> At 03:48 AM 10/27/2009, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> But if you instead attributed the lack of authenticity to the
>> absence of people of color, somehow you've put your finger on an
>> inexcusable failing of the organizers and weeks of workshopping
>> would be required to rectify the error.
>
> Dennis Claxton
> Let's take another example. If there'd been a little workshipping to
> rectify this kind of error during the Prop 8 vote in California
> things would very likely have turned out differently. Instead, you
> wound up with some misplaced scapegoating of blacks in California for
> the loss.
I don't seem to have Doug's original reply on my webmail, so haven't seen it. But yeah, very much so. That was cited as one of the big reasons why things didn't pan out. There were ad campaigns and registration campaigns that, had they been inclusive of the ideas of activists of color -- not people, but _activists_ -- things would have been done a lot different.
I didn't get the sense that this group or this article was worried about authenticity. where's that coming from.
if you talk to any women of color who are interested in or advocate what they call "centering the voices of women of color" it's not because they are women of color that matters. it's because they are _activists_.
to use an example, during the burqa wars that broke out among bloggers, where white bloggers used the burqa to represent the most horrid conditions of women's oppression imaginable, activist women of color bloggers pointed out that, goshes, one of the more horrid forms of oppression was having a bombed dropped on your head. at that point, who gave a shit about the burqa?
this entire issue of essentialism came up and what people refused to get was that itwasn't about "authenticity" -- the being brown or being woman or being both that mattered. It was the being brown women engaged in leftist social struggles that mattered. So, if you wanted to know what might be done about the burqa, ask the fucking women in Afghanistan who are struggling against sexist oppression, the burqa, etc. Don't ask feminist majority. It's not ecause Afghan women are "authentic" it is rather that they are already fighting their fucking battles and don't need a bunch of white men to save them from their brown men, thank you very much. and they don't need women women saving them from their brown men either.
making it out to be an issue of authenticity is a strawman.
shag