Minor Changes and Reasons for Them

I haven’t spoken specifically about the whole BfP/Amanda Marcotte situation because I figured my readers who gave a shit about it already know about it and my readers who don’t would find it to be too inside baseball.

Suffice to say, I thought that BfP was exactly right.  It seemed to me that what she was saying is “Look here.  Here are two women who write well, who care about the issues of immigration and how they overlap with the issues of feminism.  One woman has been an activist whose writing has focused specifically on these issues for years.  The other woman seems to have recently really gotten the urgency of the situation, even though she’s been reading the first woman for years.  Isn’t it weird that the second woman would get invited to speak about this issue in ever larger forums?”

And this is what I meant by appropriation–taking a spot that seems, logically, to belong to someone else.

I had refrained from talking about this for a few reasons.  1.  It seems completely apparent to me that BfP had a legitimate complaint.  She was right to be angry.  It’s one thing when someone’s making a controversial point to chime in and be all “Oh, she’s absolutely right” but it seemed to me kind of patronizing for me, as a white woman, to jump in and give praise for something so clear.

To use a science analogy, if BfP had come to the world and said “I have discovered a way to slightly modify the cars we have now so that they run on water instead of gasoline,” that would have been clearly praiseworthy.  If she said, “As others have recognized before me, but which I now see from my own experience, water is wet,” I think it would have seemed weird and patronizing for me to have been all “Oh, that brilliant BfP.”

But apparently saying “It is fucked up that this less-qualified white woman is repeatedly getting opportunities that more qualified non-white women don’t get” isn’t as obvious as I thought it was.  So, I apologize for not speaking out sooner, just from that angle.

2.  I didn’t say anything because there’s a lot more going on here than just this.  There’s a long history of stuff that I’m only semi-aware of and there are email groups and listserves and stuff that I am not privy to.  Nor do I want to be privy to them.  This is where my writing is.  I think email is a great way for friends to give each other support, but when it turns into some unacknowledged way of strategizing against other folks who are also using email to strategize against the first group without being clear that that’s what’s going on… I don’t know.  It seems to me that there’s some line between “We are friends supporting each other and that’s not the world’s business” to “We are trying to influence things while keeping ambiguous who this ‘we’ is” and while I’m all for the first, I’m dead set against the second among progressives and especially among women who self-identify as feminists.

This behind the scenes manipulations and strategizing and acting, but not in public, is exactly the kind of influence many of us have been told is the only influence we can have on the world, because, you know, we’re girls.

Continuing to participate in that bullshit, even after we know better, is wrong.  Plain wrong.  If you want to act in the world and influence others, be up-front about what you’re up to and why.

3.  I think I hoped, deep in my heart, that Marcotte was just self-destructing, that what BfP said got to her and, instead of causing her to take a step back and a deep breath, she curdled.  When she needed to react from a place of generosity and understanding and listening, for the welfare of everyone involved, she reacted out of fear and anger.

I, myself (though I know you may find this hard to believe), often do this.  But eventually, I think things through and I mull it over and I try to get back to trying to be open and understanding, because that’s just going to be what it takes for people who are very different to achieve the common goals they have.

And I have read Marcotte for a long time and her writing and her fuck-you attitude have had a great deal of influence on my own thought (for better or for worse).  People I’ve come to consider cherished commenters and dear friends have come to me through her and I still get a little thrill when I see their names around the blogosphere–Oh, hey, that’s Church Secretary!  Oh, shoot, there’s a comment Theriomorph made and I found her through Chris Clarke who I found through Marcotte and I know I want to see what she has to say and read it over.  And, shoot, every day I hope that Steve Pick returns to the blogosphere, because I miss him terribly.

So, I wanted to believe that this was just her majorly fucking up, but, if folks took a step back, she would take a step back and everyone would take a deep breath and we’d all move forward.  As her reader, I wanted to grant her the time and space to be fucked-up hurt and confused.  Because I trusted that she would come back and say “Okay, I thought about this and BfP is right.  Here’s the thing: I do care passionately about this and I knew that if I didn’t write about it, it wasn’t like those folks were going to search out someone like BfP to write it, because, let’s face it, we live in a society set up to ignore the voices of non-whites.  So, I did it because I, as a white woman, could get heard.  It’s fucked up that I can get heard when these other women can’t, but the situation is urgent and I just felt like someone had to say something and, if I can get people to listen to me, I should.  Where I fucked up is that, in realizing that it was imperative for me to take this opportunity to talk about this important subject, I should have taken it a step further and realized that it was imperative for me to call bullshit on the fact that I’m the one who can get heard.  I should have said ‘Yes, here are these women you are not listening to, and you should be.’  I was wrong to not do that and I apologize.”

It wouldn’t heal everyone’s wounds and people would rightly still be mistrustful of her, but it would have been something.

That’s not coming.  I know that now.

And it’s not coming because… I don’t know why, frankly.  But it’s not.

Here’s the moment it hit me, not just in an intellectual way, but really deep in my heart, that I was going to have to stop reading her for my own sake.

After all this–and I mean the whole history, since clearly the book was in production before this latest round of stuff–there exists in the world an educated white woman who does a ton of pop culture analysis and who claims to feel passionately about social justice for everyone, who still lets a book with those illustrations go out under her name.

No.

No, no, no.  There is just no way that anyone, any feminist, who is making a good-faith effort “fucks up” that bad.  There is not an editor on the planet, not a designer, not at a fucking feminist press, who “fucks up” that bad.

That is not a fuck up.  That is an on purpose.

And I apologize for not realizing that sooner.