white-only

I am loyal to white supremacy. The other day I realized it would be easier to just admit this, and get it over with, than to continue turning myself into inside-out knots trying to rationalize, justify and explain the actions and circumstances that demonstrate this loyalty to everyone, it seems, but me.

The white-supremacist loyalty I’m talking about today is the fact that I spend the vast majority of my time in white-only spaces. While I don’t consciously decide, “Gee, I think I’ll only ever hang out with white women,” I also have made very little effort to change that situation now that I am aware of it. I can’t think of very many ways to go about it that aren’t icky and appropriative in their own right–but also I’m not sure if being in mixed-race spaces to be in mixed-race spaces is a useful goal in and of itself. I don’t trust myself anymore. I get caught up in the whitely liberal desire to do the right thing and prove myself a good (i.e., nonracist) person and I’m learning that’s a very bad place from which to act. Acting out of those desires recently has brought me to arguing with, even haranguing, some people I really care about, over what amounts to nothing more than my misinterpreting what they were trying to say. That makes me feel like shit, and deservedly so.

As a separatist, I know I don’t need men in my life or my organizing. Women-only space is just dandy for me, thanks so much. So by analogy, I realize that women of color don’t need white women in their lives or their organizing–even if they can’t get away from us any more than I can get completely away from men. White women’s wanting to include women of color in (white) feminist or women-only spaces is, right there, an expression of power and dominance — for if we didn’t dominate, if we didn’t think the space was ours to begin with, how would we have the right or ability to include — or, for that matter, exclude — anyone else?

Yesterday I was waiting for someone in a parking lot, randomly chatting away at myself in my mind, and I remembered Sheri Tepper’s book Gibbon’s Decline and Fall where (spoiler!) it turns out a religious fundamentalist organization is placing women and girls into stasis tanks to keep them alive as mindless baby incubators. And it occurred to me that, were that to happen in reality and not just in fiction, most men wouldn’t miss us. As a class, they’ve made it perfectly clear that they don’t consider our presence or our contributions to life on this planet valuable.*

And that reminded me of Genuine Desire by Vivienne Louise:

I have observed a certain degree of contentedness white lesbians feel among themselves; they feel at home and quite comfortable with little or no racial diversity in their communities…I wonder why they don’t realize that they are missing something. Why don’t they see that their view of the world is limited and that by accepting those limitations they are accepting the mandate of their white fathers?

I’m starting to see how my world view is limited by looking at everything through a white-dominant lens. Through that lens, the arguments and analyses of women who are not white are sometimes impossible to understand. And it’s hard to put the whitely spyglass down when I don’t even realize I’m holding it.

Some things that make sense through a white-dominant lens:

1. Women of color are welcome here; it’s their choice if they decide not to participate.
2. There will always be conflict, because women are just so different.
3. I’m not going to agree with everything a woman of color says just because she’s a woman of color.**
4. I deal with women of color just like other women, on merit.

My white-dominant lens must have slipped a millimeter or two, because I’m able to see that:

1. This is a cop-out. It pretends that we’re all participating on the same basis, which we aren’t. White women in white-dominated spaces have the full weight of white supremacy backing up anything we say or do. To counteract this, to even begin leveling the playing field, white women in white-dominated spaces must have zero tolerance for racism. Additionally, we have to invest extra effort to listen to and understand women of color’s analyses of racism, even when our white-dominant lens makes such analyses incomprehensible to us at first. We have to understand that it’s very likely not their analyses that are wrong — it’s much more likely that we’re unable or unwilling to understand them. This isn’t political rhetoric; I know this is true because I’ve gone off half-cocked and had to apologize when half an hour’s reflection made me realize how obtuse and whitely I was being.

   If white women don’t mind or even notice that a space is white only, that’s on us. If we don’t go out of our way to eliminate racism in that space, why would we expect that any woman who’s not white would want to be there with us? If someone shrugged at me and said, “Well, your choice to be here or not,” rather than addressing my concerns, I don’t think I’d feel very valued or wanted. I think I’d hear pretty clearly, “Our way or the highway,” and the highway’d look pretty damn appealing.

2. This is one of those power-neutral statements the pomos love so much. Women aren’t just different, we’re marginalized to the extent that we vary from the straight lean wealthy white male standard of humanity, and privileged to the extent that we resemble and/or demonstrate our loyalty to it. This is akin to “The poor will always be with us,” as an excuse for inequality and bigotry and our disinterest in doing anything about it.
3. I’ve never witnessed any woman of color expecting to be agreed with across the board. I have seen women of color reacting with outrage and incredulity when white women argue with them about what’s racist and what’s not–the same as white women do when men try to tell us about sexism.
4. This ignores the fact that judgments about “merit” are attached to a white standard, just like they are attached to a male standard. I went to a job interview last year and when I asked how many women worked for the company, the white male owner said somewhat defensively, “Well, to be competitive we have to hire the best candidates we can get.”*** Isn’t it because of sexism that the “best candidates” in IT just happen to be overwhelmingly male? Isn’t it because of racism that women of color are judged, by any and every measure, to be less meritorious than white women? How likely is it that our white-dominant lens makes white women out to be “better” writers, thinkers, artists, workers, friends and lovers than women of color?

It occurs to me that, instead of being so concerned about attracting women of color to white-dominated spaces and projects, a real challenge to my white supremacy might be to seek out some physical or virtual women of color-dominated spaces or projects, take a seat in the back, shut my mouth, give help when, if, and as requested, practice feeling that spyglass when it’s pressed against my mental eyeball, and learn how to let it fall away.

_______
*Well, except for babymaking, and probably only because they haven’t figured out how to build a machine to do it for them.
**I just found this post by Laurelin which lays out the objections to the “What, I can’t criticize you just because you’re _____?” stupidity in the context of sexism, much more thoroughly than I do here.
***I do not work for this company for obvious reasons.

Filed under: racism, white privilege by Amy's Brain Today