Brief Report Back Saturday 11/28 zoom "White Tears, Brown Scars: What Will White Womyn Do To End Racism?"

We continue to begin sharing our challenges and successes confronting racism and practicing effective anti-racist responses to racism and actions. Some of us continue to financially support BLM and other Black-led/defined organizations/actions. Others are also practicing confronting racism when we’re in the same (zoom) room or shopping, etc. 

We persist in talking about white fears, how we define and hold onto “security” and “safety”, how white privilege sets us up to have things that it sets up others to not have. Then we get to take their freedom if they see the things we are flaunting, the wealth, the ease of obtaining stuff and status and attempt to force sharing. We don’t even lose the items but have insurance to insure that we’ll replace every fuckin thing we’ve been forced to ‘share’ and who can replace their freedom, ever?

We talked about Seneca Village, the only community of Black people in NYC in the early 1800’s – free(d) Black people and after a few decades of families striving, white men deciding they need to remove that Black community, raze it, and building Central Park.

We discussed the need – or not – to watch every single word we say, to examine all our language constantly for racism, for “code” of the liberal whitespeak, if we want to undermine and eliminate the ways in which we transfer and transmit racism. And how ‘tiring’ it is – and yet we are not the targets of racism so how fuckin ‘tiring’ it is for Black and brown people.

Again poor white people came up along with rich white people: talking with poor white people about how their poverty is not because of their skin color, and white people who are not poor how their privilege does come from skin color.

The many skillful ways white people shut down the mere ‘conversation’ of racism – one of our biggest ‘privileges’ and one of the successful ways in which racism continues to flourish besides all the other overt, intentional successful ways. We focus on how to keep that door open, (re)open it, wedging whatever we have to wedge in the gap. We talked about putting our energy into and focusing on the ways to counter white people slamming the door instead of assuming we are responsible for that action – we didn’t say it ‘kindly’ or without ‘anger’ or…whatever. White people are extremely skilled at slamming and locking the door and we are not as skilled at putting our foot into the crack and pushing it open.

Muslim womyn: how white womyn "see" womyn of "other" cultures, where our privilege distorts our vision enabling not just how we see but also how we judge; and where the lies, stereotypes, and propaganda prevents us from "seeing" clearly in the first place plus the lack of historical knowledge of colonization, genocide, military invasion and all of this connecting to the advent and rise of extreme fundamentalists. 

If we "accept" respecting culture as the reason to remain silence about the norms of especially Muslim womyn, do we not have to also remain silence about the violence against womyn as female genital mutilation, etc?  

Recommendations:

“White Tears, Brown Skin” Ruby Hamad

“Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson

“The Politics of Reality” by Marilyn Fry

"Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger" by Rebecca Traister

On the screen for next week: challenges in addressing racism in white feminism while facing transgenderism from white and/or Black and brown womyn.