Post-march.

So there was this march day, and for a whole lot of people, it was a massive, landmark, newborn experience of feeling solidarity.

And then those people came home and read these heart-rending blogs of what marginalized people went through that same day in those same marches.

And now there is a whole lot of listening and talking going on, from people who are kind of new to all this. Awesome.

I have good news and bad news. I myself have been working seriously on intersectional feminism from a position of privilege for over twenty years. I suck at it. You will too. And that's okay. You have to get to the point where you are okay with working hard at this while sucking at it. It is the only way forward.

Part of institutionalized oppression-- unconscious, daily, deeply institutionalized oppression-- is the unspoken idea that systems of oppression don't affect the centered population. For instance, the idea that racism doesn't really affect white people. It isn't that you don't care about what's happening to marginalized people, it's that it's happening over there-- on the margins.

Then you get hit by the realization that a massive part of "who" you are really is a socially constructed "what" that has been all but totally invisible to you because you've been living in a centered echo chamber where it is taken for granted.

You are not mostly an individual who gets to be anybody you want to be with magic powers of good intentions that whisk away whatever damage your oh-so-individual words and actions might accidentally cause.

In fact, everything that went into getting you to thinking of yourself as the special snowflake autonomous author of your life actually helped keep you functioning as one more active cog in the systems of power and prejudice, which turns out to have been running over here, in the centered, the whole time. You're a tool.

When you "get" this, it is a shock.

It doesn't just change your understanding of the world we all live in.

It changes your understanding of you.

After you get this, someone calling you on your own unconscious prejudices isn't as personal anymore, because you aren't thinking of yourself as a free-floating "who" being accused of something abnormal. But the prejudices themselves are a lot more personal, because you have realized they really are a part of you and you really are part of them, and you still cry, but you cry because you realize all the angry messenger was saying, for the umpteenth time, is, "You are being normal and that is so toxic, take look at your 'what'ness and how it is working here."

Oh, yes, and you realize you are going to suck at this forever.

You realize are not going to be the uplifted savior who shows the new way. You realize you are not going to flip a couple internal switches and get to say, "Hooray, I've done the work and now I really am the prejudice-free individual I once thought I was."

**You realize you are going to need to spend the rest of your entire life actively listening to marginalized people and consciously following their guidance.**

You also realize that your initial sense of resistance to the idea that marginalized people are the people you need to listen to most was actually your own internal prejudice trying to maintain the status quo.

That was the good news.

The bad news is white feminism. There is an incredible amount of newborn confusion and beefy intellectual introductions to white feminism floating around right now. Let me put it in a nutshell.

White feminism seeks to buy into the existing systems of power and prejudice, not to dismantle them.

White feminism isn't all about race; it is all about cluelessness.

White feminism comes from a place of taking most of the status quo for granted. This is a place of an obsession with how hard it is for a woman to win the rat race that comes at the cost of awareness of the human beings the rat race is running on top of. This is a place of speaking about helping marginalized peoples the way Rudyard Kipling spoke about helping our little brown brother.

Textbook example: When my lesbian classmate crowed about how new reproductive technologies were increasing women's options all the time-- without thinking about how those reproductive technologies are almost exclusively developed through testing on isolated low income non-English speaking immigrants who are the most vulnerable women in our society-- that's textbook white feminism.

Race isn't the singular spotlight issue there-- the issue there is complete obliviousness to all the instersections of privilege and lack of privilege happening there.

Because classism is a system of oppressing women. Transphobia is a system of oppressing women. Anti-semitism is a system of oppressing women. Euro-centrism is a system of oppressing women. BECAUSE WOMEN ARE PEOPLE.

White feminism fails to recognize all women are people, and that isn't feminism at all.

Remember:

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." -- Audre Lorde