[Wamvan] Race and Feminism-->recommended NPR series

[Joanna Chiu]

Any thoughts on the Hugo Schwyzer Twitter meltdown and the subsequent
debate? Do blogs like Jezebel marginalize feminist women of colour? Are any
Canadian alt media guilty of that as well?

This NPR series might be worth following:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/08/22/214525023/twitter-sparks-a-serious-discussion-about-race-and-feminism

Twitter Sparks A Serious Discussion About Race And Feminism

Twitter isn't always the best place for big, thorny philosophical
conversations. But it's a great forum for catharsis and taking the
temperature of a popular sentiment. Sometimes, rarely, it's actually both.

If you were on Twitter last week, you may have seen a lot of rallying
around the satirical but serious hashtag
#solidarityisforwhitewomen<https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23solidarityisforwhitewomen>(which
itself spawned another trending hashtag
#blackpowerisforblackmen<https://twitter.com/search?q=blackpowerisforblackmen&src=typd>).
It was an unlikely trending topic, but it served as a high-profile digital
example of one of feminism's most enduring internecine tensions — how or
whether to make space in the world of feminism for people who aren't white
(or upper middle class or straight or able-bodied).

The hashtag was started by the blogger Mikki Kendall, but the proximate
cause of the hullabaloo was the digital self-immolation of Hugo Schwyzer, a
self-identified "male feminist" and one of the most polarizing figures in
the feminist blogosphere.1 (BuzzFeed has a rundown of Schwyzer's Twitter
meltdown here<http://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonvingiano/why-did-controversial-feminist-hugo-schwyzer-have-a-twitter>.)
Several women of color have long complained that Schwyzer publicly went
after them for criticizing him and his writing — something Schwyzer copped
to during his Twitter
rant<https://twitter.com/hugoschwyzer/statuses/365910268473114625> —
and yet despite this, he had long remained a contributor in good standing
at influential feminist-inclined sites like the hugely popular
Jezebel<http://jezebel.com/tag/hugo-schwyzer>.
(Notably, most of those sites being criticized for publishing Schwyzer are
run and largely frequented by white women.) A lot of people tweeting
#solidarityisforwhitewomen felt that those sites and their proprietors had
granted Schwyzer the platform to snipe at and undermine women of color
while bestowing upon him undeserved feminist street cred. And now that
Schwyzer was basically admitting that all of those complaints about him
were true, they wondered why those same digital feminists who'd helped
Schwyzer's ascendancy weren't denouncing him or locking arms with feminists
of color. In their eyes, it was emblematic of the same myopic application
of feminism.

"Admittedly, this isn't a new problem: white feminism has argued that
gender<http://www.theguardian.com/world/gender>should
trump race since its inception," Kendall wrote at The
Guardian<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/14/solidarityisforwhitewomen-hashtag-feminism>.
"That rhetoric not only erases the experiences of women of color, but also
alienates many from a movement that claims to want equality for all. This
is especially clear when posts and articles about racism in feminism from
five years ago involve some of the very same players."

We wanted to go longer than Twitter can allow on the issue of race in
digital feminist spaces. So we asked several women who actively live, think
and write in the feminist blogosphere to expound on
#solidarityisforwhitewomen and what, if anything, happens next. We'll be
hearing from them over the next several days. First up is the writer Roxane
Gay. — *Gene Demby*
......

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/08/22/214525023/twitter-sparks-a-serious-discussion-about-race-and-feminism


-- 
*Joanna Chiu | [image: Twitter] <http://www.twitter.com/joannachiu> [image:
LinkedIn]<http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=90180242&authType=name&authToken=PVJq&locale=en_US&pvs=pp&trk=ppro_viewmore>
 *
 HK:+852 5115 8253 | Office +852 2565 2276
skype: joanna.chiu555 | w: www.joannachiu.com
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