SexyBunnyCop69420

We have our work cut out for us, but fortunately we aren’t starting from scratch: there’s a rich history to draw from. In the 1960s, feminists held regular group meetings, in houses and apartments, to discuss gender injustice in ways that would have been taboo in mixed company. A set of such “consciousness raising” guidelines by Barbara Smith and fellow activists Tia Cross, Freada Klein, and Beverly Smith provides an example of identity politics work as the Combahee River Collective envisioned it. The exercise starts by asking participants to examine their own shortcomings (“When did you first notice yourself treating people of color in a different way?”), but ends by asking how they can use an element of shared oppression as a bridge to unite people across difference (“In what ways can shared lesbian oppression be used to build connections between white women and women of color?”). Because, in the end, we’re in it together—and, from the point of view of identity politics, that is the whole point.

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/olufemi-o-taiwo-identity-politics-and-elite-capture/

Seems like it might have some answers. I like leftist spaces because it’s like one of the only places where you can say “read a book” and people will go out and do homework. It’s rad.

Here’s the book:

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1867-elite-capture

Like I said, I haven’t read it yet so take this post with a grain of salt. Maybe this can be the next slot in the book club, idk.

3 mo. ago

Locked

Why do I lack the ability to trust white people who claim to be progressive or leftist?

I never understood the liberal mainlining of the discussion of intersectionality, either. Shorn of any class intersection (which is just NPR-style liberalism), yeah, you’re going to have a lot of pissed off non- anti-cracker-aktion s (and liberal white women who’ve “swung their Guuci-booted feet over the wall of oppression” like Bill Burr says).

But because of the power and privilege inherent in whiteness you now have white people almost 10 years later deploying that power in very fashy ways and you have the reactionaries now claiming they’re the party of the working class (which is bullshit, but it’ll play). And it’s totally understandable from a chud viewpoint because your options are liberalism or frothingfash but one of them is calling you a KKKracker who benefited from racism (even though you did but you live in a trailer, so it doesn’t feel that way) and the other is saying “yeah, this shit sucks. Let’s vent it onto someone lower on our fucked up hierarchy” which just perpetuates all this shit.

All of this is because of intersectionality shorn of class, imo. Even this thread.

Anyway, I bought this book because I listen to a lot of NPR and it seems right lol. Haven’t read it, so feel free to pika-pickaxe me or give me your reviews, if you’ve read it: