coldhearted scientist وداد

Julian, who identifies himself as a white, gay, Jewish man, posted a comment at The Primary Contradiction which could stand as a post of its own, so I am making it one. It is about selves, identities, categories, and power, and it is worth reading and thinking about. I have bolded the sentences and phrases which most stood out for me.

Man/Woman, White/Black, Heteropatriarchal/Queer, are not “categories” exactly, nor are they identities, primarily. They are the embodied manifestations of systems of real power exercised against real human beings. Those systems of power, not the individual self, creates what appears to be “personal identities”. Those systems of power also manufacture depression, self-hatred, bigotry, and maintain the institutions which bolster and uphold the “proper” white patriarchal flow of power and privileges. Whiteness, manhood, heterosexuality in men, and queerness as it currently expresses itself (in my city) are all forms of white male supremacist power, organized socially and culturally to oppress, invisibilize, and destroy women of Color especially, also men of Color and white women. It’s time to call out “Queer Politics” as both male supremacist and white supremacist, also deeply classist. It’s time to call out “The U.S. Left” (such as it is) as profoundly white male supremacist, and also heteropatriarchal, as well as steeped too deeply in the arrogance of the Euro-Anglo-White Male Academy.

By the way, folks I know speaking English as a second language are far more directly articulate about reality than anyone I know in a U.S. white male supremacist graduate studies program in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

In my town, women are encouraged to ask others to call them “he” and not “lesbian” and to consider shooting themselves up with T and then to consider the butchering of the body to obtain consistency within one’s mind, never noting how the body/mind is one of many key sites in which WMS power is distributed and maintained. Not interrogated is what this “identity politic” does to society’s women. The Radical Queers I know want our new and surgically made-up identities to be real. Never mind the real lives of real women around the world, who, no matter what they call themselves, nor how they dress, are rapable. Never mind the class and imperialism issues. Never mind the truly dangerous indulgence in thinking of gender as something someone can “transition into and out of”, rather than as a supremely well-organized system of atrocious power, which targets all non-masculine men, and all women, for some form of violence and degradation.

“The Queer Movement” that I know of, in North America, is so white supremacist, pro-capitalist, and blatantly woman-hating, that it doesn’t seem that different, from where I sit in despair and rage, than dominant white heteropatriarchal society and culture. And so I am not part of it. I protest its politics because those politics and their accompanying practices harm women, especially poor women of Color worldwide. That’s a truth I am hoping white Queerdom and white Leftists will acknowledge as real. Only then we can sit at the same table, or stand in the streets, and work collectively towards ending WMS.

I have called out white Gentile male Leftists, white liberal Jewish men, white “pro-feminist” and queer men and white male supremacist trans folks, and the prioritization of “my identity over all” or “what do you know–you didn’t study Marx”, or privileged and individualistic, anti-collectivist understandings of the self are the most frequent responses I get.

Directly challenging any manifestation of white male supremacy, and meaningfully naming its institutions, systems, structures (psychic and otherwise) is something too few WMS Leftists and WMS Queer activists seem willing to do, for self-serving oppressive reasons.

I hold those two groups especially accountable because they claim to be “progressive” and liberating, also feminist, when, in fact, they are none of the above. My cousins, working class white folks, don’t claim to be liberation activists or gender radicals. They and my middle class white friends struggle in this privileged portion of the white, white West with little recognition of the systemic level of the forces which control, benefit, and dehumanize them and me.

Through what means do we connect with one another, in friendship and earned, trusted alliance, in caring coalition, accepting our differences of lived experience and political location while working for the eradication of white male supremacy? Through what means do we radically change these systems of harm and exploitation? These are the revolutionary questions I wrestle with every day, while watching feminism become something meaningless, in the hands of male Leftists, queer academics, and white activists.

The self-determined life comes after those systems are eradicated, not before. We can posit and practice new ways of being, but those systems are still shaping us, every day.

The notion that new identities which are, somehow, not WMS, can exist, for real, in WMS societies, is one of the most dangerous ideas being floated around on the bubbles of denial and delusion by folks who claim to be fighting for justice for all.

Axé, Julian. And I would love to see some of these points expanded upon, with examples.

Update: Julian expands upon these points (comment 28).

Axé.