Terms of Enrampagement

I don’t want to have it over on the ol’ political blog just yet. This is my personal blog and I know a lot of you here are queer and/or PoC and I really want to get some input from all y’all. This is a lot of stuff I’ve been thinking about for the past few days and I apologize in advance for my jumbled ramblings.

I am a white cis lady feminist blogger. I’ve done some good stuff but I’ve made a lot of mistakes too. It’s an ongoing learning process for me, which is part of what I love about it, and about Tumblr.

I often see people criticize white feminists for race erasure, not acknowledging racial issues and not reporting about issues specific to WoC. At the same time, I see a lot of PoC bloggers criticizing white feminist bloggers for appropriating their issues. For instance, Amanda Marcotte wrote about how we shouldn’t judge Rihanna’s current relationship with Chris Brown because every abuse survivor handles it differently. A lot of people responded positively to the article. I saw a lot of Black bloggers say, “OK, we all said this stuff ages ago, and now a white person is taking our concepts and ideas and repackaging them and suddenly everyone ‘gets it’, what the fuck.”

When The Help came out, the most prominent criticism of it was, “Oh hurray, a story about a white person stealing Black people’s stories and profiting from them.” And I thought, “Yeah! It’s not OK for a white person to insert themselves into a discussion pertaining to Black people and then take all the credit for it.” But then I saw a lot of PoC bloggers saying, “Well how come no white feminists are writing about how problematic The Help is?” I didn’t write about The Help, and my thought process was this: I am a white lady. This is a movie about a white lady who appropriated Black ladies’ issues and then got all the White Savior credit. Black women don’t need white women to explain racial issues. Tons of Black bloggers are writing great stuff about The Help. If I write about its problematic issues, doesn’t that make me just as bad as Emma Stone’s character? Wouldn’t that be me, a white person, butting into a dialogue where I’m neither wanted nor needed?

Yesterday I blogged about how comparing abortion to slavery is awful and a false equivalence. I followed it up with this cartoon about interracial marriage vs gay marriage and said it was a much more honest comparison, since both issues were about equality and conservative bigots not wanting people to get married because of “God’s law” and “the natural order of things” or whatever.

Some people reblogged it and agreed with me, but other people — including bloggers I deeply respect — said I was totally out of line. One WoC blogger talked about how we can say gay marriage is a bad thing without appropriating the Civil Rights movement. But to me — TO ME, AND I AM ALMOST DEFINITELY WRONG AND THIS IS WHY I NEED YOUR INPUT — to me, it’s not appropriation, because appropriation implies taking or using something without respecting its history and significance. No, the gay rights movement and the Civil Rights movement are not exact parallels, but the arguments used against them are the same, so it seems OK to compare interracial marriage to gay marriage/marriage equality.

So, a few questions that I’m struggling with:

• How can a white feminist incorporate things about race and intersectionality into her work without appropriating those issues?
• One blogger said it makes her uncomfortable to see white people reblogging things about race, especially if they don’t add any commentary. That’s what I tend to do, because my line of thought is, “I am a white person and have nothing of value to add, so I will just reblog this for my readers because it is brilliant.” How can I bring attention to awesome posts about race without alienating PoC?
• Basically, I know I am white and privileged and I make mistakes. But I want to fix them. I want my political blog to be a space where PoC who are interested in liberal politics and feminism can read about it without feeling like they’re totally erased from the picture. What is the best way to speak ABOUT PoC without speaking FOR PoC?

Askbox me your thoughts. Please, please feel free to call me out for being an idiot. Like I said, I want to apologize for yesterday’s post, but I don’t want to be an ass, and I’m just struggling with how to resolve this stuff.