Also, the idea that racism is just “well intentioned working class people using the wrong words and then being policed by super woke privileged POC” is ridiculously reductive.
Considering that someone on this thread tried to tell me slavery wasn’t an example of structural racism I realize that there may be confusion as to what racism is, and that, again, people have not really bothered to find out what they are talking about before very confidently asserting that they know what racism is (super woke people identity policing others, mostly, apparently) and how to fix it.
People take so much offence when you suggest they read and learn things like you’re threatening to send them to a re-education camp, but seriously, how can we have a critical useful discussion if people are just unwilling to know things?
Like the observation about black patriarchy and the assumption on this thread that black women/people/feminists never address this - have you read the Combahee River Collective statement by working class black lesbians from the 70s? How can you possibly claim that “nobody” challenges black patriarchy when the entire field of black feminist thought is about this and about their recognition of misogyny in the black power and civil rights movements? (Starting with books like Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins, the collection This Bridge Called Our Backs, All the Women are White, All the Blacks Are Men, etc.) Soneone took the suggestion that people educate themselves as “performative woke signalling” but seriously - how can you think you can discuss these issues when you simply don’t know what you are talking about and so dismiss decades of feminist work out of ignorance? Do you know how offensive it is to claim that Black women and organizations never address black patriarchy? Go look up Alicia Garza’s tweets on Cosby, for example (the same BLM that was accused of defending Cosby!) When people are telling you to educate yourself and listen they’re not saying shut up white women, they’re saying there’s literally thousands of books and centuries of work (Sojourner Truth) talking about these things and it’s not reasonable to ignore it and continue talking as if it doesn’t exist. Again, how is that feminist?
By the way, a really great radical feminist book by the white butch lesbian Butch Lee is “Underground to Freedom: the rebiography of Harriet Tubman” that looks at the radical “Amazon” histories of Black women. “Military Strategies of Women and Girls” by the same author looks at liberal feminism and uncovers feminist histories around the world from Beguin nuns to Indigenous women to Nigerian women to undo the notion that feminism is only having more women generals and that there’s only a western, recent history of women’s history. People interested in challenging the idea that WOC have to be “included” in feminism - as though white women created and do feminism and other women don’t already have feminist practices - should read her work. I found it life changing. She is a truly radical writer who changed my thinking on feminism and also on how women can organize together in revolutionary ways.