That said, I’m posting here specifically to wish you Kudos: This post is enlightenment, Sister, and it is surprising how few people get there. Numerous movements countering one ism or the other will fail to recognize how connected the problems are, not just because of the struggle, but because there are a great many people who are experiencing several of these struggles at once. Oftentimes, they will be marginalized within a group that is supposedly fighting for them: Homophobia in racial struggles, racism in feminist struggles, Classism in Queer struggles, that damn list goes on. People are forced to react in all kinds of ways; prioritizing one aspect of their oppression over another, splitting themselves, or simply shutting down. It’s another system of privilege and oppression that’s often much harder to address-but JUST as important.

Hearing someone figure that out–and there is no judgement there: the way I see it; Racism, Hetro-sexism, classism, and other forms of ignorance and oppression are diseases and our entire culture (and several cultures besides) are infected; we are contaminated merely by being socialized in the U.S. It is not any individual’s fault, but it IS out responsibility to recognize the symptoms and develop the “antibodies” of awareness, educating ourselves and others, as you are clearly doing–is a sincere breath of fresh air. Thank you for that. Kudos, and I look forward to the other things I’ll find on this site…

I am having a TON of these realizations right now–having so many hit at once is making me question my intelligence XD. But it’s a process. I have to not hate myself–I had no control over my skin color or where my parents raised me: white, and in an overwhelmingly white area. We had only a handful of POC in a school of about 1200–maybe twenty weren’t white. It was a very, very sheltered existence in a mountain area with mostly middle class residents. Even college was fairly white-washed, at CU Boulder, in a mostly white town, at a mostly white college.

Five years ago I was a conservative republican anti-liberal anti-feminist girl, and now the only thing that’s the same is my gender. I’ve never been overtly or openly racist–I know the racism I am still battling in myself is the often more dangerous kind, the kind that grew in me because I just didn’t know anything, because I was shaped by where i grew up and who I grew up with. It was the same with that engrained sexism–but that, being female, was the easier thing to get over and look at more critically. I’m now, perhaps, overly critical of things related to gender. And somehow, in that, I overlooked the racism.

I’m also still in the ‘me me me me’ phase–I haven’t figured out how to get out of that. When people make generic comments about white people, I think “but I don’t do that…, isn’t that the same as saying all POC does something?” Which is, I think, a definite part of my privilege.

So thanks, for this post, it’s helped me realize that “we do what we can,” we try our best, and when our best isn’t good enough, we have to redefine what the best is and strive for that.

I think. I’m sure if I’ve mistakenly been stupid it’ll be pointed out (which is a good thing).

I like the fact that you didn’t waste a lot of time feeling all guilty. You realized it, addressed it and worked to fix it.

Thank you.

Call it privilege or ignorance or whatever works for you, but I was definitely missing something, and now I’m at least aware of it.

See my blog entry for more.
http://sweatingthroughfog.blogspot.com/2007/10/playing-games-with-privilege.html

I’m still not sure what caused me to lump, for example, racist portrayals of non-white women in with racism instead of feminism. It’s part of both (and a phenomenon unto itself). But it certainly belongs on a feminist site. It’s just not possible to distill feminism down to one set of problems faced by all or even most women, because we all have additional privilege issues beyond our gender. Better to be inclusive, and welcome those sudden embarrassing realizations that there’s yet someone else I’ve left out and correct it in the future.