Colorful Prism Of Racism

A symposium at Harvard Business School delved into intersectionality—the seemingly obvious yet complex idea that gender interacts with other axes of inequality such as race, age, class, and ethnicity.

Language is an extremely finicky thing. Much like a snowball, a language picks up habits from the culture that uses it as time goes on, especially our really bad habits like racism, sexism, and homophobia. If a single word is enough to dismiss and disregard an entire population’s feelings, ideas, and humanity, you can imagine why those people would want it erased from society’s vocabulary.

Personally, I haven’t encountered that argument in the feminist blogosphere, and I would never make it myself. It’s the first lady’s life that sounds like the nightmare to me. You only need to spend one election season writing about Michelle Obama’s clothes to be caught in a fusillade of drive-by commenters’ hate speech. Yes, they’re only Internet trolls, but they’re digital traces of the simmering racism that makes being a high-achieving and high-profile black woman in America singularly frustrating. Cottle pays lip service to the racial limitations of Michelle Obama’s public persona, noting that some say Michelle “must tread lightly to avoid being stereotyped as an Angry Black Woman.” As if that were an abstract theory used to rationalize Obama’s frivolity and not a racist episode we collectively watched unfold over the past five years.

Melissa Harris-Perry has a conversation with famed author bell hooks on the evolution of the black feminist movement in America.

"I am in Great Britain today because I believe that the silent indifference with which she has received the charge that human beings are burned alive in Christian Anglo-Saxon communities is born of ignorance of the true situation. America cannot and will not ignore the voice of a nation that is her superior in civilization."

In 1893, journalist and early civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells crossed the Atlantic for the first time to deliver that sobering message to Great Britain. She had hoped to sway public opinion about the racial violence that plagued the U.S. The lynching of black men and women seemed to have become a sport among Southern white mobs — reaching a peak of 161 deaths in 1892.

And then in Zami, when Audre Lorde shares with us another memory, a memory of people spitting at her in the streets, I understood something. An experience of racism can involve the loss of the words to explain what is going on. It was a memory of her mother explaining to her that people were spitting into the wind because they were ill-mannered and rude, because the mother wants to protect her black child from the knowledge that those people are spitting at her, because she is a black child. I understood something. I understood that racism can be what happens right in front of us – in the direction of violence towards some of us – but also that we learn not to see it. We might learn not to see racism as a way of being protecting from racism: but of course we are not protected. We might not learn the word ‘racism’ or learn not to say that word ‘racism’ as if by not saying it, it might go away. Not naming racism as if racism is not going-on keeps racism on-going. This is why, in naming racism, we are always doing something. We need to find the words. Black feminism can be a way of finding the words.

From Black feminism as a Life-Line by Sara Ahmed. (via tamghrabit)

This is a story about intersectionality. It's going to displease a few people who don't know what intersectionality is, annoy a few people who do, and enrage a load of people who don't use Twitter. But I checked with my privilege, and my privilege said it was OK. (Don't know what "check your privilege" means? This might turn out to be a problem for you, too).

Last week, an argument on Twitter started in the manner characteristic of, possibly unique to, that medium. Someone called historian Mary Beard a racist. Helen Lewis, the deputy editor of the New Statesman, asked what made Beard a racist. A small but persistent Twitter intersectionality-core rounded on Lewis, accusing her of mindlessly defending the establishment against outsiders, effectively using her platform in the mainstream to defend racists within feminism from the critical voices whom feminism ought properly to champion and defend.