May 27th, 2007
books you’re likely to be hearing from soon
Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections edited by Chris J. Cuomo and Kim Q. Hall (1999, Rowman & Littlefield)
Divided Sisters: Bridging the Gap Between Black Women & White Women by Midge Wilson & Kathy Russell (1996, Anchor Books)
Memoir of a Race Traitor by Mab Segrest (1994, South End Press)
Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging, and Ageism by Barbara Macdonald with Cynthia Rich (1983, Spinsters Ink)
Cultural Etiquette: A Guide for the Well-Intentioned by Amoja Three Rivers (1990, Market Wimmin)
Let’s start with this one, shall we? A sweet, obscure little pamphlet, really, but gosh darn, every middle-class white person on the planet should read this. It’s like, hmm, all the things we should have learned about not being ignorant exploitive imperialist assholes, but didn’t, because we grew up in a racist system that benefits from our never questioning white people’s central role in, well, everything.
“All people are people. It is ethnocentric to use a generic term such as “people” to refer only to white people and then racially label everyone else. This creates and reinforces the assumption that whites are the norm, the real people, and that all others are aberrations, and somehow a bit less than truly human. It is seeing white people as the center and everyone else as variations on the theme.
What function does racial labeling serve? If you’re talking about someone, or relating an incident, how necessary is it to mention the race or color of the people involved? What picture are you trying to create? Unless you’re making a point that is relevant to the topic of conversation, think about whether you really need to racially label anybody.
And:
The media images we see of poor, miserable, starving, disease-ridden “third world” people of color are distorted and misleading. Nowhere among the tearful appeals for aid do they discuss the conditions that created and continue to create such hopeless poverty. In point of fact, these countries, even after they threw off the stranglehold of colonialism, have been subjected to a constant barrage of resource plundering, political meddling, and brutal economic manipulation by European and American interests. Most non-Western countries could function quite adequately and feed themselves quite well if they were permitted political and economic self-determination.
Just for starters. This booklet says it is available from Market Wimmin, Box 28, Indian Valley, VA 24105, and I am checking with the grapevine to see if that is still the case.
