Gosh, I wasn't expecting this!
In addition to the above intervention from MNHQ, I received an email saying they've been getting reports about my posts on these H&M threads, my deleted comment was speculative, and warning me that further breach of the MN guidelines would result in suspension. They also referenced the race-based argument quoted above.
To MNHQ, and for the benefit of everyone who takes the time to use this board: I have never, EVER, made any race-based commentary on MM or anyone else based on their race other than in a fully supportive manner. I feel like the I AM CANADIAN! poster: as I've said before on these threads, I am a woman of color, my DH is black, my children are biracial. This doesn't mean I can't be racist; this doesn't mean I think all white people are racially biased; and it doesn't make me the arbiter of what is or isn't racist. What it does make me, like it made MM, is someone who has had to think about race since I was first made aware of it (in my case, aged 8 in the playground of my primary school in London).
MNHQ finds itself, like many contributors to liberal mainstream media in the UK and the US (I live on the east coast of the US), stuck like a deer in the headlights. The conversation about what is racist, what is covert racism, what it's okay to discuss, how to discuss race - all of it - is very difficult. To my mind, there can be no definitive answer, but there can be rules of engagement. Those rules of engagement will take a long time to emerge: for some of y'all, this current time is an awakening. It'll be ages before a new consciousness seeps into mainstream culture. I'm happy to wait. MNHQ isn't a group of ethics professors devoting their time to this issue, so it's fine with me if they take a hard line and err on the side of caution and delete (although I do think that any right-thinking person with a bachelor's degree level of education can apply enough critical thought to see that some of their deletions are blatantly unfounded). It's frustrating and confusing, but the whole debate is. It'll be a mess before it's put right.
Finally, on the point about race, HQ will see from my posting history and my PMs to users (including some related to these very threads, especially at the height of the protests following George Floyd's murder), that I've been consistently supportive of posters' and the site's push towards racial awareness. Race is not a stick I can be beaten with. I'm not going to defend myself further on this. If MN wish to ban me for racist posts, it'll say a lot about them.
Onto the post itself. Girl Up's stated mission is to "advance girls' skills, rights and opportunities to be leaders". It seeks to promote the provision of education, the establishment of equal rights and opportunities, and to encourage girls to seek leadership roles. My post was to make the following points, probably not clearly enough as I was so irritated when I posted:
- what standing does MM have to tell impressionable young girls and women what lawmakers, CEOs, policy makers, executives, politicians etc think and believe? what are her credentials?
- MM is a woman who has risen to apparent (not in my eyes, but others clearly think differently) leadership status through 'achievements' which are marrying a Prince (a monarchy being the absolute embodiment of inequality) and looking the way she does, partly by virtue of distracting cosmetic alterations (fillers, extensions, make-up). This is NOT what leadership is, in my opinion. Girls are not going to become empowered women through marriage to rich men, or through altering themselves to look like a certain archetype. This is not progress. Does this even have to be said?
- assuming that everyone knows that MM is not in the same league as Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nadia Murad, Sheryl Sandberg, Dr Terarai Trent etc (billed as Global Leaders) and is perhaps a celebrity attraction in the same league as Jameela Jamil (who is actually an outspoken feminist activist), or Priyank Chopra (but not even, as she successfully navigated Bollywood), I think it's detrimental to the very message MM and Girls Up was seeking to promote re female empowerment: here, on a pedestal, is a woman who has achieved global prominence through marriage into the most closed, unequal and unfeminist institution in the UK.
My point was, in short, that MM stood in front of the camera because of her marriage to PH, saying little of substance (in my opinion) while appearing cosmetically altered to look a certain way, and that THIS is delivering absolutely the wrong message to girls seeking empowerment. She actually risks hindering such empowerment.
I have always given MM a fair ride, in my opinion, on my posts (clear to see, at least in the ones which haven't been deleted). She doesn't owe anybody anything. Nobody can be right, all the time. What she's had to deal with in the British tabloid press is unconscionable. She's a hustler who's got where she's got through hard work. If she'd spoken about THIS, about her hard work and grit, the choices she's made in her life, the compromises she's made, the sheer hustle she must have had to go through, the obstacles she overcame - now THAT is empowering. Instead she quoted the Dalai Lama and said.....I don't even know what.