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so the fetishization of ruth bader gingsberg 'holding on FOR US.' and working so hard 'for us.' and doing everything 'for us.' and now we're supposed to be angry that she couldn't retire or die in peace bcz she had to 'protect us.'
we're all supposed to be angry at Rs or something, i don't know who we're supposed to be angry at. i'm angry at white women. cuz you know who wouldn't have had to 'hold on for us' or die while working 'for us' if ANY of those white feminist women had listened to WOMEN OF COLOR?
like--just scratch a teeny bit and you'll find an entire online history of white women writing long essays abt how immigration is not a feminist issue and it's sexist to try to force feminism to be to everything to everybody.
written, in many cases, by the same women currently cluck clucking over how we need to abolish ICE.
this level of govt infiltration didn't happen overnight. i was writing about it back as early as 2005-ish. where we are right now with a single old chronically ill lady standing between everything bad and everything good didn't happen over night.
it took an entire generation of online feminism to silence the 'intersectionalists' and the 'WOCs' and 'call out feminism' to *help get us to where we are*.
none of this 'just happened.' the fetishization of 'FOR US' mythology, turning white women in to christ like figures, constantly sacrificing themselves to absolve 'us' of 'our' sins, refuses to at least interrogate what 'our sins' really are.
and functions as a way to, yet again, minimize and invisibilize the work of women of color. white women as christ, women of color as (at best), judas, who at least had the good sense to leave the party early.
occasionally they try something different by bestowing 'christ' title onto black women--'black women will save us!'
and are completely confused that it is WORK and it is GENERATIONS of it by black women that have positioned black women has endlessly more politically savvy than them. *work*.
work is incomprehensible when it's not being done to shatter the glass ceiling 'for us.'
that every day work that just keeps things going one more minute, one more hour, one more day--that back breaking work that kicks a soul to the ground--the work they're protesting against SO HARD during the time of covid--the work that they can no longer hire somebody else to do.
that's the work that's incomprehensible. the work they can't afford to fetishize--if you fetishize it, you have to pay properly for it.
out of all the great things i've read about ruth bader ginsburg, these past few days, not one of them have mentioned the nanny she had when her kids were young and she was going to school.
having a nanny does not make her a bad person--but it speaks to what i am trying to get at here. there 'work' white women like to endow with christ like properties and there is work they like to pay others to do so they don't have to.
and when they people that (maybe) get paid (like shit) to do the trash work of keeping things going one more day say--hey you have to do this work too! they get mad and say it's not feminist to expect them to do the work and not men.
i started actively organizing in 2003, online in 2005. what would've happened if feminism had listened to any of the black women or women of color at that time when they said-
the govt is getting infiltrated, ICE raids are profound violence against women, you cant compromise w/white supremacy. what would've happened if they had listened and changed how they worked?
and that's just my generation. how many generations upon generations of women of color have been trying to get white women to wake up?
it's no mistake in my mind that it was AOC out on instagram the night RBG died--talking with folks, offering encouragement, organizing ideas, helping people to get back up again. one more time.
that's the work that organizing needs, every single day, to survive. there would be no movement without it.
the work done *with us* not *for us*.
i'll wrap up by saying--nothing in this thread should be taken as a critique of RBG. i don't know enough abt what she did as a judge to say anything. i dont know much abt any of the judges, and that is def on me.
i am scared now, bcz all of us are going to have to bear the consequences of the choices that the left has made all these years. and that is where my critique is.
