[image that illustrates the socially harmful power of white supremacy is from here]
Jeff has left a new comment on your post "To WHM who are dads: Make It A Happy Father's Day-...":
Wow! You have a very intense blog. I don't like your attitude (you sound just like any another jaded racist, but the message is clear. As a married "white" (who says I'm not a person of color!?? Actually I am a little bit pink) man, I am looking forward to being the kind of loving father you've described. I know what you are saying about the "WHM" thing, but my challenge to you is to not see it as systematized. That makes it sounds as if white men across the world have united to collude some global grab. This explanation is the easy way out and the easy way to explain why WHM have dominated modern times.
It is far more complex and, at the same time, much simpler to figure out. But I am not in your shoes and I cannot possibly understand what it is you think and feel. Attaining power is one thing, but I think what your referring to is the systems employed in order to try to keep the power.
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I respond as follows (which has just a couple of additional points from my earlier reply at the post where his comment also appears):Hi Jeff,
Intense is good, yes? :)
First, I do hope you are an awesome, caring, father who is fully supportive and respectful of the child's mother. I wish you all the best with that.
I assure you that my "attitude" has little to do with whites overtly or covertly dominating much of the world, or patriarchal atrocities existing, or gay men being beaten up by het men.
My question to you is by what means will white supremacy, male supremacy, and heterosexism end? What are the practices and perspectives that will accomplish this? What values? What methods of organising?
Your suggestion evades the question and helps ensure all those systems remain fundamentally in tact, so that the oppressive harm this blog centrally addresses will not be taken up by you.
This I know well: Western white het class-privileged men don't ever want to be seen "as a group". Identifying you as part of a group doesn't tell me much, really, about what sort of fellow you are personally--it doesn't tell me what your favorite color is or what your favorite foods and movies are, but it does tell me what privileges you have relative to those without them. And that constructs us, partly.
And, it tells me that I can put money on the fact that you haven't read these books: Yurugu, by Dr. Marimba Ani, and Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde. Am I correct? Please tell me if I'm wrong.
I'm going to wager that most if not all of your favorite books and movies have a WHM lead character or author. Am I wrong?
You being a WHM tells me that you or many of the WHM you know probably hold mistaken negative views of radical feminism as being "too often anti-man", and of lesbianism as "hot" for all the wrong reasons. Am I right?
That construction of you, of "your people", with power and privileges acted out interpersonally and bolstered institutionally, which includes your social status and position relative to those you structurally oppress does "exist".
I'm not making it up to indulge myself in a fantasy world, I assure you.
WHM supremacy exists in the form of particular shared and acted out values, behaviors, attitudes, and philosophies. One of the behaviors is to believe you, Jeff, are in no way responsible for ending rape.
Do you think women, collectively, have that luxury to assume "The heterosexual men will stop raping us. We don't have to challenge them about it. They'll just stop on their own."???
Let me ask you: what have you done in your life, in close and organised collaboration with other men with accountability to women, to ensure that rapes don't happen among your group of het men--among the het men you know and call "friends"? What have you done to stop white supremacist violence and bigotry, or, even, to stop racist joke-telling among all the whites you encounter? (Or is that only the job of people of color to attend to, as individuals?)
What have you done to challenge heterosexism's privileges and power?
What political philosophies do you most admire? I'm going to make an assumption here and I welcome you to set me straight, so to speak. ;)
The philosophy most admired by white het men is one of liberal humanist individualism, which supports white het men to only be socially discussed and challenged "as individuals" and erases from reality the REALITY that you are a group, a politically active group, not in a way that means you're making mobile phone calls to each other before you go to bed. But in ways that require you to not interrupt certain things "your people" do, that are oppressive to those of us who are not in your group.
No one is only an individual, even while we also are all individuals, in some regard. But if you think being the only white person in a group that is predominantly of color, or, even, all white, doesn't manifest in some ways that ensures the maintenance of white supremacy, it's your privilege that allows you to not know exactly in how many ways you actions or inactions do exactly that.
If you think being a het man doesn't play itself out socially in "gendered" ways, you're also not in touch with what het male privilege does to a person's identity and humanity and social behavior.
I believe you are misinterpreting the political function of me identifying WHM a group. It isn't to promote bigotry.
It's so I can track the ways that you, Jeff--if you are white, het, and a man--are embued socially with many forms of status and worth, with value and attributes that make your people's lives, collectively, easier than that of poor lesbian women of color. And that "show up" including in the comment you left here above.
What you probably know, but may not admit, is that your group is the only one that thinks it ought not be seen as one. Your group--WHM--is the only one that actually has sufficient privileges and social power to resist being seen as one.
Think about it: "White gay men are [ ]"; African American men are [ ]"; "Latina women are [ ]". You can fill in the blanks with what you hear all the white het men around you say.
What do WHM you know put in the blank spaces? Promiscuous? Dangerous? Uppity? You tell me. I'd say it likely depends on where you live and what time period we're talking about.
And if you're liberal, you probably won't want to admit you all do that sort of stereotyping and likely feel "bad" if you do. And if you're conservative you are more likely to feel okay and even proud of doing so.
You tell me what you witness among the WHM you've known for years. And how often you come into contact with extremely harmful misperceptions of "your group". I mean EXTREMELY harmful and DEEPLY hurtful misperceptions, that leave you depressed, feeling despondent, feeling so wounded you cry.
NO Black woman I know can pass through even one day without being cast into a grossly stereotypical box, a harshly negative light, having a mind-spinningly distorted view of herself reflected back to her by whites and men, that ISN'T based on her individuality. She can't pass through ONE DAY in society with that luxury that you are proposing I dignify you with, that society already dignifies you with.
You suggest not seeing WHM supremacy as a members of a system that benefits you. Why? For whose liberation? People of color? Queer people? Women? Or yours?
My point is that just about everywhere you go, among whites, among heterosexuals, and among men--and that's likely a lot of people you encounter in your life--you will primarily be seen as "an individual" in ways women, people of color, and lesbians and gay men are not, by WHM.
Any WHM who knows I'm gay carries assumptions to me about what that means, and they are almost always wrong. Every African American person I know, and every Black person outside the U.S., carries assumptions about what it means that I'm a U.S. white guy, and those assumptions are usually right.
You're expressing to me some resistance to being put in a box. I say, "Feel what that's like, deeply, and realise you can go through life mostly not being in one."
I don't believe one WHM group meets once a week in an office building or church basement--except to go to AA meetings.
I believe WHM meet casually and professionally all the time in ways that help reinforce WHM supremacy. And in ways that rarely challenge it, in part because you, Jeff, and so many other WHM, resist even thinking of yourself as "one of them".
See, you get to grow up and mostly not be "one of them". Mexicans in the U.S. have no such luxury (meaning, entitlement and privilege). Lesbians and gay men have no such luxury (entitlement and privilege).
It is more complex than one group of WHM meeting with the specific intention of preserving WHM supremacy, yes. But it's not so very complex that you are rendered ONLY an individual with no culpability, no responsibility, in the project of either enabling or eradicating WHM supremacy.
Does that make sense to you?
I'm not saying you are only a stereotype. I'm saying you're no less of one or more of one than anyone else. And therefore why should you get to be thought of qualitatively "different" than most of the world's population of poor people of color who never get portrayed in Western white media as "only individuals".
And I'm saying that WHM attitudes such as yours, here, contribute to reinforcing WHM privileges and oppressive power. That you've done that, here. With your one comment in ways you don't even recognise.
An attitude that contributes to the maintenance of WHM supremacist violence and discrimination is you feeling indignant when someone sees you as "one of them", and when anyone at all asks you to be responsible with the privileges and entitlements you have that you likely couldn't name for me right now. But prove me wrong: write back with fifty ways you are privileged by being a WHM. I love to be proven wrong by WHM. But when I've challenged WHM in the past, here, I never hear back from them. Is that a "group" behavior?
P.S. Oh, and on being "pink". Dude. Really. You have white privileges in a racist society, not "pink" ones. That makes you white. Sorry to bust your pink-self bubble.
Welcome to the world of raced identities. Tell me if you were in Apartheid South Africa--or, if you are currently in South Africa, does your nation divide people up based on how pink they are? I'm guessing not.
And I do welcome a reply.
t Patricia Hill Collins coined the term "Matrix of Domination" to describe the way the specific forms of privileges fit into a larger system. The example that is given in "
What? So I could not, for instance, say to a non-white male "you ought not beat your wife"? Or are you saying I don't have the necessary lack of privilege to label things as atrocity? Help me out here, your non-sequiturs are getting out of hand.