I don’t think you can be fair. You obviously have a certain bias in favor of Amanda. I am the opposite and I strongly dislike Amanda, so it would be unfair of me to discuss this situation on my blog. I can comment on it there and elsewhere, but I can’t honestly host a discussion about any more than you can.

If you’re truly interested in a discussion about appropriation and how to stop it, just write about that, no need to reference the Amanda/ BFP controversy.

That insistence is pretty much worthless, though, because I’m reasonably sure Amanda is not sitting at home wondering what Tom Head thinks.

So here’s what I’m doing:

- Reading Conquest cover to cover. I have a tendency to read books of sequence and need to see the whole narrative, soup to nuts. I’m about halfway through it now. Frankly, it’s more like a kick to the gut when I read it that way, but maybe I need a good kick to the gut.

- Revising my About.com feminist blogs list by next week so that no more than 4 out of 10 featured sites are exclusively white-run. Right now, if my math is right, 7 or 8 are.

- I’ve already blogged and linked to ABW and written a piece full of ideas on how to react if one is white and “steps in it” when talking about race. Doesn’t address the Alternet situation specifically, but then none of these other solutions do.

- While revising my civil liberties book for Oneworld UK, pay special attention to what I’m saying–and not saying–about the contributions of WOC to the ideas I’m discussing.

- Go on and write that About.com SisterSong profile I’ve been meaning to write, and profile Incite! while I’m at it.

- Take care that my upcoming piece on prison abolition acknowledges not only the contributions of Angela Davis, but also the other folks in Critical Resistance and allied groups who are doing hard work in this area.

There are also some less public steps I’m taking with regard to my local activism that nobody really needs to know about here, but I could make a bullet list of 15 things I’m doing differently after reading this stuff.

So this has been educational as hell. I, personally, benefitted from all this discussion about appropriation–mainly I have come to further realize how little concern most “mainstream” (i.e., white) social justice traditions have for honoring the contributions of WOC.

Whether anyone approves of me more or less after it’s done is irrelevant, both from a cosmic and a personal POV–I try not to do things just to get approval, not even from my favorite bloggers, and likewise whether Tom Head is well-liked is insignificant from a social justice perspective–but I’ve seen some opportunities to fine-tune my work and I’m taking those opportunities. I think any white feminist who doesn’t learn something from all this, and is still posting in these threads, is probably wasting time.

If Amanda has admitted to plagiarism, without an apology, than yeah, that’s complete bullshit. But I’ve been reading Pandagon since the days of Jesse and Ezra, and that simply doesn’t sound like Amanda. If you’d like to point to the comment where Amanda admits to plagiarism, then I’ll agree: she should apologise.

In the meantime, I’m inclined to agree with Holly at Feministe: The collective resolve to do better in the future (including, of course, following through on this resolve) is much more important than any one individual mea culpa. As I’ve said here at least three times, it’s the general pattern of appropriation and the resulting lack of trust that’s the real problem.

Here’s what I’d suggest my fellow white feminists do:
1. Diversify your daily reading list, if you haven’t already.
2. Make a deliberate effort to link to the RWOC you’re reading and bookmark/save especially interesting posts for future reference.
3. Avoid writing (blog posts and other pieces) about `general trends’ or ideas from `the Zeitgeist’. Ideas don’t just magically pop into existence and float around waiting for you to write them down. They’re the product of other people’s hard work.
4. The other side of 3: Make a deliberate effort to connect what you write to the work of others. (Check that folder of interesting posts!)

And for everyone:
5. There aren’t two sides here. There aren’t even lots of different sides. We’re all feminists. We’re all on the same side.

What we say we value — and with whom we say we see ourselves allied — means precisely nothing if our conduct does not reflect those values. White liberal feminists (at least the “important” ones in the blogospheric hierarchies) have made themselves into Lucy, swearing up and down that this time they won’t be snatching the football away before it can be kicked.

http://physioprof.wordpress.com/2008/04/13/intellectual-appropriation-attribution-of-credit-privilege/#comment-717

…what is to be done now?

For the I-don’t-know-how-many-th time:

Mainstream feminists should insist that the white author who wrote an article without crediting/acknowledging her original “inspirational” feminist sources of color — to which she has admitted — do so.

Because when the “mainstream” community says, “Cultural appropriation is wrong!” but won’t come down on a prominent white feminist author that just pulled a textbook example of the exact same crap, it makes the “mainstream” handwringing look more than a touch hypocritical.

It makes the “mainstream good intentions” look ridiculous, and hollow, and it blows an enormous hole in the center of your credibility on the issue.

I’m not sure why so many “mainstream” feminists are being so obtuse about this.

As for the WOC panel, I ought to have mentioned that I was torn for other reasons — I very much wanted to attend Ann Friedman’s session on breaking through the Old Boys Network, which ran at the same time. So my concern that my presence would not be well-received was truly only half the reason.

And my feeling is that Amanda really should post a blog entry, ASAP, highlighting WOC who cover immigration issues on a more regular basis than she does.

I would be so much happier if this whole thing were framed in terms of what can be done pro-WOC rather than what can be done pro- or anti-Amanda, primarily because while what Amanda Marcotte does is up to Amanda Marcotte, I can actually control what Tom Head does. And Tom Head is probably just as likely to unintentionally appropriate the contributions of WOC as Amanda Marcotte. Maybe more so.

Personally, I don’t know if any of the speech was appropriated because I can’t find a copy of BFP’s speech for comparison. The reaction from the white feminist blogosphere–circling the wagons, very hostile to BFP, etc.–is more what bothers me. I’m sure that, as someone pointed out in a previous thread, a lot of my ideas could be traced to other people–and their ideas traced to other people, and their ideas traced to other people… Ideas tend to be socially constructed, not individually constructed. That’s why ideas, as such, can’t be copyrighted. That’s why the academic tradition, which places extra emphasis on tracing the sources of ideas and crediting those sources, is so important.

But if BFP had just covered the same ground in a high-profile speech, the pro-WOC thing to do would have been to at least use publicity from the article as a way of highlighting WOC contributions to this topic, even if only on her blog. And not even necessarily BFP’s. Amanda can still do that now, by the way. Nobody’s stopping her.

I’m a white guy. I’ll occasionally be sitting at an otherwise all-black table and hear someone remark about how no whites would do X and no whites would do Y when I am in fact doing X and Y. And I keep my mouth shut because I realize that it doesn’t really matter. It’s not about me. It’s about the bigger problem of inadequate white participation on certain issues.

BFP was much more explicit than most in pointing out that she was referring to a GENERAL problem. She even erased Amanda’s name in her posts. But the response of the white feminist blogosphere has been to plug ears and sing “la la la” when WOC are talking about the bigger problem of rendering the contributions of WOC invisible, and focusing instead on making it all about a perceived attack on Amanda. But for most bloggers, this wasn’t mainly ABOUT Amanda. Not by my reading. If it weren’t Amanda, it would be, as you point out, Dave Sirota. Or maybe Tom Head. But the problem is still very real.