From Jill
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From Zuzu
Back in March at Everybody Comes from Somewhere, Scribe40 was mystified about something that had gone wrong with one of her friends, she was giving a presentation which her friend attended. There was a segment for interaction with the audience and the friend raised her hand, but Scribe didn't see her, and didn't call on her for quite some time. Afterwards the friend was decidedly cool towards her, even after Scribe explained that it wasn't an intentional snub, she really didn't see her. One other thing you should know, Scribe is white, the friend is black. Scribe wanted to know what was really going on and I said:
That lady knows that sometimes people are nice to her and still hold the notion that she is inferior. She thought you were ignoring her in a room full of superior white people, and sent her to the back of the line to wait her turn until the “important” people had their say.This kind of thing is common enough that I bet every POC has experienced it, and it's happening in the blogosphere right now. Over at Feministe Jill writes a review of Full Frontal Feminism, a book written by Jessica of Feministing. Since I've been following the reviews and criticism at blogs written by women of color and other allies, I was interested. I expected the posts at Having Read the Fine Print and Anti-Essentialist Conundrum to be included, and possibly an older one at Blac(k)ademic but when I finished reading the post, they were noticeably absent. Why? Jill says:
I found the posts criticizing Jessica through a BlogHer summary and through a Google search. I didn’t see either of their posts; I’m sure there are many, many others that I also missed. I was also focusing on the criticisms that I thought were unsubstantiated and cruel — while I don’t completely agree with Sylvia or blackamazon, I do think they make substantive points, and they didn’t engage in the kind of personal attacks that some other bloggers did.Uh huh, she didn't see those black women with their hands up. What's odd is that both BlackAmazon and Sylvia were making similar arguments in the comments thread of the post Petitpoussin wrote, which was linked. Wonder how she missed that? But wait, she was only looking for unsubstantiated and cruel criticism...
Anyone have a problem with that? The black women have a good point, so ignore it and pretend they don't exist, because she needs to show loyalty for the "important" people, her white friend. She actually wants to hide valid criticism from view of her readers.
I have Feministe in my blogroll for a reason, they do cover racism and all the other "isms" in a serious way. While not all the blogs I link to are actively anti-racist, they are non-racist. I don't expect this kind of disappearing and dismissal of POC voices. While Scribe simply didn't see her friend in the back of the room, Jill was putting the "important" white person first and telling the black women to get to the back of the line.
It's true, middle class white Americans are untrustworthy and unreliable.
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