Reblogged from The Crunk Feminist Collective:

What is wrong with this picture? 1.)   He is the President. She is being disrespectful. As hell.  Period. Point Blank. End of Discussion. 2.)   White privilege conditions white people not to see white rage. However, it makes them hyper-aware of Black threat.   Newt Gingrich is white rage personified. And for it, he gets loads of applause.  So is Jan Brewer, but usually we think of white rage in masculine terms. Gender stereotypes condition us not to see white women as being capable of this kind of …

Good post on white female privilege.

One of the many (subversive) videos to come in light of the “Shit Girls Say” videos. If you haven’t already seen Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls, Shit Girls Say to Gay Guys, and Shit White Girls Say to Desi Girls, those are fantastic, too.

This is awesome. To all those guys who think, “Do you know Lucy Liu?” is an appropriate pick-up line. . .

And fell quite short of the mark.

In addition to glossing over the massive racialized structural socioeconomic inequality that afflicts our American society, he, the poor man, simply is unable to see past his own privilege in his suggestions for the hypothetical poor black boy.

And I would use the technology available to me as a student.  I know a few school teachers and they tell me that many inner city parents usually have or can afford cheap computers and internet service nowadays.  That because (and sadly) it’s oftentimes a necessary thing to keep their kids safe at home than on the streets.  And libraries and schools have computers available too.  Computers can be purchased cheaply at outlets like TigerDirect and Dell’s Outlet.  Professional organizations like accountants and architects often offer used computers from their members, sometimes at no cost at all.

He’s assuming here that libraries and schools in under-funded districts will have the resources he’s talking about. Remember Ty’Sheoma Bethea’s school? The one where there’s so little money that they can’t fix the leaking ceilings? 

Not to mention, affordable computers? You mean the ones that cost $200? Enough for food for maybe a month? Or rent? What would you pick if you had that money?

If I was a poor black kid I’d use the free technology available to help me study.  I’d become expert at Google Scholar.   I’d visit study sites like SparkNotes andCliffsNotes to help me understand books.  I’d watch relevant teachings onAcademic Earth, TED and the Khan Academy.  (I say relevant because some of these lectures may not be related to my work or too advanced for my age. But there are plenty of videos on these sites that are suitable to my studies and would help me stand out.)  I would also, when possible, get my books for free at Project Gutenberg and learn how to do research at the CIA World Factbookand Wikipedia to help me with my studies.

Don’t get me wrong; these are great sites. I peruse them often, and they’re better than nothing. Yet, these are more supplementary to an education than essential. What’s essential you ask? A decent teacher, some  up-to-date textbooks, and basic school supplies, which are often in short supply in under-funded districts.

In Philadelphia, there are nationally recognized magnet schools like Central, Girls High and Masterman.  These schools are free.  But they are hard to get in to.  You need good grades and good test scores.  And there are also other good magnet and charter schools in the city.  You also need good grades to get into those.  In a school system that is so broken these are bright spots.  Getting into one of these schools opens up a world of opportunities.  More than 90% of the kids that go to Central go on to college.  I would use the internet to research each one of these schools so I could find out how I could be admitted.  I would find out the names of the admissions people and go to meet with them. If I was a poor black kid I would make it my goal to get into one of these schools.

Or even a private school.  Most private schools I know are filled to the brim with the 1%.  That’s because these schools are exclusive and expensive, costing anywhere between $20 and $50k per year.    But there’s a secret about them.  Most have scholarship programs.  Most have boards of trustees that want to give opportunities to kids that can’t afford the tuition.  Many would provide funding for not only tuition but also for transportation or even boarding.  Trust me, they want to show diversity.  They want to show smiling, smart kids of many different colors and races on their fundraising brochures. If I was a poor black kid I’d be using technology to research these schools on the internet, too, and making them know that I exist and that I get good grades and want to go to their school.

As shown in many studies, charter schools, while a good addition to our educational system, aren’t the end-all and be-all of solutions to our educational ills, since overall, they don’t make as drastic of an impact 0n kids’ achievement as previously thought.

Also, has he ever watched Waiting for Superman? Does he know how competitive getting into a charter school can be? A lot of them are done by lottery, as well!

And sorry to burst his bubble about private schools, but it’s not all that easy for an underprivileged kid to waltz in and get a scholarship. They’re exclusive (i.e., homogenous) for a reason. Not to mention, I went to private school, and all the extra fees add up:  uniforms, transportation, etc.

If I was a poor black kid I would get technical. I would learn software. I would learn how to write code. I would seek out courses in my high school that teaches these skills or figure out where to learn more online. I would study on my own. I would make sure my writing and communication skills stay polished.

Again, which high school courses? Who’s going to teach this boy? What if only six out of 14 computers in a school work on a day-to-day basis? 

 The division between rich and poor is a national problem.  But the biggest challenge we face isn’t inequality.   It’s ignorance.

That’s only one part of the problem. Sure, the hypothetical boy might not know about the new wonders of technology, but even if he does, where’s he going to get these technological solutions? The ones that cost a “cheap” price of hundreds of dollars?

While I admire Mr. Marks’s faith in technology, technology isn’t going to cure vast inequality in resources for difference districts and neighborhoods. Technology isn’t going to cure broken homes and deep poverty, a lack of opportunities. Technology isn’t going to cure a school system burdened by bureaucratic problems and an unwillingness to push through truly innovative but long-term and potentially unpopular solutions.

Additionally, I resent the implications behind the piece:  That if you don’t smarten up and get on the technological train, then somehow you deserve to be left behind. That, because inequality isn’t the real problem, the ignorant, the ones who don’t learn how to get ahead, get what they deserve.

I’m sure this is not what Mr. Marks intended to say in his piece, but because he is unable to acknowledge that a person’s situation in life is too often the result of chance, his solutions, at best, are “ignorant” and at worst, condescending.

Please check out these great responses:

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “A Muscular Empathy“

Cord Jefferson’s “An Ode to a ‘Poor Black Kid’ I Never Knew:  How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong”

Akiba Solomon’s “If I were a white male middle aged Forbes columnist” 

Kelly Virella’s “If I were the middle class white guy Gene Marks”

It’s tough enough to be poor, nonwhite and female in today’s crisis-struck USA, but without legal status a woman is stripped of even those rights and resources that equal-rights and labor fights have secured. The Wild West quality of law enforcement when it comes to such new immigration laws—amid myriad state, federal and, frankly, ad hoc regulations—makes it virtually impossible to use existing protections against harassment, violence or exploitation. And abuse thrives in the chaos. Migrant women face particular threats at the border, in the workplace, even at home—and stiff odds stacked against them as they try to keep, and raise, their kids. This is what inspired women from around the country to travel to Atlanta in September under the banner We Belong Together for a conference organized by the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. A similar delegation met in Arizona in May.

“We believe that when you see the world through the eyes of women you see an up-close, clearer picture of the full impact of what’s going on,” says Ai-jen Poo, director of the NDWA.

That’s right — over 5,000 children have been separated from their families due to an accident of birth and circumstance.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] supposedly has regulations allowing parents to make arrangements for their children in the event of deportation; any regulations they may have made, though, have not been uniformly and effectively enforced. According to Seth Wessler of the Applied Research Center:

I mean, ICE has said, and consistently says, that parents get to choose what happens to their children if they’re deported. The reality is, that our research and our investigation has found, that’s simply not happening. Now, ICE protocols for protecting families are really antiquated. They apply to old forms of immigration enforcement that were relevant when there were these workplace raids. Now we’re talking about the expansion of immigration enforcement to local police departments and where local police are now tasked with the job of immigration enforcement. So, as I described, there are people being picked up by local cops and then funneled into the detention process without any regard for their families, where their families are.

Worse still, sometimes this separation comes after women who are “illegally” in the country report domestic abuse. Once detained, they emerge to discover their children in foster care, adding one calamity upon another.

It’s not a simple matter of simply requesting that their children come back with them to their country of origin either as this Colorlines article demonstrates:

Josefina and Clara were deported to Mexico after three months in immigration detention. They made their way to Michoacán, 1,000 miles south of the border, to their mother’s home, where they began trying to regain custody of their children.

During a July 2011 phone interview from Michoacán, Josefina spoke quietly about the baby she never got to bid goodbye. “I don’t know where my child is, I have no contact with my baby,” she said. “I didn’t do anything wrong to have my children taken away from me. I didn’t steal, I didn’t do drugs, nothing. Why did they take my children?”

Once parents are deported, the threats to their families grow. While parents are detained, child welfare departments are largely prostrate to reunify families. Once mothers and fathers are deported, however, the agencies often switch gears, actively slowing down the reunification process and sometimes halting those efforts altogether.

Soon after they were deported, the sisters contacted the Mexican consulate in New Mexico to ask for help in regaining their parental rights. The consulate began corresponding with the child welfare department on the sisters’ behalf. For months after their deportation, a staff person at the consulate repeatedly told Clara and Josefina that the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department planned to reunify the family as soon as the sisters could prove that they had stable housing and jobs. Yet, even after they found work and were set up in their mother’s home, the children remained in foster care. Reunification dates cited by the department came and went, but still, no children.

According to the sisters, the New Mexico child welfare department would not let the mothers speak by phone with the youngest two of the three children and Clara spoke only once to her 6 year old. According to Josefina and Clara, they heard word that their children were placed in three different foster homes and the babies were being raised entirely in English. They feared their children would not remember them even if they were reunified and they began to believe they might never see their children again.

“I miss everything about my kids,” said Clara through sobs over the phone. “How I spent Saturday and Sundays with them, how I made my home with them, all of it. Then my children were just gone.”

Many deported parents make the tormented decision to make the bloody desert journey over the U.S.-Mexico border without papers so that they can be present at juvenile court hearings. Caseworkers around the country said that in many cases, when a parent of a foster child is deported, they are back weeks later to appear in a juvenile courtroom to try and reclaim their children.

The risks of crossing are enormous. In addition to growing violence in Mexico against migrants crossing into the U.S., immigrants caught in the country after a previous deportation now face prison time. Until recently, immigrants who were deported before were simply deported again. Now, “illegal reentry” is treated as a federal criminal offense that carries sentences of years. The charge now accounts for nearly half of all federal criminal prosecutions.

While Clara and Josefina were eventually reunited with their children, the rupture of families is unaccountable. It’s a shame that these people, without legal or political resources, have a high chance of never seeing their children again due to a mishandling of and misguided legal attitude towards so-called “illegal immigrants.”

For all those who say that all “illegals” need to be deported immediately, look at the human cost of this:  if this same rate continues in the next five years, over 15,000 children will be in the foster care system. Think of all those families torn apart and tell me we don’t need an overhaul of the whole immigration system in the United States.

Any future progeny of mine will be a viewer, I guarantee it.

Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.

Feminists responded by wearing “slutty” outfits and marching en masse to protest this victim-blaming, a form of protest which I, initially, supported.

Then, I saw this photo:

There are other objections to Slutwalk that are well-worth exploring, especially the problems associated with the word “slut,” that, for instance, it’s enforcing a patriarchal virgin/whore binary.

Still, I suppose that this photo resonated for me because it perfectly encapsulated my occasional alienation from the “mainstream” American feminist movement.

Despite the efforts of third-wave feminism and womanism among other movements, the feminism covered by media and popular culture often seems to me very much a feminism for a particular type of woman:  white, middle-class, i.e., a WASP.

This is not to denigrate WASPs or feminists in general (I still identify with feminism). Without the efforts of prior movements, I, a Roman Catholic Filipina-American woman, wouldn’t be reaping the benefits.

Still, why is it that there is this emphasis on a “universal” woman’s experience? Why is there this refusal to acknowledge specific female experiences?

As the Crunk Feminist Collective put it,

If we thought of the history of feminist movement building as a battle over terms,  what we would find is that every major battle over terms and the rights and identities attached to them have always had the same damn problem: the racial politics, like the Black women implicated in them, have been fucked. “Suffrage” didn’t include all women. (Just ask Ida B. Wells how she felt about marching at the back of the 1913 suffrage march.)  “Woman” is not a universal experience. (Sojourner Truth anyone?) “Nigger” is not a catchall term for oppression. (Ask Pearl Cleage) Feminism is not a universal organizing category. (Ask bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Fran Beale, and on and on) And “slut” is not the anchor point of a universal movement around female sexuality, no matter how much global resonance it has.  (Ask a Hip Hop Generation Feminist).

I am not black and cannot claim to understand the experiences of a black person. However, I can empathize with the willful blindness of some in certain movements (i.e., many identity-based movements) to the intersectionality of identity, i.e., that we all have multiple identities associated with class, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, etc. No one person identifies solely as “Asian” or “female” or “middle-class.” Oppression can happen to you based on any number of identities, as does privilege.

To reiterate, to say there is a universal experience for, say, a “woman” or an “Asian” or even a “Filipina,” erases deeply individual experiences.

For instance, what has alienated me from “mainstream” American feminism is my birth Roman Catholicism and my race. I struggle with supporting the pro-choice movement because of my Roman Catholic upbringing, even if, ultimately, I cannot support striking down Roe v. Wade. Yet, if I mention my ambivalence, I often feel summarily dismissed.

As for my race and ethnicity, well, see above.

This is why I cannot support the use of the “n-word” as a catch-all for oppression. The oppression of black people was a very specific experience, and to flippantly claim that black people’s history, which includes slavery and Jim Crow, can be equated with women’s experience in a matter like this is irresponsible.

And that’s not even getting into issues of white women “reclaiming” a pejorative that, guess what, was given to black people by white people.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons summed up the core problem with this image in this Colorlines article:

I’ve been informed that one of the (Black) women SlutWalk NYC organizers asked the woman to take her placard down. She did. However, not before there were many photographs taken….

Now, my question is why did it take a Black woman organizer to ask her to take it down? What about ALL of the White women captured in this photograph? They didn’t find this sign offensive? Paraphrasing Sojourner Truth “Ain’t I A Woman (too!)?”

ERADICATING RACISM SHOULD NOT BE THE SOLE RESPONSIBILITY OF PEOPLE OF COLOR.

How can so many White feminists be absolutely clear about the responsibility ofALL MEN TO END heterosexual violence perpetrated against women; and yet turn a blind eye to THEIR RESPONSIBILITY TO END racism?

Is Sisterhood Global? This picture says NO! very loudly and very clearly.

. . .but don’t let it turn us to our darker impulses.

If two presidents from two bitterly opposed political parties can manage to sit tight through a memorial ceremony as well as two political “enemies” managing to work together to raise money for a memorial for the victims who died in Pennsylvania, we can all try to stop using a national tragedy for personal gain or revenge.

So, let us remember but let all those gone rest in peace. Always.

I’m not going to comment directly on The Help since I have neither finished the book nor watched the movie. Still, its success  is definitely going to guarantee some debate about the depiction of race relations in Hollywood.

Dana Stevens boiled down contention about movies like The Help beautifully:

The Help, written and directed by Tate Taylor from the novel by Kathryn Stockett, belongs to the Driving Miss Daisy tradition of feel-good fables about black-white relations in America, movies in which institutional racism takes a backseat to the personal enlightenment of one white character. . .

If The Help contained more moments in which Skeeter’s good will wasn’t enough—in which, despite her best intentions, she blundered by unintentionally patronizing one of her interview subjects and had to confront her own received ideas about race—contemporary viewers might recognize a moment we’ve actually lived through, rather than being encouraged to congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve come.

Then again, if glossily inspiring movies about African-American lives didn’t get made, would a different, more challenging kind get made in their place? Part of me wants to say that it’s fine for The Help, book and movie, to exist as a pop-cultural phenomenon. The story simplifies and reduces the civil rights movement, yes, but at least it’s about it. That’s not nothing given the insulated bubble in which most movies marketed at women take place . . . The Help raises the eternal question faced by minority groups who have to fight for space onscreen (that is to say, anyone but white men): Do we count ourselves glad to make any inroads we can, or do we demand rich, nuanced, subtle representations right from the start? I get the feeling that The Help‘s reception will be sharply divided by that question—a division which may in itself be this movie’s most valuable contribution.

So, guys, what do you think? I’ve definitely written about issues of race in Hollywood before, so I’d be interested in what everyone else thinks about it.