That Feminist Dyke

thisiswhiteprivilege:

White privilege is being accepted by society as the norm.

It’s never being told that “you could almost pass for a white girl, almost,” as the person who tells you this smiles and nods with approval.

As if I’m aiming for that. As if I can’t just be comfortable in my own skin, with my own heritage.

Submitted by sea-rchlight.

thisiswhiteprivilege:

White privilege is not having to use an alternative first name instead of your real first name because when your first name is Santos every potential employer just glosses over your resume and assumes that you are not a legal citizen, do not speak english, are not educated/qualified enough for the job. White privilege is both my boyfriend and I being out of work at the same time and myself (white) landing and interview for every single job I applied to and by boyfriend getting absolutely no response from anyone. White privilege is my boyfriend changing his email address and first name on his resume to David in order to get people to call him back for a job. 

lavenderlabia:

shooting4ownhand:

mattachinereview:

I think the part of Tumblr that makes me the most tired is the party line of:

“We found this person saying/doing a problematic thing(s) and now no one is allowed to like anything that they have ever said or done, because this happened, and now everyone’s previous experiences with this person’s work are invalid and/or must be disavowed”.

This creeps me out for a wide variety of reasons.

Like let’s say a sad queer kid gets really into a certain writer in high school—idk who to pick, let’s pick Hemingway, because I’m tired. 

So this sad queer kid gets super into Hemingway and it helps him survive high school, right? 

And then years later this kid reads A Moveable Feast, which is Hemingway’s memoir, and discovers that Ernest Hemingway was a grade A total complete absolute homophobe who destroyed his own relationship with Gertrude Stein by reacting shittily when she explained she was a lesbian.

So there are a few ways we can go with this, right.

We can accept that Hemingway is flawed and complicated, or we can make this kid feel shitty about ever having been into Hemingway and invalidate his queerness by suggesting that the only possible way to be still into Hemingway is through some measure of internalized homophobia.

THIS IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO MODEL SURVIVAL STRATEGIES OR MENTAL HEALTH.

This is a good way to hate yourself!

We are living in hell world, ok, to steal a phrase from Mehron, and the idea that we can somehow isolate ourselves in someplace that isn’t hell world is so problematic on so many levels and relies on so many creepy notions of boundaries and purity! Hell world is all around us and inside of us and in order to deal with that we have to engage with it.

Why do you think I like WAUGH? Absolutely NOTHING about Evelyn Waugh’s politics is even a TINY bit redeemable, as far as I’m concerned.

I’m just tired of all the different ways ~young radicals~ have of determining who’s a “real” radical.

And I think that loudly forever disavowing people who fuck up is a way of implicitly saying, “because I never fuck up, because obviously I don’t, because if I ever fucked up why would I suggest that all people who fuck up be forever removed from the near sphere of people we might like or value”.

And I think that helps ~radical communities~ to foster a certain quality of “but we are Good People” which renders everybody impervious to call-outs once they have amassed enough cultural capital by, idk, talking loudly at events about how much they hate [x].

Disavowal is an incomplete strategy.

Anyone who pulls the “you are not a real [insert minority here] if you like [insert problematic thing here]” can go fuck themselves. I am so sick of this bullshit mentality on Tumblr, this shit doesn’t exist anywhere else, where you are only a good social justice advocate/person if you hate every problematic thing. Frankly if you do that, you are left with one boring ass life since you cannot like anything. Everything has some problematic elements to it. Also, what really pisses me off about this whole mindset is it assumes people do not have critical thinking skills. However, I guess one wouldn’t have critical thinking skills if they cannot admit something they like has problems. -shrugs-

This is something that’s been bothering me for a long time, and there are particular factions of Tumblr that do this all the fucking time. It’s quite a bizarre way to look at the world actually, especially when you’re advocating fairness and equality. Like everyone fucks up — every single person — that’s the whole point of social justice. It’s a learning process; it’s calling people out; it’s articulating the nuance and grey area of social interactions; it’s critical thinking that allows you to say “this is what I like and this is what I would change”; it’s the analysis of culture and people. And for all the oft-heard cries about paying more attention to intersectionality, I barely hear anyone talking about the intersection of “fucking up” and “being a decent person who’s learning and improving all the time”. Those categories aren’t mutually exclusive. 

I particularly hate when this attitude extends to “if you even reblog from somebody who has done something problematic in the past (whether you were there for the drama shit-storm or not) you are somehow tainted by association”. It’s fucking ridiculous. 

And none of this is takes away from the fact there are obviously super fucked up things where such ostracising the problematic is warranted. But too often that perspective is lost.  

Anyhoo. That’s my rant for the moment. Here’s a pertinent quote on the topic. 

feminishblog:

Please understand when someone says you have privilege - whether it be because of your race, gender, etc., understand they are not saying they claim to know you and understand your life. They are not saying you have lived an easy life. They are not saying you were born with a silver spoon or found one along the way.

What they are saying is that you were born with something, something that others were not. You were born with an advantage that for the time being, is still inherent and institutionalized.

What they are saying is listen, because as a result of that privilege, there are some things you can’t learn unless you do exactly that - listen.

So I implore you: Open you eyes. Close your mouth. Fill your ears, and consequentially, your heart and mind.

thisiswhiteprivilege:

White privilege is saying that AAVE(African American Vernacular English) is “desecrating the English language”.

These people don’t know how language works because they never feel that way about English people saying “I’ll take me coat” or “the building you’re sat in”.

If AAVE or other POC-related dialects were exactly the same, but affiliated with white people instead of people of color, they would be a “cute accent”.

 submitted by: firework-comic

Editor’s note: I often think of this when white supremacists and racists talk about AAVE, language is the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, so if white people hate AAVE because it sounds complicated or doesn’t sound ‘right’ then they shouldn’t speak English because all English speakers do is mold their words to most accurately illustrate what they want to communicate. If white people don’t understand AAVE that just goes to show it’s a legitimate dialect. 

Words like abdabs, cheeky, cuppa, pants, chips, chav, and arsed all have different meanings in the UK than they do in English(or don’t exist), and even within the UK some words have different meanings(or don’t exist).

People like to down-play how much other languages distinguish themselves through their dialects, especially English speakers. Regardless of the fact that English is a very clear example of how there is no ‘right way’ to speak it. 

Dialects, sociolects, and ethnolects of English are all valid. People only hate AAVE because it is something that seems exclusive to Black people and it comes from a language that we were denied full access to for a really long time. 

AAVE should be respected for what it is. 

- thelittlekneesofbees