It's rough, living in the Intersection. Especially when you feel like your allies are only allies sometimes, not all the time.
When I was first asked to write the inaugural piece for the launch of the RaceGender DiscrimiNATION forum by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse some time ago, I intended to clean up and repost a very old piece I wrote here called A Black Woman's Musings on Coffee with Dad, Racism and Barack Obama as an example of the frustrations and difficulties women of color have in communicating across the chasm of race about the unconscious nature of racism practiced by allies. The comments to that diary, and the somewhat delayed reaction of the diarist which was highly defensive and seemed to emotionally embrace that she'd been victimized by the diary, to me exemplified a phenomena that has been discussed here many times: the unconscious exercise of white privilege generally and by white women in particular. The reactions to that diary, which was about the unconscious racism that too many supporters of Barack Obama demonstrated in the arguments they chose to make the case for his presidency, were notable. Most of them really didn't talk about the substance of the diary, initially. Most were about how I should cut the diarist some slack (even though I never said a mean word in that diary) because she "meant well." Most of them contained the rhetorical assumption that, by "calling out" the well-meaning diarist's arguments to her father in support of the impending election of President Obama for what they were, I was victimizing her.
I thought then, and still do today, that the reactions to that diary were an apt example of the fundamental problem we who are Black women face whenever we try to discuss matters of politics across racial lines: expectations about our behavior that (a) dismiss the merits of what we are trying to say as secondary to "how" it is emotionally perceived and (b) presume that at any given moment, some poor white person is at risk of harm if we express frustration about the ongoing unconscious racism we see in allies, such that it is more important to "protect" them from us online and ensure that their "good will" is defended, without regard to whether that person's conduct is defensible.
I was going to write about that diary and the comments, in hindsight. However, two weeks ago an event occurred that eliminated the need for me to discuss that long-ago diary. Because we have a brand new example that highlights even more starkly the problem, and the challenge for this new Daily Kos series.
Follow me below the squiggly thing to understand why.
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