I had a great discussion with some friends the other day, and I felt like writing about it. It’s no secret that I care a lot about social justice, even if I’m far from an expert. So of course I heard about Patricia Arquette’s Oscar speech (meh) and her elaboration afterwards (ugh). I don’t want this post to be about her comments though, so I’ll just redirect you to Amanda Marcotte’s great overview at Slate instead. The key thing Arquette is:
And it’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.
As if there aren’t women of color, or women who are queer, and on and on. And as if people from other marginalized groups don’t have …show more content…
We need to start on this now, so we don’t get set into patterns and vicious circles and self-fulfilling prophecies that in ten or twenty years will be damn near impossible to fix.
What can we learn here from the LGBT movement? The early LGBT movement screwed this up. Badly.
The early LGBT movement was very much dominated by gay white men. The public representatives of the movement were mostly gay white men; most organizations were led by gay white men. And the gay white male leaders had some seriously bad race and gender stuff: treating gay men of color as fetishistic Others, objects of sexual desire rather than members of the community… and treating lesbians as alien Others, inscrutable and trivial.
And we’re paying for it today. Relations between lesbians and gay men, between white queers and queers of color, are often strained at best. Conversations in our movement about race and gender take place in a decades-old minefield of rancor and bitterness, where nothing anybody says is right. And we still, after decades, have a strong tendency to put gay white men front and center as the most visible, iconic representatives of our …show more content…
Trying to directly compare who has it better or worse does a disservice to the challenges that different groups face. These differences are multi-faceted in a thousand different dimensions. And of course what about people who fall into two or more of these groups? It’s not “double” the lack of privilege. I feel that trying to determine who has it better or worse only serves to normalize the experiences of vastly different groups. It ignores what makes people
And it’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.
As if there aren’t women of color, or women who are queer, and on and on. And as if people from other marginalized groups don’t have …show more content…
We need to start on this now, so we don’t get set into patterns and vicious circles and self-fulfilling prophecies that in ten or twenty years will be damn near impossible to fix.
What can we learn here from the LGBT movement? The early LGBT movement screwed this up. Badly.
The early LGBT movement was very much dominated by gay white men. The public representatives of the movement were mostly gay white men; most organizations were led by gay white men. And the gay white male leaders had some seriously bad race and gender stuff: treating gay men of color as fetishistic Others, objects of sexual desire rather than members of the community… and treating lesbians as alien Others, inscrutable and trivial.
And we’re paying for it today. Relations between lesbians and gay men, between white queers and queers of color, are often strained at best. Conversations in our movement about race and gender take place in a decades-old minefield of rancor and bitterness, where nothing anybody says is right. And we still, after decades, have a strong tendency to put gay white men front and center as the most visible, iconic representatives of our …show more content…
Trying to directly compare who has it better or worse does a disservice to the challenges that different groups face. These differences are multi-faceted in a thousand different dimensions. And of course what about people who fall into two or more of these groups? It’s not “double” the lack of privilege. I feel that trying to determine who has it better or worse only serves to normalize the experiences of vastly different groups. It ignores what makes people