hey Iâm sorry if this is venting but late last year I started lurking radblr and well it wasnât long until I found myself on white supremacist blogs I noticed a lot of white women and other non-black women on radblr even interact with them they donât really care as long as they agree on a thew things I became really insecure and started to hate myself a lot and I still do kind of it really altered my brain seeing that shit and the fact that going in feminist spaces was a gateway to discovering people who think Iâm not even human felt pretty awful I donât think white woman will ever be allies to black or even most non-white woman under feminism and itâs always âme, me , meâ complete radio silence when black or non-white woman are being hurt but theyâre very loud when theyâre able to theorise about it possibly happening to them too or when they need to defend a racist white woman as just a victim of the patriarchy Iâm convinced most white woman on radblr donât even think white woman are capable of being âtrulyâ racist
two different anons. i get asks like these almost every day, and they're frankly overwhelming, yes, because my heart breaks for these women and girls. they tried to find a community where they can explore their burgeoning feminist beliefs, and instead they're met with unending racist apologia and worship of white womanhood and the consistent erasure of race from the conversation.
you know what? i hate the left but it's true, what they say about radical feminists in the west: it easily becomes a trojan horse for white supremacy. as i've said before, how dare we think we know better than audre lorde knew? our sister outsider who tried exactly what we tried and came to the same conclusions?
this isn't about "fuck feminism" it isn't about "race first" it isn't about any of that, it's about the onus being on our so-called sisters to stand in solidarity with us by protecting us from the racists who co-opt our movement. which they are currently doing, right now, at the very highest levels of government, while radical feminists seem to be paralyzed by joy or inaction or both at seeing our ideological enemies burned at the stake by our oppressors. pathetic. and when you confront them about the worrying number of "trad" types who have begun to ingratiate themselves into our circle, they're glib. they're dismissive. they tell us, "she's only like that because of the patriarchy. she was groomed into it by a man. isn't it better to focus on men as our enemies? where is your solidarity with women who aren't like you?" as if we're having a disagreement over the choice to wear makeup or the choice to sleep with men and not, you know, literally harboring white supremacists.
this is coming from someone who has poured more love and care into listening to white women talk endlessly in a bid to desperately keep them from becoming neo-nazis like their boyfriends, to convince them that i'm human. if i could go back and confront the me that used to waste her time consciousness-raising alt-right women who used me for emotional labor, i'd slap her across the face like she fucking deserves. mammy behavior! straight white women, especially, act helpless, they beg us for guidance, they struggle with us over whether or not they should cut thor or whatever piece of shit they're dating off. i sat there and listened to some crazy women recount their rapes at the hands of black men to me in graphic detail, all while saying both jack and shit about my own rapes, which of course matter a great deal less. these women are reservoirs of unending grievance and they're just looking for a vessel to pour into. if you let them, they'll fill you up until you're overflowing with all their trauma and it will make you hate yourself.
the overlap between white identity politics and the genderists is indeed worth investigating, as anon two said, and there's further overlap with western radical feminism. let me explain. white leftists created a politics of privilege, placing themselves at the top, and then became disillusioned with having to take accountability by their own standards. so they identified into a different gender identity or a different religion or a different cultural identity which they can plausibly claim as an additional layer of oppression that moves them lower on the privilege ladder. that same white idpol mindset is in many western radical feminists, who have created their own litmus test for radical living which places the things they personally hate on the verboten list (not being "natural" all the time, which is exceedingly easy to do when you're a blonde woman who is met with a neutral reaction if she leaves the house looking like she just woke up, while my brown ass would be treated like i'm subhuman for the same) and things they personally like on the permitted list (liking white dick, for example. guilty as charged, but i'm not on here saying breeding with kyle is actually goddess behavior because you're creating more little feminists and he's such a good dad, for real).
if a system is created by people, the biases of those people will be baked into the system.
as black feminists, we have been attempting to bring attention to this, and we're met with so much hostility. they tell us the system is perfect, it works as intended, the second wave foremothers got it exactly right and it's the splintering of the movement by selfish actors (brown and black women, lesbians) that "ruined" feminism. i think the call is coming from inside the house.
