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

[Heather]

A friend of mine, who happens to be a local Vancouverite, has been doing some really powerful writing on intersectional feminism for a new feminist website called The Toast. Her work has been picked up by other blogs like Slate's double x and inspired quite a bit of debate.

I highly recommend this piece on so-called allies of women of colour in the feminist movement post-Trayvon. 

http://the-toast.net/2013/07/24/ally-phobia-the-worst-of-best-intentions/

Sent from my iPhone 6.

On 2013-08-24, at 6:10 AM, Joanna Chiu <chiu.joanna5 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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(which itself spawned another trending hashtag #blackpowerisforblackmen). 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.) 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 — and yet despite this, he had long remained a contributor in good standing at influential feminist-inclined sites like the hugely popular Jezebel. (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 gendershould trump race since its inception," Kendall wrote at The Guardian. "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 |   
> HK:+852 5115 8253 | Office +852 2565 2276  
> skype: joanna.chiu555 | w: www.joannachiu.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
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