Learning to listen – really listen – to people of color and believe what they say when they are describing their experiences in a white supremacist society didn’t come naturally to (virtuous, white) me. It came painfully, and the lessons demanded an intensity of self-reflection and self-examination that was usually embarrassing, often excruciating because it contradicted my saintly self-image, and it was always shocking.
And, these painful lessons ultimately also proved to be liberating, because by embracing them rather than fleeing in defensive, angry flurries, flaps, and frenzies of denial, I began to aspire to be a white, female race traitor. It wasn't a planned career ladder, but hey.
I’m not completely there yet; while I am not a foaming-at-the-mouth racial bigot, there undoubtedly are still ways in which I am complicit – often unwittingly, certainly unintentionally – in perpetuating systemic and institutionalized racism. But it’s a journey filled with astonishing goodness, inspiration, relationship, and possibility.
It began in a serious way in August 1970, in the sweltering confines of Denver County Jail.
I've written in an earlier diary about my coming of age as a kid in southern Colorado, not in a liberal family, where we inhaled racism in the same casual, routine way we inhaled air. As I headed into college - also in Colorado – I was reincarnating myself as one of the "good guys."
My eyes were truly being opened to the obvious harms of racism. I was involved in direct, nonviolent support actions for the United Farmworkers Organizing Committee and in organizing against the American war in Vietnam. I stood proudly with the black and brown students at our school. I did support work for the Denver-based Black Panthers. I co-founded our college/community's first women's consciousness-raising group. Whoever I was, I certainly was not the violent, bigoted, ignorant "other." In fact, I saw myself as a savior, really, part of a left/progressive tide of change that would change power relationships once and for all.
The "different" white girl who carried with her none of the baggage of the old regime. You know the type.
And that's when a physically small but seriously compelling black woman I'll call Wilma - in on a trumped-up charge of murder of a white man, according to the one nice, trustworthy matron at the jail - pulled the rug of smugness out from under me with a flourish so well timed that my assumptions, my ass, and my self-righteousness hit the floor simultaneously with a series of rattling thuds.
In Which RadioGirl Learns Painfully that Injustice & Oppression Have Multiple Realities that Implicate Her, Too
I've written about this, too, in an anthology called Interruptetd Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States. (My piece is called "The Long Shadow of Prison: My Messy Journey through Fear, Silence, and Racism toward Abolition.")
Given the prison experiences of kossacks Meteor Blades, DaNang, and One Pissed Off Liberal – among others, I'm certain – my jail experience is nothing but chump change. 30 days in Denver County Jail for conspiracy and impeding access to a federal building (a civil disobedience action against paying "war taxes" on April 15).
I say "chump change" because my fellow prisoners were overwhelmingly women of color, poor, and unable to either post bail or be given personal recognizance bonds because the judge presumptively considered them "bad risks." Most were in for nonviolent, economic survival crimes - bad check cashing or prostitution. I came from a white, working-class family. But, I was white and a college student, so a personal recognizance bond was no problem for me. Many of my fellow prisoners were in for "dead time" - even if they weren't convicted, they would have to serve time awaiting trial. I had a whole support network: the National Lawyers Guild, the ACLU, and a whole anti-war movement. Most of my fellow prisoners had nothing. Nothing.
They existed within a larger, predominantly white world that considered them to be intrinsically criminal. By virtue of my whiteness, I was considered misguided and errant, but not intrinsically criminal.
So I don't pretend I've had a "prison experience." I had an idiot 30-day sentence. It was distinctly unpleasant and dehumanizing, but I had a certain release time and tons of support.
That's white privilege.
And I wanted to resist "The Man," right?
From my essay in Interrupted Life:
From the moment I entered jail, I’d cooked up ways to protest the countless degradations: the unnecessarily painful gynecological exams by contemptuous health care providers, the matrons’ jokes about the prisoner who had committed suicide, the ways in which particular guards, both male and female, drunk on their little shards of power, felt us up. I tried to sabotage every sleazy job I was given, one of which was sewing together pieces of cheap, thin denim material to make the three-armhole dresses we all wore. By screwing up the tension on the sewing machine, I produced stitches that, on cursory examination, looked fine. But once the dresses had been washed two or three times, they started to unravel.
Imagine my shock, then, when Wilma stormed up to me one morning, clutching a handful of her dress – which was, literally coming apart at the seams– and hissed, "Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing? Who you think has to wear this thing?"
...What I’d intended as a principled response to injustice was an affront to Wilma, an act that took away one of the shreds of human dignity–a decent piece of clothing–that she possessed.
What could I say? I may have muttered something; I don't know for sure. The only thing I do know is that I was both mortified and defensive, and I could not bear the image of myself that she handed to me.
Wilma and I eventually became friends. But not at that moment, when she was in my face, alternately berating and laughing at me. She was, as my Buddhist mentors say, a "difficult teacher' who wasted no time in scissoring to tatters my sense of political certainty.
I realized, Ohmigod. It's not always somebody else. It's me, too. Sometimes my own actions create injustice or do harm. I had, wrongly, assumed that my good intentions would always translate into justice– not only for me, but for everyone else...
The more I tried to avoid her, the closer she came...by demanding that I stop treating her as nonexistent, Wilma forever changed the space we both occupied...If I really cared about justice, I had to own up to and divest from my secret, unexamined stash of white supremacy, not just protest somebody else's...
It's not that I had set out to do wrong. In fact, I had set out to do right. But by assuming my world view, my own assessment of justice and injustice, was sufficient for everyone, I made mistakes. Mistakes for which women of color would and did pay in jail, directly or indirectly, one way or other.
And it was the searing pain of that recognition that helped me start the process of morphing into a white race traitor.
For the purposes of this discussion, "race traitor" is defined as a white person thought by some to support attitudes and positions purported to be against the interests or well-being of white folk in the United States. In fact, she/he is working intentionally to dismantle systemic white privilege and white supremacy, which is in the interest of ordinary folks of all races.
Wilma eventually got sent to the state penitentiary, and there she died a couple of years later.
I often think of her, and I have continued to learn in multiple settings, through countless experiences, that my white assumptions are not adequate to address the justice needs of communities of color. No matter how good and lovely and well-intended I am.
Why This Diary Today: It’s the ArthurPoet Factor
I'm posting a white race traitor diary now because of something that happened recently, which is perhaps not (yet) known to many of you.
Kossack – now former kossack,– ArthurPoet has been banned from Daily Kos.
For this I extend deep gratitude not only to Meteor Blades, but also to all those who brought the case for banning to him.
Perhaps most of you have not yet readArthurPoet's most disturbing (in my opinion) recent post in which he brags about his alleged skills as a martial artist and gives either a factual or fictional or hybrid account of his participation, when he was young, in a possible brutal baseball-bat slaying of a black teenager. (It's not the first time he's talked about this violence, but it is his lengthiest post about it – or so I believe.) It makes no difference to me whether this hymn to violence is truthful or bullshit. Either way, it is chilling. And either way, I wish ArthurPoet no harm, and whatever help he may require in order to fully grasp the terrible impact of his words.
I hope you will read it. It is likely to disturb you. But I implore you to read it because this is a [former] site member who worked overtime for quite some time to try to insult, ridicule, silence and discredit more than a few kossacks of color – and has done so with the largely uncritical approval – indeed, the active and sometimes gleeful encouragement – of many who also have tried to shut down any discussion of racism in the liberal/left/progressive end of the political spectrum.
Some would like to take this post as ArthurPoet’s attempt to say that one can overcome a violent past; that he learned valuable lessons from it. Some will say, well, this is an isolated incident; there's no larger lesson to be culled from the post.
I know what I think. ArthurPoet has a long history of communication here on DK, and I believe he used far too many of his comments to intimidate or at least attempt to intimidate people into silence. Knowing he regularly antagonized many at Black Kos, he returned again and again, boasting of his presence there in comments in various discussion threads.
I call that pattern of behavior disturbing, creepy, and abusive.
But ArthurPoet is gone now. So what’s the problem?
My concern is that many white/non-black folks here refused to listen to people of color and others who warned that his comments were increasingly troubling. My concern is that many folks here dismissed, scolded, and belittled people of color at Daily Kos who repeatedly flagged his posts as disturbing.
My concern is that many white folks here treated ArthurPoet's comments as a kind of game, a contest among "factions" on the site, a contribution to clever put-downs. And that "the game" takes precedence over the integrity of our relationships across racial divides.
But racism in the United States is no game, and its impacts are horrific.
I think we can and must do better on this site in terms of community moderation. Meteor Blades cannot and should not be expected to do it all. And I think white folks have a special responsibility to intentionally open up room for candid and civil discussions about race and racism in progressive politics. And to listen, really listen, to people of color when they are telling us about collective experiences of racism, whether in the larger society or at DKos.
And I know for sure that all of us white folks will be better off if we can just sit through our defensiveness and the pain we feel at being put on the spot in hard discussions about race without lashing out and trying to just shut down the whole conversation - or pretend that the only racism exists "out there," in somebody else. In the wingnuts. If we can do that; if we can learn, then the possibility of real relationship across chasms of race exists.
And that's worth celebrating.
For that to happen, I think we need more white race traitors on the site who are helping to tend discussions about institutional racism in intentional and thoughtful ways.
Inertia & Complicity
blindyone, a kossack whom I like and greatly admire, says it just right:
"Institutional racism doesn't require intent. It's more like inertia."
– blindyone
(with thanks to Yasuragi for rescuing this
comment from oblivion by putting it in her
sig line)
It takes continuous attention and effort to even begin to put small cracks in that wall of inertia.
Personally, I draw inspiration from a long history of brazen, bold white, female race traitors who have always seen the importance of organizing across issues and constituencies to simultaneously address multiple kinds of oppression – never losing sight of the central importance of race.
I hope they may inspire you, too.
In Celebration of a Long History of White, Female Race Traitors
Here are a few of the 20th and 21st century (s)heroes in my personal pantheon of most-admired race traitors – though I will admit that there are also a number of kossacks who fit this description.
Each of the women highlighted here has risked open hostility in a variety of arenas – the lecture hall, the media, among family and friends, and in faith communities. In one case, taking the risk meant death at the hands of white supremacists.
Each of the women here has faced powerful liberal opposition to their insistence on centering race in justice discussions and agendas. And none of them – past or present – has backed down. I am blessed to have known and been influenced by four of them.
Caitlin Breedlove, currently co-director of Southerners on New Ground, former youth organizer for the Highlander Center, and a self-described Queer Femme organizer
Suzanne Pharr, political handywoman, founder of the Arkansas Women's Project, co-founder of Southerners on New Ground, former director of the Highlander Center.(You'll find her now out-of-print books available by free download here.)
Mab Segrest, racial justice organizer, co-founder of Southerners on New Ground, academician, and author of Memoir of a Race Traitor.
Constance (Connie) Curry, first white woman appointed to the executive board of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, (SNCC) and field staff for the American Friends Service Committeeduring Mississippi school desegregation struggles. Author of several books detailing the civil rights struggle and producer of the documentary film, The Intolerable Burden.
Lillian Smith outspoken and uncompromising southern civil rights activist, writer, speaker from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Viola Liuzzo, mother of five, economic justice and civil rights activist murdered by white supremacists for taking part in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march. She was singing "We Shall Overcome" in her car when she was shot.
Their lives teach not by rhetoric, but by lived example.
And can you imagine any of them failing to listen – really listen – to people of color?
I can't.
