Wear Clean Draws  (’coz there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

I think you were wrong about what you said last night, Gary. For those who don’t know, Gary’s an old friend of mine and we yakked on the phone for about four hours last night. Anyway, I think Gary and I might have it wrong about blogging and memory. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. :)

I stumbled across the below while doing a search on “cultural appropriation.” It led me to a popular blog by a man I consider a feminist, though he himself rejects the term. He was hosting an anti-racism/how to be an ally session at his blog and, of course, I read through it. Toward the end, I read a woman who was the featured quote on dead queer dewd. It’s unclear to me why, after nearly a year of not participating in any of this — and not even participating in the thread to which she points — that my name was ever mentioned at all.

I’m trying to be a grown up about this, but I confess that as I sat my privileged ass down to enjoy the privilege of reading on my porch and listening to the train whistle, I couldn’t really focus on Kempadoo because all I could do was cry. I don’t know what to do anymore except just forget about all of it and move on, realizing that maybe Gary, you’re right about body and identity. But then I think: Naw, women did this to each other during the women’s liberation movement, so it had nothing to do with identity-lessness of blogging space.

I’d like to rant about how only a year a go I used folded up rags instead of menstrual pads or tampons because I couldn’t afford it. I’d like to tell you what it was like to use a debit card after three years of hardly ever using them. I was totally incompetent at how to use one. My hands trembled and I was, at first, stumped about what to do. Shopping for anything at all, I’d forgotten how because I stayed away from stores so not to feel need or want or hate myself because I couldn’t buy things for my son. R did the grocery shopping on the way home from his part-time job in Tampa since we couldn’t afford to make special trips so I could go too. Sure, in that sense, I was privileged. And I’m always gonna be class privileged compared to so many others, even when I lived in my car. Or, about the fact that, for the first time in my life, I had a fancy coffee with whipped cream and syrup at Panera Bread last spring. Life was a little better before that but I realize now, in retrospect, hardly much.

So, how it’s been determined that my life has been one of privilege with the time for activism and reading… I don’t know. I worked four adjunct jobs to get through that part of grad school where I didn’t have a scholarship or assistantship, sometimes driving 250 miles a day to get through one job to the next. I fell asleep once and totalled my car. I spent ten years getting an education, living on 4-5 hours of sleep a night, every day of the week because I had to juggle school,work, family, and a commute. I didn’t have student loans because I was too stupid to know you could get them — ignorant, actually, because no one in my family had gone to college and my dad didn’t finish high school.

Well, before I sti around and wallow in salt water, I’ll stop.

I am not Lesley. I wouldn’t have put it as she did, even at my angriest.

And I REALLY wish rrp had not edited that comment.

But this thread: http://ilykadamen.blogspot.com/2007/05/pseudocode.html

1. Who is A really angry at?–B!tch|Lab, a white woman.

2. Who does A transfer her anger at B!tch|Lab to?–Sylvia, a woman of color.

3. Who pays the price?–The woman of color.

Put bluntly, I think white academics especially need to watch their shit, because I know how long I justified and excused my racism with my hatred of all things ivory tower. A fell into the same trap, and she still hasn’t crawled back out. That’s on A, not on B!tch|Lab. That’s A’s responsibility to get past, same as it was mine.

But no one’s about to pin a medal on B!tch|Lab for all her “help” all the same.

The thing that bothers me about your comment is that, personally, I hear this argument of elitism more from white people than from people of color – so much so that it verges on code, for me.

I won’t speak for Lesley, but for me?–It’s not code. Repeat: IT’S NOT CODE.

For myself, it’s frustration with the idea (and very popular with ol’ B!tch|Lab it was, too) that you cannot POSSIBLY be redeemed until you have read as much as she has, studied as much as she has, taught as much as she has, written as much as she has, organized as much as she has, worked as much as she has, been born as marvelously insightful as she has–

–and no wonder some people are turned off right away and don’t want to put that much into it, because most people CAN’T. Having that much time, being able to make antiracism a full-time job, IS A PRIVILEGE.

This conversation has largely gone from 101 to 501. “Process?” “Facilitate?” WTF? That isn’t ANYONE’S “natural voice;” that is jargon. It has to be learned.

This absolutely may not have been your *intent,* but there’s an embedded presumption I hear in that: that people who lack privilege (and who that means, in the context of this thread, is people of color) are not educated and if ‘we’ are going to ‘reach’ ‘them’ we need to speak very slowly and use very small words. Not on board with that.

This I agree with. That does seem to be what Lesley is saying. It is not what I am saying, and I am not on board with it either; thus I mourn rrp’s original comment. But:

It’s about white people talking with white people in their natural voices – whatever those are - to help each other figure out how to stop being assholes to people of color. With, so far, invaluable input and challenge from people of color along the way.

If that’s substantially different from a “whitesonly” tag, I’d really love to know how.

I’ll finish with something I said to someone else today: On cynical days I’m convinced that whites who are interested in antiracism, a disproportionate number of whom happen to be academics, are, whether they realize it or not, too often invested in seeking, obtaining, and jealously guarding Expert Antiracist status. Call it Most-Favored White Person status.

First, because making it out to be So Hard makes white people feel better when we screw up. Anyone could fail because it’s So Hard! It’s like how I could only feel so bad when I’d fail a Static and Dynamics test–that shit’s hard and failing a test in it didn’t make me stupid, it only made me not at all cut out to construct dams or tunnels. I could live with not being a civil engineer.

Second, because making it out to be So Hard means ONLY A VERY FEW are likely ever to be any good at it. And I thought the idea was to have MANY people be good at it. If only a few are any good at it, then racism continues to be a problem, white people continue not to get it (it’s so hard!), and white antiracists get to keep leading the pack, all the while sighing in frustration over the ignorance and feeling superior to the poor people who still don’t get it.

Well, fuck that. Antiracism should not model a gated community.

Now Kai said it’s a lifetime of work. He’d know, and I believe him. I am not saying there isn’t lots to be done, or that it isn’t complex at times, or that it is effortless, or that it’s a trivial problem–none of that. And white people don’t get to decide when the problem’s solved anyway. That isn’t up to us, EVER.

I AM saying that Lesley isn’t the only one with a Wank Detector going off, and that there’s a way to make these conversations accessible without having to take them all the way down to “speaking very slowly and using very small words.” There are many grades between a Masters and preschool.