BINGO. Let’s please stop doing this. I 100% admit I’ve done this myself as a white ally, claiming my “rightful” victim points as a #GenderQueer #nonbinary who is also a “woman.” & feeling hurt when POCs don’t give me extra points for that & justneed my help in #antiracist work. https://twitter.com/isasaxonists/status/1199743076123721728
When members of @GroupBABEL tried to tell me in 2014 & again in 2015, that BABEL wasn’t paying enough attention to issues around #ableism and #racism, my first reaction was HOW DARE YOu?!? DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW EVERY FACET OF MY LIFE HAS BEEN COUNTERCULTURAL SINCE I WAS 10?!?!
& then I realized I was behaving badly. But not before my feelings were hurt. And then I got over it & decided I would do whatever I could to help my colleagues make our field more inclusive and less racist, which is work that goes hand in hand with labors against misogyny, etc.
It’s difficult but as white scholars we have to realize our #whiteness is the ultimate privilege. We may come from poverty, we may be #queer, or victims of sexual & other assault, even #war, but we can never truly know the daily slings & arrows of #racism, which are relentless.
#Racism & especially #StructuralRacism are so pervasive, they have created what @JordanPeele memorably named the #SunkenPlace. As whites, we can’t claim this place as partially ours as well, even if we’ve seen & experienced the worst. This is also why #intersectionality matters.
#intersectionality because all oppressions are NOT equal to each other nor can be compared side by side, though many white feminist scholars don’t GET this: intersectionality looks at the death-trap formed when certain modes of subjugation intersect: black, female & poor, esp.
It is important to know that white feminists have so badly misappropriated #intersectionality that they claim that #classism has a rough equivalence to #racism which is not at all the case: you can’t treat any of these isms as if they bequeath equal victim status. #WhiteFragility
More pointedly, #intersectionality (rooted in Critical Race Theory+Legal Philosophy: start with K. Crenshaw) looks at what happens when the forces of racism & sexism (etc.) intersect in ways that bring double- & triple- (etc.) legal/penal threats to POC. #AbolitionDemocracy
So if you really want to work on behalf of an #antiracist Academy & you’re white, park your pain & grudges at the door and commit yourself to dismantling #WhiteSupremacy & the #racist institutions it has founded, from the prison to the classroom to the statehouse and White House.
We live in a world built on the foundations of #racial #state #capitalism and there is practically no corner of our world untouched by #racist ideologies & sorting practices, including our academic “fields,” including medieval studies, esp. #AngloSaxon studies. #MedievalTwitter
What this means is the work at hand is about truth & reconciliation. As whites we must acknowledge our & our ancestors’ part in building this #racist world that bequeaths to us immense privilege. We must desire to know our own part in it & to tear that out by the root. #Whiteness
Turns out F. Jameson was right that we should “always historicize!” The next step is to work through the trauma of historical & ongoing forms of racism with our POC colleagues while always acknowledging our part in that, asking for forgiveness & working to repair the damage.
The final step is to dream & rebuild. To repair relations. To imagine another, better Academy & to build it from scratch & somewhere else if necessary. No one said we had to stay here. No one said we had to worship the past, or tradition, or your version of any of that. #Enough
& most importantly: read through all of @ISASaxonists’s thread linked to in my first tweet here as she does an even better job than me of explaining what #intersectionality really means & why we white persons need to stop deflecting blame from ourselves in discussions of racism.
You can follow @EileenAJoy.
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