Tag Archives: intersectionalism

Guest Post: This is what an activist looks like

While I’m trying to get well enough and focused enough to resume blogging regularly, I decided to look around for a guest post or two to share with you. When I first read this, is resonated with me, and at the moment, when even blogging seems beyond me, it feels particularly apt.

This piece, originally published September 15 2009 at Chally’s own Zero at the Bone, discusses the various ways we can do activism, many of which may not be recognized as “traditional” activism, but nonetheless make a real difference in the world. As someone whose activism rarely looks traditional (I can count on one hand the number of protests and marches I’ve been to), I appreciate her analysis of why “traditional” activism excludes so many of us — and her exploration of all the other ways we can and do work for change.

This is what an activist looks like

I’m disappointed when I hear activists prescribing what other activists ought to do. I’m surprised it doesn’t all come from rich, white, etc, etc, men, and here’s why.

Traditional forms of activism are often not possible or difficult for a given individual. Is a single mother going to go to a rally for paid maternity leave when she can’t find someone to look after her kids? Is someone with chronic pain and/or fatigue going to take kindly to being told they ought to attend a protest? Is it reasonable to expect that everyone has the time, energy, resources and know-how to do research or a survey? Is someone struggling to get by going to have the money to pay to get into your event? Is your crowded, loud meeting held in a room up a flight of steps going to be accessible to everyone?

You see, if you’re claiming to be progressive, but your organising unthinkingly excludes chunks of vulnerable and oppressed people? You are not a progressive. And if you are nevertheless insisting that some other form of activism is not a proper one? You are a douche. If you’re low on resources, and really trying to include folks, that’s one thing. But if you think you have the one true way to save the world, that is quite another.

What I am suggesting is that there are a lot of forms of activism in the world, and looking down one’s nose at some of them is detrimental as well as being offensive to those of us working hard to make valuable contributions in any way we can. It goes beyond ‘well, everyone should do what they can’. It’s not even a case of ‘if you can only contribute a little, that’s fine’. It’s not even just about the privileging of particular modes of contribution. It’s this: I do not know where anyone gets off saying that what another person does to heal the world is less than proper.

Now, I sign petitions and write letters all that sort of thing. I buy badges and do bakesales, too. Right now I’m volunteering with the local government on a DVD aimed at crime prevention. (These forms of activism have various levels of “proper activism” quotient attached to them. Discussion questions: How much do they tie in with what you do? How traditional do they seem to you?) I do traditional activism – sometimes. I am disabled, and it is not always physically possible to do so. Here is a short list of some forms of activism in which I engage that traditional thinking doesn’t call activism:

I call out people when they use “ism”-based language.
I attempt to be an ethical consumer (and frequently fail, but I’m getting better! And it’s a feature of economic privilege that this form of activism is even possible for me).
I try to centre marginal people/experiences/voices in any given situation.
I engage with the world, and learn as much as I can about what I can do to make it better.
I look into myself and work at unravelling oppressive ideas I have taken on as my own.
I assist those around me with their activism where I can and should.

We should be rethinking traditional methods of activism, because progress means rethinking the traditional to make sure we have the very best for ourselves and the world. Even where we’ve assured ourselves we’re progressive. We need to keep thinking, keep examining, not only the world but ourselves.

Because it’s not just pressuring governments that’s important, as important as it is. Central to my activism is what I do right here, right now, in my life and my communities. When it comes down to it, progress is not only in the big sweeping changes. It’s in our souls. It’s in relating to each other with kindness.

I just don’t get it when people say that blogging isn’t real activism, because it is a big deal to this activist. I’ve reached and been reached by so many people, sharing lives that would never otherwise touch! Because the Internet is not composed of individuals shouting into the void. The Internet is composed of people, and we use it to direct attention to issues and petitions and all sorts. And we take what we learn with us to the offline world. Even if this wasn’t so, there is important work to do inside our minds. We have to tease out the oppression we’ve stored in ourselves. We have to understand and learn. Blogs have given me tools to put language and frames to my experience. For instance, amandaw’s work at Three Rivers Fog and Lauredhel’s at Hoyden About Town gave me what I needed to talk about my experiences as a disabled woman. You know. Writing isn’t useless. Writing is a good part of humanity’s process and progress, how we connect, how we relate to ourselves. Whether you’re writer or reader – and how often those roles intertwine in a sphere such as blogging! – writing is not just valid, but vital.

Chally is, among other things, Australian, non-white, cis, disabled, a reader, a writer, a woman and a feminist. She enjoys feminist science fiction, French knitting, Doctor Who and cake. She considers herself to have been a feminist all her life but only realized consciously in 2007. She blogs at Zero at the Bone and the new group blog FWD/Forward.

9 Comments | Posted on 12 October 2009 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy | Tags: ableism, activism, intersectionalism, politics, Privilege

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WFPP Guest Post: We Will Braid Our Way to Revolution, Baby

Kelly Diels, of her eponymous blog, offers the following entry to the Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer on hair, and parenting biracial black girls, and hair, and love, and hair, and revolution, and hair. Because hair is (if you’ll pardon me) woven in with all those things, especially for black women and girls.

I love this piece not only because I love Kelly’s writing, but because it is an excellent intersectionalist piece. Although — like many — she doesn’t use the words “feminism” or “white privilege” or “internalized racist beauty standards”, her post is about all that and more.

We Will Braid Our Way to Revolution, Baby

I wish my children were turtles and carried a carapace of protective armour on their backs. I wish I was a warrior woman who would blaze trails of righteousness with fearsome weapon, the word. Or the laptop. It has a certain heft. It can also start fires if you leave it unattended on the sofa. True story. Not mine, but true, so leave your laptops on hard surfaces only, if you please. That was my PSA. No charge. Tell your friends.

I wish these things — the armour, the bravery, the righteousness, not the small house fires – because I often feel helpless to protect my children from both the big, bad wolf (and lo, he is out there) and the big, bad world.

I am white. My children are black. Although in my work, my studies and in my thinking I challenge those poles of identification, the truth of the matter is that my children and I have inherited and inhabit two different worlds.

This is not an easy thing to admit. I’m an idealist. I really would like to buy the world a coke and live in perfect harmony. The world that the multicultural clubs and Benetton ads of my adolescence sold me is a sexy fantasy. Sometimes I think I’ve created it. Sometimes I marvel at how my friends are just so damn progressive and awesome and kickass that I’ve accidentally-on-purpose astral-planed into a right-thinking world where Barack Obama is president and schools don’t boycott his speeches. And then schools protest his speeches. And then someone questions the paternity of my children, or my connection to them (are you their mother? their REAL mother?), or talks about their good hair, or or or or.

Or my daughter will tell me: I wish I was white.

Or I will hear her barbie say: I want to be friends with the white girl. You can’t be my girlfriend because you’re brown.

Or she will pester me for seven hundred consecutive years AND I AM NOT EXAGGERATING to oppress her ringlets into a straight-hanging hair curtain.

Or she will tell me that her cousins are more beautiful than her because they have yellow hair.

The hair, the hair, the hair. I worry constantly about the hair.

I straighten my hair every day. It is a creative endeavour. I’m working a Cleopatra-bob AND IT IS ART DAMMIT. I love parts of the aesthetic community that women can opt into or out of: I love going to a salon or getting together with a girlfriend to apply rinses and pluck offenders and having my hair stroked and my words heard and frizzies steamed into submission. It is cheaper than therapy. It IS therapy, and art therapy, to boot, and there is touching and I am a affection sponge entirely devoid of shame. I’ll take it any way I can get it.

So for me, hair is just another medium for personal expression. Blue hair says something and so do gleaming chestnut bobs. Mine says, is it just me or is the unrepentantly oft-married Liz Taylor the EFFING BOMB? (It might be just me.)

So that’s what hair is to me: a choice. A playground. At work, no one will look at me any which way if it is curly one day and straight the next. I can come back from vacation with braids and beads (please kill me if I do) and it will be a lark, not a political statement, though HOLY is that weighted with economic and political implications. I can wash it and leave it be and it will be and it will not be a big deal, to anyone, anywhere, and definitely not in my office. I’m not sure anyone there has even noticed that I have hair even though I sometimes straighten it at my desk. No joke. I do it as a joke. I like to send up my job.

This is fun and inconsequential and this is not necessarily how black women experience hair. This is not entirely how my children will experience their hair. Their hair signals something: not white. Not black. It means something.

OMG BREAKING NEWS: TYRA BANKS JUST TOOK OFF HER WEAVE ON NATIONAL TELEVISION. “Is embracing the state of black hair the new liberation?”

And that is what I mean: for black women, to just wear your hair, as it is, is so bad-ass. So Africanist. So Authentic. Such a political statement that even Tyra can make a play at challenging the beauty myth. Because the dominant standard of beauty in our society is so Eurocentric that to be acceptable black women must pay for entre. They pay to the tune of $45.6 million a year in home hair relaxers (not including relaxers sold at Wal-Mart). There’s a quip that isn’t just a quip in the trailer for Chris Rocks’ Good Hair: “If your hair is nappy, white people aren’t happy.”

So my white hairplay is frivolous but what I do with my black children’s hair has meaning. It might mean that I haven’t bothered to learn how to care for it. It might mean that I am flaunting their biraciality and their ‘good’ hair and the way they might straddle of the divide between white and black. It might mean I’m allowing them to be culturally white and aesthetically exotic.

Or it might mean that I will usher them into the art and touch and play of hair. We might sit for hours and braid and talk. We might blow-dry and straighten and stroke and talk. We might oil and twist and knot and talk. We may play, we may bow, we may straighten our spines and there will be curls and braids and beads and straight and wild days.

But with each style, with each hot-set undertaking, we will talk. Love talk is radical.

I always wanted to be political, to be an activist, but I was always too lazy for protests, and besides, the crowds freak me out. I can barely handle the twelve parents and assorted children at softball games without medication. So mothering has been the most surprising endeavour: my most mundane moments are protests. Negotiation. Navigation. The revolution is much smaller and intimate than I ever imagined. The revolution will be mothered. And fathered. And, one wonderful day, parented.

The Beginning.

About Me. Kelly Diels.
1. This year, I’m thirty-sex. Yes I AM.
2. By day, I’m a single mama who works in the big bad corporate world writing proposals and managing contracts.
3. By many, many nights, I write from my heart and spill my tawdry secrets (they’re mostly not tawdry, alas, but that might make you look) on my wildly unfocused blog, www.kellydiels.com.
4. I also have an unacknowledged Twitter problem except now I just acknowledged it. Please find me (@KellyDiels) and say hi.

7 Comments | Posted on 10 September 2009 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy, Parenting, Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer | Tags: Gender, hair, intersectionalism, Privilege, Race

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More on intersectionality

You know how I said we can’t always get it right? Well, I was right, because I got some stuff wrong in that last post. I have a tendency to let language run away with me, and go with what sounds good rather than what’s right. So in the last post, I conceptually missed one really important piece, and messed up in some of my language.

To whit, the idea of us v them (or even us and them). It doesn’t work. When I’m talking about me, I can talk about “those who are not like me”. But if I’m talking about “us” — say, feminists, or fat acceptance advocates — then I can’t talk about a “them” — women of color, or persons with disabilities — because they are us. There are feminists of color, and disabled fat activists, and fat Brown trans Deaf feminist bisexual women (ok, I don’t know of one, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t exist), and for them (tricky word!), separating out one “strand” of privilege/oppression is both impossible and ridiculous. It is only when one has most of the cards stacked in one’s favor that one has the privilege of pretending that that one axis of oppression can stand alone, be examined alone and dismantled alone.

We have to think about those who are not like us, yes, but we also must remember that those who may belong to a group we do not might also belong to ours. To say “feminists think this and blacks think that” is to ignore Black feminists. To say “well we invited them, why don’t they join us?” is to exclude them (to Other “them”), and to render invisible those who are both “us” and
“them“.

Intersectionalism is vital — necessary to life! — because the world is not made up of white people and black people and feminists and trans people. Rather, the world is made up of persons, who might be any combination of white and black and trans and feminist and disabled and fat and neurotypical and and and and…

It is fine and well to have a focus, a specialty (or two or three or however many). It is natural and understandable to have more expertise in the areas where one personally and intimately experiences oppression. But we cannot, we must not, allow that focus to blind us. We must not use our expertise in one area to exculpate our ignorance in another. Intersectionality doesn’t mean we are required to study all areas of oppression equally; it calls us rather to open our eyes, to look to our own privilege when telling of our oppression, and it demands that we rid ourselves of the fallacy of “us” and “them”.

Selfishly, I need for intersectionality to succeed, for examples of those who work to end one type of oppression interlinking with others to abound, for the skill of looking beyond oneself to find the “us” in “them” to flourish; I need it to succeed, for it is my only hope of teaching my presumably-straight white middle class son how to look at all areas of his privilege, to work against all the ways those-like-and-not-like-him are oppressed, to recognize the existence of kyriarchy and oppose it always. Those of us with even one area of oppression have an opening, as we learn of privilege, to learn intersectionality; those of us with many are forced to adopt it or self-destruct. My child has nearly every privilege in the world heaped on him, in a society that teaches the ugly art of Othering from birth: I fully admit to maternal selfishness when I say I need intersectionality to succeed so I do not lose him to the kyriarchy, which would have him Other everyone I love — including me — out of importance in his life.

So, that’s not much of a reason for anyone else to adopt intersectionality (I fully recognize that an argument that sounds rather like “think of the white males!” is hardly much of a draw), but it’s one reason, among many, I will defend and promote it as much as I can. I have an obligation to others to avoid oppressing and Othering and rendering them invisible, as I myself have been, as I myself am demanding not to be. And also, yes, I have an urgent desire to demonstrate that skill to a child unlikely to ever have call to learn the hard way why it is so very vital.

Intersectionality: the art of opposing the kyriarchy, one word at a time and all ways at once.

Leave a comment | Posted on 31 March 2009 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy | Tags: intersectionalism, isms, language, Privilege, Race, white privilege

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On intersectionality

Four months ago, when I was starting this blog, I had never even heard of the word “intersectionality” (wikipedia article, blog post [amazing pictures, but probably NSFW], another blog post, link post). I was aware, in a general way, of race issues, certainly of queer issues, to a lesser extent of trans issues, among others, and I was aware of the language of privilege, of the many ways in which I live with privilege (and the many ways I do not). But “intersectionality” was not a word on my radar, and I didn’t really “get” it when I started looking it up — the arguments “watered down!” “loss of focus!” “not in this movement!” floated through my thinking, though each was, in turn, shot down.

And yet, I think I understood it even then, before I heard it, intuitively; as I named and taglined my blog, while it was primarily about the experience of being a feminist raising a boy, I was clear that he was not just any male, but a white male, a probably-straight male, an American middle class probably-straight white able-bodied male: very nearly the tippy top of the hierarchy, by way of the intersection (!) of all these different aspects of privilege.

The more I’ve thought about it, and especially after coming upon the word/concept “kyriarchy“, the more intersectionality makes sense (kyriarchy is what I was talking about here, though I didn’t realize it at the time — and I was also, unrealizingly, arguing against something of a straw feminism there). Feminism is in opposition to patriarchy, and this is good, but it takes only a moment of thought to realize that this does not and cannot (even at its most inclusive) cover all the ways in which some people are artificially privileged over others. Ultimately, I think it is the very concept of placing persons in a hierarchy (which is to say, it is kyriarchy) which needs to be done away with; and ultimately, it is intersectionalism alone which stands in opposition not just to one strand but, by definition, to all strands of oppression. It is only by working to recognize all forms of oppression/privilege in our work can we oppose all aspects of the kyriarchy; anything less is merely scrabbling for position on that fucked up ladder.

Which is not to say we need to get everything perfectly right all the time; we are human, and therefore both limited and flawed. Furthermore, we are humans raised under kyriarchy, and not one person reading this post can be without at least some privilege (since you’ve all managed to access the internet in some way or another); we are not going to be able to avoid all slip ups, all language of privilege, all incidents of accidental or oblivious oppression. But we can, and we must, try. Any step is worthy; any mistake is an opportunity to learn; any privilege recognized is a privilege weakened.

This ain’t an easy path to walk, and there is no end to it. It would be all too easy to turn aside, to close my eyes, to rest easy on the privilege I do have while screaming for justice for the privilege I don’t; but that way lies pain, if not for myself then for others, and if for others, then for all. Intersectionalism isn’t diluting our purpose; it isn’t putting others ahead of ourselves; it isn’t “PC metastized”. It is nothing less nor more than refusing to oppress others as we seek to end our own oppression. It is nothing less nor more than basic human compassion. It is nothing less than necessary, and nothing more than possible.