Facebook Publication Date: 12/21/2018 22:12
Am having a conversation on my personal page about this. Telling the truth matters; what matters more is dominant culture women choosing to lie by omission and, in doing so, perpetuate a false and toxic narrative about brown and black women. I said the following in response to the discussion about an often lazy and misrepresenting media:
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[Tarana Burke’s] being slighted is a thing, yes. The bigger issue to my mind is that our accomplishments and innovations are not only erased, but appropriated.
One of the enduring pains of growing up brown was the dearth of black people, other than the usual establishment approved names. It was the lying narrative that we were little more than passive leaches; that we, with few exceptions, did little for our own liberation, and that we contributed little to society as a whole.
This has changed somewhat as an adult. These days, I am both in awe of names and faces suppressed that have now been brought to light and dismayed that it was kept from us; that textbooks and media perpetuated that myth. Still though, our notable efforts almost always revolve around race, other than sports or music, or it seemed to, even though almost everything fought for in the movement benefited dominant culture as well.
This though was different. This was a movement where a black woman took the lead and, though it began as empowerment of women and girls of color (that’s been lost too), it beautifully morphed into an undeniably universal movement for all women–and that is when credit was snatched.
That black women will be minimized and erased by media is, sadly, not surprising. What is sadder still is that it took a groundswell of protest by women of color to make Milano share the credit. Even now, the ‘price’ Burke pays is to, at best, have her name alongside Milano and others. To insist upon her singular achievement is considered arrogant and ungracious. This is the violence; not the misreporting, but the silence of women at first. and the policing of how she moves and reacts in the movement that she made.
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My second response, on the issue of ‘willful ignorance’ on the part of the LA Times and their posting of the tweet:
I suppose because I say racism, not willful ignorance, it’s easier for me to parse. Her erasure was racist. That is the reason for the ignorance–or in this case, the lie. They know the truth the LA Times does. No question. This has indeed been common knowledge. But it is dissonant knowledge to most white people, although certainly not to brown and black people. They willfully misreported, based on tropes they knew would go largely unquestioned precisely because they knew people still hold to the racist narrative that we do nothing of value–and because they don’t consider people of color a natural constituency.
Again, the media has been telling lies about black people, by omission and by commission, as long as there has been newsprint. For me, the story is the silence of dominant culture, like the silence, till the eleventh hour of Cyntoia Brown in Tennessee, who should have been as much as a heroine of the metoo movement as Susan Blasey Ford. She was not, and the silence of white women who have been shouting ‘believe women’ in the wake of Burke’s movement was deafening.
The thread running through all of this is that black women are not worth fighting for and standing with. And that actions and movements are only legitimized when a white woman is harmed or a white woman has the mic. I would be interested in knowing how many people challenged that tweet–and how many were white people.
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