feminist blogs

Last month, civil rights trailblazer Juanita W. Goggins passed away in her home (h/t).

Goggins was the first African-American woman to be elected to the South Carolina state legislature, in 1974. She served three terms before retiring. Among her many other accomplishments, she was also the first black woman from South Carolina to be represented at the Democratic National Convention two years before her election, in 1972, and the first black woman appointed to the United States Civil Rights Commission.

Many of Goggins’ obituaries are focusing on the sad story of her death. While those circumstances are worth discussing for several reasons (and you can follow the links to read about them), here I would like to center and celebrate the many important achievements she had throughout her life (all emphasis mine):

Several neighbors in her elderly, mostly black community in downtown Columbia said they had learned the full scope of Ms. Goggins’s accomplishments only from her obituaries. At the peak of her political career, in the 1970s, she twice visited President Jimmy Carter at the White House and was the first black woman appointed to the United States Civil Rights Commission.

In the legislature, where she represented Rock Hill, on the northern border of the state, for three terms in the 1970s, Ms. Goggins, a Democrat, helped pass key legislation for improving elementary school education and public health. Last year, a stretch of Highway 5 was renamed in her honor.

“She was truly a mover and a shaker, so well-liked and so well-loved by so many,” said Representative John King, 33, who holds her former seat in the General Assembly.

…

Those achievements include teaching public school, founding a tutoring company and in 1972 becoming the first black woman from South Carolina to be a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Ms. Goggins was elected to the State House in 1974, defeating a white male incumbent.

“I am going to Columbia to be a legislator, not just a black spot in the House chambers,” she told The Associated Press at the time. Voters, she said, “were ready to accept a person who was sincere and concerned about things. Those feelings go beyond color.”

In the legislature, Ms. Goggins helped expand kindergarten classes, reduced student-teacher ratios and approved sickle-cell anemia testing in county health departments.

The AP adds:

Goggins, the youngest of 10 children, grew up the daughter of a sharecropper in rural Anderson County, about 130 miles northwest of the capital. She was the only sibling to earn a four-year college degree. Her bachelor’s in home economics from then-all-black South Carolina State College was followed by a master’s degree.

She taught in the state’s segregated schools, married a dentist and got into politics. In 1972, she became the first black woman to represent South Carolina as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Two years later, she became the first black woman appointed to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

…

She sat on the powerful House budget-writing committee and was responsible for funding sickle-cell anemia testing in county health departments.

The former teacher also helped pass the 1977 law that is still the basis for education funding in the state. Her proposals to expand kindergarten and to reduce student-teacher ratios in the primary grades were adopted after she left politics in 1980, citing health issues.

…

Her son said she worked several years as a case manager for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, although a spokesman said the agency had no records of her employment. At one point, she also started a nonprofit tutoring service called the Juanita W. Goggins School of Excellence.

That is a hugely impressive list of achievements, and Ms. Goggins sounds like an immensely impressive woman. I’m very sad and regretful to say that I had never heard of her and her work until after her death, but I am grateful and honored to have the chance to learn and write about her now. She fought for those who needed her to fight, broke down barriers, worked towards social justice, and was one of many heroes who helped to get us to where we are today.

Her son Horace Goggins says:

“I would like for her to be remembered as a woman who cared about her community,” he said. “I want her to be remembered as a positive role model, not only for African-American girls, but also any young girl who has a want and a desire to make a change and do something positive.”

Thank you, Juanita W. Goggins, for your work and public service. Rest in peace.

A must-read article about race, class, caste and the American prison system. A few facts from the piece:

• There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
  As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

The mass incarceration of African Americans over the past 30 years is primarily related to the War on Drugs — a convenient cover for a program essentially targeted at the black community. The talking points all came back to the supposed rates of drug-related violence, but that doesn’t exactly compute with historical fact:

President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

The vast majority of people arrested for drug-related offenses are non-violent, and are arrested for possession rather than selling. Just read the whole thing.

William Saletan takes on the “abortion is genocide” campaign, pointing out that guns are really killing a lot of African-Americans, but the “pro-life” movement doesn’t seem too concerned — in fact, they’re unapologetically pro-gun.

The numbers are provocative. But there’s something odd about the billboards. The child who appears beside the text is fully born. Abortion doesn’t kill such children. What kills them, all too often, is shooting. If you wanted to save living, breathing, fully born children from a tool of extermination that is literally targeting blacks, the first problem you would focus on is guns. They are killing the present, not just the future. But the sponsors of the “endangered species” ads don’t support gun control. They oppose it.

Two months ago, the Violence Policy Center issued an analysis of black homicide rates based on the latest FBI data. The national U.S. homicide rate is 5.3 per 100,000 people. Among whites, it’s 3.1 per 100,000. Among blacks, it’s 20.9 per 100,000. That’s four times the national rate and seven times the white rate. In 82 percent of black-victim homicides in which the fatal weapon can be identified, it’s a gun. And 73 percent of those gun deaths are inflicted by handguns.

The report calculates that in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, blacks were 13 percent of the U.S. population but suffered 49 percent of all deaths by homicide. And the problem has been getting worse: From 2002 to 2007, the number of young black males killed by guns increased by more than 50 percent.

Maybe that’s why blacks, unlike whites, strongly favor gun control. In a Pew poll taken last year, whites said by a plurality of 50 percent to 44 percent that it was more important to protect the right to own guns than to control gun ownership. But an overwhelming majority of blacks, 72 percent to 20 percent, said it was more important to control gun ownership.

Saletan highlights the hypocrisy of anti-choicers raising a stink about race, when gun fanatics have pretty solid Klan roots — or, as he so beautifully phrases it, “People who live in glass hoods shouldn’t throw stones.” Indeed.

The lovely Renee of Womanist Musings and Monica of TransGriot hosted Amanda Marcotte and I on BlogTalk Radio last night to discuss the divide between white feminists and womanists/feminists of color. It was a great conversation, and you can listen to it here. Enjoy!

I’m incredibly far behind on the recent Colorlines investigation into the practice of poor U.S. families selling food stamps for cash. But now that I’ve finally gotten to reading it, it’s certainly worth the time to bring it to the attention to those of you who have not.

Due to the welfare “reform” of the 90s, which placed time limits on how long one can receive cash welfare assistance, a substantial and growing number of families who have already used what the government is willing to supply literally have nothing else left. More still simply do not have enough for what they need. In order to buy basic necessities (soap, toilet paper, laundry detergent) and pay bills, they’re forced to illegally sell their food stamps as their only option for making ends meet. According to the article, not only were a staggering one in eight Americans (one in four among children) using food stamps in November, but about 6 million Americans receiving food stamps say that they have no other income.

And yes, women, and particularly women of color, are by far suffering the greatest impact:

Blacks, Latinas and Asians nationwide are about two times more likely than whites to have been pushed off cash assistance as a result of time limits, rather than for another reason, according to a ColorLines analysis of 2008 data from the US Department of Health and Human Services. Because women-led families make up 90 percent of TANF cases that have been closed, women of color like Eva are now more likely to be living without access to any cash assistance.

For many people then, food stamps are all they have.

Not discussed in the article is the conundrum of the legions in the U.S.’s bootstraps obsessed culture who will insist that women selling food stamps is not a sign that our system is broken, failing desperately, inherently cruel, and on the brink of collapse, but evidence that those receiving any assistance at all are “scamming” the system, and do not even deserve the scraps the middle-class is willing to throw their way. After all, this situation didn’t occur by accident; it was predicted and chosen.

But what the Colorlines investigation does do is follow the life of a woman, called Eva, who is unable to find a job, and must both sell her food stamps and run up a tab at her local store every month in order to ensure that she and her daughters can survive. It’s also the result of interviews with several other women in similar circumstances, as well as service providers. If you haven’t read it yet, go do that.

via Racialicious

Glad to see so many awesome new media types on this list, including the always-wonderful Rachel Maddow and Feministing founder Jessica Valenti. Less promising: Only 7 women on a list of 25. And I don’t know the racial background of everyone pictured, but on first glance (and from what I do know about a lot of the listed journos), there are even fewer people of color.

The United States is not the world. It’s not even the centre of the universe.

I know, I know, it’s shocking stuff. If I were polite, I would have offered you a seat first. But I am an uncouth foreignerWell that’s just too bad. Also, you have frequently whipped the seat out from under me in the past. I shall illustrate how through the following fun fact-filled lessons.

Not all non-white people are black. Stop referring to us as such. In fact, neither do all non-white people fit into that routine construction of ‘black/Latino/Asian’ that you so frequently employ. Yes, indeed, you are not being inclusive even if you sometimes tack Native Americans on as an afterthought – you know, as though you’re not in their ancestral homeland or anything that would accord them some respect. In fact, there are many many many many many people in the world other than the ones you choose to mention. I would tell you about some of them, but I don’t want to contribute to that whole list-some-people-and-erase-other-people thing you do. And also it would be a great exercise if you could go learn about them! Maybe you could even meet some! Maybe you have been meeting some and have also been erasing their identities by acting like they were from ethnic/racial groups you’re more familiar with!

Oh, another thing about all that racial stuff! USian racial dynamics do not translate anywhere else on the planet. Hence their being called USian racial dynamics. No one else has the precise history you do, that unique racial make-up, those particular constructions of what those identities mean – things that ought to be respected. Likewise, this stuff works differently in other countries because your experiences don’t magically melt over into and obliterate ours. Do not, do not, ever try erase or modify our experiences of racism, Indigenous experiences in particular, by framing my country’s appalling racist history in USian terms. Have some respect for the stuff other people have to deal with every day, some basic consideration of where we’ve been. That means sometimes people are going to be uncomfortable with the use of terms that are benign or even positive to you, like ‘person of colour’ (because it’s often considered a term particular to the USian context, because it indicates a sense of alliance that isn’t universal, stuff like that). Sometimes you are going to be uncomfortable with such non-white-shaped cultural aspects in other countries. It is not cool to force your ideas about race and racism on us and in doing so alter and damage our cultures, our strategies of resistance, so that you’re more comfortable. I seriously don’t know how you stomach doing that.

We do not instantly understand all of your cultural references, though we do get a lot of them because USian popular culture saturates our consciousness until sometimes there’re barely any local TV or films or books. It is almost impossible to make a living as a writer in this country because USian products flood the market. Sometimes I’m watching TV and I’ve gotten so used to hearing USian accents all the time it doesn’t even register that I’m watching a program from the United States. We do not have your legal system, so references like ‘you can’t censor my free speech, it is protected in the constitution’ get REALLY annoying in a way that is quite apart from it being annoying on the level of, you know, the fact that censorship cannot by definition be performed by anyone who is not the government. And, believe it or not, the world does not operate according to your timezones and schedules, so quit complaining when we don’t respond to you at 3am our time.

We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving! (Though that’s pretty messed up, not sure why you do.)

We don’t celebrate Independence Day either, because it is the day of USian independence and on account of our not caring!

We sometimes spell words differently, not wrongly, when we’re speaking English! English came from a country called England, not the USA, and it has spread out all over the world so that there are lots of different spellings! So can you stop using the USian flag to symbolise English on your little translator flags unless you have multiple versions of English on your system, please?

We, depending on context, may well have TVs and soft drinks and jeans and newspapers and it is not incredibly amazing that countries that are not the United States have those things! USians didn’t even invent all those things.

We are not all super unlucky to not be in a country like the United States of America, because there are lots of great things about living in other countries too and quite frankly a country with that bad a healthcare system in spite of having that much money and that large a population is not really a country I want to be in!

Other countries exist! And the people in them? The world around you? Do not revolve around you. We have our own contexts, but sometimes it is hard to focus on anywhere but the United States because YOU KEEP THRUSTING EVERYTHING ABOUT YOUR COUNTRY IN OUR FACES ALL THE TIME.

So when you try and put USian racial narratives onto us
or your cultures
or the expectation that everyone you are interacting with is USian
Well, I get really tired of it.

So stop that please.

Sincerely,

A person from another country.

A guest post by Renee at Womanist Musings; read the original over there as well.

This weekend Focus on the Family Plans plans on running a Pro-Life advertisement during the super bowl. From the moment that this was discovered, it received national attention. Groups like NOW and the feminist blogosphere waged a real effort to challenge this threat to women’s reproductive rights. The Center for Reproductive Rights wrote a letter to CBS pointing out that Ms. Tebow lived in the Philippines at the time of her supposed choice and therefore her only real option was to have the baby because abortion was and still is illegal there.

At the same time that this battle is being waged, another is going quite unnoticed. An anti-abortion group in Atlanta is targeting Black women by putting up billboards stating that Black children are an endangered species.

As proof of this claim they offer the fact that Blacks account for 30% of the general population and 56% of the abortions. When we consider the fact that Black children are universally devalued, this campaign has the possibility of being really effective. Over the last two years campaigns specifically targeting the ability of Black women to choose have been on the rise and yet there has been little to no commentary from White feminists regarding this issue and so I ask, whose reproductive rights matter?

These organizations repeatedly point to the fact that Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist and it seems that rather than countering this claim with the fact that Faye Wattleton, an African American woman was president of Planned Parenthood from 1978–1992, there has been a resounding silence. Is Planned Parenthood suddenly not worth defending when it is about Black women having abortions? It seems to me that highlighting a former Black president would go a long way to fighting the claims of racism.

How about the fact that Black women are impoverished due to racism and sexism? We already know that a woman living alone with a child is more likely to be poor and therefore when we factor in racism, it is quite obvious that poverty would increase. Would it really be so hard to suggest that part of the reason that the rate of abortion is so high is because Black women are already aware of the herculean task and are simply opting out due to a lack of community support and government funding?

Another factor to consider is education. The way to stop abortion is not by outlawing it but by ensuring that sex education is offered from an early age. We already know that schools which are located in impoverished neighbourhoods fall short in terms of education. Is it not possible to suggest a co-relation between this fact and a lack of good sex education?

I do understand that some White women may be reticent to enter this debate because it is framed as saving a Black child, who we know to be universally undereducated and invisible. Even when Black women place their children for adoption, they are less likely to be adopted and so it would appear that Black women are really reduced to two choices, abort or raise the child themselves. Even if we validate that point, there is still the issue of placing a priority on women’s agency when it comes to reproductive rights. We do not have the right to question these women on their decisions. No one chooses to abort without putting great thought into the matter and if we truly respect the right to choose, it must apply to ALL women.

Finally, as scared as White women may be to interact because of the racial undertones of this argument, I must ask don’t Black women matter? All of these campaigns revolve around saving the Black child and this is predicated on the idea that the child is infinitely more valuable than the mother. If abortion were to be outlawed tomorrow, more children may indeed be born, however you would also see a rise in the deaths of Black women due to back alley abortions. The Black woman has a right to life and this must be forcefully asserted.

I will continue to blog about this issue because I believe that choice applies to all women but I must ask where are the voices of my white sisters in arms? If you truly believe in choice, it is irresponsible to ignore the ways in which Black women’s reproductive rights are increasingly being challenged. The issue is that you either do not care enough to sound the battle alarm or that race is once again a sphere in which you are unwilling to engage because of a desire to center the concerns of White women. Here’s an idea for you to chew on, if abortion was ever revoked it wouldn’t apply solely to Black women, it would restrict your rights as well. I suppose that some of you may have the capitol to travel to Canada or Mexico to assert your choice, but invariably some of you would find yourselves in the same alley as a Black woman.

In January, a storm blew up over cover art for new young adult novel Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore. I haven’t read the book, so I’ll not summarise it, but you can read about it if you click through to the author’s website. The book’s main character, Nimira, is explicitly described in non-white terms – ‘dark,’ ‘brown skin’ – as you can read over at Charlotte’s Library. Here’s what was released as the US/Canada cover.

As you can imagine, lots of people are incensed that a person we’re clearly meant to read as white is featured on the cover of that uncommon thing, a YA book about a person of colour. There’s now a statement from Bloomsbury on the book’s page on Bloomsbury’s website (via Shelf Life). ‘Bloomsbury is ceasing to supply copies of the US edition of Magic Under Glass. The jacket design has caused offense and we apologize for our mistake. Copies of the book with a new jacket design will be available shortly.’ As is proper. There’s no word yet on what the new cover will look like. By way of comparison, I’ve included a copy of the UK cover to the right.

What makes this worse is that it follows on from Bloomsbury doing the same thing last year. The main character in Justine Larbalestier’s Liar, Micah, is a young black woman. The original US cover featured a young woman who – well, I won’t make assumptions as to the model’s racial identity, so again I’ll just say that she certainly has features we’re meant to associate with white people, and we’re meant to read her as white. This would be bad enough in general, but it’s particularly horrible when you consider the plot of the book. Micah is, well, a liar, particularly with regards to herself and life. You’re supposed to spend the book trying to figure out what’s really going on, separating out Micah’s truths from her lies. But, as Larbalestier says on her blog post on the subject:

I worked very hard to make sure that the fundamentals of who Micah is were believable: that she’s a girl, that she’s a teenager, that she’s black, that she’s USian. One of the most upsetting impacts of the cover is that it’s led readers to question everything about Micah: If she doesn’t look anything like the girl on the cover maybe nothing she says is true. At which point the entire book, and all my hard work, crumbles.

Here’s what Bloomsbury said in a statement to Publisher’s Weekly: ‘We regret that our original creative direction for Liar—which was intended to symbolically reflect the narrator’s complex psychological makeup—has been interpreted by some as a calculated decision to mask the character’s ethnicity’. Firstly, their “creative decision” hugely undermined the decisions of the person whose creative work they’re responsible for. Secondly, they’re not apologising for their blatantly racist actions, only for people’s interpretations. It’s the classic deflective non-apology; “we’re sorry we hurt your feelings, please go away now”. Thirdly, it does not matter whether the masking of Micah’s ethnicity was intended or not. What matters is that it happened, it affected people, because it’s part of a crushing system of racism. What matters is that it told a whole lot of young women of colour that people like them are not good enough to be worthy of representation. Now, I don’t know if Bloomsbury are telling the truth about the cover being a conscious creative decision – I wouldn’t put it past them to have not thought it through properly – but if it is, it is hugely inappropriate, especially in the context of the heavily white publishing industry, and hurtful to non-white readers. Happily, they replaced it with the cover to your right.

The thing about Justine Larbalestier, who is white, is that she is pretty hardcore about decentring whiteness in her work, and she has long had my respect for that. (In fact, she has yet to publish a single book with a white protagonist; check out Why My Protags Aren’t White.) It must have been devastating to have had her hard and valuable work undermined in this way. Before I go on, I must make my recommendation for Liar, it’s excellent. I of course bought a copy with the Australian cover, which I think looks rather good.

But this isn’t just about book covers, not just about who is represented in a visual sense. There is a wider context of the (lack of) space allowed non-whiteness, of permitting only some of us in and on problematic terms. Western writing is being translated and dominating other markets even as writers in those regions are struggling to get a foot in the door. In white Western countries, non-white writers have a hard time getting published – unless their background/culture/history is the publishing industry’s trendy flavour of the month. Moving wider, even where our stories aren’t being twisted and appropriated for white consumption, we’re not allowed stories of our own. Having to learn and fit ourselves along white ways of thinking, doing and being means that we’ve less of our own. When you have to know white thought, myths, story blocks – because that’s what you were allowed access to, because you’ve been taught white cultures are superior – they take over your imagination. (If you haven’t read deepad’s I Didn’t Dream of Dragons, you must, you must.) I myself was fortunate enough to have access to stories from many cultures as a child, but I still gravitated to white stories as superior.

But let’s pull back to YA, because these book covers point to a specific problem with the genre. I’ve looked around many a bookshop YA section to see… whiteness. In the authorship, on the covers, in the stories. A good portion of young adult fiction is about addressing the issues involved in growing up in accessible and on teenage terms. I’ve read a lot of YA, but I rarely read anything in which non-white characters constitute anything more than one-dimensional and secondary presence. It’s not really about centring young adult experience. It’s about centring white adults’ perceptions of white young adult experience. It’s not only alienating, it’s denying non-white youth the same means of working life out as our white counterparts.

Books are precious, they’ve been heavensent for me. Books can change your life, change your worldview, change something of your very self. These constant little jabs of alienation tell non-white youth that the sort of thought provocation and lazy silly Sundays and transcendental change books can provide are not for us. These things are for the white kids, the kids important enough to get in the books. Not for us the dreams books foster.

The problems with the Magic Under Glass and Liar covers in particular may be over, but there’s a whole industry left to go. Let’s keep up the pressure so young people of colour can be that much more free in their imaginations and inner lives.

Lots and lots of people have said this, so I’m just repeating here: I don’t think it’s a good idea to boycott Bloomsbury and other publishing houses that pull this crap. Because in doing so, you’re harming the writers who are trying to represent POC in their novels, and you’re reinforcing the idea that people won’t buy books that feature non-white people – or the trope that non-white people don’t buy books. Instead, support books with non-white authorship, non-white covers, non-white stories: borrow them from libraries and ask for more, buy them if you can or recommend favourites to other people. It’s these writers who are trying to fold whiteness back from our imaginations, so let’s help them out and show them what we’ve got.

If you would like to contact Bloomsbury USA, here are the details you need thanks to Tami:

Bloomsbury Publishing

Distributed by Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY, USA, 10010
marketing: marketing@bloomsburyusa.com

publicity: publicity.adult@bloomsburyusa.com

F: (212) 780-0115 or (212) 982-2837

Related reading:
Publisher whitens another heroine of color by Kate Harding at Broadsheet.
Kids of Color and the New American Whitewashing by Colleen Mondor at Bookslut.
An Open Letter to Bloomsbury Kids USA. Other Publishing Houses Take Note by Ari at Reading in Color (Ari’s a teenager reviewing POC-centred YA, so go check it out!)

Previously:
Invisible Identities, Part 1: Invisible to Whom?
Invisible Identities, Part 2: The Default Human

Note:

I’m told that in the American context, when speaking about race, the term “passing” is most associated with black people due to a pretty loaded history. This is not the case where I live, simply because that’s not the history we have with the term. As such, when I speak of passing race-wise, I am not speaking only of light-skinned people of African descent who can do so. I realise that this post could therefore be a somewhat uncomfortable read for people in that context, and am putting up this note to therefore hopefully address some of that discomfort.

It’d probably be a good idea to read the previous posts in this series if you find anything else in my word use or context confusing, especially as many of the points in this post build on the previous posts.

Comments that say it’s wrong to try and pass, or conversely that someone ought to try and pass, will not be tolerated. Either way attempts to take away something of someone’s choice, experience, decision making. How one negotiates one’s own life, how one chooses to deal with all the oppressions on hir back, is hir business.

Being able to pass is a privilege. Passing privilege means that others don’t grab my body or assistive devices, people I’ve never met don’t look at me with pity or disgust and I am less likely to face intrusive and upsetting questions. Those are amazing privileges that many of my fellows in the disability community don’t share with me. Passing privilege means that I am not watched suspiciously in stores, negative comments are not made about my features, white people feel comfortable to interact with me and strangers do not expect me to act as an example of what all people of my background are like. Those are incredible privileges that many of my background do not share.

First up, we must address the nature of passing. Sometimes it is active (one chooses to pass) and sometimes passive (one is passed). Sometimes it’s an interaction of expectation and experience, habit and circumstance. One cannot untangle one’s own efforts to pass or to not from the point of the idea of passing. That is, whether one passes or not is dependant on the outside observer. The whole idea of passing hinges not on what the (non)passer does, but on the observer’s response to that person. There’s an extent to which one can control it – and people have developed quite some techniques – but it’s not always a matter of choice as to whether to pass or not.

There’s a friction between passing and solidarity with one’s group. Those who can pass as being a member of a dominant group may miss out on many experiences and forms of discrimination that are held to be facets of that group’s commonalities. One of the main problems with passing is that in doing so an inequitable system is being held up (by those who pass others, by those choosing to pass). This is to say that passing supports the idea that equality, better treatment, is gained by melting into the dominant group. This is of course true, as is evident in, for instance, shifting definitions of whiteness; but one shouldn’t have to lose their own identity to the “good,” dominant identity in order to be dealt with well. We should work not until identities disappear but until they’re all okay to have.

That burden should be placed on those making the assumptions of – enforcing – default identities, not on the passers. Passers frequently report hostility from within their own groups, and accusations of not really being a member of their community from all sides. No one is less a member of the group for other people’s perceptions and it’s incredibly offensive to suggest otherwise. Passing is not always a choice; when it is, it’s presumptuous to resent someone for that and just outright wrong where safety is involved. How one deals with one’s own experiences of oppression is one’s own concern.

Being able to pass really messes with my head. I’ve frequent bouts of intense guilt about it, and I feel sick when people in my communities admire me for the features that make me more likely to pass (‘look at her beautiful skin.’ Increasingly I need to get the nearest bathroom and scrub and scrub where they grab my arm). Sometimes I don’t feel quite real or as though I’m cheating, an intruder in someone else’s identity. With regard to being disabled, this has some nasty consequences: in the past I’ve not gotten needs met, either because I can’t bear to out myself or because someone doesn’t quite think I’m truthful. Passing doesn’t mean I’m not struggling to remain standing while we’re talking. I struggle with passing and being passed. Sometimes I try and do it to feel safer (never safe) and lose my integrity. Sometimes I am passed, and it’s a mix of delight and loss and damage. Whatever I do, it’s never enough, I’m never enough.

Now I just mostly let people think what they will. The glowing effects largely disappear once I give off too many cues. Because so much of my identity, experience and expression is tied up with those of my identities that are invisible, the effects are frequently fleeting.

Being invisible doesn’t mean I face no discrimination but that I face less individualised discrimination in many contexts. Looking like I do has not prevented, upon the acknowledgement of my identity, looks of disgust, offensive remarks about my family, having to listen to racial hatred. It has not prevented the fear in me, the way I have not felt safe since I was a little girl. It has not prevented that I modify my dress, my speech, my movements, my stories in order to appear as “normal” as possible, just like anyone else trying to not face the wrath of whiteness. Attempting to invisibilise difference is hardly restricted to those of us who can pass.

The thing is, I’ve done everything. I’ve been loud and proud about my invisible identities. I’ve done my best to make them disappear. I’ve allowed myself to be passed, I’ve actively worked to pass. I’ve just been myself, I’ve made my identities explicit. At the end of all this anxiety and modification and thought and care, one thing remains constant: it’s the perceptions and actions of people in dominant bodies that count. When I pass, there’s still the weight of many manifestations of oppression on my shoulders. And irrespective of whether I pass or not, people outside of my groups still get to determine how I am treated and how I am perceived. There is no way to win.

[Cross-posted at Zero at the Bone and FWD/Forward]