On the Persistent Erasure of Women of Color (and Other Sisters and Brothers)

William Blake:  "Europe Supported By Africa and America."
Oh, the irony. The story of our lives.
I will have many occasions to use this image in the future,
and much to say about what it represents.

It's been a rough start to the year for members of marginalized populations, particularly for people of color and members of the LGBTQI community, and especially for women of color, however they identify. The past few weeks, though, have ratcheted the racist noise level way up past the threshold of pain, a result of a confluence of several incidents and events.

I'm going to address several of them in turn (which means that this will be a long post), and I'm going to do so in plain English, with some language variants. We'll get to those in a minute, but what this means, from the outset, is that a lot of the folks who read this post are not going to like what I have to say — and I'm not gonna hold your hand through it all. No punches pulled, no blows softened, although none, frankly, will be inflicted, either, as you'll see provided you can squelch your defensiveness long enough to approach these words honestly and to contemplate the factual nature of what's presented here. It's not going to be a personal attack on you for being white, regardless of what some self-styled celebrities in online spaces like to pretend is the case. It's going to be an explication and explanation of what the reality is, within the dominant culture of what we know as the U.S. (which is, necessarily, "white" culture, and mostly cis/het, as well) for marginalized populations. And as a woman with cis/het privilege, I'm going to do so largely via the lens that life has afforded to me personally, which is one of race. This is not to exclude (or, to use a term you'll see a lot of here that seems to have twisted the white liberal world's knickers so thoroughly, erase) members of LGBTQI communities and populations. But it is not my place to appropriate their narratives and to presume to speak for them, and so I am not going to arrogate to myself any [nonexistent] right to do so. I am, over the days and weeks to come, going to point you to online spaces in which LGBTQI women of color tell their own stories and share their own lives and identities, so that readers will be able to learn from those whose stories they in fact are to tell.

Now, about some of those language variants: Educationally, I caught the first real wave of any size of what is now known loosely as "critical theory" — critical race theory and critical gender theory, or studies, specifically. At that time, of course, they were both largely termed "deconstructionism," and their best-known proponents were an array of largely white (and in some instances, already dead) European males. Oh, there were women, and especially women and men of color, who'd been saying these things loud, long, and in great breadth and depth, but it wasn't given the imprimatur of ivory-tower [ahem] respectability until white men made their names on it.

The concepts involved really caught traction in the 1990s, and since then, it's developed into a full-fledged field of study, one with, of course, its own specialized jargon. Think of them as clinical terms (medicine) or terms of art (law) — highly specific to the field, yes, but also simply everyday language within that field. There's nothing magical about them, nor anything particularly difficult. Besides, "liberalism" is supposed to welcome the notion that life is a process of learning, one that's supposed to challenge, right?

Right?

Oh.

I've been thoroughly disabused of that notion over the last few weeks. I knew it already, of course; we all did. But recent weeks have given us the spectacle of respectable mainstream [white] liberalism proudly flaunting all of its conservative biases and bigotries on full and flamboyant display, not merely staking out its turf as masters of the political zeitgeist but challenging anyone not in their camp to fall meekly in line or step off as unworthy. 

In light of this, and in light of all the willful misinformation and deliberate shoveling of ignorance and worse that's filling online spaces, including those spaces occupied by those not white (and especially not white, cis, and het), I'm going to deconstruct (yes, there's that word again) this hot mess.

As I do, be prepared for some things: While I know a lot of the jargon (and there's more, more current, that I've missed in recent years), and I will use it, this is not going to be an academic treatise. The lives of people of color are a constant process, and actualized identity, of code-switching, and I will do plenty of it here. So you'll be taken between dissertation-speak and ordinary speech (what outsiders regard as slang) with no warning and no explanation, and you'll manage those bumps in the verbal road just fine, trust me. After all, we're forced to live our lives this way, every minute of every day; white folks can handle reading it on a screen for a few minutes.

Also, to lay the groundwork for anyone coming at this without knowing who I am: I am mixed-race. Red, white, and Black. It's what my "L'il Bro," with the same ancestry in differing proportions, calls "hitting the 'New World' trifecta." And unlike some of my relations, I drew the longest of long straws when it comes to the privileges, benefits, and downright luxuries that accompany perceived whiteness in this society. I have fair skin and green eyes (well, they've changed color over the years, and as I've aged, they've turned amber with dark blue outer edges, but what people "see" is "green," just as with my skin, most "see" "white"). I can "pass" in virtually any environment — although to be brutally frank, my entire life has been one of presenting people with plain old confusion. They look at me and initially assume they're seeing "white," but at the same time, something's off; they recognize something on a visceral level that their eyes don't process. And, of course, it changes their behavior accordingly (oh, yes, indeed, it does). And let me stipulate for all the records that I don't hate white people, and I'm not self-loathing. What I am is unusually clear-eyed about who I am and where I come from, something that tends to be true of people of color where it tends to be manifestly untrue of white folks. Something else that tends to be true of us? We understand who y'all are and where you come from, too. We understand it better than you do. We have to; it's a little thing called survival.

So when I talk about white privilege (and, no, I will not put that in quotation marks for you, because it is a thing, simply an objective fact of life in this society), I'm talking about it as someone who also has a lifetime of lived experience of it — in addition to a lifetime of lived experience of the racial discrimination that perforce accompanies who I actually am. This is by way of warning: Don't even try the tired old argument that there's no such thing as white privilege in the U.S., because in addition to its, you know, actual, factual existence apart from the comfortable shibboleths of equality this society loves to repeat to lull itself back to sleep, I've lived it. And I've had it wielded against me as a weapon. Daily.

Now, on to the current series of unfortunate events (a/k/a racism and other bigotries, a/k/a just another day in the dominant culture that is called the U.S.).



EVERYBODY'S RACIST

No, I'm not talking about the Broadway number. I actually hate that song, because it diminishes the nature of the problem, trivializes it, gives people a way to dismiss it as something oh-so-cute but unaddressable, gives people an out. No, I'm referring to the real down and dirty thing.

We begin with first principles, and these are truly fundamental. At bottom, in this society, everybody's racist. You, me, everybody. No, don't shine me on about how you're so not racist and how dare I suggest such a thing, because that's crap, and we both know it. In a society birthed from genocide and midwifed by slavery, one that over the course of centuries has still flatly refused to come to terms with the slightest substantive portion of its murderous origins, it's flatly impossible for anyone in it not to be racist.

Now, technically, from a purely definitional standpoint, it's not precisely "racism" (usually) when it occurs between marginalized populations of color; our peoples don't have the structural power and authority needed for it be classified as true racism. It's prejudice, bigotry, yes. But for ease of discussion, we'll simply let the label stand.

Racism is, in this country, a state of being that frankly isn't chosen; it just is. We are born into it; we live immersed in its toxic miasma; we die without having freed ourselves of it. Under such conditions, it takes a conscious effort of will simply to recognize, to identify its existence (hint: everywhere) to identify the spaces and place and faces and forms in which it manifests in ways striking and subtle, externally-imposed and wholly structural, shockingly flagrant and virtually invisible all at once. 

And it's not a condition that applies only to white folks, although they are the ones who benefit from it almost entirely, and who do and should bear the burden of its dismantling. But people of color born into a society like this? How can we not be racist? Some of us make a conscious effort to decolonize our minds and spirits, to dismantle the structures that seek to hold us in thrall to an ugly societal system of racial poison. But for many people of color (and people in other marginalized populations), getting through one more day alive and [relatively] intact in mind, body, and spirit takes as much or more than the collective resources available to them. Expecting critical-theory analysis of their existential selves is a bit much when, at the best of times, you're making not much more than half of what white male counterparts make. And we're talking averages here, not hard numbers, which are far worse for people of color regardless of gender nearly across the board than they are for white women and white men (the exception is Asian Americans, whose income levels are competitive with those of white folks).

But we've all grown up in this mess, and we all have to work at shedding its toxic residue. 

For myself, one of the dynamics I find most difficult is race-based bigotry and hatred between Native folks and Black folks, for what should be obvious reasons. And it's rampant, even within our own families. But beyond that, there are so many, many resentments that get distilled down to race, even when race really has relatively little or nothing to do with it. Of course, sometimes, race does play a significant role, and those dynamics are that much harder: here, for example, the resentments between the local indigenous population whose lands these are, who were forcibly colonized and displaced half a millennium ago by ancestors of the local Hispanic population. The Hispanic racism aimed at Indians, on the other hand, is more complex: part resentment at the guilt of having what they have thanks purely to colonialism; part resentment that the Natives refused to be conquered and simply go away with all that existential noise that serves as a daily reminder of that guilt; and here in this region, seemingly almost uniquely, a form of internalized racism that refuses to acknowledge its own indigenousness, insisting on being called [European, i.e., white] "Spanish" when every look in the mirror proves the lie of the label. 

And sometimes, it's a pretext, a diversion, a ringer, an episode of displacement for something else entirely, as in the situation involving a guy I dated some years ago: Native, and hated Black folks (and not realizing my own ethnic make-up). We didn't date long; he let the mask slip fairly early. And in the middle of a rant about "those people" (Black folks), he flashed back to an incident during his days in-country in VietNam, when he, like the white soldiers, was forced to shave every day that it was possible to do so, but the Black soldiers in his Army unit were given a pass and allowed to let their beards grow. It was a health issue, but to a young Native man conscripted by a government not his own for a war he didn't believe in for the sole purpose of killing other people of color half a world away — after having his head forcibly shorn of its long traditional hair — the seeming unfairness of it not merely rankled, but festered, and forty years later, it had long since turned into something much more vile. His real beef was with the Army regs in the first place, but he displaced that anger onto a much more convenient target, what he perceived as the underserving recipients of an unfair advantage. He never forgot, only stewed on it until it transmuted into a truly ugly hatred of all things in any way related to African Americans, and four decades later, he was a towering bigot where Black folks were concerned.

But here's the dirty little secret of growing up in a racist society as a person of color: We're racist against our own, too. Oh, it's [mostly] unintentional, unconscious, even. But having grown up in a society geared specifically to teaching us from the womb that we are "other," we are "less than" — it would be a miracle if we hadn't managed to internalize some of that poison. And there ain't no miracles here. [To be clear, I'm not talking about the phenomenon known as "reclaiming: e.g., the practice of a marginalized group taking a slur or a racist dynamic and inverting it, claiming and owning it in a way that turns it back on the oppressor. That is wholly valid, necessary, even, in a culture like this one. It's also a topic for another day, but we'll get there at some point.] But I can't count the number of times I've been shocked out my complacency to hear people I call my own use labels like "shiftless," "lazy," "drunk," "savage," etc., to refer to others of our own in both of my communities of color. And, then, too, there are the times when I'm shocked by the same stereotypes arising seemingly out of nowhere in my own brain. 

It's like the dynamic that occurs when someone mentions a generic professional: doctor, lawyer, architect, engineer. And your brain immediately summons an image of a white male suit. Where does it come from? Oh, we know where it comes from; it comes from centuries-long ancestral and existential immersion in an unjust society, in one that elevates such false tropes the better to secure a false and unearned primacy of place. 

And what do you do when that happens? What you should do is sit down, take a moment, figure out where, precisely, it came from, and then investigate your mind and soul for the why. Until you do that, you can't begin to address it, much less claim the mantle of anti-racism. And it's uncomfortable — oh, hell, yes, it's uncomfortable. It dredges up ugly from your subconscious that you, if you're honest, always sort of knew was there, but since you didn't have to see it consciously, you could pretend it didn't exist. And then you have to figure out where your brain went so wrong that it was actually internalizing these things, thinking them, even if not out loud, where it came from, where to put it. And thus begins the process of decolonizing your mind. We'll get to decolonization as a sub-topic later. But it's a perfect segue to our next sub-topic.

RACISM DOES NOT REQUIRE INTENT

I have this argument with white folks all the time. Frankly, liberals are by far the worst about this, if only because a lot of conservatives will freely admit that, yeah, they hate [insert marginalized group here]. And this is something that white liberals have got to get over if this society is ever going to make any progress in combating racism.

Racism does NOT require intent. Period. This is not an opinion; it's a simple statement of fact, and the sooner people realize that, the sooner we can all move forward. Words, acts, structures, all of these can be thoroughly racist, and yet there may not only have been no intent to be racist — the actual intent involved may have been to do the exact opposite. But the end result is still racist, and when called out, it needs to be addressed and ameliorated accordingly.

To explain how and why this is the case, let's take something entirely neutral, from an example a friend of mine from an online community, Leesa Brown, offers:  I step on your foot. It hurts, and you yell, "Ow! You hurt me when you stepped on my foot." What's the proper response here?

It should be easy, right? I can say, "I'm so sorry; I didn't mean to step on your foot and hurt you, but I apologize for doing so." Good? To most people, just fine.

Now, suppose I said, "Well, I didn't intend to step on your foot, so I couldn't actually have stepped on your foot, and I couldn't actually have hurt you. So there's no need for me to apologize, because I didn't intend it." Meanwhile, your foot still hurts; hell, maybe I was wearing steel-toed workboots and I broke one of your toes.

Now, what are you gonna say if I come back at you with some nonsense like that? Yeah, that's what I thought. But somehow, when it's racism involved, people seem to think that the only thing that matters is intent. And often, it's the least relevant part of the whole picture, as we'll see when we get to the recent nonsense involving Patricia Arquette and her defenders.

But here's another dirty little secret: Very often, among the people who protest the loudest about "intent," guess what? Scratch the surface a millimeter, and bingo! That intent really was there all along, usually accompanied by a whole host of noxious stereotypes and racialized resentments (the same holds true, of course, for sexism and misogyny, as well as for bigotry based on sexual orientation and gender identity, ability/disability status, or religious and spiritual traditions). But being able to say (or being able to convince yourself that you're able to say), "I didn't intend . . ." is taken as a free pass to say and do whatever you want, regardless of impact.

And impact is key: It's why the law recognizes discrimination and other violations rooted in disparate impact, and does not [always] restrict recovery to instances of disparate treatment. Unfortunately, the law has a long way to go, and in recent years, we've regressed on a number of fronts. As is always the case with marginalized populations, progress made in systems built and maintained by the dominant culture is a dance of one step forward, two (or more) steps back, incrementalism at its most frustrating. Which leads to our next topic.

WHITE PRIVILEGE IS A THING

Yes, it is. It's simply a fact of life in this culture, which was founded and built entirely on white privilege, and dependent in equal measure on ripping away the privilege and status and indeed very existence of the non-white to sustain its own existence.

If you are white, denying the existence of your white privilege is like denying that you breathe oxygen, or that water is wet, or that the earth revolves around the sun. It's regressive to the point of mythological absurdity. It's also not something that is the fault of any one person alive today . . . except insofar as said person refuses to recognize it and take steps to ameliorate the problem. For a problem it is. 

Whiteness is a construct, just like race is a construct, but in this society, they are both very real (and often to people of color, very deadly) things. I'm not going to debate the terminology with you; if you're stuck on that, you have no argument; you're just filibustering to avoid dealing with the real issues. Ain't nobody got time for that anymore.

But in the U.S., if you are white, you already enjoy certain foundational benefits that, while they may well be invisible to you, nevertheless exist, and exist to the detriment of non-white folks. And this, as we'll see later, is precisely the crux of the problem: This culture is normed on whiteness, on white experience, and, indeed, on white privilege. If you live in this country and you are white, you can go through life without ever really having to address the fact that you are living on stolen land from a people that those you call the "founding fathers" tried to exterminate, and built on the backs of another group of people who they brought here in shackles and presumed to "own" like a commodity. [And that's just the barest outline; the murderous, genocidal outrage of both dynamics can't be expressed in a sentence or two, and is best left to later analysis.]

With what we do here, there have been many opportunities to have gentle and superficial forms of these discussions with white tourists. Every once in a while, they meander into something a little deeper. Once, a white couple who came into the gallery were talking to me about this society's ghastly history with regard to our own peoples. At one point, the woman said to me, "You guys must hate white people." She didn't mean it as an accusation; she was using shorthand to say, "Considering all our ancestors have done to your people, and that we continue to do, it would be understandable if you hated all white people." And, indeed, she followed it up with a statement to the effect that if she were in our shoes, she probably would. 

And so I grabbed the opportunity. I said to her, "No, we don't. What we do want is for white folks in this country simply to realize that all of the privileges and benefits they enjoy, their very existence and ability to live here in this place, was gained by that history, by the invasions and wars and massacres, by the lynchings and murders and rapes and episodes of torture, by the robbery and theft and appropriation and attempted extermination of our peoples. Once people understand that their existence is based on that, it opens up a way for them to understand our existence and our needs today."  

She got that. And I know she took it away with her, something that she will relate to other people when she talks about her visit here.

I'm not going to dwell on this particular topic. As I say, it's simply a fact of life in this society, and with the hindsight of history, those who continue to deny an obvious and fundamental fact of life will eventually be consigned to the same dustbin as Galileo's persecutors and prosecutors. For now, I want to get to more recent happenings, but to do that, I need to define some terms, lest I be dismissed [oh, irony] as an "elitist ivory-tower academic," as actually happened this week to several other activists and commentators of color.

INTERSECTIONS AND INTERSTICES, INVISIBILITY AND ERASURE

I've written about these phenomena lo, these many times already — too many times, but since the need never seems to abate, I have no doubt that I'll be writing about them many more, too.

One of the recent events that sparked much merriment in the vein of "laugh so you don't cry" was the whinge of a white woman radio-show host, an alleged liberal, about an "erased intersection" — a term properly used in a Tweet by a Black commentator, one to which she took great offense and which she then flogged incorrectly for days. We'll get to her in a while, but I feel compelled to point out here that had she actually permitted the Black woman she subsequently invited onto her show (allegedly to explain the phrase "erased intersection") to speak without constantly talking over her in defensive denial, she might have learned the actual concepts involved, to wit, "intersectionality" and "erasure."

Now, I'm not going to spend a great deal of time on these definitionally, nor am I going to go and find you some sort of peer-reviewed academic definition by a white "expert": If you're reading this, you have just as much access to The Google as I do, and if you really cannot accept definitions given by people of color, then you can go do your own digging to try to find an alternate definition that is a more comfortable fit for your particular stage of existence. What I am going to do is to put into plain English what these terms mean and how they relate to each other in terms of analyzing existence and cultural dynamics from the viewpoint of a woman of color in this society, for an audience for whom such terms may mostly (or entirely) new and unfamiliar. [And if you're an academic or an activist who specializes in these subjects, then, yes, I know I'm grossly oversimplifying here, and I'm omitting a great deal that would necessarily be included in an in-depth discussion. See above about "audience." Also, space concerns and attention spans.]

If memory serves, "intersectionality" was first coined somewhere around 1989 by a Black woman to explain where her own privileges (and lack thereof) met, joined, crissed and crossed with her other privileges (or lack thereof). Here's an example, using myself: I am a mixed-race woman, far less white than of color, but who can pass easily for white. I therefore have, in a sense, white privilege, although unearned even in senses that white folks can't fathom. I also do not have white privilege to the extent that my identity as a Native woman with a not-insubstantial amount of Black ancestry is recognized. Since I am also a woman, I do not benefit from binary-gender privilege in a culture that remains dominated by men. As a heterosexual ciswoman, however, I am afforded vastly greatly privilege on any number of fronts, structural and otherwise, than my brothers and sisters who identify as LGBTQI. And so my privileges, in one sense, exist at an intersection of [erroneously-perceived "white"/]het/cis/woman. My lack of certain types of privilege converges at an intersection of non-white/woman. There are others, too (ability/disability status, religious/spiritual tradition, so-called social class, income level, etc.), but these are where the rubber meet the road in my daily existence.

The whole point of recognizing intersectionality is to get people to understand that 1) privilege is a thing, 2) it is not uniform nor all-encompassing, 3) people can have privilege in some areas and not have it in others, and 4) at those intersections, some people who fit into multiple categories do objectively have it better or worse than others. 

Here's what I mean by the latter: I hear from white folks all the time, "I'm not privileged! I'm poor, and I don't have it any better than you do!" First, see above with that nonsense, because whatever your individual circumstances are, if you have whiteness, you have the foundational privilege of this culture. Second, and this is key to understanding the entire analysis, across the board: These terms are not coined to apply, in every possible permutation, to every person on an individual basis; they are coined for the purpose of analyzing group dynamics and impacts. And so while, generally speaking, when I am seen as merely a part of the group labeled "women" [taking the indicator of the week], I might be expected to earn anywhere from 78-82% of what "men" earn, if I am instead seen as part of the category labeled "Black women," I can expect, on average, to earn only 64% of what "white men" earn. If I am seen as part of the group "Native women," that number drops still further, to less than 60%. And if I were part of the ethnically-undefined category under the heading "transwoman," my earning power drop by nearly one-third after transition. If I were identified as a Black transwoman, wage inequality might very likely be a secondary consideration, because I would face an unemployment rate double that of the overall transgender population, and four times that of the general population of the country. It's hard to demand pay equity when you can't get a job in the first place.

Oh, and about that "men" designation? It shows the great flaw in not factoring intersectionality into your analysis. Because while "men" in the my specific examples above refers to "white men," public discourse often shortens the expression simply to "men," implying that the numbers are static for men across ethnicities. But when broken down by race, LGBTQI status, or disability status, those numbers change drastically. Just to take race, Black men earn 74% of the income of people in the category labeled "white men"; Hispanic/Latino men, only 63%. (Both earn less than white women, as do Native men.) And so, it becomes impossible to have any kind factual analysis, much less any kind of honest discussion, when intersectionality is ignored.  

Still the term "intersectionality" has become a catch-all for concepts and ideas to which it doesn't really apply. It's why, in describing myself, I rarely use it; I use the term "interstitial" to describe myself instead. It's intentional, and I've written about why here before, at considerable length. But for myself, someone who has been treated her entire life as invisible on nearly every front, who has seen herself systematically erased from existence in context after context, I've never felt that I existed much at "intersections." No matter how many aspects of my identity criss and cross, people still don't see me, not even when they crash into me. And so I have embraced the gaps, the spaces between, the netherworlds unseen and unrecognized by the categories this culture demands, the places where my essential self lives, and occasionally even thrives.

Which brings us to invisibility and erasure. 

I've had too many occasions recently to write about both. Both dynamics are rampant in this culture where marginalized populations are concerned, both are run of the mill and par for the course to an extent that the dominant culture doesn't even see that it doesn't see us. [Which was, of course, precisely the problem with Patricia Arquette's comments.]

As I've noted elsewhere, I've spent my whole life pointing out that, even in allegedly "liberal" circles, we Natives are the "invisible minority" (and, yes, I recognize that "minority" is a god-awful word, and about the only time I use it is to make this particular point). I'm not going to rehash all that here; you can read my other work on it, if you're so inclined. But we are peoples that, in the minds of the dominant culture, exist mostly as historical oddities and stereotypes; to the extent it realizes the fact of our existence at all, it's merely as fodder for appropriation, for theft, for mockery and minstrelsy and worse.

But "invisibility" is a phenomenon against which all marginalized populations struggle. The one group that has made real strides in this area is "women." By which this society refers to "white women." In mainstream discussions of "women's rights," to say nothing of "feminism," it's all normed on the experience of white women, and mostly middle- to upper-class white women, at that [Lean In, anyone? Sandberg wasn't writing for the likes of me, nor was The New York Times enthusiastically covering it for women like me.] It's the mechanism by which Patricia Arquette, in demanding pay equity for the women from the Oscar stage, systematically erased women of color and women in the LGBTQI communities.

Yes. "Erasure." I know; I know. You thought it was a '90s Europop duo. You didn't think you'd have to get your head around it as an anti-racism concept.

Well, if you're going to be able to think critically about these concepts and dynamics — and especially if you're going to don the mantle of "Anti-Racist" — then you're going to need to understand this one. And it's really very simple, but it pisses white folks off to no end, and especially white women, witness this week's concerted attacks on the people of color and LGBTQI folks who spoke up against it.

Here's the root of it: The entire dominant culture is one of erasure. Hell, it's founded on erasure. Beginning with Contact, and the immediate attempts to kill or at least convert the indigenous population (all for the most venal of motives, I might add), this society's history has been one of systematic erasure, and its workings have been like in character and effect.

It's a very convenient practice: If there's something ugly in your societal family tree, simply erase it from the chart and then everyone can pretend it never existed, never happened. Then we can all get on with the important work of American exceptionalism.

Except we refuse to be erased.

Bringing us, at long last, to recent events.

ERASURE IN PRACTICE AND PURSUIT: KTZ, MADONNA, PATRICIA ARQUETTE, NICOLE SANDLER

Now, the four names listed above are only the immediate examples that have sucked the oxygen out of online spaces over the last few weeks. There are so many more examples, from the stealing of Native children from their families and identities to the appropriation of mascotry and pop culture to the plagiarizing and outright theft of the intellectual and physical property of women of color to . . . oh, so much more. I've had my own run-ins with the phenomenon throughout my life, but perhaps most infuriatingly in the last year or so, and especially in recent months, when I've found that certain spaces have simply removed me from the historical record without blinking and that people who are actual frauds have stolen actual physical and cultural property from me and used it as their own. I awakened this morning to find that women of color had once again been wholly erased from an online space that arrogated to itself the right, in the voice of one white woman and one white man, to lecture about stealing from and erasing . . . you guessed it: women of color. 

It's a cultural and societal system and structure that considers it perfectly acceptable to claim the work and, indeed, the very identities of women of color for its own, to use and to sell for various forms of coin, to receive credit and to be hailed and heralded, to possess like any piece of property. It's why a fierce Native woman activist can pour her heart and soul and labor into a project mapping the continent's missing and murdered indigenous women, only to find that a dominant-culture institution of higher learning stole her work and put its name on it, then told her she should be grateful to them for it.

It's why people who have no right to speak for particular communities, as actual members of those communities can tell at a glance, can arrogate to themselves that right while stealing the work of those communities activists, then gin up dominant-culture support with shouts of "lateral violence!" and turn the whole thing into a virtual event that garners the applause of . . . yup, the dominant culture itself.

It's why the actual "lateral violence" in these situations is fostered and goes unchecked, as some individuals become so accustomed to the limelight, so culturally blinded by its glare, that they appropriate the work of others and then demand exclusion of those others. It pits members of marginalized populations against each other for resources and exposure, and appeals to the basest of dominant-culture egotism, encouraging an ugly dynamic of ostracism and exclusion within communities, the worst kind of minstrel's jig.

It's why celebrities like Eve Ensler can hijack a movement of a quarter-century's standing, derailing a Native-founded and Native-led focus on the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women in our communities, diverting attention and resources to her own appropriative and thoroughly colonialist paean to her own ego, all well co-opting and claiming and colonizing the very bodes of women of color herself.

It's why KTZ, a European design house, thought it perfectly acceptable to engage in the worst of catwalk colonialism at New York's Fashion Week. It wasn't enough that they paraded their models down the runway in faux-Native dress paired with headgear in the style of Confederate officers and Indian killers. It wasn't enough that they stole Lakota beadwork, sacred Diné yeii, and even an actual dress design from an Apsàalooke/Northern Cheyenne designer (a family design that belonged to her great-grandmother, no less), nor that they used [pretended to use?] "human bones" coupled with their allegedly Native designs. No, the head designer, who, of course, has shown not one white of remorse nor even offered the most artificial of apologies, actually promoted the event by describing it as “a tribute to the primal woman indigenous to this land, who evolves into a sexualized, empowered being."

Got that?

As a Native woman, I'm "primal." With, apparently, all the baggage, all the dehumanizing associations that accompany that word and its family members. I also apparently haven't yet "evolved" (more of that whole "primal" thing, doncha know), because I haven't yet snapped to the need to wear the ostentatious bits of feather and fringe (and human bones!) on offer by this white man's design house. 

But more than that, once I see the error of my ways and do "evolve," then — and only then, apparently — will I become both "sexualized" and "empowered."

Gah.

Let's take the last one first. You know what, white man? I'm plenty empowered. Not only do I not need you to do it for me, you couldn't possibly do it for me. You have not the faintest understanding of what it means to be "indigenous," much less to be an "indigenous woman," still less what it means to us to be "empowered." The only thing you've managed is to try to strip away our power by stealing our identities, and, in some cases, our sisters' actual property.

But the worst is that whole "sexualized" thing. Really? Coming mere days after all the #MMIW activism, even in places like Manhattan, and your response is tell us that we need to be sexualized? As though that isn't what white men have done to us, and continue to do to us, since Contact. As though they haven't warped our language to create specific racialized sexual slurs reserved just for us. As though they didn't, in the course of massacring our ancestors, amputate our genitals for use as sacrilegious "medicine bags" and more. As though Native women do not already suffer the highest rates of sexual violence of any ethnic group on this continent — and unlike other ethnic groups, sexual violence inflicted overwhelmingly by white men.

And that's only KTZ. Comes now, only days alter, a report of a white designer sending his models down the runway in Blackface at Milan's Fashion Week. And since then, we've seen two other hipster white guys operating under the design house name DSquared2 launch their own display of catwalk colonialism under the hipster usage of a genocidal slur: #DSquaw2. While, I might add, appropriating the work of yet another Native woman designer. 

But you know what? I sort of expect that from clueless white men. I don't excuse it one white, but I've come to expect that behavior. From women, yes, white women, one would think we had a right to expect at least a modicum of solidarity.

Not so much, it seems.

One again, of course, Madonna is in the news here, to the surprise of exactly no one in our communities. This is, after all, a woman who, like Gwen Stefani, made a career out of appropriation. In Madonna's case, she also made a career out of exploiting men and women of color in other, more pernicious ways. Take a look at her video history. Even the other night, when she fell backward down the stage at the Brit Awards, it was the same-old/same-old with her: Virile-looking young men of color, in this case, dressed in animal costumes, bowing down before her. Her Great White Savior complex has always been on loud and proud display.

But she strayed into Arquette territory recently, in a particularly hypocritical fashion. After exploiting Black History Month and the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by visually comparing herself to Dr. King and to Nelson Mandela in a photo array — and worse, doing so by using Photoshopped images of their faces bound and silenced by black leather reminiscent of the lash — she attempted to score off Black folks and gay folks while complaining about discrimination against women of a certain age (i.e., against her, specifically). To quote her precisely:

"No one would dare to say a degrading remark about being black or dare to say a degrading remark on Instagram about someone being gay," Madonna continues. "But my age – anybody and everybody would say something degrading to me. And I always think to myself, why is that accepted? What's the difference between that and racism, or any discrimination? They're judging me by my age. I don't understand. I'm trying to get my head around it. Because women, generally, when they reach a certain age, have accepted that they're not allowed to behave a certain way. But I don't follow the rules. I never did, and I'm not going to start."

This, from the woman who last year Instagrammed a photo of her own son and hashtagged it "#disnigga."

And, of course, it's all utter bullshit. "No one would dare to say?" They dare, and the do, every minute of every day. But of course, since the world revolves around Madonna and her own precious white womanhood, her experience is of course the worst thing ever. [And, no, I'm not minimizing the fact that no one should be mocking others on the basis of age or physical appearance. But Madonna is about as far from "unprivileged" as it gets these days, by every measure, and even when she was at her least privileged,she always had her whiteness to provide baseline protection that her counterparts of color still don't have. [Nicki Minaj, anyone? How about Beyoncé? These are women at their top of their very high-powered careers who still take it on the chin every single day purely because of their Blackness in a white-normed culture.]

Since then, she's doubled, tripled, quadrupled down:

“Gay rights are way more advanced than women’s rights. People are a lot more open-minded to the gay community than they are to women, period.” For women, she feels, the situation has hardly improved since 1983. “It’s moved along for the gay community, for the African-American community, but women are still just trading on their ass. To me, the last great frontier is women.” 

Coming from Madonna, the analysis seems significant. I ask her to elaborate. “Women are still the most marginalized group,” she says. “They’re still the group that people won’t let change.” 

And again, we see the recurrent theme of "all the women are white."

It's interesting (and by "interesting," I mean it's really about as ordinarily predictable as it gets) that her latest remarks coincide with those of Patricia Arquette.

Now, y'all are gonna need to miss me with defenses of Patricia Arquette, period. Because as soon as you set yourself to talk over me about how she "meant all women," and how we're "misinterpreting" her statements, and so on and so forth, you're part of the problem. Because, you see, we didn't actually misinterpret anything at all; indeed, we see the full picture here far more clearly and in greater focus than she and her defenders ever will. We live it. But even if, for the sake of argument, we granted that misinterpretation might be a remote possibility (and again, it's not, but this is for argument's sake), see above about intent.

In fact, what Patricia Arquette was such a perfect example of erasure — and then followed it up with a clarification of her earlier remarks that was worse — that it will provide fodder for theses and dissertations and monographs and classroom lectures and panel discussions probably for decades yet to come.

Here's what she said from the stage:

"To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America."

That's bad enough. It was full of erasures of women in various categories, many of them, yes, intersectional categories, and we all felt that omission at levels fully conscious and bone-deep.

Not all of us have given birth. Not all of us our taxpayers (in the sense the expression is used in modern public discourse, which invariably refers to federal income taxes; many poor people, of course, pay no federal taxes, although they bear a disproportionate burden when it comes to other kinds of taxes). Not all of us are citizens of this country, which has a substantial population of immigrants, both documented and un-. After all, "we are a nation of immigrants," aren't we?  Or so white folks are so fond of telling me, never mind that some of my ancestors predated theirs by ten millennia or so, by the most conservative reckonings.

But the tell was the last clause in that sentence: "we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights." Really?

I don't think so.

In fact, I know that's not so. Because the one category of voter (beyond the obvious one labeled "white male") most likely to sell out women's interests? White women. Not so much of that "fighting for everybody's else's" there.

Of course, there are other problems. She assumes that "equal rights" have been achieved for all these other as-yet-unnamed groups. But of course, they haven't, as noted above. Arquette wants to talk about pay equity, to take just one rights issue? Fine, let's talk about that. Again.

White women make, depending on the source, between 78 and 82 cents for every dollar white men make. As an ethnic group, they are surpassed only by Asian American women, who, by some estimates, make .90 on the white man's dollar. Women of other races? Not so much.

Most scales put Native Hawai'ian and Pacific Islander women's earning power next in the running — at a comparatively paltry 65 cents. That's followed by African American women, who come in on average at .64. The next two categories tend to be somewhat interchangeable, depending on the source used, but they tend to peg Native women's earning power at 59 cents for every dollar a white man makes, and 54 cents for Hispanic/Latina women. I have seen estimates of .52 for Native women, and one thing these analyses all omit entirely is the rampant unemployment (on some rezes, as high as 96%) among Native women and men alike. Huge segments of the Native population have been erased from the numbers entirely. And, of course, none of this reflects the numbers for women who are lesbian, gender-queer, intersex, or transgender. They're worse yet at the intersections: Add color to any of those four categories, and the numbers drop more drastically yet, especially for transgender women of color (who, incidentally, are among the most likely to be brutalized and murdered). 

Still, Arquette's on-stage comments were, frankly, par for a very white course, and not especially unusual but for their prominence. Their clearly planned nature coupled with the size of her virtual stage made them more problematic than had she simply uttered them casually in a single interview — in large part because they threw into stark and international relief the dichotomy between dominant-culture perceptions of the American norm and the everyday lived reality of our lives as women of intersectional populations. Worse, they pointed up that difference in another glaring way: Witness the rowdy cheering that accompanied Arquette's remarks, and then contrast it with the subdued, merely polite response to the critically-important speeches by Black musicians John Legend and Common about the over-policing and carceral control exerted over Black and brown bodies in modern America at numbers higher than when slavery was still legal. They made those comments in the aftermath of a heart-rending, soul-searing performance of music from the Academy-spurned movie Selma, and while white men were filmed crying at the music, the message was evidently far less significant to their lives.

And then Arquette felt compelled to expand on her remarks backstage.

"So, it's amazing, but it is time for us. It is time for women. Equal means equal. And the truth is, the older women get, the less money they make. The more children ‑‑ the highest percentage of children living in poverty are female‑headed households. And it's inexcusable that we go around the world and we talk about equal rights for women in other countries and we don't ‑‑ one of those Superior Court justices said two years ago in a ‑‑ in a law speech at a university, We don't have equal rights for women in America and we don't because when they wrote the Constitution, they didn't intend it for women. So, the truth is, even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface, there are huge issues that are applied that really do affect women. And it's time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we've all fought for to fight for us now."

Really?

Apparently so.

So it's not simply that, as the saying [and part of the book title] goes, "all the women are white; all the blacks are men." It's that we don't really exist in any real way in her worldview, except insofar as we are there to serve her ends. Because, after all, she and her white woman peers have "all fought for" us, and of course, we've never done any fighting for her [them].

Sorry; that's some weapons-grade horseshit right there.

One of the things that has been most infuriating in this whole mess is the ahistoricism involved. Or perhaps I should say historical revisionism, since much of it seems just a tad too convenient to be honest ignorance. I can't count the number of white folks over the last few weeks who have thrown "Suffragists!" "Abolitionists!" in my face, as though both categories comprised entirely white women who did nothing but work selflessly for women of color and non-cis, non-het women. 

Which, of course, is absurd on its face, but the reality is actually far more sinister. Take a look at what the women of that period alone had to say about people of color (and LGBTQI women didn't even enter in the equation, or anyone's thoughts). And this conflict continues in the "feminist" movement wholly unabated; it was a primary schism in second-wave feminism, and the reason why so many women of color refuse to use the term "feminist," preferring instead to use Alice Walker's coinage of "womanist." There is a current of entitlement, of quite literal white supremacy, woven so deeply into the fabric of feminism as to be un-unravelable. It's always "Let's talk about our [white, middle- to upper-class] issues and concerns"; "let's make sure we're 'respectable'"; "let's not take on fights that aren't ours"; "let's not involve ourselves in issues that will make other [white] people uncomfortable." It's "No, really, let's not, because if we get ours, then eventually, you'll get the same thing." Trickle-down theory worthy of the most Reaganite Republican. 

Trickle-down morality, too, and a wholly unfounded assumption that what white women want is by definition of course what every other woman, regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender identity, economic status, or other classification both wants and needs. And, of course, if we don't want it, then we're just too benighted to know that we actually need it anyway, and should listen to those who know what's best for us. They are the norm, after all.

Irony, that: Women who identify as out and proud feminists, who insist that they're "speaking for all of us" and that "we're all in this together," engaging in raw paternalism over those they Other.

And patently false. As I pointed out above, it's white women voters who sellout other women. Women of color and LGBTQI women are far and away the most reliably liberal, most consistent voters out there. We are the ones who have fought unreservedly for reproductive rights, for assistance for women with children, on the front lines of domestic and sexual violence, and, yes, for wage equality and every conceivable women's right in existence. We do so in coalitions and alliances with white women who e know neither get nor want to get our issues, much less our lives and daily experience. Yet with have partnered with them, however uneasily, through it all for the greater good for, yes, genuinely, all of us.  

And apparently not satisfied with having already made a bad situation worse, Arquette proceeded to make it worse still. She lashed at out her critics on Twitter:

"I don't care if people are pissed The truth is that wage inequality adversely effects women."

"Don't talk to me about privilege. As a kid I lived well below the poverty line. No matter where I am I won't forget women's struggle."

"I was a working single mom at 20. I know how hard it is to pay for diapers and food .Explain why women should be paid less?"

Distract, divert, deflect.

Not one critic has said that women should be paid less. No, what we're saying that is women of color should be paid more, too. But what we're also saying is that you can't erase us entirely on the one hand, making counterfactual statements accusing of us not supporting "you" while you've done so much for "us," and then think you can slide by with the casual appropriation of stock phrases and a few photos. And we're also saying that no matter how poor you were, you always had your baseline societal shield (and sword) of cis/het whiteness, something not afforded to the poor in LGBTQI communities and communities of color, many of who have experienced poverty [and still do] that makes your poorest days seem rich by comparison.

Oh, and before you even think about going there, miss me with Arquette's use of Black children [and adults] as props. I don't care how much she's "done for Haiti." That's admirable, and I'm glad people are helping in Haiti, when they're actually helping, that is. That's a subject about which I've done a not-insignificant amount of writing elsewhere, and most of the white "help" for Haiti is more about the people doing the "helping" than about the people of Haiti, and it shows in the results (or lack thereof). But that's another topic for another day. It's reprehensible in the extreme that a wealthy and powerful white woman who can't take criticism for her full-scale erasure of people of color is now using photos of Black children to manipulate her audience, all while she, like Madonna, continues her doubling, tripling, quadrupling down unabated.

And so, we come to Arquette's fierce defenders. They are legion, and they cut across political, gender, and age lines. One thing they nearly all have in common, though, is whiteness. And while I tend to expect snide responses from a lot of men when it comes to such issues, to see the Harriet Christianing of white feminism at us has been . . . disheartening, to say the least.

For those of us who travel in political circles, whether in tangible or virtual spaces, this has become especially fraught. People with whom we have worked for years, who we considered friends and more, have turned on us, individually and collectively, with absolute ferocity. They have othered us to an extent and with an open pride in the act that we really would not have expected. And they have made it abundantly clear that there is no room for us in their "liberalism," their "progressivism," their "Left."

The most obvious example from my own experience as a reader and participant in certain online communities involves Nicole Sandler, a white woman who hosts a political radio show (and sometimes fills in for Randi Rhodes). In her eagerness to defend Patricia Arquette from what she insists is unwarranted "attacks" from people of color, she wound up launching an all-out, full-fontal attack on the person, the reputation, and the livelihood of a man of color: a Black activist, fellow radio-show host, and all-around great guy, Elon James White. 

God, it has been an ugly week.

It all began when White offered an opinion, in the public sphere that is Twitter, in response to Sandler's full-throated defense of Arquette during her show on day after the Oscars:

Sandler took offense. Apparently, great offense. But publicly, she agreed to take him up on his proposition that she actually interview one of Arquette's critics who was a woman of color, in hopes of explaining why so many of found the actor's comments so objectionable. The following day, she "interviewed" (I use that term loosely) lawyer/writer/activist Imani Gandy, who blogs under the sardonic name AngryBlackLady. For those unfamiliar with her, she is indeed Black, and a woman, but not really particularly angry; indeed, during this "interview," she showed superhuman patience and restraint, despite constantly being interrupted, talked over, and otherwise treated with dismissiveness and frank discourtesy. It soon became clear that her role on the show was not, after all, to explain the situation's dynamics from the point of view of a woman of color, but rather, to serve as a foil for Sandler's own self-righteousness and denial.

Still, they seemed to part on decent terms.

Then Sandler posted her take online, which was . . . counterfactual, to put it mildly. And so, of course, Gandy defended her own position and explained what actually occurred.  

And Twitter blew up.

Sandler went after both Gandy and White publicly, both with dogwhistles that were nonetheless loud and clear and with unusually blunt language more suited to the dulcet tones of you average rabidly conservative commentator than one who professes to espouse the principles of "liberalism."

That's not all she did.

She took to Twitter and to her show's own Web site, publishing a long screed and shortened 140-character snippets, slamming both, but especially White. The title of her little treatise was "They Sure Told Me!"  

This was ugly stuff.

There came a point when White was left with no practical options but to go public with Sandler's behavior, and so he did: She had been contacting his employer to complain about him, in an apparent attempt to get him fired.

Hmm. Depriving someone of a job because of a disagreement doesn't sound particularly liberal to me. Even less so when the person doing the complaining was so manifestly, obviously, wholly in the wrong.

She didn't stop there.

He belongs to a number of progressive organizing lists, and she sent e-mails to all of them repeating her complaints about allegedly "racist" mistreatment at the hands of a Black man, their colleague. 

As host of This Week In Blackness [TWIB] and as media director for Netroots Nation, White also manages the soundstage for radio shows that participate in that annual conference. According to Sandler, she'd sent an application to be permitted to use the stage for her own show. She sent a letter to the Netroots Nation management, openly suggesting that White would deny her application because she was white. In other words, she tried to suggest that White is a racist, and a reverse one at that, without even having the courage to own the words themselves.

And she continued her Twitter trolling until the pushback against her falsehoods became so great that she downed her own Twitter account, thereupon announcing publicly that Black folks had "bullied" her off Twitter. 

Later in the week, she invited Jay!, one of the hosts of Best of the Left Radio, onto her show, allegedly to help her try to sort out what happened and explain where everything went off the rails. Oh, did I mention that Jay! is white? 

Interestingly, Jay! took a very calm, civil, reasoned stance. In other words, he explained the dynamics at issue in the same way that Gandy and White did. And when push came to shove and he was forced, in the public sphere of Sandler's own radio show, to take sides, he made it clear that White was not at fault.

The result did not go well.

Since that time, White's Twitter feed has been filled with support from people of all ethnic backgrounds and identities, which is encouraging. It's also been filled with racist trollery and bullying of particularly ugly varieties. He's been called a racist, a bully, a harasser, an abuser(!); he's been accused of "fracturing the Left," of being the reason "why we can't have nice things," of being anti-women, of being hypersensitive, of being addicted to outrage, of looking for attention, of sins cardinal and venal and everything in between. He was accused of starting a race war. In another "laugh so you don't scream" moment of brilliance, White and his followers turned it into a trending Twitter hashtag, #RACEWAR, and made a joke out of something deeply, disturbingly ugly, complete with merriment about whether there would be potato salad and what soundtrack and dance forms and types of transit were appropriate.

The commentary from the supposed "Left" has been enlightening to many (although I was not at all surprised, because I see this same dynamic play out every day where people of color and our issues are concerned). And while it is likewise not especially surprising to me, it has been disappointing to see that White's Netroots Nation employers have not stepped up with a vigorous public defense of their colleague.

And while a not-insubstantial number of white women who are furious that the legitimacy of their primacy of place in Feminism™ is being challenged are attempting to pre-empt the voices of women of color yet again by complaining that they are "being chased off the stage," women of color actually are being chased out of the coalition. I can't count the number of women of color who I respect, strong, assertive women who know their will and make their voices heard, announce that they are simply done, that it has been made clear beyond doubt that there is no room for them at the table, no seat for them in the circle. Their identities and existences erased, their voices deliberately muted, for all practical purposes, to silence, they can see no point in remaining present where we are so clearly not wanted and where those in authority insist we are not needed. 

And why would we be needed when those in authority, as they so hastily assure us, mean "ALL women" — even when they cannot be bothered to raise their heads for one moment, look around beyond the faces that look like their own, and realize that we exist? We are present, have been present from the outset, have put our own heads down and sublimated our own often far more immediate, more exigent needs and circumstances to work for some "greater good" that allegedly will exist for "all of us" . . . and yet, in 2015, we are not merely invisible, but being actively, purposefully erased from the scene.

If your own circle of "feminist" activists suddenly seems a bit whiter, a bit more homogenous, a bit more narrowly focused, well, this is one reason why.

Do not, for the briefest of moments, think that this means that activists of color will drop the fight. We won't, of course. We'll continue as we always have, doing the work, fighting the battles, prosecuting progress with every fiber of our collective being. But if we do so in ever more segregated spaces, in the year 2015, look to your own leadership, to those in positions of power and authority within FeminismTM, to see why.

If, as the old saying goes, your liberation is bound up with mine, then come along and work beside us. But if the coalition is to be mended, strengthened, if our mutual and collective liberation is to move forward together, the changes required to make that happen begin and end with the dominant culture.

__________________________________________

End Note: I will have much, much more to say on these issues in the days and weeks to come. I will have more on each of the incidents itemized here, both in terms of details and as illustrations of specific problems in the so-called anti-racism movement of the dominant culture's self-styled "Left." Among other things, they have proved to serve as useful examples of how not to be an ally in the anti-racism and social justice movements. In the coming weeks, I'll be launching an occasional series here dealing with exactly those dynamics.

Except as otherwise identified with images, links, and quotes, all content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.