night, and they decide to call for a one-day boycott on the Monday when Parks is going to be arraigned in court. And so Robinson actually sneaks into Alabama State College in the middle of the night with two students and runs off 35,000 leaflets in the middle of the night. At about 3 a.m., she calls E.D.—this is Robinson—and says, "This is what we’re planning." And so, at 5:00 in the morning, Nixon starts to call some of the ministers in town to get them on board for this one-day plan. And it is not 'til midday, when Rosa Parks, as she often does, takes her lunch to Fred Gray's law office, that she finds out sort of what’s happening.

And so, they are planning, again, for just a one-day boycott, at this point, on the Monday. And people are very worried. Will people do it? Will people stick together? And then Monday comes, and it is this amazing—people stay off the bus. She describes it as sort of the best moment of the whole thing. And that night, at a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, people decide to carry on the boycott sort of—and make it, you know, a longer boycott.

AMY GOODMAN: And they choose a young minister who’s just come into town to be their leader.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Martin Luther King.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: They choose him for a number of reasons. In part, he’s young. He’s new. He’s not—he doesn’t have any—he’s not firmly aligned with one side or the other. His church is actually located right across—it’s downtown; it’s right across from the Capitol. So they have the first meeting—the ministers have the first meeting at his church on E.D. Nixon’s sort of idea, in part because it’s so centrally located, and again, because Nixon sees that King doesn’t have enemies in town. And then, it is at Holt Street where we get the first taste of sort of Martin Luther King’s sort of, you know, kind of political and oratorical brilliance, right? because the speech he gives that night is an incredible speech.

AMY GOODMAN: December 5th, 1955.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Rosa Parks helped to—helps to launch Dr. Martin Luther King.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yes, she does. Yes, she does. And in many ways, she—there’s this interesting moment. So, on Monday, right, she goes to court. She’s very quickly convicted. And then she goes back with Fred Gray to his law office. She doesn’t go back to work. She doesn’t go home. She goes to his office, and she answers—

AMY GOODMAN: She worked at Woolworth’s?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Ah, sorry, she worked at Montgomery Fair. She’s an assistant tailor. Montgomery Fair is the biggest department store in Montgomery at that point. So she’s—she’s working in the men’s shop. But she doesn’t go back to work. And she answers phones in Fred Gray’s office that Monday, and she doesn’t tell people it’s her, right? So this is sort of the paradox of how she negotiates this role. So she’s—she wants to be useful, so she’s answering all these calls. People are wanting to know what’s happening, what they should do. She’s not saying it’s her. And then, meanwhile, she stays and answers phones, while Fred Gray and Nixon and King have a meeting where the Montgomery Improvement Association will be born, right? So, in some sense, she—she’s sort of doing this kind of behind-the-scenes work while the kind of leadership is being formed on that Monday afternoon.

AMY GOODMAN: You talked about December ’55 coming just a few months after the murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi—

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —fourteen-year-old African-American boy, seared into the history and consciousness of this country, what happened to him. Describe what happened and how Rosa Parks was affected by it.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: The lynching of Emmett Till happens in August of 1955. But just days before she makes her stand, they’ve had this mass meeting. So, part of what happens is, the two men—because of the attention to the lynching, the two men are actually put on trial, which is sort of a rarity, but they are acquitted. This is Bryant and Milam. And so, a campaign comes up to kind of raise awareness around this, sort of organized in part by Mamie Till, his mother, and T.M. Howard. And so they’ve had—T.M. Howard comes to Montgomery just days before, and they’ve had this big mass meeting. And so, it’s very much on her mind. When she talks about sitting there in those moments, she talks about thinking about her grandfather, she talks about thinking about Emmett Till. And she’s—

AMY GOODMAN: When had he come into town, in Montgomery?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Howard comes in—I think it’s just literally four or five days. They’ve had this big mass meeting.

AMY GOODMAN: Four or five days...?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Before her arrest, so—

AMY GOODMAN: So at the end of November, right after Thanksgiving.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Exactly, exactly. And so it’s really fresh, right? And the organizing is really fresh, right? So, the lynching itself happened in August, but the kind of movement to sort of raise awareness is happening and has come to Montgomery just days before her bus stand. And so she’s very much thinking about that. And the bus driver says, you know, "You all should make it light on yourself and get up." And she thinks to herself, "This is not making it light on us as a people." And she’s thinking about Till, and she’s thinking about this kind of longer history, you know, and the Klan coming to her grandparents’ house, you know, and sort of coming by. And so, it’s very much kind of how she’s—you know, it’s with her that day.

AMY GOODMAN: The Klan came to her grandparents’ house?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: And her grandfather would sit out at night, often with a gun, to protect the house. And she would sometimes sit with him. After World War I, there’s this sort of backlash partly against black service during World War I, and there’s all of this kind of this uptake in violence in 1919, and so that also comes to Pine Level, to Alabama, where she grows up. And so she very much talks about remembering her grandfather sitting out on the porch with a gun, again, ready for sort of the Klan, if they come.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. When Rosa Parks died in 2005, there was a huge memorial service for her in Washington, D.C. She was the first African-American woman to lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda, then her body brought to a church before the big funeral in Detroit. And I remember the networks talking about Rosa Parks. I mean, there’s no question it was a big moment, and the media took notice. I remember CNN saying Rosa Parks was a tired seamstress—

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —she was no troublemaker. But Rosa Parks, as you point out, was a first-class troublemaker.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: She was.

AMY GOODMAN: So how did the image of her change? What did people understand at the time in 1955?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: I mean, I think there’s sort of two different things at work. Certainly during the boycott itself, they background Rosa Parks’s political history for the safety of the movement, right? Immediately, I mean—

AMY GOODMAN: You mean they put it on the back burner.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: And they play it down, right? They tend to talk about her as a good Christian woman. They tend to talk about her—and this is King, this is the black press, this is even Parks herself, right? They don’t tend to foreground her political history, in part because civil rights protests—this is 1955—are getting—you know, this is the Cold War. They’re immediately redbaited. All sorts of crazy rumors come up about her: She’s a communist plant, she’s an NAACP plant, she’s Mexican, she has a car, she’s not even black—I mean, just all manner of rumors in Montgomery spring up. And so, in part to counter the idea that these are outside agitators, outside forces, coming to—you know, coming to Montgomery, there is a tendency to talk about her, right, just as a kind of local woman, seamstress, Christian, right? So, that obviously then, in the decades afterwards, takes on a life of its own, in terms of her political history.

The other thing, I think, that contributes to this is Rosa Parks leaves Montgomery in '57 and spends the second half of her political life in Detroit, sort of fighting the racism of the Jim Crow North. And so, in many ways, she leaves the South as this movement that she's helped to galvanize sort of takes on, and she has this new place in which she’s sort of struggling in and part of a movement and that is not getting the same kind of attention.

But fast-forward—I think, by the '90s, right, and 2000s, right? In many ways, in the wake of the establishment of the King holiday, we see the civil rights—the history of the civil rights movement begin to get kind of reshaped and twisted into this very happy, limited story of a—this American movement that rises up and changes America, and then we vanquished racism, and there's this dreamy Martin Luther King and this quiet Rosa Parks. They’re sort of the two people we get in that narrative. And that’s a very happy story, and it makes us feel good about ourselves as a nation. And that story, I think, is part of what is at the center of the kind of national spectacle made of her passing.

AMY GOODMAN: Who was Rosa Parks’ hero?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Rosa Parks’ hero, she describes as Malcolm X. She very much—she loved, she admired, she had—I mean, she had tremendous admiration for King, but she describes Malcolm X as her personal hero. Rosa Parks was a lifelong believer in self-defense. Obviously she gets that from her grandfather. In many ways, Malcolm X reminds her of her grandfather. Malcolm X’s willingness to sort of talk about sort of Northern liberalism and Northern hypocrisy, Malcolm X’s very early opposition to the war in Vietnam—all of these things are very similar to her sort of political outlook, and therefore, I think, she very much looks to him.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s interesting, talking about Vietnam. You write about Rosa Parks as an internationalist.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right, right. I mean, she is a very early opponent of the war in Vietnam, as is John Conyers. And she—in many ways, she—she comes to volunteer on John Conyers’ very first campaign, right, for this new—

AMY GOODMAN: Longtime congressmember, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right. And he runs for the very first time. Michigan gets a new congressional seat in 1964 that looks like it’s going to, like, perhaps elect a second African American to Congress from Michigan. And this young civil rights lawyer, right, is running on this platform of jobs, peace and justice, right? So he’s running on a kind of anti-Vietnam platform in '64. Rosa Parks, very attracted to this, volunteers on his campaign in 1964 and gets Martin Luther King to come to Detroit on behalf of Conyers, right, basically prevails on King. King is staying out of doing this kind of political stuff; he doesn't. But he can’t say no to her. And this is a very crowded primary; eight people are running. Conyers wins by less than a hundred votes. And so, one of the things that he thinks really contributes is King coming, and part of what gets King to come to Mont—to Detroit, excuse me, is Rosa Parks asking him. And so, one of the first thing Conyers does is he hires Rosa Parks to work in his Detroit office. And he is very much in the forefront of kind of the opposition to Vietnam. And so—and she—and that’s—both of them are sort of working on that, and so she takes—she is part of that sort of—like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She’s supportive of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, of the Winter Soldier hearings that are held in Detroit.

AMY GOODMAN: The American soldiers who came back from Vietnam and talked about the atrocities they committed there.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right. And those hearings are held in Detroit, and then John Conyers actually goes—you know, is sort of one of the voices to kind of make—to bring those—bring the Winter Soldier hearings to sort of Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s when John Kerry became famous, as this soldier who’s returned and goes to Congress and testifies against the Vietnam War.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Absolutely, absolutely. And so, that happens in Detroit, and it happens, in part, through kind of Conyers’, you know, kind of work on it.

AMY GOODMAN: Why didn’t Rosa Parks run for Congress in 1964 when the second seat opened up in Detroit?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: She is not someone who seeks or wants that kind of public limelight. She finds her fame sort of hard to bear. She is a sort of stalwart activist. She is a steadfast activist. But Conyers talks about her speaking with her presence, that she went to tons of things, she did what she could do to support, you know, prisoner defense committees, to support the anti-Vietnam—all sorts of movements, but she is not someone who likes to be in—in the front, in the limelight, in the way that running for Congress would have been.

AMY GOODMAN: Historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of the new book, The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks, professor of political science at Brooklyn College, has written extensively about the civil rights and Black Power movements. When we come back, we speak with Theoharis about what happened after Rosa Parks was arrested and convicted in 1956, how she dealt with losing her job. This is Democracy Now!

Writings by Audre Lorde, including "Man-Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist Response" and "A Litany For Survival". Also, a new book of Lorde's writings, I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde !!

image of book cover is from here

Revised on the 26th , 29th, and 30th of August 2012, and December 2, 2015.

I just found a website that has a photocopy of Audre Lorde's classic essay from Sister Outsider, titled: "Man-Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist Response". If you haven't yet, I encourage you to read it and to read the whole book along with it. Here is the URL and link to that one chapter: http://www.scribd.com/doc/103750751/Audre-Lorde-Man-Child.

I have been saddened to see how many younger people online believe that radical feminist = white woman. I know that many, but not all, of the people publicly naming themselves radical feminist or the more contemporary and racially narrow term, rad fem, are white women. I've written about how I don't equate the terms: radical feminist and rad fem. I've hopefully respectfully challenged the white supremacy of white-majority and white-led organising by people who identify as rad fem *here* in an earlier post.

Of course most of the whites who organise politically are not feminists. They are anti-feminists, racists, and misogynists, protecting white male power at all costs. But unlike anti-feminists and other misogynists, rad fems and I share a lot in common: our critique of pornography and prostitution as male-protected and mass produced forms of men raping and enslaving women and girls; a serious analysis of human sexuality as it is constructed and acted out in heterosexist and male supremacist contexts; and a de-marginalising of male supremacy and patriarchy when analysing and challenging increasingly globalised systems of oppressive, terroristic, and deadly power.

In fact, many of the people who claim to be the definitive example of "human" are white men. And we certainly know that even though white men write most Western history books--that have systematically left out or distorted the accomplishments, the history, of white women, women of color, and men of color--that surely doesn't mean only white men are human. Nor is it the case that only white women are radical feminists, lesbian or not. Many of my role models growing up through my early adulthood were Black and Brown radical lesbian feminists.

My focus, here at this blog, on women of color is seen by some whites and many men as divisive. Some view this centralising of women of color at a pro-feminist website as one way to focus on the differences between women rather than the similarities. I hardly see how focusing on women of color is divisive. Nor do I see it as divisive to point out where white supremacy lives and breathes. Whites want to keep white power all to ourselves thereby dividing humanity into raced "haves" and "have nots". Exposing and challenging white supremacy is an effort to end divisions of social power among humans; its aim is to equalise the control of and the access to resources among humans, including intellectual resources.

Another way to approach the issue would be to ask: Is focusing primarily or entirely only on the written and other activist work of whites divisive? Because that's what most whites do, often thinking they are representing "all men" or "all women" or "all queer people" when doing so. So it comes across to me as problematic when a white person, in my case a white male, who doesn't wish to marginalise women of color is seen as promoting divisions among women. Why isn't this blog seen as unifying women by focusing on the work of women of color? And, if whites wish to deal with our white supremacy in public ways, how does identifying where it lives further divide humanity?

I'd argue that routinely and systematically ignoring, tokenising, or marginalising the activist work of women of color is divisive. It maintains white supremacy and male supremacy. So too does using terms like "radical" by whites who don't include "white" when naming ourselves. The name of this blog certainly participates in that pattern. It would visibilise (and challenge) whiteness more if I termed it "A Radical White Profeminist". It would also serve to make it visible as a particular and non-universal political condition.

I now consider any white person refusing or neglecting to name our structural location by race when we describe our political position, as supporting and reinforcing white supremacy. Were I to start my blog now, I'd name it with "white" being in the title.

I have grown up hearing Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith be regularly identified by whites as Radical Black Feminists or Black Lesbian Feminists. Mary Daly and Sheila Jeffreys have only ever been identified by whites as "Radical Feminists" or "Lesbian Feminists". I hope it's clear how that way of naming white people reinforces whiteness as somehow not worth mentioning. But the "worth", or value, of not mentioning it is the white power that is so well-protected in the practice of whites not naming ourselves with that term. This is a crucial, and often enough unconscious, practice of protecting the very brutal power underlying and enforcing unnamed whiteness. The brutality is aimed squarely at people of color, with especially horrific forms leveled against women of color.

Conscious or not, it is an undenibly political decision to not mention our whiteness as a structural place of power in a white male supremacist system. (This is not, as some have indicated, primarily an issue of naming one's "identity"; this writing isn't advocating what is sometimes termed "identity politics".) If it is not deemed collectively necessary for whites who name ourselves as "radical" to also name and own our own whiteness as a political reality, how do we practice being responsible and accountable to those we structurally oppress by race?

It's not a radical practice for white folks to "disappear" our whiteness in our writings and other work, in my opinion which has been informed by dozens of radical activists of color, most of them feminist. It's not even liberal. It's politically conservative; it has many of the same effects as mainstream neo-Conservative and more publicly marginalised White Nationalist agendas.

White males making our race invisible but our gender visible serves white and male supremacy because the two systems, particularly in the West, are inextricably linked and are mutually reinforcing. Both work together to oppress and destroy women of color. Put another way: let's consider white radical Andrea Dworkin's definition of "feminist" which has been summarised as follows: if it hurts women, feminists are against it. Surely white supremacy as well as male supremacy hurts women (of color). So to ignore race in one's feminist and pro-feminist work is to participate in the deeply racist practice of pretending women of color are not "women"--unless they, too, are somehow presented as unraced. Ironically, whites are very reluctant to do that. Only whiteness is to be systematically ignored-while-protected.

The same is true for men of color who name their race as a structural position of marginalisation and oppression but not their gender as a structural position of power over all women. Men of color not identifying their gender as a structural source of oppressive power serves not only male supremacy, but also white supremacy. Because protecting any male power, as such, bolsters white men's power as men, but particularly as white men.

As I see it and hear about it from radical and feminist women of color, those two systems of power--male and white supremacy--together with capitalism, are the main dividers of humans into--according to power elites--those who are meant to survive and those who are not.

This matter is addressed in those terms in at least two pieces of writing by Audre Lorde. One is in a speech in the book Sister Outsider titled "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action". This is also contained in another book discussed below. Another discussion of this theme is in a poem titled "A Litany for Survival", which may be read in full, along with several other of Lorde's poems, here.

Finally, I offer a link to a relatively new book (2009 hardcover, 2011 paperback), of Audre Lorde's work. The book is titled: "I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde", edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall.

 I have had the pleasure of hearing Johnnetta Cole speak, many years ago. Calling the three editors only "editors" would not be to understand their role in the creation of this book. Rudolph Byrd offers a significant introduction of the works contained in the volume. Johnnetta Cole offers a chapter in the section of the book called "Reflections", which also contain chapters by Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Gloria I. Joseph. Beverly Guy-Sheftall closes the book with her epilogue.