Please stop being racist.

Just stop.

I know you think my skin’s just dark enough to look like I tan well, but I’m not white, and I don’t think it’s hard to figure that out. My name, for one, should be a fucking clue. Do you people honestly think that just because my skin’s not too brown for you that means I’ll happily eat up your racist bullshit? Because that’s how it seems to be. Hell knows I have no real idea what’s going on in your heads, because ya’ll seem to be stupid, even those of you who should know better.

I’m not from Mexico. I was born in Utah. I don’t speak Spanish. My grandfather was from Guatemala, that country in Central America that apparently doesn’t exist, because everything south of Texas is fucking Mexico to you.

But my name is a Spanish one. My hair and skin are brown. I have the short stature and figure of a Latin American mestizo, because that’s what I am and where I come from. I’m not tall and thin like an anglo girl; I have the short, thick bones and wide hips of the Mayan women my grandfather came from on one side, the other being the European, yes, European despite their language, conquistadores who gave me my name.

And, despite being raised in the white Mormon cultural vacuum that is Utah, I’m aware of it. You want to know why?

You are the people who can’t remember my last name, unable to spell it correctly even when I tell you how to your damn face, substituting my surname for whatever generic Spanish name comes to mind at the time.

You are the people who put me in the lowest academic classes when I transferred to school in Colorado, apparently assuming from my name that I was one of the many ESL students without even bothering to look at my fucking transcript, because if you had you would have seen that I was supposed to be in the advanced classes. And then you did it to my little sister when she went to middle school, too — making the same mistake two years in a row, which took a total of months of everyone’s life to resolve, again and again and again.

You are the people who assume I don’t speak English, or that I’m uneducated or incapable of being educated, that I’m less than human and unworthy of respect because my last name didn’t come from English or German or whatever other European languages seem more acceptable to you. And if I’m not subhuman I’m a demographic, oh, glee.

And you know what?

You may think that you’re only talking about undocumented Mexican workers when you say racist shit to my face, but you’re the same people who think that we’re all one homogenous group. Hell, you could at least pretend to be concerned about illegal immigration in general, since Mexico isn’t the only place that people come from — so when you only talk about “those people” with brown skin from further South than makes you comfortable, it’s pretty obvious you don’t actually care about the immigration issue. It’s just an excuse, because you’re fucking racist.

When you talk about those “Hispanics” taking all the jobs, it’s pretty fucking obvious this isn’t about immigration — it’s about language and culture and surnames and that which allows you to identify them without knowing anything more, skin. It’s about skin. Because you assume that an entire continent and a half is all Mexico, all immigrants, all illegal. Even those of us who are born here, even those who have lived here for generations longer than your families.

So when you say all these things, it seems pretty clear to me…that you’re talking about me, and forgive me if I find that pretty fucking offensive. Forgive me if that makes me defensive.

When you say that Mexicans are subhuman (and, literally, some of you have actually said this to my fucking face), you’re hurting me. When you talk about how “those people” are taking over and “ruining” “your” country, you’re hurting me. When you say that illegal immigrants deserve no legal rights or protections whatsoever, by extension, you include anyone Latino, you include anyone with a Spanish last name, even those of us here legally, even those of us born here, even those of us with skin pale enough to please you — because you don’t know us. You don’t know who we are, or how or why we’re here, and you all use rudimentary and, frankly, stupid measures to identify us.

So what reaction do you think you’re going to get from me? Why does it surprise you when my feelings are hurt and when it makes me angry? I’m not from Mexico and I’m a US citizen and I don’t speak Spanish — but I’m still going to be fucking personally offended when you say that shit, because people see my name and they automatically lump me into those categories. All. The. Damn. Time. I don’t care if you don’t realize it. I don’t care if you don’t think that about me, personally. I don’t care if I’m white enough that it doesn’t register in your egocentric anglo mind that my feelings as a mutt are going to be hurt. I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.

This is still who I am, and I’m acutely aware of it. It’s your privilege not to have to think. It’s your privilege to plead ignorance, or to claim that’s not what you meant, or that you’re not including me because I’m somehow special and worthy of being elevated to “human” status.

America is a nation of mutts and immigrants and their children. You white people don’t get off talking about how those immigrants are ruining “your” country, because it wasn’t “yours” until you took it, and I think the ruining thing was pretty much all your fault to begin with. (And I’ve got colonial invaders from all over the world in my past, Spanish America, British India and Africa, and who knows where else — but I kind of accept that my ancestors were responsible for that and that I benefit from it.) Your families all came here from somewhere else, and apparently that’s all fine and dandy for you because your names aren’t Spanish and you don’t have indigenous Latin American blood to darken your skin. Why is it different for us? Why don’t we get the benefit of the doubt in the land of opportunity?

I’m not a good little queer, who shuts up and doesn’t trouble you with my existence. I’m not a complacent little bitch who puts up and puts out and takes being treated as anything less than a man would be. I’m not a baby-making machine or a sex object, and I’m not a heterosexual man’s pornographic bisexual fantasy. Given that, I’m not going to be a nice little mestizo, a quiet little mutt, a properly hidden and assimilated Latina to make myself palatable to you, either.

Love, Julie

PS: And you know what else?

My grandmother on the other side was a Mexican immigrant who never became a US citizen. And. She was Anglo. She was from Utah Mormons, from English nobility and German ancestry, totally, completely, thoroughly white. You see, in order for Utah to become a state they had to outlaw polygamy, so my great-great-grandfather and his three or four wives packed up and moved to a Mormon colony in Chihuahua where it was still against the law but no one cared, and they stayed there for generations until they ran out of nice anglo boys to marry their daughters off to.

I’ll bet that blows your narrow little mind. This is what happens when you define a whole country, a whole continent, a plethora of cultures and languages and racial backgrounds, as one homogenous being.

This is what happens: things don’t fit. Reality doesn’t conform to expectation.

Do you like irony as much as I do?

All right, a serious post.

My family has never really emphasized Easter. That’s the thing with growing up Mormon: Easter is not a big thing in the Church. Mormons claim to be Christian, but they only occasionally ever talk about Jesus. The Bible is a sort of secondary document to the Book of Mormon and Jesus has almost nothing to do with anything.

So it wasn’t until I was about 16 or so that I realized Easter is a huge deal for most Christian denominations, being as how the entire symbolism of the ordeal is central to any real Christian faith. Easter could go by without me even noticing. I’d hardly even thought about the symbolic value because when we were Mormon, no one ever really emphasized it. We gave Jesus the briefest of lip-service and then went back to talking about our religious plans for world domination and our self-inflicted persecution complex and that kind of thing. (Okay, most religions, to be fair, have both those characteristics.) I think the Mormon Church is probably the only “Christian” church where you can go for weeks at a time without anybody mentioning anything about Christ.

But this isn’t about the Mormon Church.

So…Easter. Until a few years ago, I’d never even really thought about it. I had a dim atheistic awareness that it was important for some reason. It’s only been recently that I’ve actually understood who Jesus was (allegedly), what he said, and why, because, growing up, even though we supposedly followed him, there was a suspicious lack of any information about the subject.

People may sometimes think I have a problem with Christians, but that’s not entirely true. If the only thing that one had to do to call oneself a Christian was to accept and live by Jesus’ peaceful and generally unobjectionable central philosophy, I’d be proud to be one. Can I argue with the message that everyone deserves to be treated well despite real or imagined flaws, that everyone is deserving of dignity and kindness, that violence is bad, that charity is good, that compassion, even for one’s enemies, is a virtue? Obviously not. But I’ve met very, very few “Christians” who I think have any real claim to the label.

The problem is that Christianity, as it stands, brings a lot of baggage which, far as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to do with the central figure of the religion. I strongly feel that Jesus probably had very little to say about Heaven or God, embellished or altered accounts of his teachings in the New Testament aside — but to be properly Christian, in most denominations, one must adhere to a very specific and narrow definition of God, when, like Buddhism, I don’t really think that the principles of kindness and responsibility for one’s actions and basic human decency really need to be rooted in the concept of a symbolic being. Why does anyone have to have a condescending paternalistic figure to articulate what seems like a generally good idea? (Why, if I were a cynic, I’d feel that the only reason to add the concept of Yahweh into anything would be to validate the control of manipulative hierarchical organizations over society.)

But I think Easter is an important holiday. I think it is important to remember.

This message of peace and acceptance and love…it was so radical, at the time, that a man was killed for it. Simply for saying that everyone should be treated justly, that rich men are not any better than poor men, men better than women, anyone intrinsically better than anyone else. That we are not our parents, and that the sins of our parents should not reflect upon us. That we should love everyone as ourselves, even our enemies, and extend to them all basic human courtesy and recognize that it is not our place to judge. That we are always in control of our own actions, and that those actions should never hurt anyone else, even if that person has hurt us. I think it is, at its heart, a very powerful and empowering philosophy about personal responsibility and respect. And this message was so frightening to the people in power that they had to have him killed.

And yet, two thousand years later, nothing changes. Men are still killed for this very basic and, as I said, fundamentally unobjectionable message. All Martin Luther King, Jr. did was follow the basic tenants of his faith, simply adapting the messages of his prophet to modern-day America, and he died for it, too.

I think there’s something very wrong with the world that this is still the case, and I have the feeling that Christ, if he could or can see what has become of his words, would disapprove. More than disapprove, really, though I can’t think of a word that describes exactly how awful it is that his message has been twisted into one of hate, war, and oppression. Everything he spoke against, his followers have done in his name. Not all of his followers, obviously, but far, far too many.

So, Christian or not, I hope we all can recognize Easter for what it really is, and not for what it has become.

I think I’ve got most of the even remotely interesting posts back up and in the right places (yanno, every post that isn’t just me posting about how I haven’t posted anything interesting and the like), so permalinks should work again. Uh…I just lost all the comments on them since I didn’t have any backups. Sorry, since there was some interesting discussion on some of them.

I’ll post something actually interesting maybe later.

For now, I guess the only things I have to say I’ve been putting into chapter 12 of Beauty. Are you all up for a rough-draft novel excerpt that might be thought-provoking, in which non-gender-normative characters of various species discuss love and polyamory, not-so-subtle racial/cultural allegories, and the patriarchy?

Yeah, it’s a big chunk of just dialogue and setting/backstory, and it’s totally all over the place. I swear stuff actually happens in the book besides the characters all sounding pompous and intellectual, but I can’t post any of that out of context, really, without lots of explanation.

This is more so that I remember, although if you haven’t heard yet, I guess that’s useful, too.
April 18 - Blog to raise awareness about sexual violence!

April 22 - Blog Against Heteronormativity!

Anything else I should be blogging against this month that I don’t know about?

Okay, I’m re-posting as much of my old content as possible…but I’m starting with the pages that have been linked elsewhere, especially my Open Letter. So I figured I could back-date the posts and the permalinks should work again, so no one has to go update their links.

Okay, now that I’ve upgraded Gallery and finished setting up Textpattern (that only took all freaking day), I’ll be able to get around to re-posting the most popular posts so that people can fix their links to the site. Hold on for a day or two and all shall be well.

Whelp, I appear to have irreparably fucked-up my weblog. (Oh yeah…THIS is why we don’t mess with the server in the middle of the night, huh? Or, in my case, EVER, really, but the middle of the night is especially dangerous.)

Accidentally screwed up the database and I don’t have a recent backup. Sure, I can re-post the interesting stuff, but the comments will be lost and the links from other sites are going to be all messed up, no matter what I do. (EDIT: I’m working on this. If you have links to my content that you wish to maintain, never fear, for I shall have articles posted again in a permanant location hopefully within the next few days and will post links to everything here so that you can find it. I just have to finish figuring out Textpattern and writing my template so that I can repost all of my writing, then I’ll work on the blog. Priorities, you know. Stay tuned.)

Should I even bother putting stuff back up (Edit for clarification: on this blog specifically, since I’ll put at least some of it elsewhere)? Okay, the real question I suppose I’m asking: should I bother to keep blogging (here?)? I like talking about feminist issues and engaging in dialogue with other feminists online. It’s a good way to get an audience and to feel like I’m doing something productive in the world. But I don’t like feeling like I have to write really interesting engaging stuff all the time–and if I write stuff that’s not smart or insightful I feel like I shouldn’t be bothering, but I don’t want to have a two or three week gap in between blog posts just because I can’t always think of something to say. Get what I’m saying? The self-inflicted pressure doesn’t work well for me and having to just start over again just makes me despair about doing it.

I don’t want to stop writing about these things, so I’d probably just publish them in different places, in different mediums, so don’t freak out at the suggestion.
This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t post at least some of the stuff elsewhere, mind. I’d probably just put the posts I thought were interesting on my main site instead. Actually, that seems to work well with what I was trying to do when I screwed my site up: install a CMS to manage my writing on the main site so that it’d be less complicated and I’d have an RSS feed, etc, etc.

I’ve been too busy working on other stuff lately to really post anything interesting for a bit anyway. I’d rather work on my fiction and art and trying to get stuff published. (Maybe for money, even! *gasp*)

I guess I’ll sleep on it.

What do you people, those of you who care, think?

“Privilege” is a word much bandied-about in the online feminist and pro-feminist community. What it means varies depending on the context in which it’s used: white privilege, male privilege, class privilege, hetero privilege. Sometimes these various forms of privilege intersect, and sometimes people are privileged in some ways but oppressed in others.

What does it mean, in the most basic sense, to be a recipient of social privilege, in any or all of these areas? What, exactly, are these privileges that the privileged party receives?

First and foremost, I think, is the privilege to self-define and to define others. Oppressed people do not have the power to insist that they be labeled and perceived as they are by society at large; instead they are stereotyped. Individuality is a privilege that powerful groups can claim. Privilege is invisible to those who have it; therefore being privileged, that group is seen as the default: white, male, heterosexual, gender-normative, middle class. Anyone who varies from this mold is “Other”. They are marked as Different. Different people are defined by what they are not: the so-called “normal”, the “average”. Being defined by what they are not, rather than what they are, the Other is defined in narrow and confining terms.

This can be seen in representation in the media. A white man in a movie is just a man. He could be anybody. He is the Everyman. A black man in a movie can’t just be anybody, no, he’s the Black Man; he cannot be made the universal protagonist because he is something Different, with Different concerns and Different history and Different thoughts than what is the “average” white experience. (Nevermind that any actual differences in life experience between a white man and a black man are mostly due to the fact that a white man benefits from privilege — this is why it is invisible. It’s not that the black man is inherently different as a human being, it’s that the average white man is utterly oblivious as to how or why his life is easier; it’s not the black man’s fault if the white man can’t relate to him.)

A woman can’t be just anybody. She is defined in relation to her heterosexual interactions with men, real or hypothetical. Women are defined as the mothers of men’s children, or an objects with the purpose of men’s aesthetic, romantic, or sexual appreciation. She is somebody’s mother or somebody’s love interest, and if she is neither she is considered remarkable only in that she rejects these stereotypes. A man can be a father or a love interest, and he can be neither, but he is still a man. A female character who does not fit the traditional roles is usually referred to by her similarity to men — because if she does not fit the role of the Other, the things which men are not (or not supposed to be), then she must be aspiring to the Default. She must be trying to be like a man.

One queer character in a story makes the story “gay”. It is assumed that all characters are straight, and any representation at all is cause for outrage and alarm among some conservatives. Even acknowledging the existence of people who are not heterosexual threatens their viewpoint that homosexuality is an immoral aberration. Anyone who defies the heteronormative conception of gender has their gender taken from them: gay men are characterized as inherently effeminate and lesbians as inherently masculine, or even as non-women, non-men, asexual creatures without identity.

It must be said that, by defining the oppressed as what the privileged are not, the privileged are certainly hurt, too. These narrow categories of “normal” and “deviant” limit the self-expression of everyone — but, though it certainly hurts, this is another privilege in and of itself: the privileged person has a chance to fall from grace. Certainly, yes, being subject to cruelty for failing to live up to what one “should” be is terrible, but what is at the root of this?

At the root of it is the fact that the privileged party is now being treated like the Other, and ze is not reacting well to that indignity. A man enraged at being treated like a woman is still drawing from a misogynistic attitude — otherwise, what should be the problem? If women were not perceived to be weaker or less then men, why should it be so upsetting to bear the same burden they do? Being perceived to not be what one “should” is essentially a problem of Othered groups being stereotyped as exactly what the privileged are not.

This is why racism is everybody’s problem, why sexism is men’s problem too, why homophobia should also be a heterosexual concern. This leads to my next point:

Ignorance is a privilege. Being able to ignore the oppression of others is a privilege. It is a privilege to be unaware of or unconcerned with one’s own privileged status. It is a privilege not to experience the same things as other groups, and so, be able to discount others’ specific concerns. Simply because one does not personally experience or see the same things others do does not mean that those things do not exist.

It is a privilege to be able to believe that others’ subjective accounts of their own experience are not valid: women aren’t subject to sexism, instead, they’re “overreacting” or being “emotional”; queers are “flaunting their sexuality”; people of color are “playing the race card”; the poor are “lazy” and simply need to “work harder”; fat people “have no self-control”; everyone is “asking for it” by daring to defend their rights and dignity, or simply by virtue of being who they are.

This is why a white gay man can be racist, people of color can be homophobic, the feminist movement has historically been both of these things, and none of these groups tend to recognize the concerns of those who are not able-bodied. (And there I go, defining a group by what is it not. “Disabled” and “handicapped” seem like a ruder way of saying the same thing; does anybody who knows more about this than me know a better word?) A person privileged in some areas and disadvantaged in others is still capable of ignoring the existence or effects of hir own privilege, even when ze ought to know better. If oppression does not effect someone personally, most people tend to ignore it, believe it doesn’t exist, or think that the oppressed are lying about the extent of their oppression.

Marginalized people do not have the luxury of believing that their own experiences are not real, are imagined, are a simple misunderstanding or a fluke. It is a privilege to be free of these experiences and so able to dismiss them as legitimate or valid or logical.

Because ignorance of others’ oppression is a benefit of privilege, privilege is ignorant and in denial of its own existence.

This is, at the root, at the most basic level, what is means to have privilege: it is a sense of entitlement, a sense of superiority, and it is the sense that one’s own life experience is the most accurate measure of the state of the world. It is the idea that one’s own problems are the only and most pressing problems. It is the idea that one’s life and attitudes are the norm and all variations are simple errors that ought to be corrected. It is the idea that other people must be what you think they ought to be, tailored to your preferences and needs to be complimentary to you, what you need, what you want, what you are not, and that those who do not fulfill this purpose are doing you real harm by being themselves rather than your fantasy of them. It is massively egocentric and dismissive of others as only privilege allows.

In reality it becomes more complicated. The way that this is expressed in the real world is reinforced by racist, classist, sexist institutions which give very real benefits to the privileged at the expense of the oppressed. Because the white heterosexual middle-class man is “normal”, therefore “good”, everyone else has to work extra hard in order to be the same, or to conform to his expectations — however, becoming what one is not is impossible, and so women, people of color, etc., etc., will never be quite “good” enough. At most they are pretenders. They are still Other. At best they are seen as imitating the Default, at worst they are seen as dangerous and revolutionary and out of their place.

That is what I mean when I use this word.