I’ll admit to completely selfish relief at being able to read one last thing by brownfemipower. Here is a portion of a very powerful post:

1. there are clear racialized reasons why women of color are never and will never be the sought after by big companies, named as the leader of feminist movements, asked for interviews etc

2. that white feminists bear a responsibility (that they are NOT accepting and in fact are actively rejecting) to negotiate power and create spaces (while working alongside or a step behind marginalized communities) in which power is de-centralized

3. As a result I do NOT consider myself to be a part of any fucking “feminist movement” because to me, feminism requires diversity (We have a responsibility (especially in the undergraduate years) to demonstrate to ALL students, no matter what their identity is, how to interact with the critical thinking of people who think differently than they do. To bring this a step further, however, feminist academics who are actively aware of how power plays out in very negative ways in the classroom, have a very specific responsibility to those students who have little to no power. The very basis of feminist scholarship/academic training is to dismantle and/or redistribute the power structure within a classroom and the academy. Women’s studies is nothing more than an articulation of this demand–women WILL be studied. Men will NOT be the focus of all academic work. Thus, women’s studies professors (and all other ethnic studies, disability studies etc depts) have built the commitment to diversity within a classroom into their very existence–so I feel no qualms at all about insisting that women’s studies professors (and instructors, lecturers, adjuncts etc) are *required* to show diversity within the classroom through the texts that they teach.)

And even though I wrote this whole post about those three points–the only thing people heard was “She thinks she’s Freud and she wants money/power/recognition.”

No, actually, I know I’m brownfemipower and I want to end violence against women. And I wanted to do that with all the women who keep insisting to me that we are all in this together and we have common problems that we have to work against and we’re all sisters, and there is such thing as a commonality of experience between us all—as I said in my original post—I thought feminism was important because it brought women together (I had thought at one time that feminism was about justice for women. I had thought it was about centering the needs of women, and creating action in the name of, by and for women. I had thought that feminism has its problems but it’s worth fighting for, worth sacrificing and sweating and crying and breaking down for.)

But how can it have “brought us together” when my implicit goal in feminist centered media justice is to write erased communities into existence—and the result of the work of the ’sister’ down the street is the erasure of the same communities I’m working to write into existence? (And no, I do NOT accept that I or any other fucking Latina out there should just be “grateful” that our work is being talked about while we remain hidden in the shadows. Even now, as a person who explicitly rejects feminism, I KNOW that Latinas have the right to demand that the work we do not be hidden in some dark silent space that nobody talks about and everybody avoids even as everybody else eats all the fruit that we pick. Yes, even Latina writers have the right to fucking unionize and come into the light.)

There is no “feminist movement” because the work being done is not just conflicting with the work of other “sisters”—it’s directly negating it.

For me, this shit has all been about community. I did not expressly state this in my original post. I was angry enough at the time that I really didn’t flesh out my ideas fully. Having since had the time to think things through more carefully and surf around several of the blogs that are talking about this—part of what I was trying to say was that feminists have a choice in deciding what community they belong to. And they are implicitly choosing to stay away from and otherwise distance themselves from communities that make them uncomfortable or worried for any reason. This has consequences for the communities that they refuse to work with. Most importantly, it has consequences because WOMEN belong to those communities that they refuse to work with.

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I know it’s not her job or responsibility to educate me about my privilege or about the racism and sexism that women of color face. It’s not her responsibility to educate me about the problems with white feminism. At the same time, I have learned so much from her blog. And in concert with the class I took last semester – Race in Latin America and the Caribbean, taught by Winnifred Brown Glaude (hands down, best professor I have ever had) I’ve at least begun to build a framework where I can begin to understand these issues better. I have a very long way to go, but I credit these two women with helping me to even begin to comprehend these issues on a deeper level.

brownfemipower’s posts routinely blew me away and it’s hard to describe the loss. I know it’s nothing compared to those who had built a relationship with her over the years she had blogged. I won’t be taking any of the links to her in my own posts down in the selfish hope that she may reinstate her blog and resume posting, though the chances look slim to none.

There is a post at Feministe that gathers a number of posts together to explain what happened. From what I’ve read concerning the matter it is the one that has been the most constructive in trying to look at the larger issue. A short explanation rather lacking in eloquence – that when white women are given an opportunity to speak “for” women of color, they have a tendency to appropriate WOC work as their own and do not give credit where it is due. It erases people and their experiences, and it allows for this structure that privileges certain voices over others – that it is news when a white person says it, nothing important when a person of color (who has been working on the issue for years) says it – to continue.

It makes me cringe that mainstream feminism often regards the issues that women of color face as “special interest” and only worthy of coverage “when there’s time” or if they can get a “marketable” white woman to cover it. Sounds rather familiar, in that it is the same bullshit way that patriarchy devalues the issues women face as a whole.

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