The part of me that likes to avoid conflict wants to stay quiet. That part of me is not on display this morning.
Certain radical women of color bloggers (RWOC) are accusing Amanda Marcotte of “stealing” her ideas for this RH Reality Check piece: Can a Person Be Illegal, from this speech by Brownfemipower at WAM. The speech was given March 29 in Cambridge; the Reality Check article was published on Wednesday, April 2 (and republished by Alternet five days later). Here is Brownfemipower’s post, and Sudy’s,and Sylvia’s, and Rebecca’s.
Amanda has explained, in comments on various blogs, that she had already outlined the Reality Check article in an editorial meeting well before she, Brownfemipower, and all the rest of us were gathered for WAM. Brownfemipower has not acknowledged that claim, and has chosen not to name Amanda, changing her name to an “X” in her comments section.
Radical women of color have rightly suggested that “mainstream”, predominantly white feminist bloggers need to do more to cover broader issues of social concern. Amanda, who has been writing about a wide spectrum of justice issues for years, chose to tackle the immigration/language issue in her Alternet piece because, as she says, immigration is a vital contemporary issue, much in the “zeitgeist.” And inevitably, when people who share the same progressive concerns start focusing on an issue, the chance that they will independently come to similar conclusions is pretty high.
Perhaps the Reality Check article ought to have had more links within it; I don’t know what Alternet’s particular policy is to citations. But the accusation of “stealing” — a charge now being repeated on multiple blogs today in regards to Amanda — is very serious indeed. It’s also a charge that requires far more proof than has been offered, and if that proof cannot be found, it’s a charge that ought to be withdrawn. It’s one thing to be frustrated, as many women of color bloggers are, that radical ideas are not getting published. It’s another thing altogether to accuse a fellow feminist of theft when she does take on, in eloquent and thoughtful terms, the very issue you’ve been demanding that mainstream white feminists address.
Certain words are matters of perspective and opinion. You can call me elitist and pompous; you can call me a clueless, self-serving asshole; you can call me a self-loathing fuckwit. (I’ve had all of these thrown my way in the past year.) It’s not a crime to be pompous; I can’t be sued for being a fuckwit. But to accuse someone who makes their living with words of stealing is a very, very serious charge — one that is normally subject to civil litigation or severe academic discipline. To make that charge without compelling evidence is to damage a writer’s reputation in perhaps the most serious way possible. No amount of frustration or anger justifies it.
There are larger issues here that may be driving some of the anger towards Amanda. Her new book (which I reviewed here) has just been published by Seal Press. Representatives of Seal Press got into a nasty exchange with some women of color bloggers at WAM. The community of “radical women of color bloggers” has suggested that Seal needs to do more to publish serious works by non-white feminists; Amanda’s article in RH, repeated on Alternet, coming so soon after both the publication of her book and the conflict with Seal, is understandably exasperating. Why some folks get book deals and others don’t, why some folks get articles published and others don’t — these are issues worth discussing.
Here’s what’s not okay: assuming that if Amanda Marcotte writes an intelligent and interesting piece about immigration right at the same time that Brownfemipower makes similar points at a conference, then somehow the former has “stolen” from the latter. The struggle for justice for undocumented migrants is an important one. Those who come late to the issue ought indeed inform themselves by listening to those who have been publicizing the struggle for a long time, but that doesn’t mean that the right to publish on the subject is limited to those who were writing about it first.
The charge of theft against Amanda has spread fairly widely, despite her clear statement that she had designed the article well in advance of the WAM conference. BFP’s powerful speech, read side-by-side with Amanda’s article, in no way constitutes a “smoking gun”, proving that Marcotte’s piece was plagiarized. Amanda seems caught between a rock and a hard place: if she doesn’t write about issues like immigration, she’s ignoring an issue of vital concern to women of color. When she does produce an intelligent, provocative piece on the subject, she’s accused of having stolen the idea.
There are some charges for which there are no proofs or disproofs: “clueless”, “racist”, “elitist.” But theft can be proven, and if you’re going to use the language of theft, you need a hell of a lot more evidence than you have so far produced.
UPDATE: The links to Brownfemipower are defunct, at least from my blog. If you don’t go through me but through one of the other links listed above, you can apparently still access the post. I don’t want to link where I’ve been explicitly asked not to do so any longer (Chris Clarke’s Faultline), but since this post is already up for discussion and receiving many hits, I did want to explain the difficulty folks might have in obtaining access.
Hugo,
As a big fan of Amanda’s, I mostly agree with this post, but you should probably watch your language here: “Amanda, like other prominent white feminists, seems caught between a rock and a hard place”. It really does smack of “poor, poor white feminists! They’re so oppressed!” To the extent that any injustice has been done here, it’s against Amanda herself, not to white feminists in general; it would be wise to leave the analysis at that, given the stuff that feminists of color have to put up with that often goes far beyond the occasional (if serious) false accusation.
Good point, Kathleen, I’ll change that, and leave the comment in.
Hugo: where do you see an accusation of slander? The posts I’ve seen and contributed do not go out on that limb, but suggest that there very likely was a knowledge that the earlier material was out there and therefore an ethical responsibility, if possibly not a legal one, to cite it. And I have not seen a satisfactory response to why this didn’t happen.
Why place a legal burden on WOC (and white feminisits, because guess what — some of us also have called this out) here? Does something have to be illegal to be ethically inappropriate?
I enjoy spreading memes on a daily basis through commenting and blogging. A million times, I’ve heard an echo in the white progressive blogosphere and everywhere else actually. At first I didn’t mind but I eventually want credit.
I didn’t accuse anyone of slander, and didn’t use that word once. I said that “stealing” is a specific word with a specific meaning — words matter. Several bloggers are using that very word: stealing. Asking Amanda to link to other writers is one thing, accusing her of stealing (which is a very precise charge) is something else. In her post, BFP obliquely compares Amanda to Ward Churchill, of all people, who lost his job for plagiarism. The implication is pretty clear that Amanda has done the same, and yet the evidence simply isn’t there.
Brownfemipower has been writing on the topic of immigration and feminism for over a year at least. She’s one of many people of color in the blogosphere who has written on the themes of immigration in America, language, and dehumanization. This isn’t a 10 day timeline. The speech BFP gave at the WAM conference is an introduction to a whole body of work she has constructed at her blog, specifically looking at the interplay between immigration and feminism. To claim that it is somehow acceptable not to credit anyone connecting immigration and feminism for such an extended period of time is laughable. This is definitely not an example of a zeitgeist; it is an example of people very unaware of the world they live in attempting to reinvent the wheel and expecting to hear no objections to it.
The person in question has “pitied” people, she’s tried to “keep an open mind,” she’s waffled, and she’s come up with this “zeitgeist theory.” She’s done everything but deny it.
One minor correction: The Alternet piece was a reprint of something published on April 7th on RH Reality Check. I have no idea why the Alternet reprint is being passed around instead of the original, but I sure do hope it’s not to make an already specious claim seem a little more plausible.
Oops, thanks, Amanda. My bad. I’ll correct it.
My point still stands.
For the record, the overall inspiration behind my piece was going to an ACLU conference that focused on issues of immigration on March 8th. Apparently, a lot of people focus on these issues, enough to fill an ACLU conference that I attended. I hadn’t really thought about the substantial (as opposed to symbolic) links between anti-illegal immigration sentiment and just plain anti-immigrant sentiment until I saw a panel of people working for voting rights talk about how legal citizens are getting purged from voter rolls. Ever since March 8th, I’ve wanted to incorporate some of these ideas into my writing, and the green card-blackmail case that I heard on NPR seemed to be the perfect starting point to connect women’s rights and immigration issues.
In sum: These are not minor issues that only BFP is paying attention to. I went to a conference about just these issues.
Ack, April 2nd on RH Reality Check, I’m sorry.
Sorry, a couple of jumps ahead. Let me make myself more clear. Your suggestion that there someone has accused Amanda of plagiarism is in effect a suggestion of slander. Yet, nobody has done so. An oblique comparison does not an accusation make.
Nobody is trying, to my knowledge, to make out a case for plagiarism that they should need to defend. That’s not the point. Those trying to make it the point are instead distracting from the actual point.
Which is what Sylvia said above. Does there need to be a legal necessity to do the right thing? Credibility and ethics are separate matters.
It’s interesting that you are resting on issues like “proof” and getting into legalistic “words matter” minutiae (appreciate the refresher as the Bar was over a decade ago, BTW). That indicates that you are less confident that you can make the arguments on the more nuanced, less “precise” issues of credibility and ethics.
These are important characteristics of both a scholar and a feminist blogger, however.
Here’s a good piece published on Feb. 7, 2008.
You know, Hugo, I read your blog fairly consistently, and I see a whole lot of defending white feminists in these sorts of situations. I actually stopped reading your blog for a while after the FFF issues erupted, because of the way you handled it.
I don’t know the ins and outs of this one (yet), but you seem pretty damn quick to defend these white women against criticism from women of color every time the issue comes up.
Once again in this type of situation, you’re focusing on whether women of color have articulated their grievance “appropriately” rather than on the merits or lack there of of the grievance itself. You say that “several bloggers” are using the word “stealing” - but you don’t say that BFP is. Is she?
It’s a cop out to say, “I don’t have to think about whether Amanda’s course of action was exclusionary/dismissive/reinforcing of racial hierarchies because the criticism of her is clearly over the top.” When you focus on the manner in which the criticism is articulated, you take the focus and attention off the criticism itself. And that is how women of color are silenced. Because then no one’s talking about whether BFP should have been acknowledged. They’re talking about whether women of color bloggers are angry liars.
You could say you think the “stealing” accusation is not supported, and then discuss BFP’s insights and how they are/are not reflected in Amanda’s piece, and how and why Amanda’s piece will get more recognition in certain circles. But you’ve chosen instead to focus only on whether women of color bloggers are angry liars, and not at all on the criticism they are/were expressing. And I think that’s a shame.
Well, if folks want to retract the stealing charge and get into a discussion of ethics, they can start to move things along. But with the hyperbole out there right now, it’s not happening.
Amanda has made clear that she didn’t just come up with this out of the blue — she went to conferences, did her homework, and drew from a great many sources. When we get one breakthrough idea from a specific source, we cite it — but Amanda wasn’t simply influenced by BFP or any other one particular writer/blogger, but rather by a host of sources over a long period of time. It’s not as if she was Newton under tree, suddenly bopped by an apple of ideas about immigration falling from one particular branch called Brownfemipower.
Emily, you’re right that I’m angriest about the “stealing” language. But I also don’t like the implication that Amanda has behaved unethically here, when there simply isn’t any evidence other than the fact that she’s come to a conclusion that is similar to the one being made by BFP and others. I think some folks are falling for the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, and that troubles me.
Hugo, with all due respect, I think you’re missing the point.
From what I understand, the complaint is that white feminists often write about WOC topics and do one or more of these things:
1. Don’t reference WOC bloggers, writers, thinkers
2. Cite using “this blogger” or “here” with a link instead of using the person’s name
3. Leave WOC out of the discussion either intentionally or unintentionally
Regardless of whether or not Amanda outlined the article prior to the speech, her refusal to include WOC who obviously wanted to be included in the discussion is the real issue here. It’s not really about Amanda and Seal Press as it is about an entire industry that listens to white, educated, published feminists more than women of color.
I’m guilty of this at times and so are many other white feminists. And we need to listen and accept criticism better. Our job as feminists isn’t to write and publish books for our own profit; our job is to change the world!
Elaine, we can all certainly do a better job of naming people. Which is why I actually linked today to the blogs that discussed this issue, with, where I knew them, the actual names of the bloggers. Where I and others have failed to do that, we’ve been wrong, and I learned that in the FFF kerfuffle.
So, does this mean that, since the discourse on immigration and feminism seems to be owned by Brownfemipower, nobody else can talk about it on her/ his blog? Or should the discourse on immigration and feminism perhaps be owned by immigrant women?
And might there be more important problems to resolve for this entire community than blogger infighting?
Regardless of whether or not Amanda outlined the article prior to the speech, her refusal to include WOC who obviously wanted to be included in the discussion is the real issue here.
Oh my Jesus, no. It’s not. It’s really not.
The real issue is the work of women of color gets trivialized or rendered invisible every time our feminisms intersect.
I don’t know how anyone could read the Seal Press situation as a request for inclusion unless they have a highly inflated sense of their worth. “Fuck Seal Press” is not a cleverly short and provocative book proposal, not a plea for love, or a request for respect. It’s a dismissal. Though it may lack context in the post it’s written in, it is NOT without context in Seal Press’s decline in incorporating and publishing works by women of color.
I also don’t know how anyone can read this situation as a request for inclusion into dialogue. It is about work and respect for that work which is ongoing, with or without the weigh-in of white mainstream feminists. Just tossing our names in isn’t enough. But it’s a start in showing that the ideas that you’re presenting are not novel and that they have a foundation beyond the “zeitgeist” of the time. This is not a new concept. It’s called appropriation. May not have the force of “stealing” or “plagiarism” but it’s much worse in its impact.
That’d take knowledge and engagement with the idea that women of color do feminist work, anti-racist work, work involving people with disabilities and LGBT that decidedly does not depend on white feminists noticing them. Yet the ideas and information from the work of women of color find its way into the books and articles of white feminists without attribution.
Feminism is not limited to one action or conceptualization. There is not only one movement. We are not trying to join anything or to have ourselves included in anything. Once again, please stop ego tripping. There are publishing houses, copyrights, programs, networks, opportunities and consciousness for women of color. We pour our experiences and our passions into the work we present, the work we do, the work we live everyday. We want credit for what we’ve done and what we’re doing when it trickles down and through to white middle-class feminism.
We don’t want disembodiment from issues that affect us because it reached someone later than it touched us. We don’t want our bodies and our lives and our truths dependent on whims and zeitgeists and bound to arbitrary timelines. Our strongest claim to these issues beyond dates and clear similarities of theory and synthesis is we live in them and they live in us.
The red herrings tearing this discussion away from this fundamental request for respect are galling.
Failing to mention the work immigrant rights activists are doing is not the same thing as plagiarism. From what I could tell reading BFP’s post, her criticism of Amanda was the former, something which maybe she has a point about but it’s really not an attack on Amanda’s personal integrity. For this reason I think it’s important to separate what BFP actually said with what’s been said on her behalf by others.
From what I could tell of most of the other posts Hugo linked here, the accusation was of direct plagiarism, something which is, let’s be frank, an attack, and which, as Hugo said, needs something to back it up. They also attribute a lot more in terms of “original ideas” to BFP personally than she herself does, one of them even goes so far as to insinuate that BFP “planted the seed” of those ideas. This is, to me, pretty beyond the pale because the basic ideas in question are
-That bureaucracy and paperwork create a sort of tyranny: And yet when most people talk about paperwork as a problem they don’t cite any of the 19th century libertarians and anarchists who argued for open borders and an end to government bureaucracy.
-That the term “illegal aliens” is a use of language that dehumanizes immigrants: This, again, is a pretty old idea, and while I’d have a lot of trouble finding where it was first applied to this term particularily, there’s a certain George Orwell essay where the root idea can be found that predates both the internet and the contemporary feminist (or Muejerista) movement by a hell of a lot.
Anyone who thinks that anyone comes up with any idea “on their own” is gravely misunderstanding how human ideas and communication happen.
I feel kind of torn because BFP and Amanda are propably my two favourite bloggers, they’re both tremendously smart people whose basic sense of justice is the basis for their writing. But on the balance, I’ve got to agree with Hugo - meaningful discussion can’t happen amid the negative personal attacks that have happened. That said, I think that BFP was trying to start an interesting and important discussion and it’s really too bad that now this discussion is unlikely to happen.
The real issue is the work of women of color gets trivialized or rendered invisible every time our feminisms intersect.
This is what Amanda and you, Hugo, are missing. There is a long history of white people taking up a political struggle that has been worked on long and hard by people of color over the years and then COMPLETELY ignoring/erasing all that work and all those efforts.
Fortunately, bloggers like BFP do a wonderful job of linking to people who have done the work before them and sending their readers to sites where we can learn more and make a difference. We white bloggers should be following their lead. It’s not about ethics or legalities. It is about the best method of creating a broader movement and a better world.
If you want to make the world a better place, why not learn from and support and recognize those who have done so before us?
I believe as Hugo does that “words matter” and I disagree when Emily writes, “When you focus on the manner in which the criticism is articulated, you take the focus and attention off of the criticism itself.” I’ve found that the opposite is true. Specifically if one is going to criticize, then one needs to learn how to articulate the criticism, otherwise you’ll risk alienating one’s audience and the focus will be on how it is articulated rather than the criticism itself. And I also agree with Labyrus that an important discussion is unlikely to happen.
there’s a certain George Orwell essay where the root idea can be found that predates both the internet and the contemporary feminist (or Muejerista) movement by a hell of a lot.
I’m tempted to say Politics and the English Language, but I could be wrong?
While looking at that one (it’s one of my favorite essays on language and ideology and politics), I did spot this Orwell essay that pleased me greatly.
(And to be a goof, I’m convinced that this essay by Bertrand Russell describes the course of most internet arguments and fighting. :-p)
Oh, I’m sorry. It’s hard to find links to things! Or even to try! I forgot. Pretend they aren’t there. Some people are good at it.
I find it interesting that you assume that someone who defends Brownfemipower is necessarily a ‘radical woman of colour blogger’.
Rebecca is definitely white…
I have to agree with some of the other commenters here… there’s a lot of ‘the WoC bloggers hate us!’ sentiment on this blog at times.
I am pretty fucking ignorant of race issues, and so I stay out of the debate at this point, cos frankly, I had to eat my words about a variety of issues after reading the words of sex work bloggers, disabled bloggers, and other minority groups, and I don’t feel like offending and then finding out how wrong I’ve been on yet another issue I have the privilege of not being directly effected by.
In a nutshell, I think that white middle class bloggers should try listening, and then engaging on the home territory of the minority bloggers. Mostly listening… When you *get it* and have stopped stomping all over the minority you are trying to ‘represent’, then speak.
Hugo, I would like to ask you to imagine a scenario. Say you were doing your daily perusing of blogs, and you came across a post titled, “Can A Person Be Inferior?” In this post, a man outlined what he considered to be a revolutionary idea: that women are full humans who should be treated equally to men. He implicitly claimed this concept as his own original thought, and didn’t link or mention any feminists or feminist writings.
Maybe he isn’t guilty of stealing. Maybe he really hadn’t heard of feminism. But he is sure as hell guilty of something, and feminists would be right to react badly.
I know this example is an extreme one — Amanda Marcotte didn’t implicitly claim to have originated the concept of racism — but it’s the same phenomenon, essentially.
I refuse to play the game with the goal posts moving so fast. You can’t even see them.
Daisy, nowhere did Amanda ever say her idea was revolutionary, nor do I find the implicit claim that all of this spawned in her own head. I don’t accept the scenario you provide as applicable here.
Well then, I don’t see why anyone should accept the conclusion you’ve reached that there is more to prove. I won’t play the game of acting like all this handwringing and subject changing directly relates to the specific allegation here.
You still haven’t made a case for why Amanda did not and could not have referenced the work of Brownfemipower and other people of color who have written on this topic for a year or more. I’ve seen blogs referenced at RH and at Alternet, both within the body of the article and at the end of the article. Netiquette breaks down whenever it comes to crediting people of color for their work. Why is that?
But I guess people won’t have BFP to steal work from; her work (along with her blog) is now gone.
“I refuse to play the game with the goal posts moving so fast. You can’t even see them.”
Ah, I see. You’ll only accept criticism if it is one-dimensional and consistent? Is there a form we can file in triplicate and submit to the proper bureaucrat? Should we expect a response in three to six months?
The issue is neither complex nor shifting. You have shown yourself capable of dealing with complex issues that affect white women. You can choose to use the same abilities on this issue.
Well, okay. The implication that it spawned in her own head is evident in the lack of citations — when one is drawing an idea from elsewhere, one makes the source plain. When one presents an idea with no source attached, the implication is that it’s the writer’s own thought. That’s my understanding, anyway. Do you disagree with that?
Also, I’m not trying to say that this is a case of plagiarism, per se. I don’t think there’s any reason to suspect malice aforethought. She just happens to have written out ideas that have been discussed at great length for something like years at blogs just down the tubes from hers… And she apparently has no idea this is the case. Why is that? Why are certain feminist — i.e. white ones — totally blind to the lives, works, worlds, and words of others — i.e. women of color? How is it possible that BFP and others have been making this point daily, daily, and other people — people living and reading the same blogtown — straight up didn’t notice?
The goal posts have been stuck on the issue of lack of citation to or even mention of:
(1) arguably the most detailed and re-occurring discussion of the linkage of feminism and immigration to come from the feminist blogosphere of late, published over the course of a number of months by:
(2) the speaker who presented this linkage at the same conference at which you recently presented. (The syllabus from the conference has been out for months; it’s highly likely that most attendees were familiar with it prior to the conference).
Is that stationary enough?
I just don’t get it. I am an academic, a writer, and a blogger, and in all three of those pursuits, when I write about an idea that other people have also written about, I refer back to them. In blogging, it doesn’t take nearly as much as it takes in, say, academic writing. All you have to do is say, hey, people are talking about this, so-and-so over here wrote about it, these folks here are talking about it, and I want to add this to the conversation or build on this idea. Even journalists, who frequently do not cite sources as thoroughly as academic writers, do this. As Amanda herself says, these are issues that people are writing about. So why the refusal to refer to her sources?
I think what happened is that she felt she didn’t have to cite her sources - quite a lot of people don’t cite their sources, and she’s hardly alone. But she got called on it, and it’s embarrassing. The classy thing to do would be simply to say, “yes, quite right, I neglected to cite these sources, here they are, here are links so that you can check out their good work, sorry about that.”
On a different note is what you are doing, Hugo. You’re suggesting that when a white feminist addresses issues of women of color, then, by golly, that’s all that matters. Further, your conflation of the Seal blow-up with this issue is simply inaccurate and fairly insulting. You are defending Amanda’s professional integrity at the cost of BFP’s. You are essentially suggesting that women of color are only upset (and, FYI, contrary to your assumption, there are plenty of us white women who are upset on their behalfs, as well) because they’re not getting published. You’re making it about personal gain. You’re worried about professional reputations, and they’re worried about the social change they’re trying to effect, the change that is being stalled by white women twisting their words and denying their realities.
But you are right that there are some of the same dynamics operating in both of these instances, as well as in this very thread, which involve white folks tuning out people of color and not taking their work seriously enough to even think that perhaps, just maybe, it deserves to be acknowledged and given proper credit. Instead, the body of BFP’s work - which was really incredible - has been winnowed down to this one speech, as if she hadn’t been writing about these issues all this time, as if she hadn’t had a tremendous influence.
Thank you for bringing up the moral obligation not to falsely or lightly destroy a person’s livelihood. I haven’t been following the story otherwise; but to turn a claim of “not researching and crediting the work that was done before you” into an accusation of conscious and intentional theft is an act of malice. Brownfemipower’s actual grievances sound like they were both reasonable and reasonably presented, and I’m sorry to hear that third parties who thought they were “helping” took things to such a vitriolic and harmful level.
Damaging a person’s professional reputation is like taking food from their mouth. Think carefully before you speak in anger.
It doesn’t look like plagiarism but it’s definitely appropriation, which does have negative consequences for the appropriated, especially if they are not given credit.
Also, bfp is quite informed and eloquent about issues of immigration and feminism, and she has put a lot of fascinating original thought out there. It’s got to be painful to watch someone with a relatively superficial understanding of the topic (and who you know to read your blog and who probably learned much of it, if not all of it, from you) regurgitate that superficial understanding to a wide audience…when you’ve been discussing and dissecting and giving eloquent and detailed and well-supported explanations of these issues for years.
Where has Amanda been destroyed?
Congratulations, Hugo and Amanda: bfp’s nuked her blog now. Please feel free to continue whining about how put upon the mainstream white feminists are and how Amanda is being “destroyed,” though.
No one destroyed her fucking livelihood. People were saying, as they’ve been saying for -quite- a while now: -would you please acknowledge your fucking sources.- Apparently it’s too much trouble. And no, it isn’t just this piece. It’s. not. that. hard. to understand. Really, it’s not.
and really: you know why I’ve always liked Orwell, myself, is because he had very little patience for fatuous bullshit. “Politics and the English Language,” indeed. It’s about people who don’t want to face up to their own shit, is what that’s about, under the dissection of semantics.
Not. Hard. To Understand.
Unless, of course, one doesn’t -want- to.
If there’s one thing women of colour hate more than middle class white women’s ossification of feminism, it’s white men who threaten us when we take issue with the way white women go about things. You really have no place making a post like this, Hugo. To capitalise on the stereotype of angry and emotive woc to trivialise our concerns makes you the predatory one.
So apparently you don’t take accusations of racism or sexism as seriously as accusations of plagiarism. What the hell kind of moral high ground are you claiming here?
Hugo Schwyzer, this is wrong. You must know this is wrong. The ethical discussion is well underway. Surely you see that. You’re participating in it. Unfortunately you’ve made your position very clear so far.
The legalistic-sounding verbage is irrelevant. “Stealing” can mean “appropriation” just as easily as it can mean “plagiarism.” And yet you are not only refusing to respond to the broader systematic problem of appropriation, you are claiming that it hasn’t been raised properly.
That’s simply not correct. Please keep in mind that we can all read the thread for ourselves.
I think one problem here gets lost in the discussion of individuals. The problem is that you are arguing on the wrong side of a system of appropriation. It’s not primarily personal, it’s primarily systematic. How about this time the white people acknowledge the appropriation. We, as a Combine, grabbed “something” out of “the air” without attribution. If you like, we can take comfort in the fact that it’s something we’re programmed to do. But acknowledge it, try to make amends, and put some fixes in place to avoid a repeat?
This is an incredibly vicious attack against Amanda. She’s being accused of what amounts to plagiarism — no amount of trying to refine the attacks now after the fact to “appropriation” or “unethicalness” can dilute the impact of the accusation. Amanda is essentially a journalist, and plagiarism is the most serious, most career-nuking accusation that can be made against a journalist. If BFP and her supporters cannot back up this accusation, then they need to make a retraction or a clarification. Not to do so casts grave doubts on their own ethicalness.
Short of plagiarism, it seems like what BFP and her supporters are upset about is their “erasure” from popular discourse on feminism — ie, mainstream blogs like RHReality and mainstream popular consumption book publishers. As an initial matter, BFP’s complaints about erasure can only be seen as hypocritical given that she’s now blocked access to her original posts about Amanda, the transcript of her speech, and renamed Amanda as “x” in her comments!
I think what BFP fails to understand is that if she wants a presence in the popular media, she needs to speak to the popular media, the way Amanda and Jessica Valenti do. To complain that the popular media doesn’t include BFP’s voice is ridiculous, considering that she herself admits that she’s not even making an effort to gain entry into that discussion. The essence of the popular media is that it distills without cumbersome attribution, encapsulating the zeitgeist (as Amanda puts it) in an easily readable form. BFP’s criticism would be exactly correct if Amanda were writing a scholarly article, but the fact is that Amanda is not a feminist scholar. She’s a journalist, and that’s a whole different world. If BFP wants into that world, she has to get there herself, not by attacking Amanda. BFP can’t complain her way into greater influence on popular culture — she has to do the work herself.
Bfp has nuked her blog a number of times since she started blogging over some blowup with “white feminists,” (whoever that might be, are Belledame, Ravenm, Octogalore, Plainsfeminist “white feminists”?) Bfp will be back.
A simpler angle, that I’m almost embarrassed to repeat because so many others have already said it, is that, on the personal level, Marcotte seems to have violated simple netiquette.
Marcotte has stiffed blogs that we all know she reads, on an article right in the middle of their subject area. It’s not right. It’s wrong. Ok. So we don’t need to compound it, we need to fix it.
People reacted to a clear violation of netiquette with the word “stealing.” Well?
“The legalistic-sounding verbage is irrelevant. “Stealing” can mean “appropriation” just as easily as it can mean “plagiarism.” ”
Now that’s just disengenous. It doesn’t matter that the thesaurus gives you alternate definitions of “stealing”; what matters is how most people will interpret it, which will be “plagiarism.” You’re the one being legalistic by saying “Stealing has several definitions and we’re not responsible if people pick the one we didn’t mean.” In fact, that’s one of Justice Scalia’s favorite moves — picking the least reasonable definition out of many available and ignoring context.
If you accuse a writer of “stealing,” that means “plagiarism” to most people. If you didn’t mean actual plagiarism, then you need to clarify yourself. Period.
Hugo, in the moment I read your “you’d better prove it”, I heard, clear as a bell, the snarl of privilege. Someone has insulted you, or someone who looks like you and whom you identify with, and they’ll justify it, or they’ll pay. I also note the irony of your reference to these women as “radical”; radical as opposed to whom, Hugo?
Then I looked into the issue in more detail, and it speaks to a serious issue which I have observed feminists of colour take with feminists identified as white. You don’t acknowledge your debts. Tina Lopes and Barb Thomas have helped immeasurably with my education in their book Dancing on Live Embers, Challenging Racism in Organizations. They have a whole chapter on the interaction between two women, feminists and anti-racism educators, which covers this and other topics. They discuss the phenomenon, where a woman identified as white restates something a woman of colour has just said, in a way that suggests that now the “white” person has said it, you should take this seriously. In the book, Tina Lopes refer to this as “capping”. Amanda herself provides a perfect example in this very thread, when she writes:
I find I have to watch myself daily to make sure I give women of colour credit for the ideas that have shaped my thinking about these and other issues.
I can’t possibly claim to agree with everything that women bloggers of colour have said on this topic, because I haven’t read everything everyone has written. But I do see a serious issue, I do see anger, and I do see a justified anger that needs taking seriously. I see the expressed concern about unjust accusations as an inappropriate diversion from a conversation that badly needs to take place, and one that deserves more than the snarl of innocence outraged you have so far given it.
Look people, words matter. The language of stealing was used, and used repeatedly. To say “Oh we didn’t mean plagiarism, we meant appropriation, and you’re just trying to derail the issue by going after the verbiage” is absurd. Time and again, privileged folks have said hurtful things to the unprivileged, and then said “Oh, this isn’t what we meant, you should have understood — why are you trying to derail a productive discussion?” In this instance, the situation is reversed.
And much of the chance for productive discussion is limited now that we no longer have access to BFP’s thread. This is the theme these days: Seal Press deleted a controversial thread for their part last week. It does make it hard to go back and look at what has been said.
“If there’s one thing women of colour hate more than middle class white women’s ossification of feminism, it’s white men who threaten us when we take issue with the way white women go about things.”
I called my mom to confirm firefly’s assertion, but apparently she disagrees. As many on this thread have noted, its not just WOC who are upset at Amanda, bur also some white women. Now here’s a thought, the reverse is also just as true.
It’s not aboput race, its about what ideological framework you choose to view the world thru.
This is a hard comment to write. Hugo, you know I have a great deal of respect for you. The same goes for Amanda. In this case, I think you and she are clearly wrong — but partly because of a misunderstanding of the situation.
I haven’t been following this discussion (if you can call something so fraught with emotion a discussion) too closely, mostly because I only read a handful of blogs and it appears to have been taking place on smaller blogs which are basically off my radar. But, if I understand the claims right, neither side seems to be engaging with the other. (Now, that’s a big if!)
Let’s see. First, BFP and other radical women of colour bloggers (and those allied with them in this discussion) are — rightfully, I think — complaining about the way white bloggers (and white feminists more generally) repeat themes, claims, analyses, etc., originally developed by RWOC without so much as a nod in their direction. That is, they’re complaining about appropriation and marginalisation. Second, Hugo and Amanda are rejecting (or at least challenging) a charge of plagiarism.
What’s critical is that a charge of plagiarism is much, much more specific than a charge of appropriation and marginalisation. To accuse someone of plagiarism is, in part, to accuse someone of claiming original authorship, either implicitly or explicitly. While I haven’t read the piece of Amanda’s that is the flashpoint of the current discussion, the responses from her and Hugo seem to be that (1) she never claimed original authorship, and (2) her accusers need to provide evidence that she did (falsely) claim original authorship.
Did Amanda plagiarise BFP’s presentation at WAM? The answer seems to be no, at least if everyone accepts Amanda’s timeline. Did Amanda appropriate and marginalise the work of BFP and other radical women of colour bloggers on immigration? Here the answer seems to be yes. In one of her responses on BFP’s blog (before that blog was, sadly, nuced), Amanda talked about simply getting her ideas for the piece from `the Zeitgeist’. But these ideas weren’t floating around in some interpersonal thought-ether. BFP and other radical women of colour bloggers created that Zeitgeist, and in neglecting that work, Amanda appears to have (unwittingly, mind you, which actually makes things worse in my mind) contributed to exactly the sort of appropriation and marginalisation that is the real issue.
Note that I said Amanda `contributed to’ rather than `committed’ appropriation and marginalisation. Appropriation and marginalisation aren’t really things that can be done by a single individual. Like other forms of racism (and, as loathe as I am to use that word with respect to Amanda, that seems to be exactly what this is), the appropriation and marginalisation of black thinkers by white thinkers must be done, systematically but not deliberately, by an institution — in this case, the institution of white feminist blogs. RWOC created a body of analysis and theory about immigration, and white feminist bloggers acted as though all this had simply appeared ex nihilo.
If the above is right, I would like to make a suggestion to those who are criticising Amanda. Your criticism seems to be focussed far too much on this one article. That’s my impression, at least. There’s a lot of talk about what Amanda did, but the larger pattern is only mentioned occasionally. Make sure you don’t lose track of the real problem. If you’re going to criticise this particular article, make sure you’re very clear that you’re doing so as an example of the larger pattern. At the very least, doing so will help avoid the confusion evident in this discussion.
Ow, this is tough. I greatly admire both Amanda and BFP, so it sucks to see these hurtful developments. I don’t know a whole lot about the particular situation, but what I know is that, hard as it is when things are this hot (And appropriation SUCKS, and accusations of stealing SUCK, and it’s pretty natural to fly off the handle), I know I don’t speak for myself in saying that as a young, relatively-new feminist, I need to see these women, in whom I’ve put my faith, rise above this crap. Somehow. I couldn’t presume to prescribe a solution because one, it has nothing to do with me other than by observation and two, Amanda and BFP are much better-read, more mature and experienced in feminism, and life in general, than I am.
(And I apologize for not being able to figure out a way to phrase this without words that, to my ears, sound very teenagery and me-centric. I lose patience with my own frequent failures to see outside myself. But I pray that will come easier with time, maturity, and practice. I still believe I’m right though, that other young feminists besides me are watching these events unfold with anxiety at how nasty it’s already gotten, and how much potential for more hurt and division there is. We need a good example on how to get from this level of white feminist/WOC friction we keep seeing, to an understanding that helps us all move forward.)
By the legal definition of “stealing,” I think you’re probably right that it isn’t the right term to use here. Did Amanda outright steal or plagiarize? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean, IMO, that she’s 100% in the clear here. Not that I as a white feminist have some need or right to validate BFP’s feelings, but I am most definitely not at a loss as to why she’s so pissed off. Amanda could’ve cited her, could’ve at least mentioned by name that BFP and other women of color have passionately written and done much on the subject, or could’ve asked BFP or another woman of color to co-write the piece, or some other act of consideration I’m not thinking of… Like she said, she *did* go to a conference on the subject. She got info and perspectives from women of color and then, intentionally or not, neglected to acknowledge them.
I think this bit of humility would have added to the quality of Amanda’s article. More than that, I think it would’ve been the right thing to do. I saw BFP’s post on her speech before she took it down, but it’s been a little while, so I don’t remember much as far as details. I wish she hadn’t taken it down because I’d like to see it again. I do remember seeing enough commonalities that, outright “stealing” or no, if the tables were turned and I were in BFP’s shoes, I’d see appropriation of work and ideas, and lack of acknowledgment for said work. Which is friggin’ crappy. I really like Amanda, but she messed up here.
I also refuse to give up hope that some learning and some good can come from this mess.
And yeah, what Noumena said, too.
It would help minimize the spread of more misinformation about the whole conflict if commenters could read previous clarifications more carefully. There are two conferences in question here — Amanda reporting from one of them, the ACLU conference, is not to be confused with the WAM conference where both she and BFP were speakers. Midgetqueen, it seems you’re conflating the two when you write:
“Like she said, she *did* go to a conference on the subject. She got info and perspectives from women of color and then, intentionally or not, neglected to acknowledge them.”
Given people are assuming the blogosphere is the only source of information about these topics (sorry for the snarky tone, but activists have been working on these topics for years, and that’s a far broader category than the RWOC blog community that has been writing about it — by their own timeline — for just the past year or so), it’s really necessary to distinguish one conference where Amanda did independent reporting on the topic, and one where she’s being accused of picking up her ideas.
It also should be reiterated that journalistic standards about citing ideas are a far cry from academic standards, and there are reasons for that: at the very least, that not many magazines are keen on printing everyone’s footnotes. But to a larger extent, journalists work by digesting and reinterpreting other people’s work and ideas, sometimes criticizing it, sometimes just trying to publicize and make it more widely known. A lot of that doesn’t get credited to one particular thinker, and though you could argue the media would be more transparent if all journalists laid bare their academic influences and positions, that’s a different argument to make than charging outright theft because Amanda has behaved exactly as other journalists do. There’s still room to talk citations within text, and it’s obviously a more sensitive issue concerning the topic and the communities in discussion, but holding a piece of journalism up to the standards of academic journals is completely unfair.
It also seems to me that part of the problem is the medium itself — a blogger writing a piece of journalism straddles boundaries of categories with their own expectations — Netiquette v. pithy journalism.
Noumena,
Maybe I’m missing something, but hasn’t Amanda linked BFP a fair bit in the past? In other words, hasn’t she already demonstrated publicly that BFP is an influence on her multiple times? I think that makes it hard to accuse her of appropriation, unless you believe BFP has a right to be linked any time the two ever discuss the same topic.
If so, maybe every feminist who reads Panadagon should have to link Amanda any time any feminist post is written. But that sure seems a little much.
Hugo Schwyzer said:
Right.
Excuse me? I thought words mattered. But in the post up top, you insisted on replacing “stealing” by your choice of words, “plagiarism.”
I objected and you responded by making the switch again, while repeating your opinion that “words matter.” I’m confused. Do words matter or don’t they?
More about how much words matter. You also leave us confused on exactly whose words, and which words, you’re responding to. I’m not a woman of color. So who is “we?” Are you really responding to my comment? Are you responding to a group of comments that you feel are similar in some way? If so, which ones? Who knows?
A lot of cloudiness. Cloudiness is not what I expected coming from someone who has the answers and is trying to set everyone straight.
Hugo, in this post you are a middle-aged white man scolding some women of color (and white women, as well) for not being nice to one of your friends, and not using the words *you* think they should be using. Can you hear how astoundingly privileged you are?
BFP’s entire blog (and a lot of her life, from what I read) is devoted to issues of justice for WOC; she’s written volumes about just this kind of thing. For Amanda to not even acknowledge her (if a citation isn’t necessary, how about a thanks and a link?) or any other WOC bloggers who were onto this issue LONG before Amanda, is a slap in the face.
And you, jumping in as the all-powerful white male arbiter, with your “you’d better be able to prove it” and your “oh poor white feminists”– you don’t even have a stake in this argument. Why don’t you just *listen* for once?
Again I feel a strong need to point out that there’s a clear distinction between what BFP said and what various folks said on her behalf. BFP is not the one who should be nuking her blog, here.
However, I’m going to have to strongly criticize the notion that
.
BFP and other WOC bloggers are great articulators of that Zeitgeist, but the basic ideas in the RH Reality check article actually predate the internet. The ideas that inform the RWOC blogosphere can all be traced to much older sources, if intellectual history’s your thing. But that’s really beside the point. Charging someone with stealing isn’t cool, and yes, there have been clear accusations that what Amanda did was plagiarism. The issue of “appropriation” is one that needs addressing as well, but you know what? I don’t get mad as an anarchist when RWOC bloggers talk about some ideas that have been in the Anarchist community for years without sourcing some Zine writer as the originator of the idea. I’m stoked that there’s some common ground between us since most RWOC bloggers seem to view anarchists as a bunch of privileged white kids who don’t know what they’re talking about (and I’m willing to admit - they’re frequently right).
Julia wrote: “Bfp has nuked her blog a number of times since she started blogging over some blowup with “white feminists,” (whoever that might be, are Belledame, Ravenm, Octogalore, Plainsfeminist “white feminists”?) Bfp will be back.”
BFP is not down. It’s just that some posts are hidden/private and the front page is currently blank. The archives remain and there’s good reason to believe Julia.
Tom said: “The legalistic-sounding verbage is irrelevant. “Stealing” can mean “appropriation” just as easily as it can mean “plagiarism.” And yet you are not only refusing to respond to the broader systematic problem of appropriation, you are claiming that it hasn’t been raised properly.”
I agree with Tom here.
But, my opinion doesn’t matter at all. This isn’t about me or about you, Hugo.
Nezua, XP, Migra and BFP wrote a great deal about immmigration for a year. One day, kos said let’s talk about immigration! and Color of Change. Dave Sirota wrote an Alternet piece on immigration and suddenly, everyone was writing about it. POC/WOC including myself are constantly marginalized in this way and uncredited. This is stealing.
As far as the bit about “a rock and a hard place,” no one I’ve seen has said that Amanda shouldn’t write and talk about these issues. What she should do is credit the people who developed the ideas. If we as white people are going to use our racial privilege to amplify the voices of people of color, we should give credit to the people of color whose voices we are amplifying. Otherwise, it is appropriation and, yes, stealing.
Also, when Amanda says that she isn’t surprised that people are coming to the same conclusions at the same time given the “zeitgeist,” that’s offensive. It implies that these are new ideas for BFP, as though she’s just discovering this “hot new trend” along with Marcotte now. Ridiculous.
BFP cites her sources, btw.
I second jb’s comment. Very much so.
>are >Belledame, Ravenm, Octogalore, Plainsfeminist “white feminists”?
Yes.
and to be clear, at least that I’m aware of, the blowup was not -with- bfp, as in, we were blowing up against her.
and yes, she’s deleted her stuff before. It sucks that she feels she needs to do it now.
and I third jb’s point.
The assumption that these issues are “new” to Amanda is kind of insulting to her, too, though, don’t you think? And that’s the undercurrent of all of this: Amanda, because she mostly writes about cultural issues that seriousradicalactivistbloggers look down on as fluff, is clearly just not informed enough to be able to write about what’s common knowledge and rhetoric in the immigrant rights/no one is illegal movement. And, yes, it is, nothing that people seem to want to claim was “stolen” from BFP didn’t appear on Indymedia or elsewhere years ago. Anti-Immigrant movements dehumanizing people in the US isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.
Except, wait, there’s a whole category up at Pandagon about immigration, and hey, even the not-as-radical-as-you Amanda has written some stuff about it (much of it actually more than a year old).
Again I repeat: I’m a huge fan of BFP and mean no disrespect to her, but the commenters who want to do a pile-on of personal attacks against Amanda should at least come up with ones that maybe apply to her. This is really not fair and as Hugo said, an attack on Amanda’s integrity as a writer is an attack on her ability to make a living.
Did Hugo just claim that this is a case of reverse racism?
Wow, Hugo. You’ve got some nerve. You are a seriously creepy, sexist human being.
Again, I repeat, what business do you have making threats and playing adjudicator in a conflict between feminists? You’ve already proven that you have no basis for making judgements in this conflict. It’s bloody patronising and insulting that a white man step between women of colour and white women to play judge.
What Fire Fly and Kathryn said.
Also, calling out appropriation of another’s writing and ideas, and a lack of citation / credit where it is due, is not a “personal attack.” Make up your mind. If *the way things get written* and *careful language* matter when Amanda is on the receiving end, if they THEN fall in the realm of professional ethics, then they sure as hell matter, and sure as hell fall in the realm of professional ethics when Amanda is on the “doing” end. They do not magically then cross over into the realm of “personal attack.”
It’s funny to visit Pandagon and see the monikers I recognize from other feminist blogs, and realize they are the ones on those other blogs who consistently dismiss / don’t get race/class/privilege issues, who get defensive and claim things like, *I don’t see color.* It’s nice they can all find a home, I guess.
Immigration is just one issue developed by POC/WOC. Many ideas are developed by POC/WOC then stolen.
Gah…posting while fatigued is ill-advised. Should read: if you are taking us to task for our conduct in how we write / don’t write about Amanda and this is somehow driven by and couched in professional ethics, then at LEAST acknowledge that us taking Amanda to task re: how she writes / doesn’t write is similarly driven by and couched in professional ethics, and similarly valid - not a “personal attack.”
Hugo, weren’t we just here, in November? Didn’t you talk then about reading a poem and realising what was being said, thinking about it? Didn’t you write then how you were going to examine your reactions to RWOC bloggers? You were going to think, weren’t you?
Why are we back here?
hasn’t Amanda linked BFP a fair bit in the past? In other words, hasn’t she already demonstrated publicly that BFP is an influence on her multiple times?
No.
Amanda is essentially a journalist, and plagiarism is the most serious, most career-nuking accusation that can be made against a journalist.
Well, the way to protect oneself from that is to point out where the conversations are happening that spurred your awareness of an issue, and to give credit where credit is due. If you fail to do that, and if people notice that you regularly clip ideas from their writings, someone is eventually going to call you on it.
hasn’t Amanda linked BFP a fair bit in the past? In other words, hasn’t she already demonstrated publicly that BFP is an influence on her multiple times?
Nope. Plainsfeminist has this right.
Moreover, when asked to link to BFP after blatantly cribbing BFP’s blog entry (my exact words were, “If you’re going to quote BFP, you really ought to link to her blog.”), Amanda claimed I had “assumed ill intent.”
No ill intent was assumed; I was just pointing out a relatively straightforward fact (if you quote someone’s work, you really ought to cite to the source), yet she immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was. It was a really weird reaction.
Nezua, XP, Migra and BFP wrote a great deal about immmigration for a year.
Yes — and bfp has admitted on several occasions that she’s made no attempt to engage the mainstream media. But to conclude that immigration is in the popular zeitgeist because of their work is logically flawed reasoning — and, not coincidentally, the post hoc ergo propter hoc error Hugo mentioned earlier. If their work were the cause of the current debate, we would have seen feminist concerns raised (or at least alluded to) from the start.
Like it or not, the reason why immigration has become a huge issue is because the conservatives have made it one because they know they need an Evil Other to mobilize their base in November.
If you’re going to allege theft or plagiarism, make your words available to substantiate the charge.
Sauce for the goose, it seems to me. Pandagon is notorious for its hatchet jobs on any idea or person who it finds objectionable; fairness and common decency go out the window anytime Amanda decides someone is eeeevil. And now people are being a little loose in their terminology around her uncredited appropriation of other people’s ideas? Fine, it isn’t “stealing”. It’s still pretty crappy. Why not focus on that, instead of standing in solidarity with your white sister?
This “It’s not about you” response to Amanda is interesting.
I wonder what would happen if after a Muslim man proclaims his innocence over terrorism charges, his accusers reply; “It’s not about you. Radical Islam is a systemic form of bigotry that affects the entire Muslim community.”
Lindsay, I don’t think we need to prove it. It’s happened continuously through the first, second and third waves of feminism. For example, the third wave of feminism originated in the 80s with WOC feminist theorists. But no one knows that. The second wave was inspired by the CRM. Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott at an anti-slavery conference in London and this kicked off the first wave of feminism:
Prior to living in Seneca Falls, Stanton had become a great admirer and friend of Lucretia Mott, the Quaker minister, feminist, and abolitionist whom she had met at the International Anti-Slavery Convention in London, England in the spring of 1840 while on her honeymoon. The two women became allies when the male delegates attending the convention voted that women should be denied participation in the proceedings, even if they, like Mott, had been nominated to serve as official delegates of their respective abolitionist societies. After considerable debate, the women were required to sit in a roped-off section hidden from the view of the men in attendance. They were soon joined by the prominent abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, who arrived after the vote had been taken and, in protest of the outcome, refused his seat, electing instead to sit with the women. Mott’s example and the decision to prohibit women from participating in the convention strengthened Stanton’s commitment to women’s rights.
Gloria Steinem’s first published feminist article, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” (1969) piggybacked on the Civil Rights Movement.
You don’t need to convince me that appropriation happens.
The question is whether there’s any evidence that Amanda appropriated BFP’s WAM speech in her RH Reality article or her AlterNet post about the effects of anti-immigrant rhetoric on violence against women.
So far, I haven’t seen any evidence that bfp’s presentation was even a substantial influence on Amanda’s thinking.
Oh poor Amanda Marcotte, whatever will she do, what with her book deals and such?
I really think you need re-read this post, Hugo. It smacks of the exact entitled privileged shit that BFP, ABW, BA and others write about all the time.
Lindsey - why didn’t you need EVIDENCE before you claimed elsewhere that Bfp’s taking down her blog was suspicious and insinuated it was to hide something? Does she not get to have a reputation as well? Does she not have a professional life and a character that you should give two shits about? Is it because she’s not your pal? Is it because you CLEARLY don’t read her, or you would realize how ridiculous those claims sound, and you would realize the manner in which she brought attention to this issue in the first place. It speaks a million words to me and many others that the only reason you and Amanda (she said as much, so I am not putting words in her mouth) *care* that Bfp’s blog is down is because it gives you less opportunity to “expose” some imaginary conspiracy against Amanda. Not because of how much it means to you, to so many, many others within the WOC community and outside it, hell to the entire blogosphere…or because it signifies the depth of pain she hersefl was feeling.
This entire situation illustrates why I avoid professional feminists and womanists as much as possible. I’m too much of an amateur.
Does she not have a professional life and a character that you should give two shits about?
I never read bfp’s blog unless it was linked to by Hugo or the other handful of cites I read, so I’m not sure if what I’m about to say is correct. But I do remember reading a post of hers in which she said that she said that 1) she does not engage the mainstream media and 2) she does not have any desire to participate in mainstream politics.
Both of those statements imply that she’s not a journalist or published author whose livelihood can be razed to the ground with insinuations of plagarism.
While we should care about bfp’s career (which I’m not even sure what it is, frankly) and character because she is a person, your argument is comparing motorcycles and Boeing 747s.
you would realize the manner in which she brought attention to this issue in the first place.
Also, I know none of you know me because I’m a professional lurker, so I know none of you has any reason to believe what I’m about to say.
This is one of those cases where the blogosophere generally thinks it’s more important in shaping the dialogue than it actually is. One of my roommates is currently a lawyer for the ACLU,* and I can guarantee you that no one in her practice group has read bfp’s blog — they developed the ideas about the relationship between immigration, civil rights, and women’s rights through a completely different intellectual history. An intellectual history which, juding by my cursory search through Westlaw, actually predates bfp’s writing on the subject by about a decade.
Finally, the only reason why they addressed the topic at all is because the Republicans — who have absolutely mastered the art of mass media — made it a zeitgeist worthy issue.
*The ACLU has different branches, divisions, and offices, so it’s entirely possible that people at different offices did read bfp and were inspired by her work. But I can guarantee that at least one of the major fact sheets and policy papers was free from her influence, simply because the only blogs S. reads are AbovetheLaw and PostSecret.
You know, I don’t think it’s that difficult to acknowledge the work of a blogger you KNOW, a blogger you READ. I don’t think it’s difficult to acknowledge that BFP has been writing about this for far longer than any of us. It is not as if she’s some random blogger that Amanda never heard of. Fine, Amanda, you saw the posts and the text of the speech and thought “zeitegist,”–is a link back such a horrible thing? Is acknowledging the work that WOC have done on these issues so bad?
And you know, given the rancor between White feminists and WOC feminists, it would be nice if we could refrain from snippy and childish comments about how BFP nuked her blog in the past (yah, ’cause we NEVER DO THAT) and about their tone (FFS, haven’t we heard this from entitled and sexist progressive men?). It would be nice if we could stop acting like certain white male progressive bloggers who take any sort of criticism or anger as a HORRIBLE! PERSONAL ATTACK! I screw up all the time, and when I’m called on it I might feel defensive, but I also consider the source. BFP, BA, and Donna have *always* acted in good faith.
M. said:
And we expect everyone will just naturally side with the 747. Because if somebody doesn’t have much, then how can taking it be a big deal?