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

grrr. while reading around, trying to understand the contours of the feminist blowout in bloglandia brownfemipower mentioned, i happened across a couple of posts and comments talking about some earlier blowout as to why sean bell was or was not a feminist issue. i didn’t read every post and comment on the topic, at least not in this latest instantiation of the discussion but i was really disturbed to visit a blog written by a black canadian woman who described it as a feminist issue in terms of the fact that women had been in Sean Bell’s life. IOW, he has a girlfriend, wife to be, mother, etc.

I was flabbergasted.

It seems to me that it’s really quite simple, and it’s irrelevant whether or not individual women were involved in Sean Bell’s life or loved him or cared about him or are personally sad that he’s dead. The simplicity of recognizing that Sean Bell is a feminist issue is located precisely in the ideas behind what became known as “intersectionality.” Gender, race, class, age, ability, colonialism, sexuality, ethnicity, and so forth are oppressive systems that interact and work together. but even more deeply, more at the root, is that, if feminism is to speak to all women, then it must speak to the issues that affect women — among which is racism. And to get even further down into the nitty gritty root, look at it this way:

to see what happens to men in terms of racism or any other oppressive ism as not a feminist concern is something you can do — something which privilege affords you — because you do not experience those other oppressive isms — you do not experience those isms as an oppressive force that weighs you down that is.

very concretely, my own experience, which meant that i turned to, at first, black feminism was this: i didn’t ‘get’ mainstream white, middle class feminism because it made men out to be the enemy, as persons. it made men out to be target number one, to be powerful and in control, to be the ones with all the privileges and benefits in life.

but this didn’t jibe with my experience. not completely. i could see some of it, but then I couldn’t see it at all when I thought about the downtrodden, forlorn men i knew who’d been out of work for months, sometimes more than a year. The men I knew who’d taken on work pushing a broom, refusing to lift their eyes lest your gaze meet theirs. they were ashamed, too ashamed to let anyone see how embarrassed they were. Or the men who wouldn’t let their wives shop during prime daylight hours, lest someone see they were using foodstamps. The men who were depressed, were alcoholics, down and out. The men who had been evicted, who found themselves packing the family car and moving away, unable to support their family.

Power? What power? Privilege? What privilege?

I would learn to understand all of that in a more sophisticated way, later. But at the time, I couldn’t stomach much of the mainstream feminism I came across. When I read black women, it felt like the sky had opened up, spilling golden pools of light on me, enlightening me with a sense of “aha!” and thank god someone understands.

As I grew into feminism, I learned to see all movements for social justice as deeply entwined. If I felt that I fought alongside other working class men, to fight against capitalism, class-based oppression, status-based oppression, exploitation, etc. — it was because part of who I was, as a woman, couldn’t be untangled from the fact of my class location. What couldn’t be untangled was that whatever I did, as a feminist, it would be deeply bound up with a liberatory class politics — a movement toward justice for men and women, liberation from an oppressive capitalist order responsible for stunting and destroying the lives of people around me.

Yes, I could learn to understand that even the downtrodden men in my life had male privilege. I learned to see that, not as something they personally had, as something for which they were somehow morally bad people, but rather, as something that was a systemic and systemized manifestation of gender oppression. This meant that I could recognize that in order to undo class domination, I would work alongside men of all races, that they were my comrades, that we were “in struggle” together. That is what first made sense to me when I read the Combahee River Collective Statement on race:

We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism…. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses…. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons…for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives…. [O]ur Black women’s style of talking/testifying in Black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political…. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black women’s lives…. “Smart-ugly” crystallized the way in which most of us had been forced to develop our intellects at great cost to our “social” lives…. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society…[b]ut we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se–i.e., their biological maleness–that makes them what they are.

http://www.buffalostate.edu/orgs/rspms/combahee.html

It was intersectional. It was all inextricably intertwined. And as I came to understand how white privilege was the flip side of a system of racist oppression then, of course, it was all bound up as well. Inextricably intertwined. Intersectional. Impossible to separate. Each bound up with the other, playing of each other, in conflict and contradiction, yet forming a synergistic whole.

And so, if we want to express and advance a feminism that is _not_ a myopic reflection of systemic, systemized systems of privilege, then we’d best work on a feminism that sees sean bell — and fighting the racist state-based violence that too his life — as, indeed, a feminist issue.

I mean seriously people, just think about it. If you are a black woman and you watch a black man basically get gunned down because of racism, are you, whether you are related to the guy or not, going to be smacked right in the face with the reminder: people gun us down because of the color of our skin. In 2009. In the United States of America.

Inextricably. Intertwined. With. Their. Lives.

Sean Bell could have been an orphan who shunned women and hung with only men. i don’t give a shit whether individual women were part of his life. what matters is that it was a racist police state that brutally murdered that man — and many other women and men just like him — or even very unlike him — every day of our lives.

you don’t have to spend your time and energy on the issue, but denying that its a legit feminist issue by having arguments about it, and (for some) feeling the need to police other feminists for taking feminist action on the issue or wasting time and energy arguing against them is a load of steaming hot horse shit.