All I can say is that this has been a painful reminder of why I stopped engaging in blogs that I did find via BFP, Sylvia, Mag, BA, or other WOC-ally, WOC-centered identified blogs.

As I anticipated, I’ve watched brilliant writers, poets, and artists spend hours defending, explaining, and redefining what has always been ours: our right to have a spoken opinion.

::head shaking:: I should have known better.

White privileged d-list feminist fan of both BrownFemiPower and Feministing-linked bloggers (like you) here with a small comment.

Please, in addition to getting suggestions through this thread’s comments, do some perusing of BFP every once in a while.

I know, I know, it’s one more thing on the blog reading list, but keep this in mind:
She has her plate full writing up articles about Tobasco’s floods and the media attention it gets, alerting people to immigrant women being separated from the babies they’re nursing, etc. Every slight once in a while, something like your post makes her get her thoughts from her head to the page, but she’s got so much else to write about that, well, if you don’t hear from her or others like her here, please go read her and their blogs every once in a while to see what authors they are referring to.

For example, in her post about you, BFP wrote about Andrea Smith and how amazing of a professor she was. I’d recommend taking that as a suggestion from her, whether it gets posted as a comment here or not.

And so on.

(What do you think?)

You haven’t understood your critics.

The problem is not how many pages the WOC section got, though the idea that the book is made up of about 200 pages of what by deductive reasonsing must be “white american feminism” (what ever the hell that is in actual fact, though I’ll just ignore it right now and assume that anything that hopelessly parochial is not a “good” kind of feminism in and of itself) and 10 pages of “WOC feminism” is somewhat alarming even if that was the actual criticism being laid at the damn godamn fucking book, which it most certainly is not. The problem is that the fucking book wasn’t inter-fucking-woven with the fucking POC “section”, a thing it needs to have done for the simple fucking reason that it’s 2007 going on 2008: We should be beyond little seperate but equal ghetto chapters in “feminist” primers, we should in fact be beyond the very notion that WOC’s struggles are some how NOT equally and far from seperately as much the struggle that white women go through, even it sometimes zigs for WOC where it zags for white women, the essential effect, and essential answers will mesh and interweave as the fuckign text of FFF should have done.

Of couse that’s been said already by the POC who’ve been routinely and consistently ignored during this whole debacle, and it’s largely been replied to with the same missing hte point reply again and agina: it’s targetted towards “girls” who are mostly going to be white.

Except it’s not the WOC who need to be told that Feminism is letting WOC down, because Duh-oh! Cuz strangely enough they kinda already know! what with the “living it” and the “needing white women to pick up the fucking slack already on their end thankyouverymuch”. It is the very white girls with their white barbies in their white schools who’ll be going onto white-with-tokens colleges and work places eventually just like Jessica did, who need to hear THAT sort of feminism, who need to be taught THOSE truths.

Jessica, and her ten page chapter, don’t let WOC down, hell no, she’s let the women the book’s supposedly aimed at down.

It’s empowering to be there for those of our sisters when they need our support, and it’s empowering to not be like a cat on the stairs tangling up their feet when they need to be moving. And this book, with it’s silly token chapter is gonna break a lot of WOC’s necks because a lot of white girls grew up without learning that the WOC can’t stroke them right at this second, and to be please be getting with the out of underfoot now like! because they need to be getting down those stairs in a condition that is still kinda breathing and moving and stuff.

but you want practical advice to improve your shit, okay. You need to learn, and that’s not something we can just tell you, or teach you in 5 easy steps, it’s something you’ve got to work at, and if I was you I would take the coming semester as an opportunity to learn stuff yourself. Focus on moving away form the WOC/white women dualism you’ve got going on, and which Jessica’s book is packed with, maybe interlacing each lesson with WOC writings and perspectives in a way that isn’t too forced. work at finding the ways, and there are a fuck ton let me tell you, in which POC’s experiences cross over with women’s experiences under patriarchy. You won’t do it perfectly all the time, but you can’t just throw your hands up in the air and expect WOC to use their magical negress powers to distil a lifetime’s worth of nerve deep life experience dealing with the problems white people and women produce and pour it like orange juice straight into your brain. If you can get a non-white person, ideally someone you’re already friends with, who you can ask questions to, that’d help, but you can’t treat them like a lab rat or tes subject. You want ot listen more than you talk, you want to hear what they’re saying more than you judge or assess. You want ot try to feel what they feel without the lenses you view the world through as a white person, and with the lenses they view the world through. You got to be able to see the way they’re treated by your fellow white people, the odd looks, the way white people pause and change hteir body language slightly when they’re noticed by the white people. the way and whens of them not being noticed at all, that invisibleness that their skin tone gets them.

Like I siad, it’s not something you can learn in a day, or even a year, and it’s not easy because you have to find the wiring that makes you act in certain ways and view things in a certain way, and then find out where it leads and what it’s actually doing, exactly, and where it came from, before you even think about getting rid of it.

Jessica has the same choices that Hugo has and that I have at that any white person has when our lesser qualities are pointed out. We can learn from the experience. We can educate ourselves about how to do things differently. We can choose to behave differently the next time we are faced with a decision about how much attention to give to our own experiences as compared to how much we want to learn from the experiences of others.

Remember, we were taught to ignore women of color. We’ve got degrees in this subject without even attending school. We know how to belittle people who disagree.

For instance, you choose to accuse the people who disagree with Valenti as leaving “nastygrams” while ignoring all the horrible things said about BA, BFP and Sylvia on Jessica’s own web site. If legitimate criticsm gets labelled “nastygrams” I guess we’d have to label the dishonest insults that still exist on Jessica’s site “nucleargrams”. hurled by her posse.

Hugo, perhaps you missed it but I suggested several tactics you may want to use this spring up there a ways.