lazybeautiful:

superdreaming:

microaggressions:

“Hey! White girl! I love you! You are beautiful!”

—

Shouted to me on the street 15+ times a day during my study abroad experience in Nicaragua. I never truly understood what it meant to feel objectified until this experience.

been reading a lot about racism/white anti-racists/cultural appropriation/how to not be a super shitty privileged person today and i’m not sure this microaggression is a good/right thing at all. like…this person may have glimpsed one kind of objectification through this experience but i don’t know about the whole idea of a “white girl” being “objectified” by people in Nicaragua during their study abroad (implies college/post-secondary education, some level of financial privilege) and the whole idea of “understanding” as a way of showing that white people can be oppressed too (i feel like the leap from “objectification” to “oppression” is a pretty small one here/one that can and will be read into it by other people as an example of how POC can be racist against white folks)? because just by the sheer fact said person was white and in a place where non-white people were catcalling them does not mean they were being oppressed? i don’t know, can someone smarter than me talk more about this, if they feel like tackling the issue? sometimes debating things with myself too long gets tricky because i’m not sure how to factcheck myself (googling “is this thing i think racist/oppressive” doesn’t work well at all) 

so glad I’m not the only one who had a problem with that microaggression. being praised for fitting into the western/Euro-centric beauty model is nothing compared to the struggles POC face for not fitting in this model in the US and other majority white countries. being told that you’re pretty is not oppression. yeah, it’s objectification, but it’s objectification based on the beauty ideals the west has exported around the world.

I wouldn’t call any of it oppression. if being called beautiful is the worst thing that happens to you when you’re abroad, then you’re lucky. when POC go abroad, from what I’ve heard, they face much, much worse. so this microaggression reeks of privilege and really isn’t on the same level of racial oppression compared to the other ones they post.

but if I’m wrong, feel free to correct me in terms of POC experiences abroad. 

Yes, thank y’all! I read that with mytongueisforked and both of us were giving that an OH HELL NO.

Yes, you could call that objectification, i.e. a woman’s body is being assumed to be public property/a commodity/open to commentary. But, is objectification on its own oppression? Linked with something larger, sure; like I’m not going to argue that white women aren’t oppressed on the basis of being women. But specifying race and location and “It was the first time this happened to me!” is way fishy, and undermines any chance this had of getting my sympathy.

My scattered thoughts on this:

• If this woman had never before felt objectified, then great! but she’s really lucky to have never been made to feel that way, let alone to feel that way constantly like many female/trans* people do. My skepticism kicks in when someone is blurting out that they’ve never experienced something that is everyday for the people they’re speaking to.
• Specifying that this happened in Nicaragua reinforces stereotypes about hypersexual latino men, that men of color lust after white women, etc. Had she never been somewhere back home that men could have said the same thing? I mean, I can picture dudes on my block saying that to a white woman; did she only encounter men of color by traveling to another country?
• And with that, it reinforces the idea that men of color are a threat because of their lust for white women, that they are dangerous, and that, just as in this example, they will put white women in deviant and dangerous positions that white men never would, e.g. being objectified on the street. This shit is serious and lethal—generations of men of color were/are lynched for this threat.
• “White girl, you are beautiful” is said EVERY FUCKING DAY. Did she never feel her skin color being fetishized when this same catcall was made by billboards and magazines and cosmetics and lynchings? If she ever overheard a white man telling a black friend, “You’re cute for a black girl,” would she feel equally objectified and offended?
• I am a light-skinned black woman in a black & latino neighborhood. When men talk to me on the street, as happens fairly often, I feel the light tanness of my skin. I don’t appreciate the catcalls, but they are telling as to how my gender is raced and vice-versa. In this situation, I have to feel my skin color and how it is being weighed against that of other black women; white women don’t have to feel this.

Is that what is so offensive, attaching a name—WHITENESS—to white women’s genders and sexual objectification? That is all I can see that is out of the white supremacy ordinary. You don’t need a study abroad program for that; go take a walk around the block.

dancingonembers:

September 30, 2008

(so, this might seem weird, but in addition to its actual content, this post is laying the groundwork for an analysis of the silence surrounding the recent anti-muslim terror attack in Ohio (see also. h/t to Cheshire Bitten. More of the groundwork will be done in a post to follow.)

How often do you see trans women of color speaking in their own voices? On the blogosphere (that is, user created media), there are quite a few: Holly, Tobi, Little Light, Mia Nikasimo, and Monica Roberts, who in turn highlights the voices of Marisa Richmond and Claudia Charriez, as well as (to a lesser degree of self determination) Isis Tsunami, Bulent Ersoy, Leang Sothea.

In non-blogosphere media (that is, media filtered through an organization), there are any number on the Being T documentary (whose names I don’t know)(h/t Monica), and the deceased Marsha P Johnson (who is rarely shown speaking for herself, almost always reduced to ‘activist and murder victim’) and Sylvia Rivera. Seriously.

In Chicago, one friend of mine is a labor organizer, and acquaintances of mine work at the Broadway Youth Center, and Howard Brown. In Minneapolis I met and briefly worked with women from The African American AIDS Task Force, The Indigenous People’s Task Force, District 202, and All Gender Health.

I make this long, long list not because it’s exhaustive (it’s not, please comment if I forgot you), but in order to make it painfully obvious that there are lots and lots of trans women of color speaking, saying and doing important shit.

And if you’re white and that’s what you think of when you hear “trans woman of color” (etc), I’ll eat my shoes. My hat, too. Hell, if you could name 5 accomplishments by trans women of color I’ll be impressed. But not because they aren’t accomplishing them. Because they’re not being reported.

Media visibility for trans women of color (scanty as it is) goes to 1)objectifying portrayals of sex workers, and 2)murder/hate crime victims. The white trans community seems to have replicated this pattern–while Becoming a Black Man¹ and Still Black may have achieved some popularity, and Whipping Girl has spread like wildfire, almost all of what I see reported in transnews and on the blogosphere at large that covers TWOC is focused almost exclusively on their victimhood, and the commentary limited to that & dissection of the fetishization.

Of the top twenty hits googling “trans woman of color”, only two were definitively not about that person being a victim (or survivor) of racist trans misogynistic physical violence, one of which was a comment by Little Light in response to transphobic hate speech included in the 59th Carnival of Feminists; 7 of the first 10 results for “trans women of color” are about transphobic violence (though one does have a positive unrelated story), and the other three are about Isis and Lavergne on reality TV. By contrast, not one of the first 10 for “trans women” focuses on physical violence, and only three out of ten for “trans woman”. Neither “trans man of color” nor “trans men of color” turned up any results obviously violence related (though the “Becoming a Black Man does relate to violence, it’s not in such an objectifying way.).

Say it with me now: trans women of color are not objects. They are not (only) victims. They are not the people you can push the pity party onto when you’re tired of dealing with it yourself and want to be seen acting to change shit. Yes, they are at vastly greater risk of violence than the rest of us trans folks–and just because you bring that up when transphobic/trans misogynistic violence is being talked about does not make you a “good ally“. Their deaths do not define their existence. Yes, many are sex workers because of economic marginalization–and this does not define their lives. They are more than points in a power struggle between multiple groups of white trans activists and cis feminists.

As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes in “The Femme Shark Manifesto”:

FEMMES ARE LEADERS IN TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS/ DEFENDING OUR QUEER AND TRANS OF COLOR COMMUNITIES.

WE USED OUR STILETTOS AS WEAPONS AT STONEWALL

WE WERE THE TRANS[ ]WOMEN WHO FOUGHT BACK AT THE COMPTON CAFETERIA

WE’RE THE GIRLS WHO STARE DOWN ASSHOLES STARING AT OUR LOVERS AND FRIENDS ON THE SUBWAY….

WE REMEMBER OUR DEAD- SAKIA GUNN, GWEN ARAUJO, AND MANY OTHER QUEER AND TRANS POC WHO DIED BECAUSE OF RACIST, HOMO/TRANSPHOBIC VIOLENCE. NOT AS A POLITICAL STATEMENT BUT AS WOMEN WE LOVED IN REAL LIFE WOMEN WHO COULD’VE BEEN US OR OUR LOVES.(link) (note–this piece is about queer femmes of color, not specifically trans ones. And you should read it.)

More later.

1: A rather (trans) misogynistic article at that–it does include trans women’s voices, but only as a means to further oppress them/erase their voices and further the subtextual point ‘black men have it worse than black women’. See also my performance piece, So Shut Up.

* * *

bolding is mine, because that is what I did in my hysterical post last night. - C

Preach it. “Their deaths do not define their existence.”

(via mytongueisforked)