More from Patricia Hill Collins
Continuing from my last posting...
Recently I've been critical of the Fem Watch YouTube video. It's meant to expose racism, transphobia, and other ugliness amongst online feminists, which is a good idea - but some of the quotes don't actually come from online feminists.
Back in the day, I spent way too long arguing with anti-feminists on Usenet. They'd attack feminism by quoting outrageous stuff feminists had supposedly said. Often, the quote was invented, or changed, or misattributed, or lifted from context to alter the meaning. I guess as a result of those debates, to me it's just obvious that you have to quote clearly and accurately if you're going to use quotes as evidence, as the YouTube video does.
But when I point out that the video's evidence is poor, I know it's going to come across the wrong way to some people - as denying racism. POC are told all the time that racism is no longer a problem, or that they're imagining it, or overstating it; so it's not surprising my criticism might sound like just another example.
Amazingly, all this is related to Hill's chapter! She talks about two ways of getting knowledge about society. Firstly, the traditional academic way of studying people: as objective as possible, distanced, emotionless, adversarial. Hill points out: "Such criteria ask African American women to objectify themselves, devalue their emotional life, displace their motivations for furthering knowledge about black women, and confront, in an adversarial relationship, those who have more social, economic, and profesional power than they."
So, suggests Hill, Black women turn to a different source of knowledge: not abstract "book learning", but their own lived knowledge, the wisdom that allows them to survive. "For ordinary African American women, those individuals who have lived through the experiences about which they claim to be experts are more believable and credible than those who have merely read or thought about such experiences."
This completely makes sense to me. It's why a White person should respect a POC's word that something is racist (not swallow that word mindlessly, but take it as serious evidence). It's why I put more stock in the statements of FOC about Martha and Doctor Who than the statements of White fans. And it's why it's important that I won't respond to a WOC's claim that there's bigotry in online feminism by trying to deny that. Even if some of her evidence is shaky, she knows what she's talking about.
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Collins, Patricia Hill. "The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought". in James, Joy and Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean (eds). The Black Feminist Reader. Blackwell, Oxford, 2000.
Recently I've been critical of the Fem Watch YouTube video. It's meant to expose racism, transphobia, and other ugliness amongst online feminists, which is a good idea - but some of the quotes don't actually come from online feminists.
Back in the day, I spent way too long arguing with anti-feminists on Usenet. They'd attack feminism by quoting outrageous stuff feminists had supposedly said. Often, the quote was invented, or changed, or misattributed, or lifted from context to alter the meaning. I guess as a result of those debates, to me it's just obvious that you have to quote clearly and accurately if you're going to use quotes as evidence, as the YouTube video does.
But when I point out that the video's evidence is poor, I know it's going to come across the wrong way to some people - as denying racism. POC are told all the time that racism is no longer a problem, or that they're imagining it, or overstating it; so it's not surprising my criticism might sound like just another example.
Amazingly, all this is related to Hill's chapter! She talks about two ways of getting knowledge about society. Firstly, the traditional academic way of studying people: as objective as possible, distanced, emotionless, adversarial. Hill points out: "Such criteria ask African American women to objectify themselves, devalue their emotional life, displace their motivations for furthering knowledge about black women, and confront, in an adversarial relationship, those who have more social, economic, and profesional power than they."
So, suggests Hill, Black women turn to a different source of knowledge: not abstract "book learning", but their own lived knowledge, the wisdom that allows them to survive. "For ordinary African American women, those individuals who have lived through the experiences about which they claim to be experts are more believable and credible than those who have merely read or thought about such experiences."
This completely makes sense to me. It's why a White person should respect a POC's word that something is racist (not swallow that word mindlessly, but take it as serious evidence). It's why I put more stock in the statements of FOC about Martha and Doctor Who than the statements of White fans. And it's why it's important that I won't respond to a WOC's claim that there's bigotry in online feminism by trying to deny that. Even if some of her evidence is shaky, she knows what she's talking about.
__
Collins, Patricia Hill. "The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought". in James, Joy and Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean (eds). The Black Feminist Reader. Blackwell, Oxford, 2000.