This post is not about Barack Obama. This post is not about Hillary Rodham Clinton. This post is not about the Presidential campaign, which is making me more ill and heartsick by the day for so many reasons. This post does not mean I have turned from my woman-centered ways or politics. This post is about the speeches, sermons and beliefs of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the unbelievable, to me, public response.
I have been absolutely floored, in a continuing and ongoing way, by the media coverage and public reaction to Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor. It is a continuing, ongoing, painful, painful reminder to me of everything that has gone wrong with the United States over the past 40 years, of the ground we have lost as progressives and persons committed to justice and an end to oppression for all people, of the turn we have taken in the wrong direction in this country.
The statements described in the following excerpt of a news article I read yesterday, which, among others, are causing such outrage and uproar and gnashing of teeth, are, in my opinion, absolutely right on. In these statements the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is, to me, a welcome, welcome, breath of fresh air, a prophetic voice to which every American should be paying heed:
Having said America’s own terrorist acts encouraged the attacks of 9/11, [Wright] said, “You can not do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic, divisive principles.”
He was asked questions about his association with Louis Farrakhan (”Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains. He did not put me in slavery. And he did not make me this color.”) and his past assertion that HIV was a government plot to kill off people of color. (”I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”)
Following is more of what Wright said about 9/11 from another article:
“I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. … This is a white man and he was upsetting the Fox news commentators to no end. … He pointed out that what Malcolm X said … was in fact coming true, America’s chickens are coming home to roost. We took this country, by terror, away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Rapaho, the Navaho—terrorism. We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear—terrorism.
“We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel; we bombed the Black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hardworking fathers. We bombed Qadaffi’s home and killed his child. …
“We bombed Iraq, we killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy; killed hundreds of hardworking people, mothers and fathers who left home to go to work that day, not knowing that they’d never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima; we bombed Nagasaki; and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon—and we never batted an eye: kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians, not soldiers; people just trying to make it day by day.
“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans, and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yard.
“America’s chickens are coming home to roost. Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that, y’all, not a Black militant, not a reverend who preaches about racism.”
These are prophetic words. These are visionary words. They are the words of a leader. These are also words spoken across the United States in black churches, especially, but in white churches of Wright’s denomination as well, every single Sunday morning, words which have been spoken for, by now, many decades by some of the greatest progressive leaders of our time.
The public response to these words and this message is absolutely heartbreaking to me, on so many levels. It tells me our nation has moved hopelessly, possibly intransigably and certainly dangerously, to the Right. It tells me that the backlash against the Civil Rights movement, the Peace movement, the Lesbian/Gay rights movement, has successfully dulled the sensibilities of the vast majority of the American public. It informs me that this nation labors under racial apartheid still in the most central and significant of ways. There is no other explanation for what has also become so obvious: that white people and nonblack people have absolutely no idea of the role of the black church and black pastors in the journey towards liberation for all people in this country, not only black people, but all women and all human beings of good will and good faith. It tells me that this nation wants a moderate President or even another conservative President, that contrary to my deepest hopes and dreams, and even beliefs, Americans do not want any real or meaningful change, they are not, as I am, longing for peace in the world, or real justice, or an end to oppression for all people, an end to racism, war, torture, murder, genocide, racism. They want business as usual, war as usual, racism as usual, lesbophobia as usual, just give them a better health plan and help them with their mortgages and they’ll be happy.
I have known that the numbers of true revolutionaries — real revolutionaries — has dwindled precipitously over the past decades. I see this every day across the “progressive” and “liberal” and “feminist” blogosphere so-called, where by far most of the bloggers are moderates, conservatives or libertarians, not progressives, leftists, or even liberals at all in the classical sense. They are not really interested in human rights, civil rights, rights for women, or an end to war, they are interested in carving out the best possible deal for themselves and the rest of the world be damned. I see this in the unbelievable, to me, reactions to actual revolutionary thought among so-called liberals and progressives. But I’ve held it in my mind and heart that what was needed was prophetic words and insights, spoken without apology, visionary calls to Americans to rise above their own self-interests and self-absorption for the sake of saving a nation and a world teetering on the brink of every form of destruction. I have been so wrong about Americans– about who Americans really are inside. Americans aren’t rising to any occasion, that much is clear. Left and right they are –incredibly, preposterously, absurdly – demanding that Wright apologize! It is unbelievable to me and honestly, so, so heartbreaking.
I do not want to talk about the Presidential campaign or frontrunners, I have nothing to say about them that is useful, productive, positive or helpful, so please do not attempt to comment about the candidates or the Presidential campaign which is currently making me ill. Even if I really like you, I will not approve any comments that are pro- or anti- any of the candidates, but especially the Democratic candidates. Thank you.
Heart
“It tells me that this nation wants a moderate President or even another conservative President, that contrary to my deepest hopes and dreams, and even beliefs, Americans do not want any real or meaningful change, they are not, as I am, longing for peace in the world, or real justice, or an end to oppression for all people, an end to racism, war, torture, murder, genocide, racism. They want business as usual, war as usual, racism as usual, lesbophobia as usual, just give them a better health plan and help them with their mortgages and they’ll be happy.”
Well… I’m sorry Heart but… yes, that is absolutely right. That is what the majority wants.
This is why I harbor a deep distrust of “democracy” some days and wonder how, if at all, it differs from “mob rule”.
Presidential races are popularity contests.
(sorry for a double comment)
I hope the above didn’t violate your terms there, but on to the main point you have:
“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans, and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yard.”
He’s right. He’s absolutely right. All that indignation and horror and rage Americans felt on September 11, 2001? How many stopped to consider there are people in the world who feel like that every. Single. Day?
It makes me feel the same way, Heart. Thanks.
It’s just nice to know that not everybody is willing to give that kind of “criticism” (truth-obscuring feigned outrage, I’d call it) traction.
I never was “outraged” by what Wright had to say. I’d rather leadership be coming from places other than Christian churches in this country, I’ll admit, but there not all Christian churches are equal, and I’ve done my fucking homework, I know that Black Liberation Theology can NEVER be compared to the sewage and hate that comes from white evangelicals in the U.S. Black churches were the one community institution left intact in African-American communities when Reconstruction was gutted to return control of black lives to whites (North and South), and it’s played a key role in every step toward civil rights since.
So — I was filled with dismay last night when I heard Wright had been tossed to the wolves. (No names mentioned.) He doesn’t speak for me, directly — it’s not just that I’m no longer Christian, I’ve gone to great lengths to undo my Christian upbringing/mindset/encoding. An ongoing process. Still, I believed his message was an essential antidote to some of the poison out there, especially in the war on racism. I had been thrilled the shock of his ideas was gaining airplay.
Thanks for this post, Heart. Especially good to hear that my lesbian-feminist principles were on track with this one. For me, the core definition of feminism includes stopping racism (and classism) worldwide, with JUST as much effort as we pay to gender issues. All chains are connected, all liberation struggles are my struggle.
I would never want Rev Wright for president. Wright does not respect women. I’m sorry that the media has chosen to pay more attention to missing white girls than women of colour but knowing that fact, declaring that fact, working on changing that does nothing for the missing and dead girl. Direct anger at the media, direct anger at the government but when the actual girl is blamed for her own murder because she “gave it up”, my ears shut. Wright is no friend of women. I will take a symbolic gesture over someone who do not get the position of women, all women.
Nice to be in such fine company, thank the goddess.
Hey, Maggie, re Christianity, the UCC denomination is Christianity like none other, really, on the forefront of gay rights, anti-war, anti-racism work, always. The bizarre thing is it is overwhelmingly a white denomination, making the criticisms of Wright (by white people) even more preposterous. Also, Farakhan is no threat to anyone, he’s just been maligned as one forever and the general public has evidently bought it.
Totally agree re the white girl who “gave it up” hideous statement. And you’re right, it makes Wright ineligible for President. That was unforgivable, and I was trying to remember the specifics of it when I posted, so as to make a disclaimer. Notice I didn’t include in my list of admirable qualities that preachers in Wright’s tradition have a stellar history so far as sexism or feminism. They do not. I’m not giving them a pass for that either.
This is what he said:
“Black women are being raped daily in Darfur, Sudan, in the Congo and in Sub-Saharan Africa. That doesn’t make news,” Wright said in the August 2005 edition of Trumpet Magazine, a publication of his Trinity United Church of Christ.
But, “One 18-year-old white girl from Alabama gets drunk on a graduation trip to Aruba, goes off and ‘gives it up’ while in a foreign country, and that stays in the news for months!” he added. “Maybe I am missing something!”
Evidently he says this in this Youtube video, though I haven’t watched it myself.
For those who don’t know the backstory, the 18-year-old girl was Natalie Holloway, a graduating high school senior on a trip with her class to Aruba. She was found raped and murdered on the beach and so far as I know, the murderers have so far not been found or arrested.
I was worried about your reply. I don’t know what to expect anymore from anyone. I am glad you did not disappoint me (not saying I am anybody to worry about disappointing though). I have been thinking a lot about cases like Rev. Wright. He speaks the truth, the truth that applies to male-to-male racism in a patriarchal world, the truth about imperialism (another male thing) and the power dynamics of patriarchy, except he does not label it as patriarchy because if he did he would be saying that he recognises that there is a male/female imbalance.
It is my opinion that when men such as Rev. Wright speak up all of his –isms do not have to be purified first before he is credited as a noteworthy voice. However, before women (all women, if one default that to mean white women then that is on them) are allowed to speak the Truth, all of her -isms (real, perceived, or projected) must be in its purest form (an impossible task). Therefore her voice is never legitimised, thus not worth listening to. I’m sick of it.
EKG !!! Huzzah!
So true, ekittyglendower. I’ve got this story in the front of my mind right now, no way am I giving these guys any kind of pass. I looked up to this guy and guys like him years ago in my Civil Rights movement days. I trusted him to be who and what he said he was.
This is who I thought Bevel was:
http://www.jameslutherbevel.com/Page331.htm
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1726656_1726689_1726383,00.html
Wright said that stuff? Huzzah. For a minute there I thought you were quoting someone from the ND party in Canada. For which I vote.
So what was it he said that was so blasphemous?
I’ve been trying to deliberately stay out of this conversation. As Heart knows, I attended Rev. Wright’s church when I lived in Chicago. What he said about Natalee Holloway was abhorrent. At the same time, the church I know has a phenomenal record of female leadership and preaching against the too-often-repeated “God says woman must be submissive to men” thing. Of course, one does not excuse the other.
EKG–I have noticed in a few comments that you have written: “women (all women, if one default that to mean white women then that is on them).” I sense that you are frustrated with charges that feminism does not embrace women of color. Not trying to hijack the thread about this point, but in this context it seems like an unneccesary dig about what really is an important issue to women like myself. Am I off base?
EKG is free to answer Tami’s question, if she wants to, but after that, I would prefer that this thread stay on the topic of the good things Rev. Wright is saying and the discouraging, demoralizing response to what he has said on the part of the American public.
Tami, I have absolutely no doubt that what you say about your former church is true so far as its work on behalf of women. Wright making the kind of statement that he made about Natalie Holloway doesn’t, in my mind, change my own belief that he has prophetic voice and is a leader to whom the American public should listen. What he has said, imo, rocks, as I said on our blogcast a while ago as well. EKG agreed in her comment. Really good men can say and do really sexist things and it doesn’t change the good that they have done, neither does the good that they do and have done cancel out or compensate for their sexism.
Sis, see No. 8, we cross-commented.
“They are not really interested in human rights, civil rights, rights for women, or an end to war, they are interested in carving out the best possible deal for themselves and the rest of the world be damned.”
Self-preservation. Isn’t that one of the roots of male supremacy: the scales are balanced in favor of the white male so he can grab as much as he can exploiting and quashing others (women) at his will because he has been taught this is the only true way to survive.
*sigh* It always seemed to me that ever since I was old enough to be aware of society, I knew that humans did not want change or progression, they just wanted to grab as much for themselves as they could and to hell with everyone else.
I never had faith in humanity at all.
The thing that REALLY bugs me: this country won’t tolerate a non-Christian, non-churchgoing President. At the same time, the violence dripping from what is NOT mentioned, ever, in staid white mainline Christian services – which tend to value the glories of the afterlife to addressing injustice in this one, and value blamelessness over activism – is ignored as being “normal,” even desirable.
It’s not about You-Know-Who and where he goes to church; it’s about the fact that millions of Americans go to church, and only one kind of church is “controversial.”
I don’t excuse what Wright said about Holloway, either. But I will recognize that he also says the word “rape” in the pulpit, which word I *never* heard in all my seemingly INFINITE hours in church. Not among the fundamentalists, obviously, but not in the nice white liberalish UMC, either.
I’ve heard good things about the church, too, Tami, and yeah – it really is awful that not only is Wright being demonized (for the wrong things) but that the entire church is being maligned as something fringe (in the negative sense).
EKG–I have noticed in a few comments that you have written: “women (all women, if one default that to mean white women then that is on them).” I sense that you are frustrated with charges that feminism does not embrace women of color. Not trying to hijack the thread about this point, but in this context it seems like an unneccesary dig about what really is an important issue to women like myself. Am I off base?
If you see it as a dig, maybe it is because you want/need to see it as a dig. I will say it every time I want to say it. I say it because I believe in personal power. I say it because women (all women, if one default that to mean white women then that is on them) need to know that there are women who think of all women when they use the word women. If you want to pretend that I am digging on people like you [“women like myself’] then you need to think about what you are projecting and if you are not projecting what you are assuming, or not assuming what you are implying. Are you setting yourself up to be dig’ed on? Do you want to be dig’ed on? If when you say women “like myself” to imply women of your colour (whatever that colour may be) then I can safely assumed that you think that only women like you default the word to mean just white women, thus assuming anyone who would say such an inclusive thing (or in your opinion digful) must be white because only white women are this way and women of colour are some other way. Or if she (the white woman) is not being inclusive and trying to make a point of being inclusive than she must be one of those nasty women who just have to dig on other women, to stick to other women. I’m so sick of boxes.
There are loads of white women who in the name of anti-racism will add to the trope that when women (who they think are white) are using the word women that they just mean white women. Well I’m tired of it.. Just like I’m tired of the assumption that I’m of this class, or this race of this background or had this reality, etc. When I say women, I mean women, all women. If you want to take it as a dig, take it as a dig.
I am say it because I am interested in changing the perception that when a woman says women she means women. I’m not going around the mulberry bush. When I say it, it is proof that I am consciously aware that someone may not only assume to know what colour I am but will also assume that I must be only talking about white women. Or if they assume I am another colour, assume that I am speaking of only that colour of woman. Well I’m not. If I ever plan to talk about white women only or any other colour of woman only I will use the proper signifier followed by only, such as white women, black women, bi-racial women. Until then you are free to take it as a dig if you need or want to take it as a dig. I am using my personal power to express that I don’t appreciate the default assumption and I’m not going to allow someone to assign that default assumption to my use of the word woman.
funnie: I don’t excuse what Wright said about Holloway, either. But I will recognize that he also says the word “rape” in the pulpit,
No kidding. And not only do most pulpits never use the word “rape”, neither are the mainstream presidential candidates talking much about rape, or violence against women, period. I can be thankful for Wright’s outrage over rape and atrocity against women in Darfur no matter what.
Kitty, you said:
I think you may underestimate the man. I did not like his comment about Natalie Holloway either, but he did say this at the end of his speech at the National Press Club, just before the moderator begins the questions:
He may have a blind spot about the male/female imbalance (I know of no male who does not, at least to some extent) but apparently he does recognize it enough to speak about it.
Now, the implications from the outside are obvious. If I see God as male, if I see God as white male, if I see God as superior, as God over us and not Immanuel, which means “God with us,” if I see God as mean, vengeful, authoritarian, sexist, or misogynist, then I see humans through that lens.
My theological lens shapes my anthropological lens. And as a result, white males are superior; all others are inferior.
YES.
Thanks for posting this, Aletha. You know, I know so well what it is to be so frustrated, so enraged, that I say something that later on I regret. I’ve been there many times. What must it be to have right wingers, conservative jerks, racists, Republicans, you name it, combing through everything you have ever said — especially when your sermons are taped every Sunday, so they’ve got a fracking banquet table! — for something you have said that they can use against you. I know what this is like on a very small scale; fairly regularly I observe that someone, or a few someones, are clicking on and reading every post I have ever written, looking for something, anything, to use against me. Sometimes it’s radical feminists doing this, causing me to regret and rue the day I ever identified as a radical feminist because this kind of crap is absolutely deadly and misogynist and ugly as all heck. Anyway, I can forgive a man who is willing to think and reflect deeply about what it is to be male under male supremacy, as Wright does here, even if, in a moment of frustration, he said something really hurtful.
Perhaps Wright and I could be running mates!
More:
According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Wright was listing the accomplishments that a black man can achieve if he stands up for himself, such as being the first African-American to edit the Harvard Law Review and the first to win the Iowa Democratic caucus. Then came the presidency.
“You can be … the first black man to have a black woman sleeping at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue legally,” Wright said.
So Wright had a feminist revelation between Saturday and Monday? So was it very sensitive and feminist of Wright to insult every black woman who has ever slept at the white house? To imply that she was either a prostitute or a whore.
But I know the drill. Give Wright a pass, he is a man, a man fighting racism. Oh like who else was that? You know that white man who has racist and sexist porn on his site. He gets a pass too.
I’m not impressed.
Yeah. Well, I’m not giving any man a pass. I sure wouldn’t compare Wright with Amp, for a bajillion reasons beginning with that I can’t recall that Amp has ever uttered the word “misogyny,” including that I don’t think that for one moment Amp has ever considered what it means to be a woman in this world. I think Wright has, even though he is a man and has not divested himself of his sexism. Then again, what man has?
Heart, I think this is true of the punditry, and that the candidates have bought into that script, at least to the extent they will only challenge it superficially. However, I think there are many people keeping relatively quiet who are plenty disgusted with business as usual, but are resigned to it, thinking there is no practical alternative. The mainstream has always done its worst to marginalize such people, make them invisible. I think their numbers are far greater than anyone realizes.
For the record, Holloway’s body has never been found.
For the rest, this post makes me too angry to comment.
“According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Wright was listing the accomplishments that a black man can achieve if he stands up for himself, such as being the first African-American to edit the Harvard Law Review and the first to win the Iowa Democratic caucus. Then came the presidency.
“You can be … the first black man to have a black woman sleeping at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue legally,” Wright said.”
I imagine Wright was referring to black women like Sally Hemmings who were forced to be playthings and concubines to presidents, but certainly not given the honored title of First Lady. That is the immediate connection that came to my mind. I think it’s a stretch to say he was referring to every black woman who ever slept in the White House.
I hope you’re right, Aletha. I feel so discouraged by all of this, but maybe this is about the pundits and not the American public. I want to believe that!
Miranda,
.
Wright also referred to Condoleeza Rice as “Condoskeezer Rice” (”skeezer” being another term for slut, ho, etc.). I also recall seeing a video in which he said incredibly misogynist things about Hillary Clinton, though I don’t at the moment recall what they were nor do I know where I saw the video. Given all this, I’m less inclined to write off the comment(s) referenced above as occasional lapses — I think the misogyny runs pretty deep.
I don’t see what’s so “visionary” about Wright. Anyone can sit there and catalog America’s sins until they drop (or make a ton of money at it like Wright did). Everyone knows the US government has done much wrong and many have much to hate it for. What is totally missing is any constructive vision of what to *do* about it that will simply not make it all worse. It is a litany of crimes justifying countercrimes, egging all those concerned, on every side, into ever worse behavior. He is also extremely inconsistent. 9/11 is “America’s chickens coming home to roost”, but bombing a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on the US embassy is just an indefensible crime, not “Sudan’s chickens coming home to roost.” It is desrtuctive, narrow and shortsighted, not “visionary”.
Rebecca, that’s discouraging. I was thinking about all of this– I think that because the first (in my opinion) dominance to be expressed in human relationships was male dominance over women, it is the form or expression of dominance that is most deeply engrained, most recalcitrant, and hence, the last to be overcome. Men can so often be breathtakingly astute in their appraisals of the effects of imperialism, colonialism, racism, war, militarism, nationalism, and yet they can continue to hate on women, completely blind to their own sexist hypocrisy, it runs so deep, and to the way misogyny and sexism have deformed human relationships in such basic and central ways.
Male supremacy is the basis of all other forms of oppression, not merely parallel to them.
Yeah, I agree with you, Mary. I’m always trying to find ways to say that that might make it around some readers’ defenses (true confessions, oh well).
Thursday’s Child, I don’t see anyone cataloging America’s sins for the most part. I see most people defending what America does, blaming it on other people/countries, or they don’t care at all. I don’t know what Wright proposes as a solution, but I also don’t need to know what he proposes to be glad he is unapologetically saying what he is saying. I think he is completely consistent re 9/11. He is saying BECAUSE we have made war on peoples, cultures and nations for centuries, they are retaliating. Wright’s an American citizen calling out America’s violent history and present acts of violence and imperialism throughout the world, he’s not a Sudanese citizen calling out the Sudanese. I think we need to start with our own atrocities before we move on to cataloging the atrocities of other nations. Americans, for the most part, are so great at denouncing what other nations do while ignoring their own violence, warmaking, racism and you name it, that’s where the inconsistencies lie.
Also, why are you saying Wright has made a bunch of money? Preachers don’t normally rake in the bucks unless they are Religious Righters especially if they’re in cahoots with Republican administrations. Preachers who call out the crimes of the United States are never going to be popular and are virtually never going to make money doing that.
So your comment basically makes no sense to me and isn’t consistent with any radical feminist appraisal of history and politics that I recognize.
Tami: I imagine Wright was referring to black women like Sally Hemmings who were forced to be playthings and concubines to presidents, but certainly not given the honored title of First Lady. That is the immediate connection that came to my mind.
Nail, hammer, bang.
I imagine Wright was referring to black women like Sally Hemmings who were forced to be playthings and concubines to presidents, but certainly not given the honored title of First Lady. That is the immediate connection that came to my mind. I think it’s a stretch to say he was referring to every black woman who ever slept in the White House.
If Wright was referring to Sally Hemmings then he should have said it in that context, instead he erased every black woman who have indeed slept in the white house legally. He needs to be held accountable for erasing the black women who have slept at the white house legally, just like anyone else who may have meant the same thing but said it differently. Which goes back to my original point, men are given the benefit of the doubt when they erase women (all women) in the name of another –ism.
ekittyglendower, I think in making reference to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Wright was talking about being President of the United States? Not just visiting the White House. And undoubtedly making reference to the President, Thomas Jefferson, who actually did bring a black woman to the White House but not as his wife, as his slave, Sally Hemmings.
The other thing is, Wright said what he said (re 1600 Penn. Ave.) in the context of a sermon at his church, where the congregation would know exactly what he was talking about, as opposed to making that statement in a speech to random Americans. He was speaking to his own congregation in other words in a language all of them understand, and that doesn’t translate well outside of the culture of which Wright is a part. I doubt he ever envisioned when he gave that sermon that it would become headline news.
Heart, Wright is given a pass on his context, something women are not given. He erased all black women who have ever slept at the white house by not being specific. Don’t women (all women) have to be specific or be called on their erasure of someone else? For example, how many times have I seen black women discussing an issue specifically concerning black women when a black man comes along and demand that she either write a disclaimer making it clear that she is not denouncing black men or frame her stance in a way to make it clear that she is including black men.
It’s a petty point, but it is a point. If he meant as a black male president, well there has not been a black male president before, so what was his point? His point was to attack white men (not a bad thing) who he is implying has mistreated black women, by raping, buying, smuggling them in 1600 for gawd knows what. This is an accurate attack, but at whose expense? He used what white men have done to black women as a jab to other white men. He used some black women’s experiences and in the process he erased the black women that have in fact slept in the white house legally and, in the process he set up the good black woman vs the bad black woman. Because we all know even though Jefferson took advantage of Hemmings, raped Hemmings, used his power over Hemmings, in some realm out there Hemmings is blamed because “she could have prevented it,” she should have killed herself or him before allowing him to “have his way.” We know this accusation. We have lived this accusation. So Wright gets to erase black women, feed off the Whore/Madonna dichotomy all in the name of fighting white men. His context feet should be held to the fire like everyone else’s. If not, the people expecting, demanding accurate and clear context are being hypocrites.
There were women sitting in that church.
It comes down to denial. Americans do not want to own the things that past governments have done in their name. Unless a person is USA all the way, they are accused of being a traitor. Truth is not considered a valuable commodity. Note that it is the same media that has consistently refused to question Americas recent foreign policy decisions that have attacked Reverend Wright. You cannot count on such a duplicitous group to proffer any form of truth that would also convict them of dishonesty.
I also believe the race of Pastor Wright is also an issue. He is not the first man to publicly decry the the crimes of the US. Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson, have published many books critiquing American foreign policy and they have not been subjected to such vitriolic attacks. Blacks are supposed to accept as truth whatever the media has to say about them and certainly not be engaged enough to offer an opinion on any subject that does not directly relate to racism in the US
[...] the Women’s Space blog offers more of Rev. Wright’s words and these spot-on comments: “I have been absolutely floored, [...]
I do think this furor over Wright is a media circus. A new NBC/WSJ poll finds
That is in the same ballpark as the Bush approval rating. I agree with Lucinda Marshall, observing about the National Press Club event,
I just got back from a conference in Boston where David Gergen was the featured speaker. He referred to Wright as a “nut case” and he went on and on about the virtues of the militaristic McCain. He was a really rotten sexist man, who was slimy and clever. “People call Hillary a bitch,” translation, that’s what I think of her etc. you know the sexist strategy.
The room was almost entirely white men (what else is new) and they all laughed hysterically at the “bitch” line.
Rev. Wright is trying to get at the truth of American Male Foreign policy — none of this stuff has anything to do with women. These crimes world wide are the crimes of men against men, and men against women. It is about male dominance and supremacy, and that is the bottom line.
I was talking to an economist during a break in the conference about what running for president forces you to do in order to get power. I found it sad that Obama was forced to disown an old friend and mentor, and that that was the evil of the campaign. It was the loss of this friendship that really got to me, because I know that when you’re in an oppressed group, it is really hard to find these good friends and mentors. It is hard for young lesbians to find older women mentors. So when white America forced Obama to denounce his friend, even thought it is quite clear that Obama said nothing like what Wright said, it was another injury.
Gergen thought Obama’s virtue was that he “wasn’t angry” white men are ok with black men as long as they aren’t the angry variety. Just as women aren’t allowed to be angry and in your face. I know I get picked on all the time because I am out and proud and in straight people’s faces all the time. They have to deal with lesbian anger, and the goddess I form my “hermanuetic around” is the goddess Kali. I want an angry deity who will draw the sword and kill my enemies, that’s what I like to see in a good goddess!
Obama the naieve didn’t know how these friends would be used against him.
I think Wright is mostly correct. He gets a little bit of sexism. Every now and then there is a glimmer, and he has said pro-lesbian statements in the usual liberal “laundry list” kind of way. As a black pastor, he gets points for standing with lesbians and gays. I wonder how many black lesbians have leadership positions in his church? Anyone know?
I believe he is actually attacking white men, and that that is his lens of injury — the primary injury to him or his hermanuetic. So the lens in which we see the world is profound, and even when we see things as so obvious we can’t believe others can’t see this reality, we have to know that white men in a room together never ever get sexism or racism. They never get that they have power, and that women aren’t included.
Every time a woman hires a male professional of any kind, assume this man goes to professional conferences of all white men. Assume those men will make outrageous statements like they support women’s equality, even when they are addressing a room full of almost all white men.
Women are mentioned now and then, Wright gets points for talking about rape, but his lens will miss the Holloways of the world, just as the Gergens get to say “bitch” at a corporate event, but he won’t utter “nigger.” Again, it is the hierarchy– men get to always insult women, but they are careful about what they say about other men.
But at least there are people of courage who are speaking up.
Wright got the conversation going, and I respect the people who try to tell the truth to Americans. But as far as male supremacy is concerned, chickens are roosting just about everywhere!
Hi there everyone,
I am disappointed to see candidates distancing themselves from someone who tells the truth about so many important isses. That is a bad sign. I am convinced the only way to regain our country (if we ever had it) is to go forward with impeachment. The nonsense has got to stop, to washington with spoons and pots!
I like Wright, too. In fact I think he’s the best thing to come out of this campaign – I would never have discovered him had he not gotten into the news like this! Go Wright!
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I’m glad to see that someone else has the same thoughts as me. Forget Hillary! Forget Obama! Rev. Wright as president.
Darn shame that this will never happen in my lifetime. Sadly our beloved country has been brainwashed into accepting the same old lies, the same old propaganda for too many years. That’s the reason we have been stuck with George Bush & Dick Cheney for 7+ long years and with another 8 long months to go……. most people don’t want to hear the truth about themselves or about the candidates produced by the self-serving media.
If you ever find yourselves wondering why feminism keeps failing, why even women seem incapable of taking women’s rights as seriously as human (i.e. male) rights, review this comment thread.
Rev. Wright is a sexist. He’s a perfect representative of the anti-feminist left, the men who believe in all progressive values except women’s rights. Eldridge Cleaver, Malcom X, etc. He preaches that women have never had to work twice as hard as a man just to get noticed. He preaches that white women “fit the mold” of Presidents. He preaches vile attacks on women who are the victims of sexual violence. He ridicules women in public life.
And he expresses admiration for Louis Farrakhan, a man who believes — and preaches — that women should be subservient to men in all areas of life. According to Farrakhan, it’s God’s plan that women should stay home cooking and cleaning and obeying their men.
But that’s all okay, ’cause Rev. Wright has some correct things to say about U.S. policy. He’s a great guy! Rev. Wright for President! It’s okay not to believe women are human, as long as you’re straight on the other stuff.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
By the way, Rev. Wright also believes black brains are genetically different from white brains, and black children are congenitally incapable of sitting still in class and learning from a teacher.
You know, if somebody came to my blog and started slinging that kind of crap about black children and about women, I’d ban the fucker instantly. Without hesitation
Dr. Violet Socks, you’re a stone Clinton supporter. That’s what your comment is all about, get real.
I don’t like the way you’ve mischaracterized what women have said here. We’ve all said the guy has said some really sexist things. I recanted my statement that he should be president, based on his sexism, after I was reminded about his inexcusable statements about Natalie Holloway.
I think what you’ve said here stinks, even though I’ve approved your comment, and I hope that Tami, who was a member of Wright’s church, will comment in response to your post since I know she can speak to your accusations and allegations. I think you’ve said a lot of stuff that isn’t true, that is distorted, that is incendiary and fucked up, and it pisses me right the hell off, because often I appreciate your posts and I don’t like being pissed off with you. I haven’t paid much attention to your blog for some time, though, because all you can talk about is Hillary Clinton, who I think will be a fracking disaster as President, if she becomes President, who is a fracking disaster for feminism, and I have no idea why otherwise intelligent feminists like you support her. I think you’re out of your gourd. And if that seems strong, take a look at your own goddamn post wherein you have not bothered to actually read or pay attention to what women have said here but have basically come here and gone off.
You know, more than anything, I think it’s this kind of shit that has messed up feminism, women so sure they’re right about something they cannot HEAR what other feminists have to say about it, going off on other feminists, distorting what feminist women have to say, ignoring what doesn’t fit the attack you want to launch, whatever.
NOTE: I do not support Barack Obama either. I want revolutionary change and I don’t believe we’ll get anything like that from Obama. And NEITHER will we get anything remotely like it from Hillary Clinton.
One more thing. I KNOW, without researching it, that your allegations re what Wright believes about black children are bullshit. I personally believe that close to ZERO children, white or black or of color or biracial, multiracial, or indigenous/First Nations, can learn much at all sitting at desks listening to teachers, which is why I have homeschooled my own kids since 1983. Our education system is patriarchal, hierarchical, and dehumanizing to the core. It warehouses children. It is the invention of white patriarchal males.
I definitely don’t believe that black children forced to sit at desks and listen to racist white teachers — a common common thing — surrounded by racist classmates, especially, are going to be receiving any education that is valuable or useful to them, or forced to use racist materials/read racist textbooks which most ARE, by far, and especially in impoverished school districts which use crap textbooks from 1968 or whatever because there’s no money for anything else. My bet is, that’s what Wright is talking about. He’s a black radical committed to black people, including black children, he’s not the white racist conservative idiot who authored the Bell Curve or anybody who ever paid heed to that particular piece of work, which is the really ugly spectre you are invoking, and why you think that’s going to fly here I have no clue.
Don’t come talking to me about what Wright says about black children until you can produce to me some reason to believe you actually CARE about black children at all, and I mean real evidence, not a bunch of crap you read somewhere that NEVER touches you. Attempting to score points in this way here — someone (you) completely uninvested in black children or children of color, criticizing someone totally invested in them (Wright) on my blog, not to mention it’s the blog of ME, a woman completely invested in children of color, my own, and my grandchildren, for 36 years now and forevermore until I die– is just WRONG. What do you think you have to say to me about black children?
And you want to come tell me about what’s wrong with feminism!
This is what I mean when I say there are precious few actual radicals any more and people you think would, nevertheless do not recognize radical thought or theory or individuals when they see them/hear them/read them anymore. The school system SUCKS. For all children. I know that’s what Wright was talking about.
Jeezus.
Heart, you’re out of your mind. This has nothing to do with Clinton. Jesus Christ, you actually imagine that before Hillary decided to run for President I had no problem with creeps like Louis Farrakhan? That I had no problem with sexists like Wright?
One more thing. I KNOW, without researching it, that your allegations re what Wright believes about black children are bullshit.
Well, try researching it. Don’t you read the news? Wright was very forthcoming with his theories last week. He’s not talking about socialization; he’s talking explicitly about inborn tendencies. For heaven’s sake, I would hardly make something like that up.
Violet Socks, if all you can see when you look at Wright and Farakhan is sexism, YOU HAVE TUNNEL VISION. And it is me, Heart, a radical feminist/separatist saying that to you.
Tell you something, it is not the “inborn tendency” of ANY CHILD OR ANY HUMAN BEING — white, black, brown, biracial, multiracial, First Nations — to learn ANYTHING sitting in a desk listening to teachers blab on. The system is patriarchal, heirarchical, anti-child, dehumanizing to its CORE. I’m not talking about socialization EITHER I am talking about “inborn tendencies,” i.e., children and all human beings need FREEDOM and an absence of COERCION and consistent, caring support in order to learn ANYTHING. This is BASIC. And these are what the American educational system systematically DENIES to children. Wright is talking about black children because it’s black children he cares about. I know what he’s saying, but I am talking about ALL children, not just black children. I have a multiracial family.
I don’t think you’re making anything up, I can see very clearly that you simply do not get it and you don’t get it because none of this touches your life in any meaningful way.
Do I read the news? I read, research and report women’s news the way nobody else on the internet, or for that matter in paper, including you, ever bothers to. If you read my blog, you know that. So knock it off.
I think we have to honor long term personal experience.
Since Heart has educated black children for so many years, I think she has some idea of this.
I agree that it’s annoying to have one’s experience discounted, and we have to be careful in evaluating black leadership today, compared to the leadership of 30-40 years ago.
We don’t all get the whole picture right; we just see parts of the picture. People in desparation have to be extreme, they have to be the truth tellers, and they have to deal with a community that is in trouble. The black community on the south side of Chicago is in trouble, it is in trouble nationwide, and there are forces out there so strong, that they will want to keep it that way.
That’s what makes Wright true to his first name. Black people are the early warning signs of our lost democracy, and the triumph of corporate power and news. We have to take this into consideration.
In time, all of us will be better at seeing how all of this fits together, so we can contribute and DO something different.
I got to hear a speech by one of those arrogant white male elites, and they are scarier in person than they are on CNN. They really are creepy racists and sexists, and then they hide behind smiling faces for the T.V. We are up against some real evil here.
So let’s recognize that Wright is trying to get people to wake up. It’s too bad America acts so “shocked” at his words. I know straight people get pretty shocked at my words too.
It’s complex.
Satsuma, thank you for those insightful words and for putting up with my cursing and swearing, I know you can’t stand that and it’s offensive to you, as it is to many women, and I should have and could have made my points without using foul language. I am sorry.
It’s just, I cannot begin to say how angry this all makes me.
Here is what Wright has to say about the education of children:
ARGH, I am so incensed I don’t trust myself to write!
How can anyone read this, hear this, and with a straight face come to this blog and characterize it this way?
Dr. Violet Socks: [Wright believes that ] black brains are genetically different from white brains, and black children are congenitally incapable of sitting still in class and learning from a teacher.
Alll I can say is, you are not listening, you are not paying attention, and especially you do not care. Because if you cared you would listen and pay attention.
The point Wright is making there isn’t even ABOUT brains other than tangentially. He is making a point about DOMINANCE and about POWER. He is saying that the prevailing culture, the DOMINANT culture — male and white and heterosexual — has had the POWER to make itself the DEFAULT, to establish ITSELF and what it VALUES and what it PROMOTES as the STANDARD. It has furthermore had the POWER to designate anybody and anything which departs from what it values and promotes as DEFICIENT and SUBSTANDARD and DIFFERENT.
That is always what oppression is all about. First the oppressor conquers because he wants slaves or servants or somebody else’s land. And whether it’s women as a group, or indigenous people as a group, or black people as a group, the conqueror points to what is “different” — language, the way people style their hair or the clothes they wear or the color of their skin or the people they love or the fact that the person bleeds once a month and bears children — and uses those “differences” so-called, the ways that the conquered are dissimilar to the conqerors, in order to JUSTIFY dominance and continued oppression. The marginalization of the “different” so called, whose difference isn’t, it is really about colonization, or oppression, exploitation, not “difference,” is then institutionalized. And from that point on these “differences”, viewed as making the conquered substandard to the conqueror, are pointed to as evidence that it was right for the conquered to BE conquered and it is now the “white man’s burden” to “help” out, in the fracking John Wayne/Mother Teresa schizophrenia that has characterized white male supremacy since forever. First we will rape, plunder and brutalize you, steal your land, destroy your culture, then we’ll send the Red Cross in because we are such good guys or we’ll take your children away from you and put them in white schools so they can grow up to be like us or we’ll sterilize you so you can’t bring any more people into the world who look like you instead of like us. Or, first we will make you our servant, force you to bear children, cook, clean without any rights to speak of, but have no fear, we’ll keep a roof over your head and buy you trinkets once in a while, all the while we are writing books about how inferior you and everybody like you is to US, and the proof is, we own you and you serve us, right? That proves that you are deficient, otherwise, you’d own us and we’d serve you, because for us, it’s all about power and dominance in the world.
I’ll be back in a moment.
wow. i just gotta say, you know a comment thread has gotten out of hand when SATSUMA is the voice of reason and compromise!
(kidding, kidding.
)
We know a lot more about the brain now than we did 20, 30 years ago, even though we still barely know anything about how the brain works. One thing we have learned in recent years is that fear, being brutalized, having been battered or assaulted or mistreated or abused, among other things, affects body chemistry, causes the release of various hormones and chemicals, and affects parts of the brain that are critical to learning. We also know that people learn differently, for all kinds of reasons, having to do with their lived experiences, their level of nutrition and general health, whether or not they have been abused or mistreated, their environments growing up, whether they grow up in affluence or poverty, whether they were able to travel or to avail themselves of community resources like libraries, museums, art galleries, whether they had parents who read, whether their parents read to them. We know that conquered people in the creativity and resourcefulness survivors always have develop their own ways to make it in contexts in which they are consistently marginalized and excluded and these ways include but are never limited to language, words, body language, patterns of responding to different kinds of things. That’s what, in part, what we know as women’s culture is about, that’s what black culture is about. People who are not allowed to learn to read or to have books tell stories and repeat the stories and hand them down, they enact the stories, they dance the stories, they sing the stories. People who are not allowed to create their own written history create oral histories, histories in dance, in art, in music. People who are not allowed to say certain things because they threaten the status quo, find OTHER ways to say them that the status quo DOESN’T UNDERSTAND because it would not be safe if the status quo DID understand. All of this stuff and so so so much more, oh my gosh, so much, which really IS about socialization and enculturation (and abuse) — Wright or anyone saying someone’s brain is “different” doesn’t have to mean genetically, biologically, by birth, hereditarily — *affects people*. All of these factors affect people, their bodies, their emotions, their spirits, their brains, everything. It is an interplay, an interconnectedness, with the surrounding culture and experiences affecting the brain and thought process, and the brain and thought process responding to experience and the surrounding culture.
We know now in a way we didn’t decades ago that there’s a lot more to say about learning and the brain than “right brain” and “left brain.” That doesn’t change the brilliance of the woman pioneers Hale is citing to who devoted their lives to black children and the difficulties they have had in patriarchal, racist, white environments.
Beyond that, what the pioneers Wright is citing to have to say — just as I said in my post last night — applies to ALL CHILDREN and all human beings. It’s not a brain thing in the sense, again, of genetics or heredity. It’s how brains and bodies are affected by what people must live through and endure and survive. I don’t think ANY child learns well sitting at a desk and being still and quiet. But white children are going to have the advantage in that senario, for the most part, (1) because of history, cultural and familial patterns and habits passed down generation to generation centered in traditions which celebrated the cerebral and consistently worked to divorce the physical *from* the cerebral in the belief that the mind is good and the body is bad, i.e., white western thought, tradition, culture (2) because they don’t have to deal with racism surrounding them, infusing the culture, in the textbooks, in the teachers.
The response of patriarchal culture to children who do not do well in school or socially has been and currently is to diagnose them as having some sort of mental deficiency or mental illness, ADD, ADHD, whatever, and most of the time to DRUG them. Would to the love of the goddess that any of the frontrunning presidential candidates would talk about THAT, about the way marginalized children, whether because of poverty, or race, or abuse or because they are girls or disabled or whatever, struggle in school, are diagnosed as incompetent or medically ill, then are drugged into oblivion and all to the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry. We’ve got by now a generation of people who have been drugged from childhood. And while the drugs might make them “manageable,” they do not change any of the factors or influences which make school so hard for so many children in the first place, so destructive to them, and so too often, they are more and more marginalized, they drop out, they self-medicate destructively, they get kicked out of their homes, they can’t get jobs, they end up in jail, and then people point to all of THAT as evidence of inferiority.
Argh, I can’t stand it.
Well, I could go on and on.
I wanted to say, too, that in that speech, Wright makes reference to Paula Giddings’ book, When and Where I Enter: the Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, a very fine book I have and am looking at right now. This is a womanist book and Wright is citing to it and hence to a prominent womanist in his speech. This tells me that although he evidences blind spots all men evidence or have, in some way or another, some time or another, he has concerns for the liberation of women as well.
ladoctorita: HA!
Well, thanks for that. I am calming down here, sort of…
If you ever find yourselves wondering why feminism keeps failing,
I should have obeyed my usual rule of thumb and stopped reading at this point. Crikey.
You know how feminine and masculine socialization are both bad but both contain some qualities that are useful and good (if tempered by sense rather than exercised in the hypergendered fashion we’re supposed to use them)?
One of the things that women have to teach the world is our ability to empathize and also (sadly, because of our experience with abuse as women, but also in a good way, because of how we pay attention to what motivates other people) to sniff trouble in the air before it happens.
The thing about Jeremiah Wright: some women are smelling trouble in the words he’s speaking. Some women are smelling trouble in the words other people speak about him. I think there’s plenty of room for both to be right.
But it really bothers me that women who are smelling trouble in the air of the kind that they know affects THEM and THEIR families and THEIR politics and concerns, and they express that concern by defending those attributes in Jeremiah Wright, they’re accused of free-pass-issuing.
To say those things is to ignore what women are saying about their own lives and experiences.
To insist that one’s own interpretation of the Wright issue (as revolving around some of the things he has said about women)
is more important than another woman’s interpretation of the Wright issue (as revolving around some of the woman-harming ways people have reacted to what he is saying, including blatant race-baiting which IS a *specifically* feminist issue),
is to put one’s own definition of “woman” and “feminism” above other women’s experiences with the kind of trouble THEY personally face, as women, when certain sentiments hang in the air (including when they are fostered under the guise of protecting women).
I think those of us who have spoken out in support of Wright (or at least against the way he’s been treated by the media) are able to acknowledge and validate why some women are triggered by some of the things he has said.
Is the reverse true? Violet and anyone else troubled by the things Wright has said about women: are you able to acknowledge and validate the reasons women would feel defensive of Wright as being specifically *feminist* concerns, rather than as a “free pass” issuing campaign?
I haven’t seen anyone who’s posted in support of Wright making such bizarre conflations as bringing up the Holloway remarks = issuing a “free pass” to the racist patriarchal media and all the rest of the fearmongers profiting from the demonization of this man (and his entire congregation).
So, I don’t think what you’re doing is fair.
Being disturbed by disgusting displays of dominance does not require allying with men against women.
That’s a bidirectional statement; treat it as such, Violet, and take it on board.
spamarama ding-dong.
You’d think that people would be able to take a cognitive leap to understand what makes education a joy or a psychic “block.”
Since my formal education was so long ago, I really have no idea what is happening in schools, other than the ones I go to now and then to talk to guidance counselors. (Our neighborhood association raises money for scholarships for the kids going to the high school down the hill). Mostly, high schools horrify me. I find high school boys repulsive, and never quite get over my desire to shoot them dead! Their foul mouths, their ugly faces! I can’t quite get over my brutal hatred of the species. So it’s hard for me to see what goes on with kids. I always argue for scholarship money to go to the girls, and in a Latino/a neighborhood, this is a huge challenge.
The brain can be affected by trauma and oppression. I know this by how many of my lesbian friends deal with the world, and the toll freedom fighting takes on the people who are out there doing it.
la doctora, I just had to laugh at you being shocked that I am the voice of reason, because my role is usually the Wright role. Maybe it’s why I liked him so much, I could see so much of my own anger in him, and since I go up against the big white boys all the time, I really connected with his raw courage.
The thing is (am I have to say I get carried away with this too), is that social justice work takes its toll. (Geez I used the word toll twice in this post
Lately I’ve been thinking about the contrast between corporate environments and social justice environments. Ironically, corporate educational settings and trainings are far more civil than the radical milieus out there. So, since I frequent both settings, I get to see a different world.
A white education is going to be very difficult for black people to access or deal with, just as a white straight male educational environment is exhausting for me to be in for long periods of time. As an adult, I am aware of this, and can take proper action to protect myself, but as a child, you don’t know what is happening.
You can FEEL the difference walking into a lesbian controlled space, compared to a heterosexual women’s space. It is almost a tangible thing. I often wonder how much farther I would have gone in life if I hadn’t had to deal with that alien culture as a child, and had an early lesbian powerful world.
I don’t think straight women can fathom why lesbians get so angry and drained in the straight world, just as whites don’t understand this about blacks.
That’s the point. As adults we come to realize the stuff we can no longer stand! But the bad part with radical feminism, is that women stay in the anger stage, and thus have a very hard time cooperating. They all become rebells or chiefs and nobody wants to be an Indian. This is a particular problem in lesbian groups, but it may apply elsewhere.
To a white person, Wright’s description of brains can seem quite odd. I think, since he is working through metaphor most of the time, you have to read his speeches in that context. Just like you have to see my commentary as a pure radical lesbian feminist not kow towing to straight women’s sensibilities ever. Wright will not put on white face, just as I don’t put on straight face. The people who are accustomed to the colonized speech of the “masks” are shocked when the real thing bursts forth on national T.V. And white talking heads once again get shocked. One wonders if, like most straight white men I know, their strategy is to “play dumb” and thus try to escape from the wrath of the real? Just musing out loud here today.
“If you ever find yourselves wondering why feminism keeps failing,” …
I don’t think feminism failed or is failing. We have been very very successful with feminism. The thing is, if women are the world’s majority, we think we should be a lot farther ahead than we are. I tend to agree with that statement.
But as a lesbian feminist, I have to sometimes give up on this issue, because straight women marry my enemies, cook, clean and have children they can’t afford with the same enemies, and then it’s a big deal later when these same enemies beat the stuffing out of the women who married them.
It just is frustrating to watch this pattern over and over and over again. I know that men are the enemy, I know they are a danger to women, and I know that living with men increases the danger to women in their own homes! That’s where the charming monsters get away with all their women destroying tactics. But hey, I’m a lesbian, I don’t give a damn!
This means they don’t want freedom from male tyranny as much as I do. And therefore, feminism gets stuck I think.
Be that as it may, men are forced to consider feminism in their “sermons” now and then, mainly because the women in their churches are strong and vocal. So to ignore progressive ideas about women’s freedom is not an option anymore for the Wrights of the world. If he did completely ignore feminism, he would be seen as a hypocritical chump. Instead, he is making attempts I think to reach out to heterosexual women in his congregation.
I wouldn’t sit still to listen to men in pulpits ever. And I think churches are contaminated with male propaganda that goes back a couple of thousand years, but again, I hate heterosexual family norms to begin with, get bored with the whole damn thing, and say scrap it all! Geez, I want to hear what women have to say. The male blab quota was used up ages ago.
So much good stuff in here, thanks funnie and Satsuma.
I can’t listen to men in pulpits anymore either Satsuma, I so hear you. Even when they say good things. I prefer to read the good things they say or listen to them on television so I can turn them off when I start smelling trouble, like funnie said. I know for a fact if I’d been in the pew and heard Wright say what he said about Natalie Holloway, I’d have gotten straight up and walked right out.
It is so discouraging to watch young women take up with bad men in such huge numbers when you know what it means for their futures. I take comfort in knowing that more and more women are *not* getting married and say they never want to get married. That right there is testimony to the success of feminism, as you say, Satsuma.
I got an e-mail yesterday to let me know when I can come down and visit and help out at OWL farm, the women’s land in Oregon that is threatened because the government wants to condemn a huge part of it and run a natural gas pipeline through. I can’t wait to go. I wish every girl and woman in the world could experience women’s lands, women’s spaces for themselves. I feel so grateful that at least my youngest daughter is growing up a Michfest girl, looking forward to that week every August that is nothing at all like the outside world, where girls and women are celebrated just as they are in their unadorned beauty, where radical politics are also celebrated, where the revolutionary values of cooperation, consensus-building, rejection of hierarchies, respect for the earth, animals, and all female persons are the standard, where women’s brilliance and creativity, above all, are celebrated. Michfest is not a perfect place but it’s a lifeline to my little daughter and I. I just wish I’d been able to raise all my girls, all their lives, as Michfest girls. It’s been amazing to see how just the two past Augusts have affected my daughters, and my youngest especially. She’s a very proud “tomboy” these days– though once she was all about the pink and the glitter and the frou frou. She wants nothing to do with the makeup and the girly clothes and all of that. She won’t tolerate anybody saying she is “cute” or talking down to her in any way. I know in part her strength in certain ways comes from having been in the presence of radical women, woman-centered women, lesbians and feminists, for a week the past two summers.
I honestly think that in order for girls to have the strength to resist the pressures they face every minute of every day where boys and men cannot be avoided, they absolutely must have experiences like these, they have to see and visit other women’s lands too. Michfest, women’s lands, they are far from perfect, but they are so much better than the day-to-day mainstream world for girls and women, you could just cry. They offer a glimpse of what women would have built if it had been up to us — so nourishing, life-giving and beautiful, so nothing at all like the rest of the world, controlled as it largely still is, by men.
Heart
Thanks for the Michfest reports on how girls do when they are in that rarest of places: women positive women controlled spaces.
I agree that its ok to hear bits and pieces of speeches like Wright’s on T.V., but I would never waste time listening to men blab and bore away in churches. They always say something sexist and awful at some moment during a sermon.
One wonders what would happen if black women themselves in black churches started to throw rotten tomatoes at the pastors every time they insulted women in any way. Or definitely there should be baskets of rotten tomatoes available to all women who go to any church.
I believe that any sexist statement should be met head on with brutal confrontation, until men are so fearful of women, that they all just shut up! Now wouldn’t that be a great world!
As for women marrying men…. geez, talk about ruining your life at the get go. Women have got to earn their own way and stop depending on men for anything. Your 20s should be a time where you launch careers, not lose steam on some future wife beater in your home! When women refuse to live with men, cook for them, or do anything for them then we’ll have a real world. But as long as women continue to live with and support the enemy, we won’t have freedom. It really is as simple as that.
P.S. I like the cute little symbols that you’ve added to each post here. Mine looks like a muli-handed crab scampering across the avenue!
just another perspective,
“I believe that any sexist statement should be met head on with brutal confrontation, until men are so fearful of women, that they all just shut up! Now wouldn’t that be a great world!’
I see valid points on Both sides…..but let me take this, from another lens,
one that has worked and still works in advocacy for Human Rights [of all, that means, no tolerance for racism, antisemitism, sexism, period, nada,],
and that has researched into the issues of feminism and NATIONALISM,
and where on on point, yes, feminism HAS FAILED AND WILL CONTINUE TO DO SO,
and why?
because it will always take a back seat to NATIONALISM, EVEN IF THAT NATIONALISM IS JUSTIFIED.
Personally, I have no tolerance for any kind of nationalism when it goes beyond the right to identification and human rights and into this justification of evil for evil, though I understand it, yes, I won’t support it.
I ran into that mentality a lot in college, and during my years working with relief [I worked in support/education] agencies who were working during the Bosnia-Croatia-Serbia war. I can’t count HOW MANY TIMES,
I HEARD WOMEN OF COLOR, SERIOUSLY NOW, SAY, “SO WHAT, ITS WHITE WOMEN–NEVER MIND THAT THEY WERE MUSLIMS…”,
in other words, the hypocrisy is just relentless and its not just the Refusal of Americans to see the Evils of American Foreign policy, or of America’s past.
and I see this crap too with White women, especially when addressing women’s human right violations in Islamic countries, same justifications, same women sitting in church or in CHAIRS AT POLITICAL FUNCTIONS, doesn’t matter, or where ever, but the Silence, of White women when Muslim women are raped and tortured and killed by White men, or Americans, is the same damn thing…
its always the, we feel for women BUT…
you know Screw that.
And it isn’t JUST AMERICA–and I’ve said this before but you would think Racism is soley an American character and that slavery/oppression was just an American sin…[want proof--Japanese nationalism and the countless rapes of Chinese women, European nationalism, African nationalism/Arab nationalism including Arab nationalism under the rise of Islam and the Conquests in Africa by VIOLENCE AND RAPE AND ENSLAVEMENT, nationalism in South America and the violence and rape against Indigineous peoples, Including the slavery and mass killings during Mayan and Incan Empires, way before Europeans stepped foot on the soil,
and lets include, the slavery and mass killings of tribes in the days of the Celts, ever hear of the Wicker Men? Yea, they took slaves of other tribes/clans and burned men, women and children to death in these huge wicker things...I was shocked when I read that...so much for the communal all is peace and love back then, NOT.
My point is, the issue with Nationalism [and ethno-nationalism] has been a dividing factor, I’d say the biggest one, not only when it comes to women’s rights but economic rights and so forth since day one…
Internationalism however, is no utopia either because for internationalism to work, someone has to Assimilate–or be annihilated for progress [Arnedt], and it doesn’t matter if its economic internationalism or some one world order…
my point being, there is merits and a need for nationalism, and I’ll refer to Black Nationalism here — but where I have issue with Wright, is not what he says,
but what is also what is not said, in other words, the agenda which goes way beyond just addressing White America,
and I do take issue with the White Devils and the all Jews are Zionist bankers hell bent on destroying the world, because its a combination of racism with anti-semitism, and then throw in sexism in there,
something is wrong there and I have to question, seriously, how not confronting Any of the three, is somehow going to be good for women.
Maybe we should question, for Which women is that philosophy good for? Definately not lesbian women [unless the fact of lesbians being 'cured' by imprisonment or being raped into submission or hung from cranes has escaped you],
definately not good for women who are not in support of traditional marriage or patriarchy.
In other words, I can be against white supremacy and racism without being apologetic or Tolerant of other forms of racism, intolerance or sexism, and I think we get into some dangerous ground when we start dimishing the real danger,
in being tolerant of nationalism [or any philosophy for that fact] that is hell bent on destroying a people or ethnic group or religion.
Whether it is religious nationalism, political nationalism [yes it exists] or race or ethnic nationalism–
it is absolutely NOT beneficial to women, Including women of the oppressed race, political or economic or ethnic or religious group,
NOR is it beneficial to the women of the Oppressor group.
I don’t have issue with the confronting white racism, American policy and the past as well as the ONGOING oppression and enslavement of people, of Human Beings,
what I DO have issue with however, is when the addressing the issue is combined with another form of nationalism that underneath promotes Racism, even if that racism [and sexism] is justified,
that was the same justifications used in Rwanda, when countless were butchered and the killing fields were flowing with blood and the rivers were coughing up the dead,
past injustices, they cried.
it was the same injustices used in the former Yugoslavia when Serbians were mass raping Croatian and Bosnian women [and I won't forget the silence and indifference of Muslims who aren't white, on THAT HOLOCAUST and yes it was a HOLOCAUST, it wasn't until it became Politically Conveinient [Hezbollah, uh hum] to USE the victims for Jihad,which they are doing now…during that time, there was no remorse for the thousands of women and young girls were were being butchered and raped,
and now its the reverse, now its the non-Muslim women being massed raped/and trafficked in Kosovo/and Albania, yet we hear NOTHING, about it, and when we do, its Indifference,
thats what Nationalism does. And when you join in that thinking,
you do more harm not only to the women you are fighting in solidarity with, but to yourself.
For Mr. Wright to say, ’she gave it up’, that right there is enough to make me walk away,
and I simply Won’t give him praise, to do so,
would be NO DIFFERENT,
for me to give praise to some White man, who fights human right abuses of workers, but then who says, that woman [class or race] just gave it up, etc etc etc., or let me put it this way,
for some Communist man to speak against Capitalist exploitation of workers/of poor but then to say, a rich woman, just ‘gave it up’ and dismissing her rape as well, hey baby, tough, the capitalist have been doing it to poor women for centuries,
because thats Exactly what many communist men do and let me assure you, they have the same sentiments when you peel away the layers, towards communist women.
So, to stand there, sit there and listen to that crap and not be offended and NOT WALK OUT,
says volumes.
And that is why, yes, feminism has failed and will continue to do so, because we’re getting into not just issues dealing with rape and pornography and male violence but
human rights.
When we in any form or manner, are tolerant of Any thought, suggestion or apathy or indifference to suffering, or in fighting an evil take on the persona of evil or justify it being done, to avenge some past wrong, no matter how horrid that wrong was or is,
then we’ve lost something. and its like a Cancer…
we don’t fight American Imperialism by taking on the persona of another Imperialist or Racist or Sexist,
nor do we fight racism or theocracy or authoritarianism by taking on other forms of the same.
And I think, thats been my issue with the whole idea of Nationalism, [btw I'm a mother of a multi-racial child who is dark skinned and I live and have seen the harm of racism every single day, I've dealt with the police profiling of my daughter every time she walks out the door, and I KNOW,
what White Racism is...I KNOW,
I know, when my other daughter, who is light skin, if she goes down the street to apply for a job, at this new outdoor mall that is in a affluent neighborhood, she could possibly get a job -- until she speaks and they realize she has a disability or that she is low income, but even then, she has a chance,
if my other daughter, who is half Cherokee, was to go there, not only would she not get a job, she'd be stopped by the security guard and asked what she was doing there,
I know, I deal with it, I see it on a DAILY BASIS and have since she was born, and I've been called Red skin lover and whore and you name it, why I left Texas and got the hell out of there, I was scared for her LIFE,
so I know what Racism is, not just by reading it in books or seeing movies,
and it hurts and all my love in the world, cannot undo the harm and hurt it has caused my daughter, whom I love more than life itself.
But I can tell you, and She can tell you, its not just white people who are racist, she gets it from several sides, and not only that,
because she is of a minority group, Native American Indian, when she got a ticket not too long ago, the officer put down White,
when I confronted the courts on that, I was told,
that there wasn't any initial or 'race' for her, and that it was just accepted to label her as White,
you want to talk Infuriating? To this day, the Native American Indians are STILL HAVING GENOCIDE AND CULTURAL GENOCIDE AGAINST THEM, STILL,
by them writing down she's White, they have Denied her Heritage, her Ethnicity and her Race, as if she's not even Human,
and she is dark, she in no way looks WHITE.
Am I angry, damn right I am, but no matter How angry I am,
if Any Native American Man was to stand up and say, 'oh white woman there gave it up and Native American Women have been raped, etc , and in fact, they STILL ARE DAILY IN THIS NATION...WITH TOTAL IMPUNITY AND I'VE YET TO HERE MANY NATIONALISTS TALK ABOUT THAT],
but If I heard that [and I have and I've confronted it],
I’d get up and walk out, and I’ be Damn, as a feminist, as a women’s and children’s human rights advocate, and as an Anti-Racist and Anti-white supremacist, Anarchist and anti- about everything,
would say,
oh, well, it just comes with the territory and besides, all the other stuff they say is right.
So What.
If I was to support in any way, a Native American Man saying ‘a white woman/girl just gave it up in a case of rape’,
and think, for one minute, that this man or the political aims would Benefit my daughter, as a woman, as a human being, as a Native American Indian,
I’d be not only duped, but crazy.
Sorry, but until women stop catering to Nationalists who dismiss Any rape, as ‘giving it up’,
then yes,
FEMINISM HAS FAILED, AND TRAGICALLY SO.
Tasha
Rev. Wright’s public hating on Hillary Clinton is public hating on me and all white women who have never been called nigger and never had to work twice as hard as a white man to get as far (as Rev. Wright put it). Rev. Wright’s hating on white women from his pulpit through his attacks on HRC specifically *as* a white woman, is just recycled 60s Black Power hatred of white women, drawing on Eldridge Cleaver, who raped Black women prepatory to raping white women as revenge on white men, and Stokely Carmichael, who stated that the only position for women in SNCC was prone.
He’s not revolutionary, he’s not speaking truth to power, he’s hating on white women, including this one and Clinton, under the guise of Black Power rhetoric. But at least he’d fit right in in the Oval Office.
and its like a Cancer…
we don’t fight American Imperialism by taking on the persona of another Imperialist or Racist or Sexist,
nor do we fight racism or theocracy or authoritarianism by taking on other forms of the same.
Tasha I’ve never stopped loving you.
are you able to acknowledge and validate the reasons women would feel defensive of Wright as being specifically *feminist* concerns, rather than as a “free pass” issuing campaign?
Anything I’d add to this isn’t fit to print. I’ll just repeat it.
But if I don’t see the n-word again that’d be just fine, really.
But if I don’t see the n-word again that’d be just fine, really.
Rev. Wright used it, I’m simply paraphrasing him. IOW, take it up with him, not me.
I’m tired of this particular double standard. Does it offend your sensibilities when it comes from Rev. Wright? I think not, given your comments here and elsewhere. So, I don’t particularly care if you find my accurate paraphrase of his remarks offensive. I don’t use that term, ever, but if Rev. Wright feels comfortable using it — as he seems to — I see no reason why it should be incumbent upon me to clean up HIS language for your comfort. It SHOULD make you uncomfortable, but not because you had to read it here. It came from Rev. Wright’s lips specifically to denigrate a white woman as a white woman — I wish that’s what made you uncomfortable.
Editing it out makes his offensiveness and hate both less real and less offensive. Editing it out makes it seem like the offensiveness is happening in my head, instead of Rev. Wright’s pulpit. I refer you to MacKinnon’s piece re: her op/ed for the NY Times on Lois Robinson’s sexual harassment case where she had to censor out “those words” or the NY Times wouldn’t publish it. Turns out they wouldn’t publish it anyway.
Tasha and Funnie have excellent points.
To tell you the truth, I am rather indifferent to all the “nationalists’ out there because I know they never mean the rights of women. Heck, we had a whole American Revolution for the sake of men. Women gained nothing from it.
I wouldn’t say feminism has failed, but I do know it’s awfully damn hard for women to get away from places where men say anything condemning women. An attack on women is sexism plain and simple, but women will sit in those churches and listen to this stuff till the cows come in.
What I don’t get is how women can sit in churches and listen to men preach about anything. Who could stand the pompous blow hards yelling away up there? You’ve got to be kidding! These male preachers should be yelling away at the men who are the rapists, the child molestors, the preditors and the woman haters. Stick men in churches and let them listen to women rail at them for being sinners, rapists and sexist pigs for a few hundred years, and you’d see men cower like the idiots that they are!
Just today, I heard yet another man on right wing radio talking about wives being submissive to their husbands. He even went so far as to say women should call the husband “Lord.” I’m not kidding, I just heard this today.
Now women are going to these churches in droves, droves I tell you. Is it self-hatred? Is it complete cluelessness? Is it heterosexual brainwashing of “my children…” Goddess knows, but that is the failure of feminism, when women sit in pews and listen to this nonsense! You have to wonder what it would take for women to walk out and refuse to listen to any man ever talk about anything from a podium, a pulpit or a T.V. studio!!
Sexism and the hatred of women is worldwide. Racism is everywhere, and it doesn’t always come from white people, it comes from every country that has some sort of minority.
Black Power was filled with the most toxic sexism I’ve ever heard. I don’t know how black women can stand these jerks most of the time, and I don’t know how white women can continue to listen to blatant woman hatred in fundamentalist churches either!
From a radical lesbian feminist perspective, you just get frustrated at women’s lack of anger at these male jerks spouting off everywhere. I don’t think anything they have to say has much to do with women at all, I believe they are forever stuck in their fat headed male egos, and that’s about all they are capable of. White women / black women– hetero women defending their men till the end of time! Now that is a failure of feminism, and as I have always said before, these women are very slow learners… it takes incredible wife beating, men beating the stuffing out of them or raping their children to cause a move to freedom.
What is it about women that causes them to be so loyal to abusers? Why would any woman who can read and write ever listen to that “lord and master nonsense”?
This has always perplexed me, until I realized that heterosexual women live under the very worst of tyrannies — male sexual colonization of their very bodies! Once men have done this do women, they are really stuck.
Get some rotten eggs, and get ready to throw them at the next male pastor who says anything against women! Wow, now that would be resistence to oppressors!
The radical feminist position is very simple: women come first. Only when women put women first and completely reject male authoritity of any kind will there be change.
Nationalism, black power, Americanism…whatever you want to call it — this is about men’s power and men’s worlds. It has nothing to do with the freedom of women ever. The sooner we understand this simple point, the better off feminism will be.
Men will get away with this as long as women show up and listen to them. They need to WALK out like Mary Daly did back in 1970! I guess you just have to be a radical lesbian feminist to really get who the enemy truly is. Men count on the passive natures of straight women, and believe me, straight women are passive passive and more passive all over the world. If they got angry, and they rose up, you’d have an end to all of this. Lesbians are a very small portion of the world’s population, so straight women, you are just going to have to step in there or step on the snake heads that have nothing but contempt for you.
To be clear, I don’t allow the use of the n-word here, neither the b-word and similar, but I didn’t remove it in Emma’s comment because she was alluding to something Wright said that has been widely circulated. To omit the word would have changed the context or sense of what she was saying to the degree that readers might not recognize she was quoting Wright as opposed to invoking that word herself.
It’s true that Eldredge Cleaver openly spoke of raping white women in Soul on Ice and said that he actually had or would rape white women. His context was revenge against white men, both for centuries of having raped black women and for having lynched and otherwise brutalized black men, then justifying it with the lie that black men had raped white women, or that black men had just looked at white women in a way white men didn’t like. Soul on Ice was more poetry than prose, there is a dream-like quality about it (though I haven’t read it or even looked at it since the early 70s;I did buy it and read it then, so this is from distant memory). It’s a soliloquy more than anything else, intended to shock and enrage white men, especially.
Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael’s) famous quote, “the position of women in the [Civil Rights] movement is prone,” was not directed towards white women specifically. It was directed towards all women in the Civil Rights movement, black women, women of color, white women.
Political revolutionaries often, probably usually, have blind spots. Revolutionary men have often been notoriously sexist, which doesn’t change the fact that as to their anti-war/anti-racism/anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism work, they were revolutionaries. Feminists, including radical feminists, have sometimes been racist, classist, lesbophobic/homophobic and imperialist. Their blind spots didn’t change the fact that as to their work on behalf of women, they were revolutionaries.
Jeremiah Wright’s inexcusable statement about Natalie Holloway “giving it up” was made in the context of rage over the way the media was ignoring rapes and other atrocities against women in Darfur. It was (I believe) more a statement about racism than it was about Natalie Holloway. It was also, of course, a statement of rage on behalf of specific women, i.e., women raped in Darfur. That doesn’t make what Wright said any more acceptable or right. But it also doesn’t, in my mind, make Wright less a revolutionary in the ways that he *is* a revolutionary. Revolutionary men, again, sadly, have almost always been sexist. It’s true that what Wright said, and the reasons he said what he said, were like what Cleaver said and Cleaver’s reasons for saying what he said. I don’t think that means they are or were not revolutionaries. I think that means they are sexist revolutionaries, accutely conscious of and attuned to racism, less concerned about the woman-hating ramifications of statements like the statements they made, also more concerned about the racism expressed in the sexism against black women than about sexism against white women.
Emma, we cross-posted.
Right, it was necessary for context to keep the n-word but change “white folks” to “white men.” Right. For context. Necessary.
Maybe it was. Necessary, to change one context and not another, to making YOUR point. To feel free to make free with a word that doesn’t belong to you, on the basis that hey, you’re just repeating what some *other* some *offensive* person said, in the process of offending you.
If Wright went on a tear about how he was offended by the Vagina Monologues or Inga Muscio and paraphrased those women’s words but made sure not to redact the c-word in any way, I’d be just as suspicious.
And, yeah, sure I noticed that you still didn’t answer my question. Which answers it, really. Speaking of double-standards.
Huh, I was noticing the reference to white women never having been called the n-word– I read right past the reference to not having to work twice as hard as white men.
All right, I’m going to get the exact quote.
To be very clear in a thread that I think requires that extra effort be made to *be* clear, I never think white people should use the “n” word for any reason ever. I have never used it, and it has never been allowed in my presence, in my home, anywhere. Neither was it allowed in my parents’ home– it was considered a swear word (and still is). I think we can make any point we need to make without ever using that word.
I have the same policy for “b***”, but in the sex torts thread, I did cite to a blogger who used the term “stupid c****,” something I normally wouldn’t do, but quoting him made the point I was interested in making, that the guy is a complete and total misogynist, so in that instance I typed the word out.
Here’s what Wright actually said:
Eldridge Cleaver from Soul on Ice, 1968:
I don’t consider any men revolutionaries at all. I’ve never met a leftist man who wasn’t sexist. Why women put their faith in revolutions that have absolutely nothing to do with women’s freedom is beyond me.
The bottom line is every male revolutionary out there goes home, and what he does in his own home is largely invisible. He can enslave women, colonize them, rape them, or take away their last names. Male revolutionaries do this all the time.
We have got to understand that any time a male revolutionary speaks, he is only talking about freedom for men in the outside world. He has no intention of overthrowing the patriarchy in his own home.
Once Nelson Mandela got out of prison, follow what happened to Winnie Mandela. Count the number of women in the first Mandela cabinet after he was elected president of South Africa. I believe that Bill Clinton had more women in his cabinet than “revolutionary” Nelson Mandela had in his. I like to count to see how things really add up.
Whether it is George Washington or Nelson Mandela, their idea of revolution has nothing to do with the material conditions of women in their own homes. So they really aren’t revolutionaries at all, they are simply men who want to be in charge. They believe in outside freedom but not inside freedom.
In respect to women’s position in these societies, nothing radical ever happens. It’s kind of like the idiocy of heterosexual women who believe they are raising “non-sexist boys” …deluded thinking in the extreme but they actually believe after 5000 years of evidense to the contrary that their little Johnny is going to be different. Oy vey. So we have to get this, and stop being enthralled by these “radical” men. I’m sick of the whole lot of them.
It’s about time that all women stand up and call these “great men” to account. How was Winnie Mandela rewarded for her loyalty to her husband all those years he was in prison? Now that’s the part of the story you never hear about these days.
I think it is safe to say that men are not in charge of the liberation of women at all, women are in charge of this. Men don’t care if women are raped or prostituted or made into house servants a la heterosexual marriage. Surely most straight women have figured this out by now! Or is denial still in place worldwide?
We should know better. How we get fooled by yet another “great” male liberator out there is totally beyond me.
I would venture to say that even when he talks about Hillary Clinton, Wright has no idea what he is talking about. As we can see in this election, the gender barrier, and gender itself is a far more pernicious issue. I think white men will talk about racism, because it doesn’t affect their home life. But again, we need to look at the structure of the home life of the men, that’s the dead give-away every single time. It’s considered natural for a Yale educated woman to chuck in her career so that her husband can be yet another male U.S. president! Geeeez loueeezzzz…. These explanations get tiresome folks, but hey, I’ve never lived with men since I turned 18, and I certainly would never consider it safe to have them live in any home a woman lives in. We should know that the worst violence is domestic violence.
We have no idea what these men do when they go home at night, no idea at all.
I think revolutionaries are people whose work and lives turn things around, make the world different, create a departure from the status quo or business as usual. I think that guys like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, men in the American Indian Movement (AIM), the utopians, guys like Ralph Borsodi, Scott Nearing, E.F. Schumacher, John Jeavons, all have made revolutions in various ways and the work they’ve done has benefitted all people, women included.
At the same time, the oldest oppression — the oppression of women by men — remains. That revolution is what feminism is about and it’s the need for that revolution that makes me a feminist and not a leftist. If we manage to free all women, will we be revolutionaries for having done that? Yes. If, having freed women, other oppressions remain unchallenged, then we won’t be revolutionaries so far as the oppressions we fail to challenge, i.e., of the earth, animals, economic oppressions of various kinds, willingness to build and perpetuate and endorse dominance hierarchies of whatever kind. I think people can be really brilliant, and really revolutionary, and really blind to some things. In fact, again, I think that is true of most revolutionaries in some way or another. I don’t think that makes them not revolutionary.
Jeremiah Wright’s tirade against Hillary Clinton traded on, was part of, and gave new life to the hatred targeted specifically at white women by the Black Power movement of the 60s. It is not “revolutionary”, it is sexist and racist. And it’s not an aberration or just one bad thing he said. His repeated attacks on white women as white women, including Clinton, including Holloway, and including Monica Lewinsky (Bill was “ridin’ her dirty” just like he was “ridin’ dirty” on Blacks) are clear evidence of a mindset of hatred targeted specifically against white women. It is the mindset of Cleaver.
How is hating on white women about Black liberation? It wasn’t when Cleaver did it, and it isn’t now. I don’t care how much poetry it was as opposed to prose, or how dreamlike it was. Lots of porn is “fantasy” after all, right? It was, and is, hatred of white women *as* white women. And it can not and must not stand if there ever is to be gender or racial equality in this country.
As for Wright’s preaching on 9/11 — he sounds just as f’ng crazy as those white preachers who blame it on gays or feminists or whoever else. “God is gonna getcha sinner!!!” Indeed, white people occupy the same mythical place in Wright’s “theology” as gays/lesbians do in Pat Robertson’s or Hagee’s “theology”. “God hates ya! God hates evil doers and sinners!! God is gonna getcha!”
That white people have “sinned” against Black folk is the tenuous reed on which some people distinguish Wright’s proclamations of divine retribution from those made by people like Robertson, Falwell, and Hagee. But it’s the same damn thing. Men from Saudia Arabia flew planes into the Twin Towers because the U.S. is a white supremacist society? And we deserved what we got for our sinful ways? Really? That’s what God dictated? Despite, you know, the fact that it really wasn’t all white folk who died. It’s not any different than God sent floods to New Orleans to stop the gays from having their biggest parade ever — a Hagee gem.
Wright is not a nutcase — at least not any more than Hagee or Robertson or Falwell. The reality of white supremacy should not provide a convenient cover for Wright’s hatred and bigotry.
I’ll stand with this, from Lincoln’s second inaugural address:
“Fondly do we hope–fervently do we pray–that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether’.”
But I will not stand with 9/11 is god’s vengance against white supremacist America. It is one thing to say that one is doing the will of God through man’s works to end the scourge of slavery and quite another to say that whites are sinners against whom god will exact his vengance. Fighting a war to end slavery is one thing. Killing white folks for being sinners is another. If revolution is necessary to end white supremacy, that’s one thing, but that’s not what Rev. Wright is preaching.
Right, it was necessary for context to keep the n-word but change “white folks” to “white men.” Right. For context. Necessary.
Oh, get off it. I didn’t “change” “folk” to “men”, I typed men b/c that’s what I remembered. Inaccurately, but it doesn’t change the meaning of what Wright said or what I said. In fact, Wright’s use of the word folk is even more telling of his inability to understand what sexism is and how it works.
You know what? If people use offensive words, I’m not all about covering up for that. He used the word, he used it specifically in the course of attacking Clinton as a white woman, he meant it, he still means it. You don’t like the word? Neither do I. But *I’M* not the one who used it, much less used it as part of a “sermon” attacking a white women *because* she’s a white woman.
I don’t think I owe Wright, or anybody else, some special consideration for their sensitivity to the actual slur used by Rev. Wright to make his racist and sexist point — especially when those folks are defending Rev. Wright and specifically defending the language he uses and the sermons he gives. I don’t like the word, but I’m trying to get across that more than just not liking the word, I object to the way he used it while attacking Clinton as a white woman. The hand waving about “the word”, and who it “belongs to”, neatly covers up that point and, I’d add, opens the door to me being called a racist because I typed the actual word used by an actual Black man to harangue and attack an actual white woman on the basis of her actual sex and actual race.
YOU seem to think that something much less egregious was going on with Wright (hence the comparison to Inga Musico) without ever spelling out what you think that something less egregious might have been. I think something very egregious was going on, directly tied to Wright’s decision to use “that word” in the way that he did against the person he chose to used it against and in defense of the person he was defending.
And, yeah, sure I noticed that you still didn’t answer my question. Which answers it, really. Speaking of double-standards.
Hey, guess what? I wasn’t fucking talking to you in the first place. As you’ve already indicated to me your disinclination to discuss my topic with me (beyond, now, scolding me for typing “that word”) I see no reason why you would presume that I was having a conversation with you about either my topic OR yours.
I don’t think Wright was saying 9/11 was God’s vengeance. I think he was saying it was no different than what the U.S. has been doing to people groups/cultures/nations since forever. If Wright said it was God’s vengeance, I’d disagree with him.
I did not say and would not say that Wright’s tirade against Clinton was revolutionary (and I don’t know whether your comments are addressed to me, I am just interested in clarifying). I think Wright’s views about colonialism, imperialism, racism, poverty, rights of indigenous/First Nations people are revolutionary.
I don’t think Wright’s 9/11 speech was a tirade of hate against “white people”. I think it was a tirade against the principalities and the powers, against ideologies, institutions, leaders, hierarchies which are oppressive in all the ways Wright names.
Emma, from my perspective you are responding to things that have not been said here (or if they have been, they’ve been refuted) and you’re arguing with positions nobody here has taken (except possibly Dr. Violet Socks and I’m not totally sure about that).
I don’t have time, and do not want to make time, to straighten out a thread that goes sideways because ideas start flying around and being argued when nobody has really advanced or defended or introduced them.
I have been careful to say:
* Jeremiah Wright has made statements that were sexist.
* Jeremiah Wright would be disqualified for President for that reason, if it were up to me.
* I would have walked out had I been present during what Wright said about Natalie Holloway.
* Sexism is inexcusable no matter where it occurs.
* Wright’s views, in certain ways, mark him as a revolutionary.
* Revolutionaries have blind spots. I think that includes feminists.
I think what Wright said about 9/11 is 180 degrees different from anything Pat Robertson or fundamentalists of any stripe have had or would have to say about it, but that’s because I do understand liberation theology and know it to be 180 degrees different from fundamentalisms/evangelicalism/literalism of every and all kind. I have also made that point in this thread– that the response to Wright’s sermon(s) tells me about the racial apartheid that still exists in this country and tells me how much worse it is in some ways than it was 40 years ago.
Again, I don’t have time to moderate a thread that veers off into stuff nobody has said/believes/argued. Please, comment carefully.
I just reread what he said. He specifically does NOT say 9/11 was God punishing America. He says hatred begets hatred, violence begets violence, terrorism begets terrorism, and if you do all of those things to other people, the chicken are going to come home to roost so far as you are concerned.
That is nothing like what fundamentalists/evangelicals like Robertson/Falwell or for that matter, Osama bin Laden, believe or preach. It is a way of stating a truth that is common to all great religions: Treat other people the way that you want to be treated. The inverse of which is, if you don’t, they won’t.
One more thing I wanted to say, a little different subject. It’s true that racist words like the n word aren’t used against white people (generally speaking), but it isn’t true that Hillary Clinton’s people don’t know what it is to be made to be subhuman or nonhuman. Clinton is a woman, and all of us, as women, know what it is to be made subhuman/nonhuman. As white women we understand this very well. Wright was talking strictly and only about racism there. As a man, that is the oppression he knows. He doesn’t know what it is to be a woman, or to suffer as women suffer, and that is evident in what he’s said at times. At the same time, if you go through his writings/sermons, he consistently and continually cites to the writings of black feminists/womanists. He does this often– a lot. You don’t have to search much to find him quoting black feminist writers in depth, not just a quote here and there, in depth analyses of what womanists/black feminists have done and written.
I want to be, again, careful in this thread, it’s important to me. Wright often attacks racism in the way it is specifically illuminated by the different treatment white women receive vs. black women. When white women listen/see that, it makes sense that they (we) understand it as an attack on them (us) only, without recognizing the way it is — for Wright, a man — more about a challenge to racism than it is an attack on white women. In the ears of others who are not white or who have different, nonwhite experiences around race, it’s the attack on racism that is more likely to be heard, with the different treatment of white women vs. black women in society understood as an expression of racism.
The issue of how well white women understand oppression is an issue specifically in this campaign because a white woman is running for President as against a black man. Will a white woman do as well by all people, including people of color, as a black man will do by all people, including white women? Why do we think so, or don’t we. I think those are the underlying questions/issues that Wright and others are talking about. I think that context is important to take into consideration.
Heart,
I don’t think you’re saying that Wright’s sermon against Clinton was revolutionary. I do think you’re working hard to make it an aberration, rather than one indication of this man’s deeply ingrained sexism and racism.
I get that you think the man is a revolutionary re: race and other issues, even if he is definitely not on gender and related issues. I think his deployment of racial and sexual hatred against Clinton, and other white women, disqualifies him from being considered a revolutionary.
I fundamentally disagree with you re: what he was saying about 9/11. But I think that’s a difference of opinion we’re not going to resolve.
Men and women can claim to be doing God’s work in all sorts of ways. I might agree with them or not. But that’s not really the point: I actually have no problem with, for example, conducting a war to end slavery and justifying it by saying it was God’s will. Because I think ending slavery is just and right, even if cast in the language of retribution for suffering imposed, as Lincoln did. And I think ending white supremacy is just and right, even if one uses Lincoln’s language to justify it.
I don’t think flying two planes into buildings full of people who have done nothing like bomb Hiroshima is just and right. First, I don’t think it was ever about ending America’s imperialism. It was about preserving the hegemony and imperialism of another, different type of system. Nor do I think it ever stood a chance of ending America’s imperialism, even if that had been what it was designed for — which it wasn’t. Given those two predicates, then, yes, I think the language of divine retribution is particularly inappropriate insofar as it clearly states that what was done WAS just and right. Just like the language used by Robertson et. al clearly states that what happened in NOLA was just and right.
When Wright says America’s chickens came home to roost, he wasn’t talking about ending imperialism or white supremacy. He was talking about punishment: now you’re getting yours.
Emma, we cross posted.
I don’t think and am not working hard to say that Wright’s anti-Clinton comments are an aberration. I think they are indicative, as I’ve said repeatedly now, of a blind spot he has with respect to sex/his own sexism. Just as I think that quite often, the outrage on the part of white persons towards these remarks indicates that they have a similar blind spot as to race/their own racism. Both blind spots are understandable. Wright doesn’t get it, in his bones, in his gut, what it means to be a woman, white or not. White people don’t get, in their bones, in their guts, what it means to be black in the U.S.
I responded in my cross post with yours to most of the rest of what you say. I don’t agree that Wright was talking about divine retribution. That’s also not my experience with the church he is part of (which I am familiar with) and with their teachings. They are an open and affirming/forefront-in-AIDS-this-is-not-any-sort-of-divine-judgment activism/anti-war/anti-violence/anti-racism/anti-sexism kind of a church. Wright is an orator in the tradition of black and person-of-color liberation preachers/theologians, and he often invokes biblical imagery, but it means something different coming from people like him than it means coming from fundamentalists, etc.; more importantly, it isn’t understood by people who go to his church/appreciate him at all in the way fundamentalists understand guys like Falwell and Robertson. These are completely different worlds.
But, I have work to do, gotta go for now.
And hopefully I don’t have to say this, but again in the interests of being careful, of course it wasn’t right to fly airplanes into skyscrapers full of innocent people! Of course it was not. Wright never said it was right either, or that it would achieve any of the ends you rightly point out it did not and could not have achieved. All he said was, in so many words, we’ve done the same thing to other people/countries/nations many times. Where do we get off being all high and mighty. What goes around comes around. And here we are all these years later STILL killing people, women, children, women being raped, families, towns, cities, nations being destroyed, by us, our bombs, our men, our own men and women dying, none of them deserve it EITHER and by now we’ve killed many times the number killed in the towers and there is no indication that is going to end any time soon.
We didn’t actually cross-post.
I think it’s more than a blind spot, as I’ve said. I think it’s active bigotry against white women as white women. Think of CAM’s piece on white women. (Also, blind spot = aberration, for me. So if that’s confusing, sorry.)
And the Church’s teachings? Fine. Whatever. I don’t have an argument with that. I have an argument with Rev. Wright’s sermons that I’ve talked about here. I don’t think what Wright is actually saying means something different b/c of the oratory tradition he comes out of. It means what it means on its face: revenge and retribution for no other reason than for punishment.
What goes around comes around.
Funny, sounds just like revenge and retribution to me, for no other end than punishment of the evil-doers. Even the plagues on Egypt had a reason: let my people go. 9/11? Not so much.
Well, but that’s not what it means to the people he was talking to, and one of the points I keep trying to make is, that matters. He wasn’t preaching to the whole world there in those sermons. He was preaching to his own church where everyone knows what he’s talking about, where people have shared beliefs and values, a shared history. I might be inclined more to agree if he wrote these sermons as Obama’s speech writer, but he didn’t. He wrote them as a preacher, for his congregation. Then the news media, et al combed through 3,000 or so hours worth of taped sermons and made those sermons a matter of public debate around Obama’s candidacy. That’s what I’m saying, in part. These sermons are not understood by those outside of that tradition/group and they were never meant to be preached outside of that tradition/group. It’s like what happens to radical feminists on a much smaller scale when our writings are plumbed for choice quotations by nonfeminists or anti-feminists, taken out of their context, shouted from the rooftops, with meanings given to what we have said that we never intended. And when we attempt to provide a context, the response is, “No, you said THIS and the only possible meaning can be [insert whatever the person insists that we mean here.]“
Having said all of this, I do believe there is active bigotry against white women as white women out there right now, all over the place, including amongst leftists and progressives so-called, especially and in particular among white men. And I think white men are being CONTINUALLY given a pass on this and on their own racism including by people of color so long as it’s white women who are being trounced and attacked. I think this is a serious problem and it has been a really serious problem for me, personally. I’ve felt it like probably nobody else in this thread has.
I just don’t think what Wright says is that. But having said that, what Wright says, broadcast, again, from the rooftops, is not helpful because it can be used by those who really do hate white women as white women, in the way CAM’s essay describes so well.
Me: What goes around comes around.
Emma: Funny, sounds just like revenge and retribution to me, for no other end than punishment of the evil-doers. Even the plagues on Egypt had a reason: let my people go. 9/11? Not so much.
It *is* revenge and retribution, just not “Divine.” Not God’s revenge and retribution. 9/11 was an act of terrorism, revenge, retribution people committed against other people. Just as the U.S. by its policies, acts, wars, violence, racism, imperialism have committed acts of terrorism, revenge, retribution against people, cultures, nations, ethnic groups, races, historically, going back a long, long time, resulting in our being hated by those who have suffered through or witnessed our violence.
Pat Robertson, Falwell, et al, say God is going to punish because you are a sinner and you won’t repent. All fundamentalists say some version of this.
Those in Wright’s tradition are continually saying something different, something about justice, nonviolence, bringing oppressions of all kinds to an end. They point to violence, oppression and injustice as begetting more of the same, the idea being that the violence and injustice must end, and in the end, all we can end is our own, or that the place to begin is with ourselves.
Okay, I get your points better. I don’t agree with them, but I understand them.
ok, TO THE POINT OF,
why do women sit and listen to these men, be in in pulpit or in politics or revolutionaries, etc.,
I think I can shed some light on this, because I’ve done it, both in religion, and in revolutionary politics.
Honestly I haven’t really been keeping up with the elections [I know, shame on me and esp being a poli sci major years back but, I just got so fed up with politics and its all the same kaka I took some time away from it],
and I haven’t kept up totally with all of the Obama and Wright and all that, though I do know quite a bit about nationalism and religious nationalism,
because I’ve been intimately acquainted with all three, Christianity, Judaism and Islam,
as well as right wing politics and far far left wing, LOL,
so yea, I kind of laugh about it now, I’m like a tumbleweed though it wasn’t like I planned it that way, but I’ve been tossed to and fro and have picked up thorns in about every place or ideology there is along the way,
So [sigh],
its about Solidarity and feeling Powerless, to do something about the oppression one is fighting,
and in nationalism its about the racism one is bombarded with day in and day out,
in class or revolutionary politics its about the classism and poverty,
in religion its about that being separated or different from the world [or what is perceived] due to belief systems,
but there is something all of these have in common for women,
a sense of belonging and Protection.
Its one thing to confront your brothers,
its a whole other ballgame to confront the sexual violence and hate from a group or class of not just men but women too, that oppress you, etc.
And while I detest the goals of ultra-nationalism, and I think I’ll use that term ultra because nationalism in itself is NOT a bad thing,
its though when it becomes a drive for Vengeance, and Retribution, that it becomes something far more sinister and its often motivated by Other political factors, especially religion,
but anyway…while I detest it, I understand it and I can see why a lot of women of color Will support men like Wright, they may not like the sexism but they’ll put it Secondary, to the issues of confronting and yes, overthrowing white supremacy and white oppression, etc.
Same thing with class oppression, why a lot of revolutionary women will put up or tolerate or turn a blind eye towards their male comrades who are sexist, misogynist, etc.,
NOW, follow me here, its not just the issue of solidarity,
because if that was only the case, then eventually one would see or hear enough of the other’s experience [women] of the other groups to know that there is far more to the picture than A oppresses B, etc.,
I think several things happen, like, for one, the status or place a person sits, meaning,
I’ll speak in terms of class here because I don’t feel it would be right for me to speak for a woman of color, though I can understand some things to a point, it would be offensive I think to try to speak for them,
so I’ll do it from a class perspective, but anyway, like, when I was heavy into revolutionary politics [and I'm talking, ready to pick up guns and start shooting], I was also in a place of dire poverty, homelessness, etc., and when you Live in that, and its all you see, then it does effect HOW you see the world, your lens so to speak,
and rather than seeing that the world is far more complex than what I could see from the gutter so to speak, all I could see is, they verses us, the rich oppressing the poor, didn’t matter either what race, because when you live in the gutter its not just white people oppressing, though now Majority IS white, nor is it just men,
BUT, it does something to your mind, when you are battling day in and day out, fighting just to breathe,
and then you are in a group, with an ideology that makes sense, that explains Why you are oppressed, etc., and how to war against it,
and during that time, you are Part of the movement, [or church or what have you] and you find yourself, Rationalizing shit, like,
ok, its just That man who is sexist or its because he’s of the older generation or he’s just an asshole and other men will jump in too and some will say yea I’m all for women, blah blah blah, you know how that works,
but the thing is, its easier to address Them, on their sexism and even Think that because you are a part of a movement that you can eventually change the men, or free yourself so to speak, and often times, men do let up on their power hold so to speak,
why in wars, revolutions feminism does gain some power within movements or women’s rights so to speak, but the Key there is that its ONLY when its beneficial to what the agenda of the men is, After its all said and done, its go back to the kitchen and have those babies [and it was the same damn way in Soviet and in China too], oh, but with them they added 10 more hours of work and bread lines,
but anyway, LOL, the Next thing that happens is you start insulating yourself, in other words, its like it becomes you Entire world, your thoughts, your thinking, and This is where I think a lot of brainwashing begins or is really happening [and I do believe that in mass movements there is some brainwashing that goes on, because of the whole hierarchy and power structure, etc and if there is a cult of personality going on, its even more so, the deindividualization process, so forth and thats part of the whole solidarity process,
many will deny this but I swear its true, and its also due to that, that feminism IS in contrast or Conflict rather with the goals of those movements because feminism is centered around human and individual rights of women, I say individual because when women start fighting for human rights, they see themselves as human beings, as individuals, not just as a group,
so in that insulation, it becomes more easy to see the whole world through the lens of what the men say...referring now to being in a group, nationalist or religious or what have you, Religion is worse because then there is that added Guilt that God/or Allah or Jehovah as made it your lot, that either you are supposed to be by Divine rule submissive or that you are of the gender that is all going to hell anyway or what have you,
and the guilt and fear, is even MORE powerful in brainwashing women or maybe better term, conditioning,
but so, like, lets say, fighting class oppression, and some rich woman comes up to you and shows empathy and solidarity,
the first thing you think is all the teachings or readings you have done and your lens, is so entrenched in your experience that you'll fight, literally any deviance from that...you don't See that woman as a person but only as some rich person who is priviledged and who is out to get you or who truly is the 'enemy',
and unless one has been or chooses to look beyond that prejudice [and yes, prejudice develops when you are entrenched in those solidarity groups],
over time it becomes more acceptable, to see the us verses them, with never a deviation,
so when lets say, one of the men in your group says something sexist like Wright said, you’ll see that rich woman, the oppressor, and it won’t be like seeing a woman such as yourself, but you see her as the enemy
does this make sense?
Now I’m not saying this is true for everyone because obviously not but I do think, it does explain a lot why women will sit and listen to that type of sexist hate, especially in revolutionary or ultranationalist settings,
and why some, sadly, yes, have even partaken and assisted in the rapes and murders of other women, the enemy,
examples: Serbian nurses assisting Serbian men in kidnapping, and gang raping young Bosnian Muslim girls/women,
or Muslim Albanian women assisting the men in trafficking and sexually enslaving/gang raping Serbian and Eastern Bloc country girls,
or Israeli women assisting Israeli men in oppressing and raping Palestinian women/children, etc.,
and we can’t just say, they just didn’t Think the men would actually Do that type of violence, or that they were too afraid,
I think there is some elements there that people, feminists especially are Afraid to talk about, [my opinion] because I think we KNOW that potential is there,
but its too much like a festering wound to open and speak about, it touches deeply and yes, it is violence,
because, like, we get defensive, and maybe rightly so,
but, that fear is there, that anger is there, and that justification or want for revenge is there,
and though its not truly directed at the Oppressor so to speak, but at those that Represent the Oppressor [does that make sense],
it is still there.
And its buried under the surface, and we speak Around it,
but its there.
And thats why I think feminism does fail, because until we start to really be honest, about our fears, our angers, our rage at Each other, seriously, as women,
I don’t think we’ll ever get to a place where yes, women Can stand against their brothers even though they may share in oppression,
and say, NO, Enough.
[and then, yes, there are women that truly agree with their brothers and do not support feminism, on that I can't answer on that one],
but on the why women sit there, I think some of what I’ve shared maybe explains some of it.
And too, the stereotypes and that includes the Stereotypes of the Oppressor class/or race, etc.,
and they Do exist,
has a lot to do with it too…
but I think, that part of the solution is yes, confronting violence not just against ourselves but confronting those brothers of their violence,
and its not easy to do, its One thing to do it on a women’s space,
its a whole other thing to do in in your group, hear what I’m saying…
Especially as a woman, because once you take a stand for human rights or against violence against women of the ‘other’ so to speak,
they’ll slam down on you so fast and call you traitor, etc.
So there is a lot of fear working there, fear of the oppressor, and fear also of the group, and well anyway,
a lot of it too is also just the woman’s personal experience with male violence, If she has been fortunate enough to not experience horrendous male violence,
then she might not be so apt to stand for all women,
does that make any sense? I’m speaking in reference in belonging or being part of a solidarity group fighting oppression of another group, etc.
Because her oppression be it racial or class or both, will Always be first and foremost on her mind and what she deals with, those harsh realities on a daily basis,
and I think some women don’t get this…
BUT, I did learn, eventually, that you have to get Beyond your pain from your personal experience and try and See from the experience and lens of others,
no matter HOW painful your experience may be, and when you Do that, you begin too see that your ‘enemy’ be it race or class,
is not that different from yourself, that its not just always black and white, and that sometimes its far more complex and that people are more complex, human nature and that,
killing ‘them’ or destroying ‘them’ or alienating ‘them’ or converting ‘them’,
is not the cure,
it might Feel or seem that way, but it isn’t because OPPRESSION is
so intertwined with So many things and different Players, meaning, its not just Them verse us, but its
Them helping Them helping Them and Them getting some Perks and Sidekicks from helping Them and so forth,
or its not always, my oppression is worse than their oppression therefore I’m or We are justified in retribution and so forth,
its very easy to get blinded by Hate,
and Hate poisons, believe me, I know, I know it on such a deep gut level and I STILL, every single day,
struggle with it like you can’t imagine, and then the Depression that it causes and the sometimes hopelessness,
but the thing that is Deceitful about hate and why its so powerful in its destruction,
is that it really does Blind you and distorts your vision of things, of the world and of humanity, including those who oppress you, like, you’ll see All of them, being the oppressor but in Reality,
its NOT all of THEM, its Some of them,
and the worst thing about Hate, is that it destroys you, ourselves, but its so clever in how it works.
And it does so in a way you don’t even realize until one day you look inside and there is nothingness…
and I think people, especially in those types of movements, when they Get to that place,
can do two things, they can confront it and choose to let it go,
or they can rationalize it, and choose to let it overtake them,
and Thats why, women in WWII Nazi Germany assisted [some, not all] in the death camps,
why those Serbian nurses assisted men in raping and mass killing,
why those Albanian/and Kosovo women assist men in trafficking/raping,
and why Israeli women, again, SOME, NOT ALL, assist Israeli nationalists in raping and oppressing horribly Palestinian people,
so forth and so forth and so forth.
It really Is true, that when they say, when you are Persecuted, that is the test of character,
and something one of my ex’s said to me [a Shite Muslim], that I’ll never forget,
during times of war, revolution, etc., there is no laws, restraints, to stop people from doing what is already in them, what is in them, will be unleashed,
and it really does expose the good in them or the bad,
usually the bad.
But there are times, that true good, comes out, that often times is totally unexpected, the rare ones that stand and refuse to take part in the banality of evil,
and they are hated by all sides. And usually killed for it.
I think, because I struggle with wanting revenge and hate often, that what stops me, inside now,
is the feeling of becoming what I hate, of being able to inflict that kind of hate and cruelty on another,
and I nip it when I start thinking like that, because it really is, like a cancer,
I share this, because its something I truly struggle with and why I left revolutionary politics, NOT that I don’t think there isn’t a need for overthrowing oppression, I do,
but I think, when you get to that place of touching that level of evil, you Really have to be careful because its not something that you can touch,
and it not have an extremely death effect on your soul or spirit or heart,
the thing is, its Easier to hate,
it really is,
its a hell of a lot harder,
to
Forgive.
But until we forgive, not saying tolerate or treat injustice like its no big deal, or that reparations aren’t needed,
but until we forgive,
there IS no Deliverance from Oppression because we just become,
the Oppressers and the cycle continues and continues…and
death wins.
Really wise and beautiful, Tasha, so much wisdom there.
I’ve always said, as Andrea Dworkin did, as well, women become fundamentalists, Religious Righters, or simply marry men, because (1) it’s the better deal under male heterosupremacy, for women who do not see that they have many options. You are owned by one man via marriage instead of prostituted/exploited/used by many; (2) you get community with women, support, and your material needs, especially if you are a mother, are met. Women don’t really become fundamentalists, part of the RR because they believe all that stuff necessarily — some do, but many don’t.
It’s similar with many movements. It’s as you say, Tasha. Women find a movement that gives them words to describe their oppression and subjugation, that gives them a community of sorts, and they try not to notice the sexism/misogyny in those movements/religions, they think or believe men will change over time.
Once they realize men, for the most part, won’t change, whether religious men or leftists/progressives/Marxists, whatever, when they finally realize that, the rage can consume them. Us. Because I tell you truly I have been there and that is a place of torment like no other.
You’re right though. Unless we can rise above our rage, our appropriate and completely understandable hatred for those who have hurt us, we can never be more, or better, than they were. We will do to others what they did to us. And if we do, we will not make any revolution that matters. That’s really the hell of it. How do you forgive men who have raped you, exploited you, sexually harassed you, battered you, tried to kill you, tried to kill your spirit, soul, as well as your body, how do you let your hatred of them for what they did to you go? How. It’s so hard. But so necessary for those of us who really do want to build a new world.
Re: #91 and #92, yes. Absolutely, Heart, that’s it.
Those are exactly the two things I’ve been sniffing.
Tasha, what you write about hate is eerily reminiscent of things I have written to Heart in emails, not feeling up to confronting that issue publicly. Rage can be a source of great power and motivation, but if one lets it degenerate into blind hatred, it becomes poison. Forgiveness is also an extremely tricky matter. I do not know if I understand how you or Heart used that word. To me, the critical aspect of channeling rage constructively is not to let it blind me or control me. I have to keep my vision clear, undistorted, focused, despite all the betrayal, spin, murk, distortion, lies, disingenuousness, poison that seem omnipresent in this world. If I let my fury consume me, I am lost. I have been there, and had to claw my way back, after certain wholly unexpected vicious betrayals. I know what getting lost like that does to my creativity. I could still write, but it was like whirling around in circles, making me dizzy and not getting anywhere.
I suppose what I am trying to get at is, for me feminist revolution is not about revenge. It is about developing new and better ways for people to relate to each other and to the planet, what some have called partnership. Wright talks about reconciliation. This may all seem hopelessly idealistic and pie in the sky, but I think it is the only realistic hope for the human race to survive.
Aletha– I agree with every word.
Does anyone know where one can obtain a JEREMIAH WRIGHT FOR PRESIDENT bumper sticker?
[...] from Heart at Women’s Space, her essay Rev. Jeremiah Wright for President offers an antidote to the unjustified media free-for-all at the expense of the better thinking [...]