💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › chris-day-race-treason-gender-trouble.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:28:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Race Treason, Gender Trouble Author: Chris Day Date: 1995 Language: en Topics: whiteness, Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, letter, race, gender, a response Source: Retrieved on June 13, 2016 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160322162355/http://loveandrage.org/?q=node/52 Notes: Published in the Mar/Apr 1995 issue of the L&R Newspaper.
Dear Love and Rage,
Noel Ignatiev’s attempt to defend his claim that white women can expect
“that the state will protect them from strangers” demands a response.
Noel replies to the evidence of the experience of “white” women on the
Love and Rage Production Group to the contrary by asserting that by
their apparent refusal “to be the property of any man” they have placed
themselves beyond the shield of whiteness.
The main problem with Noel’s argument is really a simple matter of fact:
women who in no way place themselves “beyond the shield of whiteness”
cannot expect that the state will protect them from strangers unless by
“strangers” Noel means Black men. In that case Noel is correct in noting
that such protection is extended not out of concern for women but in
order to protect the property of white men, but then it is white men and
not white women who have an expectation of protection.
White women (like all women) can expect to be treated like the
collective property of men (including strangers) without any expectation
of protection by the state. Women are routinely menaced and harassed by
strange men on the streets with impunity. And in a thousand ways (in
conversations, in the mass media, in all manner of social customs) men
assert their control over women. In the ultimate expression of male
power, rape, women usually have no effective recourse through the state.
In those instances in which the state does act a white woman who has
been raped can expect that in the defense of the property rights of
white men she will be put through a legal process that often reproduces
much of the humiliation and degradation of the initial act of rape.
I think that it is the way that Noel conflates the defense of white
women as the property of white men with a benefit to white women (the
expectation of protection) that is so infuriating. Noel is right to say
that patriarchy is decisively shaped by white supremacy, but he needs to
also see how white supremacy is shaped by patriarchy. The power of
contemporary white supremacy has its roots in the historical ownership
of human beings by other human beings. The power of patriarchy is rooted
in the continuing ownership of human beings by other human beings.
Clearly the state treats white women and black women differently and in
many instances those differences constitute privileges for white women.
But sexual violence as a central part of the apparatus of social control
is not just about upholding whiteness. It is first and foremost about
upholding the subordinate social position of women.
Noel claims that “statistics show that the safest thing to be in this
country is a white woman.” The crucial term here is “thing.” White women
are safe only if we exclude the vast majority of violence that is done
to them by men who claim ownership over them (fathers, brothers,
husbands, boyfriends, bosses...). That violence of course is highly
underrepresented in any statistics precisely because women know that
they can’t expect to be protected by the state. These statistics also
exclude the millions of times women capitulate to men (to have sex, to
do the dishes, to do what he wants) who have not even threatened
violence because those women know that it lurks just beneath the surface
of the situation.
Noel argues that by refusing male control rebellious women (like the
women on the Production Group) are locating themselves outside of
whiteness. By attempting to define acts of resistance to the patriarchy
through the solitary lens of race treason Noel is effectively erasing
the feminist content of those acts. The emerging theory and practice of
race treason will be better served by a respectful analysis of the full
range of resistance to the full range of forms of domination than by
trying to drag every expression of revolt or refusal under the umbrella
of treason to whiteness.
Love and Kisses,
Christopher Day