>^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >
>CB: My compliments to the high level of anti-white supremacist
>consciousness in _and_ assumption of first responsibility to struggle
>against it by these white bloggers.
Well, except that the conversation that ensued was about how the women of color, themselves, were feeling uncomfortable with the mean, vindictive, punitive character of the interactions. The criticisms and self-criticisms that were eventually made by, at, to, with us - together in a hard conversation - was that we had taken it to a level that the women of color were uncomfortable with. It had become about white people fighting with other white people over who was a racist. It had descended, they thought, to the level of mere rhetorical insult.
Basically, we all came to see what was going on as a battle of egos, where white anti-racist bloggers were getting far too ego-identified with and very angry at other whites for being racists.
There's something weird about the way whites exhibit this extreme anger about racism as it comes from other whites. As the women of color bloggers pointed out: look, if you recognize that we live in a racist society, then being this crazy-angry over someone doing something racist is a weird contradiction. There needs to be more understanding, less anger, more recognition that people make mistakes. They were the ones who asked us to chill out, back off, and asked us to step aside while they spoke for themselves.
This ability to get spitfire angry with other whites, to be mean and nasty in an attack on racism, was something that, as a group, we ended up having to ask ourselves why it so easily happened: an uneasy conclusion we came to, though could never really finish fleshing out, was that this anger is, in and of itself, a manifestation of white privilege. I don't know the answr to that or even how to explain it well, but I think it's worth exploring.