baka to the left of me, hentais to the right, stuck in teh middle with you, oh interdimensional mallet, my love

Just posted this over at Hugo's post yonder:

Given how much ground Jessica was covering, every topic she talked about got, in some sense, only a little of what it deserves

You haven't understood your critics.

The problem is not how many pages the WOC section got, though the idea that the book is made up of about 200 pages of what by deductive reasonsing must be "white american feminism" (what ever the hell that is in actual fact, though I'll just ignore it right now and assume that anything that hopelessly parochial is not a "good" kind of feminism in and of itself) and 10 pages of "WOC feminism" is somewhat alarming even if that was the actual criticism being laid at the damn godamn fucking book, which it most certainly is not. The problem is that the fucking book wasn't inter-fucking-woven with the fucking POC "section", a thing it needs to have done for the simple fucking reason that it's 2007 going on 2008: We should be beyond little seperate but equal ghetto chapters in "feminist" primers, we should in fact be beyond the very notion that WOC's struggles are some how NOT equally and far from seperately as much the struggle that white women go through, even it sometimes zigs for WOC where it zags for white women, the essential effect, and essential answers will mesh and interweave as the fuckign text of FFF should have done.

Of couse that's been said already by the POC who've been routinely and consistently ignored during this whole debacle, and it's largely been replied to with the same missing hte point reply again and agina: it's targetted towards "girls" who are mostly going to be white.

Except it's not the WOC who need to be told that Feminism is letting WOC down, because Duh-oh! Cuz strangely enough they kinda already know! what with the "living it" and the "needing white women to pick up the fucking slack already on their end thankyouverymuch". It is the very white girls with their white barbies in their white schools who'll be going onto white-with-tokens colleges and work places eventually just like Jessica did, who need to hear THAT sort of feminism, who need to be taught THOSE truths.

Jessica, and her ten page chapter, don't let WOC down, hell no, she's let the women the book's supposedly aimed at down.

It's empowering to be there for those of our sisters when they need our support, and it's empowering to not be like a cat on the stairs tangling up their feet when they need to be moving. And this book, with it's silly token chapter is gonna break a lot of WOC's necks because a lot of white girls grew up without learning that the WOC can't stroke them right at this second, and to be please be getting with the out of underfoot now like! because they need to be getting down those stairs in a condition that is still kinda breathing and moving and stuff.

but you want practical advice to improve your shit, okay. You need to learn, and that's not something we can just tell you, or teach you in 5 easy steps, it's something you've got to work at, and if I was you I would take the coming semester as an opportunity to learn stuff yourself. Focus on moving away form the WOC/white women dualism you've got going on, and which Jessica's book is packed with, maybe interlacing each lesson with WOC writings and perspectives in a way that isn't too forced. work at finding the ways, and there are a fuck ton let me tell you, in which POC's experiences cross over with women's experiences under patriarchy. You won't do it perfectly all the time, but you can't just throw your hands up in the air and expect WOC to use their magical negress powers to distil a lifetime's worth of nerve deep life experience dealing with the problems white people and women produce and pour it like orange juice straight into your brain. If you can get a non-white person, ideally someone you're already friends with, who you can ask questions to, that'd help, but you can't treat them like a lab rat or tes subject. You want ot listen more than you talk, you want to hear what they're saying more than you judge or assess. You want ot try to feel what they feel without the lenses you view the world through as a white person, and with the lenses they view the world through. You got to be able to see the way they're treated by your fellow white people, the odd looks, the way white people pause and change hteir body language slightly when they're noticed by the white people. the way and whens of them not being noticed at all, that invisibleness that their skin tone gets them.

Like I siad, it's not something you can learn in a day, or even a year, and it's not easy because you have to find the wiring that makes you act in certain ways and view things in a certain way, and then find out where it leads and what it's actually doing, exactly, and where it came from, before you even think about getting rid of it.

Comment left over at BFP's place:

For her latest Burma Post:

While I was in the UK I ended up working with Burma Campaign UK and a few other immigration related groups and saw a few of the eye witness accounts of stuff the current regime there did to people who even just attended NLD protests - shootings into gathered crowds to disperse them, people making it out of such violent confrontations only to get pistol whipped senseless when they run into check points on the roads away from the demonstrations.

Speaking of pistol whipped, the wiki page on the myanmar army is interesting - usual suspects are there selling arms, Heckler & Koch, Fabrique Nationale, TZ Italy and Israeli Military Industries are all there, using a neat work around the multiple trade embargos on the regime by selling the government the rights to produce their weapons - which means that myanmar makes the weapons, but the foreign businesses get paid for their acceptance of it.

Obviously all those groups are major clients of the US militaries, as well as most of the other first world nations - suffice to say they're all quite thoroughly within the military industrial complexes of the first world nations. THe only real exception is IMI, who's more innovative and interesting arms tends to get copied by H&K or other groups who then make a cheaper knockoff version (like the Mac-10 - which is often mistakenly called an "Uzi" because it so resembles the Israeli original) that governments buy.

But because it's a company owned pretty directly by the Israeli government it'd be pretty heavily affected by any sanctions or trade embargos placed on Israel itself for the ridiculous amount of crap it currently gets away with ontop of making money off of the broken bodies that come out of Myanmar's detention centres.

Obviously the PRC also sells all sorts of crap to myanmar, but it seems to be the sort of cheap aerospace crap that it's churning out recently as a side effect of its space program, but the PRC sells to everyone, because it's teh goddamn PRC and that's what it does (and yes, that's yet another reason why Jerome Armstrong's touting of dodgy chinese stocks was a morally Wrong thing, aside from the everything else about it).

Excuse the miltech pron there, I was a major Jane's geek at one point.

It very nearly goes with out saying that Aung San Suu Kyi is incredible as is the work of the NLD over the years - because it has gotten better there, and Aung San Suu Kyi has worked hard to keep the protests and movement peaceful and keep the more militant groups in check to such a degree that the Myanmar regime can't off her any more than South Africa could kill mandela or the british could have Ghandi carted off or the feds could directly shoot MLK - the country would tear itself apart in rage if they seriously hurt her.

And yes, Aung San Suu Kyi is up there with those guys, becuase while it could go without saying that she is fucking amazing, it shouldn't, because she is really awesome and makes me feel really warm and fuzzy with optmistic sprinkles on top.

If you can show your support in whatever way you can for the NLD it's kinda needed, because if the status quo remains unchanged to any serious degree, the Monks currently being held by Myanmar will likely turn up as corpses a few months from now.