uproot.

aznnotwhite:

theraceproblem:

Recently the following quote by bell hooks was shared and reblogged on tumblr over 350+ times:

“White supremacist power is always weakened when people of color bond across differences of culture, ethnicity, and race. It is always strengthened…

By Vickie Nam

The rift that steadily deepened between my mother and I emerged in the throes of adolescence, and mid-90s White feminism did little to mitigate my feelings of estrangement from her. Back in 1993, I was a first-year college student wading through writings, then, unfamiliar to me, by Mary Wollstonecraft, Betty Friedan, Catherine Mackinnon, Susan Faludi and Susan Bordo.  This was my rite of passage into the intellectual world of feminism and I delighted in the realization that feminist theory could change my life.  Asian immigrant women were largely invisible in my women’s studies classes, giving me the impression that I was part of an exclusive (and exclusionary) phenomenon that was neither of my mother’s nor my grandmother’s experience and thus not part of my matrilineal heritage.  When I returned home, I felt myself stumbling backwards into a maddening routine of roles and expectations. Suddenly one day, as I turned to look behind me, I discovered that my Ma, who made it possible for me now to glide upstream against the current, was no longer beside me.  I saw her waving me on, go, go, (or was she waving me toward her, come back, come back?).  How did we get here, I wondered, where I could barely recognize my own Umma?

In retrospect, I realize why, as a college student, I was inflamed and reactive so much of the time.  I lacked the analytical tools and coping mechanisms to resist racism and xenophobia in academia, where the process of constructing knowledge would become a struggle against the systematic silencing and erasure of Asian immigrant women’s feminist subjectivities.  Thankfully, this protracted phase of separation, splitting, differentiation, individuation from my former self, tradition, home, and Ma, began to lift as I started to realize my struggle was a collective one.  In a steadily expanding circle of feminist sisters and mentors of Color, I took up dialogues about feminisms and subjugated knowledges, where I came to the most sustaining realization of all: Feminists are messengers of communion, connection, healing, and love!

The master’s tools are created to split and separate – us from our potential allies, us from ourselves.  And how desperate I was to see myself as the opposite of Ma.  I would watch her, trying to adjust to the ways of mainstream culture, and trying even harder to be a good wife and daughter-in-law. The very sight of this would make me want to picket harder, yell louder, to do and be what I believed she was not.  In my attempt to be strong, feminist, and progressive, I failed to grasp what bell hooks so poignantly stated: Freedom does not come from “simply inverting the dominant ideology of culture” but requires careful rethinking of cultural binaries that function to distort and exoticize subjugated cultural practices.

So this is a love note to say thank you to those visionaries—Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Carol Gilligan – who expose and disrupt colonizing cycles of self-(M)Othering and who ultimately brought me closer to my Ma, clearing my eyes of blame so I could see her: flawed and fully human.  Thank you, feminist daughter-writers—Cherrie Moraga, Maria Lugones, Nellie Wong, Mitsuye Yamada—many of you who are lesbian and of Color, who theorize Mother-Love, for making it possible for me to recognize my partiality and the limits of my own knowledge. You warn me against internalizing silencing, prescriptive—and thus oppressive—representations of the majority culture that render my mother the ‘Other,’ and I am reminded of how I have been complicit throughout my life of (M)Othering.

One of the most beautiful love letters ever written by a daughter: Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born.  Rich, thank you for boldly construing radical new ways of thinking that restored integrity to the social arrangement of motherhood and daughterhood that is, by design, simultaneously oppressed and oppressive.  Thank you, Bettina Aptheker, for Tapestries of Life and, Elsa Barkley Brown, for “Mother of Mind.” Tapestries articulates women’s often fervent desire to reframe and reclaim matrilineal heritage in search of languages – a quest that can make all feminist legacies legible and real. Brown speaks truth to Black feminist daughtering standpoint, artfully portraying how her mother taught her multiple ways of being as a Black woman that necessarily involved conforming to and resisting social norms and dictates. Such contradictions, for instance, where her mother socialized her to live “one way,” and equipped her with the “tools” to “live quite differently,” demonstrates how Mother-Love is necessarily critical and affirming.

Dear feminist daughter-writers, you have written against the master narrative of separation, while lingering on the complexity of pain—the physical, spiritual, and psychological wounds that we, mothers, daughters, women, have inflicted on each other.  How sharing pain erodes it, heals it, and transforms it!

And, yet, just last week, Ma and I were poised for battle.  She tells me again how I am straying too far from what she knows. This is her survival logic, in Bettina Aptheker’s words. Instantly, images of a ruthless “Tiger Mother” pop into my head and I want so bad to hurl them at her, but I resist. “Tiger Mother” is one of many racialized, controlling images that perpetuates separation, splitting, and strips my/our mothers of flesh, pain, and subjectivity.  Later, when Ma and I have finished sparring, I’m grateful that I did not cut (to conquer) her. I will remember the fierce, unapologetic voice of Asian American feminist daughter-writer Merle Woo, who, like a phoenix, rose up and bestowed wisdom: Feminist daughtering is activism!  Woo professes: “… do you realize, Ma, that I could never have reacted the way I have if you had not provided for me the opportunity to be free of the binds that have held you down, and to be in the process of self-affirmation?” My mom—her story, her past—continues to become visible, a process that was scaffolded by feminists declaration of Mother-Love.  As Woo declares, “Because of your life, because of … all those gifts you never received, I saw myself as having worth; now I begin to love myself more, see our potential, and fight for just that kind of social change that will affirm me, my race, my sex, my heritage.  While I affirm myself, Ma, I affirm you.”

This is my love note – to my Ma and to all feminist daughter-writers who live/dream/work toward making a critically affirming, anti-colonialist, anti-racist culture of Mother-Love reality.

Mkay. I’ve been seeing this image/critique of the Daegu, South Korea Beauty Pageant participants pop up over and over again online and it’s annoying the fuck out of me. Why is it that people are criticizing the South Korean beauty/plastic surgery industry and NOT talking about what’s causing these women (and men) to get plastic surgery for bigger eyes, double-eyelids, straighter nose, bigger lips, smaller jawline, etc.??? Ahem ahem **bc the dominant definition of beauty is anglo-saxen white** ahem ahem.

I mean Jezebel (link above) kind of starts to talk about how even in the States there’s this common standard of beauty in media (blonde, big eyes, etc). But even Jezebel doesn’t name the problem. And that problem is that in many parts of the world, the standard of beauty is being white, thinner jawline, straighter nose, double eyelids, and big eyes. Oh and of course, “white” skin. You can’t critique the South Korean plastic surgery industry without critiquing whiteness, U.S. imperialism and capitalism. So unless you’re really ready to talk about the problem, can you please STFU about what you think you know???

valwildling:

Directed by Darren Aronofsky. With Emma Watson, Russell Crowe, Logan Lerman, Jennifer Connelly. The Biblical Noah suffers visions of an apocalyptic deluge, and takes measures to protect his family from the coming flood.

Welp… I didn’t know Noah and his family were a bunch of anglo-saxons. Thank you, Hollywood. I guess my bible did it wrong.

(Source: isaaclaheyes, via racebending)

April 22, 2013

by Mia McKenzie

Hey, White Liberals*:

I needed to break protocol to reach out to you and let you know that you’re killing me. No, worse. Much worse. You’re robbing me of part of my humanity.

In lots of ways, really, and frequently, but right now let’s just talk about this one way:

Your constant prioritization of the lives of white people over the lives of people of color is taking a serious toll on my psyche and those of many in my community. And by that I don’t mean what you might expect. Most of us already know that racism and its BFF white privilege have detrimental effects on people of color. Racial oppression leads to any number of unhealthy conditions, including high blood pressure, depression, heart disease, diabetes and even asthma. But what I’m talking about is something different. Something I’m going to call DSWP: desensitization to the suffering of white people.

A few days ago, I was having lunch with a good friend who is Korean-American, and she told me that when she heard about the bombings at the Boston Marathon—the marathon itself being something she knew nothing about and immediately associated with white people—she found that she had a hard time…well, caring. I’m sure that sounds shocking to many people. But it didn’t shock me. Because I was having the same feelings myself.

I really noticed it a few months back, during coverage of the Sandy Hook elementary school shootings. As news outlet after news outlet flashed photograph after photograph of mostly white children across TV screens and computer screens alike, I felt something I hadn’t remembered ever feeling before upon hearing of the brutal murder of children: I felt numb. Not numb in the way that people in shock feel numb. Not numb because of the great weight of what had happened. This was a different kind of numbness.

I couldn’t help but think about Trayvon Martin. He wasn’t an elementary school kid when he was shot and killed by a racist with a gun, but he was just a 17-year-old boy, unarmed, walking down the street with a bag of Skittles. I thought of countless other Black youth who have been murdered by crazed gunmen with badges and police uniforms in the last few years. I also thought about the hundreds of brown children in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan who have been killed by US forces on the ground and by drone strikes. I thought about how many times I didn’t see any of their faces, smiling and innocent, splashed across the TV or the internet for days and weeks on end. I thought about how white people I know weren’t posting links to stories about those children and what had happened to them. That they weren’t writing Facebook statuses about how unbearable those kids’ deaths were. And, seeing pictures of those little blonde children—because the blonde ones are always featured most prominently—I felt numb.

And it wasn’t just me. The same was true for many of my majority-POC friends and many people in my community. Many of us seemed unable to feel what a person should be able to feel when another person, especially a child, has their life taken away. After all, we had always been able to feel it before. I thought about the numbness of my friends and about my own lack of connection, and I wondered what was happening to us. I didn’t wonder for long, though, because the answer is really simple: you are happening to us, white liberals.

It shouldn’t have to be this way. While many white people may not be capable of connecting emotionally to the humanity of people of color, we POC have always been capable of connecting to yours. Because all our lives we are told white people’s stories—through news, television, movies, etc.—our ability to see white people as people has been pretty solid. (This is also probably due to the fact that we have never needed an excuse to kidnap, enslave, or mass murder you, which is always easier to do to a race of people when you can deny their humanity). But even in the face of all the evil that white people have perpetrated against us, most of us, in the face of some individual white person or small group of white people in pain or suffering, have still been able to feel compassion. Sympathy. Empathy. But lately…it’s getting more and more difficult to feel those things (for examples, see here and here).

Some of it has to do with the fact that the wars and subsequent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have gone on for more than a dozen years. For many of the younger folks I know, that’s the better part of their entire lives. It’s a whole third of mine. For a dozen years we have watched as the mainstream media has ignored the deaths of so many brown children, day after year after decade. I mean, they were ignoring the deaths of Black children all over the world, including here, way before that, but we didn’t have to see them ignoring it so blatantly every morning and afternoon and evening and night on TV (that 24-hour news cycle is a bitch; they have time for everything except our stories). Also, before the internet, and specifically before bloggers, the killing of black children by police officers had much less chance of even being known about outside of the community in which it happened. So, you know, you could at least feign ignorance. But now we know how often these things are happening. And we know how often white people don’t have a damn thing to say about it.

This is also true when it comes to the disappearances of black and brown women and children, which are all but ignored in the mainstream media. When our children go missing, there’s barely a teardrop in the news cycle. When white children go missing, it’s a national event. 

Why don’t our children get to be children? Why don’t they ever get to be innocent?

What all this has resulted in is the displacement of compassion and empathy with anger and resentment. Because when the names of slain white children are spoken, I can barely hear them anymore. My ears are plugged with the unuttered names of the Black and brown children whose lives didn’t mean enough to be spoken aloud on CNN. When I see photos of their smiling white faces, I can only imagine the smiles of fallen Black and brown children whose faces never grace the news.

I feel as if something important, something essential to my humanity, is being drained away every time you ignore the suffering and death of people who look like me and my family and my friends and my community, while devoting endless hours of attention to the suffering of people who look like you. Each time, I feel little less…well, I feel a little less.

And I’m not happy about it. I don’t feel good about it. I don’t want to be someone who can’t empathize with people who don’t look like me. 

The only way to stop this is for you to stop ignoring our lives and our deaths and our stories. For you to put the names and faces of those Black and brown children in your news and on your Facebook pages. It is not enough for you to say, when confronted, that you care. You need to act like it.  Because a part of our humanity—our empathy—is eroding. And that’s not a good thing for any of us.

*I’m speaking to white liberals because I don’t expect anything from conservatives.

Mia McKenzie is the author of The Summer We Got Free.

All work published on BGD is the intellectual property of its writers. Please do not republish anything from this site without express written permission from BGD. Yes, linking to this post on Facebook and Twitter or elsewhere is okay.

Feeling angry about this post? Wanna know why we’re not nicer to white folks? READ THIS!