feminist blogs in english

I've been wondering what to say about this whole mess--the mess that is U.S. media, the mess that is electoral politics and political appointments, the mess that is white het male supremacy in the U.R.A. I've spent many hundreds of hours speaking in depth with many women, African American women, about this country and what it so effortlessly and intentionally does to anyone Black and female, that I've not really known what I should say about this, as I knew many women bloggers of color would be addressing this matter in all its political complexity. So, with that as a preface, I'll speak a bit about what I understand to have played out before our eyes this past week, informed as it is by those hundreds of hours of conversation, with me mostly listening.

I first came to awareness of this "story" seeing "the clip" of Shirley Sherrod delivering a deviously extracted sliver of her speech at an NAACP banquet, about how (in my words) she came to understand that not only was this country white supremacist, but that it's classism meant that poor whites has more in common with poor Blacks than with rich whites, despite what rich whites would have us all believe. Watch as poor and non-poor whites blame Mexican immigrants and poor Black and Brown people for their social ills, and you'll know that rich white men's media works well to bind the oppressed to the oppressor in ways that make sturdy solidarity and trustworthy alliance among the oppressed very difficult indeed.

Now, being a radical and all, and being fed up to here [cuts hand across the air a foot above my head] with liberalism in all forms, I was hoping, against all hope, that the media might be making the point that white supremacist racism takes its toll on people in many ways, and one of those ways is it causes one to doubt that white people are human. I grew up, a white child in a white area, hearing that the White Man is the Devil. I didn't understand until later how true that is.

When I say the White Man, this is not making a determination about the value or depth of the souls of every pale male in North America. No. It is not "bigoted" or "prejudicial" as the white conservatives and white liberals might politically correctly decry. To speak of the White Man is to speak of a governing idea, embodied in practice, that whiteness and manhood are supreme and ought reign this land forever. To speak of the White Man as the Devil is only to note the cruelty and callousness, the sadism and the condescension that comes with occupying this political location with so little owned awareness of what that means for those who do not. I mean on one level, Andrew Breitbart knows full well what being a white het male supremacist means. He's no Glenn Sacks, but between and among them there is this noxious denial of privilege and power; no matter how much media Sacks controls, he'll cast the white het man as the noble underdog in any social justice battle.

Socially and collectively we are not encouraged to speak of this, really, honestly--especially if we are of color in the U.S., and particularly if we are women of color. This means that only portions of truth about white male supremacy may be known, because as long as men and whites refuse to hear what women of color have to say, the rest of us will be ignorant as hell.

"The Devil", coming from this white Jew who doesn't believe in such things as "heaven" or "hell" other than what appears before us on Earth, is a term that stands for something; it isn't literal. The Devil isn't a wicked being, cast out of a white-male sky-god's left hand, forever cursing those who were born left-handed to be sinister (sinestra in Italian means "left"). The Devil is a way of referring to something evil that is going on. What "evil" is, may be known to us in many ways. I don't believe it is a force without social structural roots. I don't think there is evil in the wind, for example, other than the evil of a very industrialised world that is killing the planet and changing weather patterns, making rain storms, droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes more frequent and more intense.

The wind that current concerns me is that emanating from the proverbial buttocks of white het male supremacists who choreographed a mass media assault against a very real human being named Shirley Sherrod. They did this willfully, with malice aforethought. White het men like Andrew Breitbart, the execs at Fux News, and Tom Vilsack did this. Others participated. The men at the NAACP. The U.S. president's spokespeople. Andrew got that sudden blast of foul wind blowing but it needed currents to carry it as far as it went.

The foul wind blowing across the land these days is an old breeze--it flows out of Tea Partier Andrew Breitbart, but he pre-exists him also. It is back for another go at swaying and shaping the current crop of saplings in our collective imagination, distorting reality in such a way as to make us believe the most absurd things. Things like this: Black women have revolutionary power in the U.S.

As has been noted here before, one stream of gaseous, noxious fumes emanating from WHM supremacists is the idea that the Black woman exists for everyone else uses and abuses, and ought never be in service to herself. Every African American woman I know has been systemically and chronically mistreated by Black men and other men of color, by white women, and by white men. Somewhat paradoxically, Black women are too often regarded as white men by Black men--as the ones with more power, as Black men by white women--as "the dangerous dark other", and as mammies and hos by white het men. These groups, who each in their own ways oppress Black women, confuse race as gender and gender as race in precisely the wrong ways, and as a consequence they project all the powers of their own position onto Black women.

Black men and white women can disagree about who has more institutional power in the U.S. (That rich white men have the most is beyond dispute.) The Democratic battle in early to mid 2008 between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was experienced by me, a white male, as a socially debated sure-fire test of what you believed the lesser of two evils was: having white privilege but being a woman or having male privilege but being Black. (That there was, in fact, a Black woman running for the same office seemed utterly on many, especially the media.)

The mathematics of such calculations tends to forget that oppression isn't only additively accrued, it's exponentially experienced. So, as I understand it anyway, being a Black woman in the U.R.A. means that one doesn't "just" deal with white supremacy and male supremacy every day. It means that one also deals with the sexism that is infused in white supremacy, and the racism that is embedded in male supremacy. To be a Black woman in the U.S. is not to endure what Black men and white women endure, only. It is also its own marginalised political position, its own stigmatised structural location, with an institutionalised national identity infused and  influenced variously by the political meaning of many other things, such as class, age, and level of heteronormativity as defined and enforced by WHM supremacy.

One's own life, of course, is another matter. One's life is, at least partly, one's own, shaped by region, one's parents, upbringing, the media and events of the era, and the alchemical, spiritual combination of one's own personal characteristics, temperament, talents, and individual ways of being. As Toni Morrison said, to a white Southern man named Charlie Rose on his talk show (and I'm paraphrasing), To know I'm Black is to know nothing at all about me. To be a Black woman in white supremacy, if I've been listening closely, is to have layer upon layer of white male supremacist sordid story-telling loaded up in trucks and dumped on you daily, with little to no relief.

As some bloggers have noted*, what gets dumped is dug up from polluted ground that's been lying around all smelly and foul, for centuries now. It's not the blood of savagely massacred American Indians--through to this very hour, that fouls the ground, nor the blood of raped and lashed slaves--who exist also in this day and time. It's the blood and bodies of evil white men who controlled everything from the start of "this great nation" who in life and in death have made it their mission, an emission, as it were, to pollute the Earth with the Western capitalist societies that currently, and for some time now, ride roughshod across it, with spurs on its heels, always pounding, digging into the body of the Earth, trying to get more and more from it.

The BP oil spill disaster and what happened to Shirley Sherrod are manufactured from the same massive cloud of destruction, and its name is the White Man, a simultaneously mythic and manipulative political figure as straight as an arrow, piercing the souls of anyone who stands in his way, or who attempts to speak the truth about who he is that he projects onto everyone else: a dangerously powerful and contemptuously bigoted form of being that achieves and maintains power only through the systematic subordination and destruction of the people who he believes are not as good as him.

*See these and other posts at The Crunk Feminist Collective, That Girl Has Issues, and Race-Talk for much more detailed and careful analysis of this whole matter.

[This post was revised later on 24 July 2010, with a partial list of WOC blogs added, and text added by me in bold and in brackets.]

When I think about the problem of men falsely accused of rape, one story leaps to mind: the story written about, magnificently and movingly, by white Southern writer Harper Lee, in her classic book, which was published 50 years ago this year--less than a couple of weeks ago--titled To Kill A Mockingbird.

There's a Southern white woman allegedly named Connie Chastain, and she's no Harper Lee in the social justice or writing departments--for those who haven't seen the movie or read the novel recently, Ms. Lee, a white Southern woman, described the climate and culture of violence of white men in the South, and who is victimised by them: namely, everyone else.

Connie, however, seems to think there's a significant social problem with white men (and women) being falsely accused of rape. This significant social problem apparently merits the formation of an online resource, primarily for men and the mothers of falsely accused boys, called "The False Rape Society". Her blog focuses its supportive lens on white men falsely accused of raping white women, and the token woman of color.

Has she noticed there's a different problem in the South--as well as the North, the East, and the West? That of white men raping white women, and white men raping women of all colors, and Black men raping Black women? And men tending to rape the women of their own ethnic and cultural group, except for the wealthier white het guys... who roam the Earth raping wherever they go? I know she knows about the intersection of race and gender problems in the South: she's read To Kill A Mockingbird and does list it as one of her favorite books.

She's just done a post about yours truly; she identifies what someone has decided are the "Top Ten Feminist Blogs", which she admits to not visiting. Note: more or less, they are ALL basically white-dominated feminist blogs. She doesn't seek out the opinions of women of color who have feminist or womanist blogs on the problem of rape. What's up with that? This shows a lack of regard for the experiences of rape faced by women of color (and also by white women) who have an analysis of men's violence against women. Connie was just checking the list that she came across. But, isn't she capable of going beyond the list to, say, the blogs of women of color? The answer is "yes", she is capable of going beyond the list, but "no", she isn't going to arrive at any WOC blogs. She does, however, arrive at my blog. Why, because I'm not a woman? Typical antifeminist practice--ignoring women's voices, especially ignoring the voices of WOC and going right to one of the very few males who has a feminist view on men's violence against women and related atrocities.

Why ignore the blogs of feminist women of color, you might ask? Because, it appears, the only woman of color she cares to highlight, to focus her attention on, with a photo and all, is a Black woman who she identifies as "The Duke Liar"--the woman who WAS abused--verbally, physically, and sexually--by a gang of white frat guys. (The abuse was in the ridiculing of her, the taunting of her, the remarks that they wanted a white woman, not her; the ways they degraded her humanity by treating her as a thing to be used, paid for, and cast out like a rag. The abuse was in their disgusting remarks, and their physical touching, as if she was "theirs". Even without rape, there was plenty of sexual abuse by that white gang of men that night. And if you believe they've been non-misogynist saints before and since, I've got some oily sea water to sell ya in the Gulf of Mexico.)

This white woman, Connie--and I do wonder if she is a woman, honestly--shows her racism against Black women in several ways. Later on in her post, below, she mentions a white feminist blogger who doesn't much like me because I once called her out on being racist to women of color to whom I am an activist ally. (The whites--of whatever gender--generally don't like being called out on racism, with a few notable exceptions.)

She also doesn't seem to notice that I identify as an intergender male, not as a man. (It is a tad confusing, as "male" and "man" are often used interchangeably, even here at A.R.P.; and I personally and politically support men and males being identified in ways that women wish and need to do for women's safety and resistance efforts). The only group of people Connie Chastain seems to go to actively support are privileged white men who might, or might not, be rapists. (How, honestly, can she know?)

Connie wrote a novel called Southern Man, about someone who is falsely accused of sexual harassment--do you think he's Black man falsely accused of harassing a white woman? Nope. He's a class-privileged white guy.

Here's a blurb about her book:
A family man is targeted with a false sexual harassment complaint by an amoral young woman and her uber-feminist mentor. 

In case Connie's antifeminism wasn't apparent, that blurb sure clears up where she stands. Could the 'family man' be amoral?? Naaah.


She mentions below, in citing "the problem" that she discovered that the two percent false rape charge rate wasn't accurate according to her own work and findings. What percent is false, "Connie"? You fail to note that. Why? (As found generally, that false report rate is generally stable at 2% to 8% percent, which means the non-false report rate is always at 92% to 98%. Think about that. And how many of those 92% to 98% of correctly accused men--the men who are rapists--see a courtroom, or prison terms? Not a whole helluva lot. And what percent of raped women get defended? Not a whole helluva lot. None of the raped women I know have someone like Connie doing up a blog about The True Rape Society. Apparently injustice only counts as such when it happens to white guys.

Coming up shortly, from The False Rape Society, is her explanation for its need. Then comes her latest post, on me and my blog, not on blogs by women of color, including but not limited to:
An Arab Woman Blues, Anishinaabekwe, AROOO (A Room Of Our Own),  Aunt Jemima's Revenge, Celie's Revenge, Code Red, Diary of An Anxious Black Woman, Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, Guerilla Mama Medicine, Journal de la Reyna, Mariposa Tales, masterwordsmith-unplugged, Racialicious, Standupsistah, The Angry Black Woman, The Crunk Feminist Collective, The Feminist Texican, That Girl Has Issues., The Kitchen Table, What About Our Daughters, and last but not least, Womanist Musings. 

There are so many blogs by WOC that I seriously wonder how far out of her way Connie has to go to purposefully avoid reading any of them. Given the list you'll see below, I now feel like this blog post is at least a BIT more balanced.

She also ignores one of my all-time favorite white feminist blogs, by a woman who VERY responsibly focuses on the reality of rape (and the truth about "false rape claims"); that blog is called Abyss2Hope. I'll bet Connie won't go near THAT blog EVER--it's got way too much information about men's rape cultures. It would shake the very foundation of Connie's blog, and political focus.

There's a lot of "reality" Connie seems to intentionally avoid. Because we know those class-privileged white het men need all our support and attention and all. Lorde knows they don't get enough from one another!

Well, they're not getting all of it. And that's not a sign of hate, Connie. It's only a sign that I pick different battles. You want to be sure that around 5% of falsely accused men are not faced with prison terms. And I want to see rape by the approximately 95% of men who do have raped when accused, stop doing it, and to get all men to stop other men from committing rape. My focus is also on Indigenous people's rights, and rights of the Earth. Does that mean I also hate everyone who isn't Indigenous, and every form of life that isn't "the Earth"? Do you get, yet, the illogic of drawing a conclusion that someone fighting to end an atrocity hates the perps? Might I actually--are you sitting down?--love women and justice for women? Can WHM supremacists and the women who defend their callous and selfish actions even imagine such a thing!! (Wait: you mean someone can LOVE women, focus on women, or focus on how and when and where men are oppressive, and not HATE men???? I know: what a concept!)

Anyway, reader, below Connie's post are some comments posted to that F.R.S. blog, and included there is one from some dolt (I think that's the right term--I'm using "dolt" in the most positive sense) named Michael Waters, who goes out of his way to find some old comment by "v" that was posted here once upon a time. Because apparently he couldn't quote me, the host, who writes most of what is on this blog (well, that isn't cross-posted). This is how the MRA-trolls' bullshit goes: Michael quotes a commenter as a representative of my voice, rather than, oh, say, quoting me directly. And then MRA-trolls can pick up that post, and use it over and over again to make their same silly points. This is typcical of how MRAs and their defenders misrepresent feminist or profeminist points of view, for their own biased and bigoted agendas which are pro-patriarchal and racist--at least. (See *here* for much more on that strategy.)

I do offer a comment to her and to Michael, at the end, which was posted to that blog she moderates.

Now, what follows next is her own introductory material from The False Rape Society blog, and after than is the latest post to that blog, which mentions me, which is really silly--who the hell am I? Doesn't she have some serial, gang, marital, or date rapists to spend time criticising? She concludes I'm basically insane. So, Connie: why bother writing about me then? (Shrugs shoulders and shakes head.) I don't offer commentary on the introductory material, but I do put commentary, in bold and in brackets, among her comments in the blog post about my blog and moi.

Why this blog [The False Rape Society]

This is a cross post from *here*. This post of mine consists of a white man's somewhat (but, relative to what I find online, actually refreshing) writing followed by my comment to him posted to his blog.

I'll add that I dislike the caption he chose to put with the image of Andrea Dworkin, but as I've seen so much worse done to her image, and in some ways he's making fun of himself there, I'll leave it in, as it does appear that way on his blog site. I did remove a video from his post, however.

Onward, A.R.P.-readers, onward...