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| 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.).
