By Guest Contributor Mike Miller, cross-posted from Classism Exposed

In 1971, when I was “lead organizer” for what became the All Peoples’ Coalition (APC), I learned a different approach to dealing with some racism I encountered among working-class whites.

APC was a federation of some thirty organizations (churches, block clubs, the neighborhood shopping strip’s merchant association, tenant associations, and other groups in Visitacion Valley, a small neighborhood of about 20,000 people in the Southeast corner of San Francisco.

“Vis Valley” included a number of sub-neighborhoods, including Little Hollywood, Geneva Towers, Geneva Terrace and Sunnydale Housing Project (where I grew up).

Its people ranged from low-to-moderate, and a few middle, income. It was ethnically and racially quite diverse. In San Francisco poverty and race politics, it was largely ignored. While racially “integrated,” there was also substantial racial tension in the neighborhood, particularly between the working class and lower middle-class “white ethnics” (Irish, Italian and Maltese) and the African-Americans.

In my “organizing plan” for building what became APC, I had Sunnydale groups I was hoping to recruit to membership, and the Visitacion Valley Improvement Association (VVIA) largely made up of white ethnic homeowners.

VVIA wanted to talk with the Sunset Scavenger Company, one of San Francisco’s two garbage companies. The company refused to meet.

A major obstacle to Visitation Valley Improvement Association (VVIA) joining the newly forming community organization was its President, Joe Brajkovich. It was from him that I learned what VVIA wanted from Sunset Scavenger Company: a dollar a year lease use of a small lot it owned so that it could be used as a “postage stamp” park in Little Hollywood, and a better way to cover its trucks so that debris wouldn’t fly from them as they passed through Little Hollywood on the way to the City Dump. In the days before “packers,” garbage was piled in an empty bin on the back of the garbage truck that went from house to house picking up its load. When the truck was filled, a big canvass was spread over the top of the load and tied down on the sides of the truck; things would fly out from underneath the canvass littering the truck’s route. Every truck that went anyplace in San Francisco passed through Little Hollywood on its way to the dump.

Joe Brajkovich, President of VVIA, was the 1972 George Wallace-for-President Campaign Coordinator for San Francisco. Wallace was the racist former Governor of Alabama who spewed a mix of populism and racism. His success with white working- and lower-middle-class voters sent a chill down the back of mainline Democratic Party activists; he was a warning of what became the “Reagan Democrats” phenomenon in 1980. Whenever I talked with Brakovich about becoming part of the organizing committee that created APC, he unleashed vitriol about Sunnydale Housing Project, Geneva Towers, blacks, welfare recipients, and how they were all subsidized by working people like himself and his neighbors who had made it in America by pulling up their own bootstraps. When we met, he would rant and rave about “them” getting everything.

I just listened. I listened to what pained and angered him, and what he hoped to accomplish for his members. He was pained by the fact that the neighborhood was going downhill (which, in fact, it was if you looked at things like housing deterioration, city services, and other “standard” indicators); that the Sunset Scavengers ignored his requests to meet; etc. He wanted to deliver for his people.

He was angry that he couldn’t get “city hall” (or the scavenger company) to meet with VVIA and deal with it on these issues. He was most angered by the fact that the neighborhood had a “broker,” a man named Henry Schindel who owned lots of property in Vis Valley, who set himself up between “downtown” and the neighborhood and dispatched favors here and there to keep himself in that “broker” position.

I kept bringing our conversations back to this point: Brajkovich wasn’t getting respect for VVIA and he didn’t have the power to do anything about it. I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know. But I did have an idea how he might get what he wanted: by joining with “those people” he didn’t want to join with. Whenever he gave me his litany about “them,” I asked him whether what he was doing now was working. I did that for about three months. Meanwhile, a number of groups in the neighborhood were in the process of becoming part of the organizing committee that was putting together the founding convention of what came to be All Peoples Coalition (APC). If he wanted his issues to be part of the convention’s resolutions, his people to be among the officers, and a voice in the adoption of a constitution and by-laws for the organization, then he would have to join.

Here’s the picture I painted: As a member organization of All People’s Coalition (APC), VVIA would be able to bring its issues to the federation. With support from Black and white residents who lived throughout Visitacion Valley, VVIA would be able to negotiate with Sunset Scavenger on both littering and the empty lot. Brajkovich finally recommended to the VVIA membership that it join APC. And he didn’t propose a constitutional amendment excluding Sunnydale and the Geneva Towers.

In fact, with APC support, an agreement was reached with the Sunset Scavengers on both littering and the postage stamp park. Ron Morton, President of APC, was part of the negotiating committee. He was an African-American locksmith whose shop was on Leland Street, Visitacion Valley’s neighborhood commercial strip. Other African-Americans who lived in the Federally subsidized Geneva Towers participated in some of the direct action events that pressured the Scavengers to finally meet; so did some people from Sunnydale.

In the brief period preceding the following story, APC had undertaken campaigns for improved neighborhood traffic controls, recreation facilities, job opportunities and public housing. In the Mayor’s revenue sharing hearings, APC demonstrated itself to be the “voice of the neighborhood.”

About a year later, the tenants in Geneva Towers, with APC organizing staff assistance, developed the Geneva Towers Tenants Association (GTTA) and joined APC. By that time probably 80% or more African-American in its make-up, the 500+ units high-rise Towers stood out in more ways than one in a neighborhood that was primarily single-family homes and duplexes. (Years later, the Department of Housing and Urban Development paid to literally blow the high-rise Towers up and replace them with townhouse subsidized units.) GTTA wanted the Towers management company to meet with it and negotiate a series of improvements and services in their two buildings. After showing up for a first meeting, the management refused to further discuss things with its tenants. Direct action by the tenant association followed .

Eddie Wafford, a retired Teamster Business Agent living in Visitacion Valley, showed up on a Saturday morning to ride a rented bus to the Towers owner’s home in nearby fancy Marin County. Eddie shared the anti-Black prejudices of his fellow Irishmen in the neighborhood. But he was a member of the Visitacion Valley Improvement Association (VVIA), attended APC’s founding convention and participated in some of the action that led to the agreement with Sunset Scavenger Company.

By that time I’d gotten to know him pretty well. Given what I knew about his feelings toward blacks, I was a bit surprised to see him, and said so when I first saw him that morning. On the way home from the picketing, he and I had this conversation:

Mike (M): I was a little surprised to see you here today, Eddie.
Eddie (E): Why’s that, Mike?
M: Well, you know, you told me a while back you didn’t have much use for Black people, particularly those living in the Towers.
E: Aw, that was before I got to know them and they showed up for me and Little Hollywood. This is the least I could do.
M: So how do you feel about the Towers people now?
E: There’s some real nice people here, Mike.
M: Whose interests do you think were served by the way you used to think about the Black people here?
E: What do you mean?
M: You think about it, and we’ll talk a little more later.

When we talked about it later, Eddie understood that “downtown,” the Sunset Scavengers and Henry Schindel, the old-style neighborhood political “broker,” were the people who benefited from his prejudices against his black neighbors.

I’d learned this approach to dealing with race from an old union organizer, who told a similar story about how he’d bring Appalachian whites into the United Mine Workers Union-which organized on an integrated basis.

The racist President of VVIA may have never changed his mind about “them” or “those people.” But some of “his people” did, Eddie Wafford included. Equally important, they concluded their interests were better met in relationship with people they hadn’t wanted to work or associate with in the past. I wouldn’t have gotten to talk with the VVIA people if I had “led with race”–telling Joe Brajkovich that he and his members were wrong about their racism, were “privileged whites” or whatever. The door would quickly have been shut or the phone hung up when I called.

My conclusions:

1. Draw the “boundary lines” (industrial union, multi-racial/ethnic turf or multi-racial/ethnic organization which chapters join) so that people come into relationships with “The Other.”
2. Look for circumstances of cognitive dissonance–when people’s experiences don’t fit the stereotypes they came to the experience with.
3. Use self-interest issues-either of the “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” or bigger ones of the none of us can handle it alone variety-to create opportunities for new relationships that cut across historic lines of division.
4. Place those self-interest issues in a larger framework of justice, fairness and democracy values.
5. Those circumstances, interests, values and relationships create teachable moments-opportunities when an organizer or educator really can get people to change their minds.

My observation is that, contrary to what most sociologists and “leading with race” organizers say, working class peoples’ prejudices can quickly disappear or at least be put on “the back burner” when the circumstances are right and the conversation provides a new way to frame reality.

White people in Seattle are more likely to own rather than rent. White people are more likely to have health insurance and a job. White people are more likely to live longer. White people are less likely to be homeless. White people are less likely to hit the poverty level. White people are less likely to be in jail. White kids are nine times less likely than African Americans to be suspended from elementary school (in high school, it’s four times higher; in middle school, it’s five times, according to the district’s data). Nonwhite high-school graduation rates in Seattle are significantly below white graduation rates—even if you’re Asian, regardless of income level.

And then there’s the white Seattle police officer beating “the Mexican piss” out of a guy. The white Seattle police officer punching a 17-year-old African American girl in the face. The Seattle Police Guild newspaper editorial that called race-and-social-justice training classes “the enemy,” “socialist,” and anti-American.

Not that racial experience is monolithic. It’s not black and white. But it’s real. And across all measurable strata, white people in Seattle have it better.

Yet nobody is racist.

The 2010 US Census data led to reports of Seattle being the fifth whitest city in the country—reinforcing the perception of this place as a white place. But if you look at the actual numbers, 66 percent of people in Seattle identify as white, which means that one in three people are not white. That’s not a white city. It only seems like a white city when you’re in, say, Ballard or Wallingford or Fremont. If you walk the street expecting every third person you see not to be white, well, then you’ll see how weird it is to be in Ballard or Wallingford or Fremont, where almost everyone is white. If you walk the street in Rainier Valley, the opposite is true.

“In Seattle, there’s really a small amount that you have to do to be labeled a hero of diversity,” says Eddie Moore Jr., the Bush School’s outgoing director of diversity, who describes Seattle as “a segregated pattern of existence.”

He adds, “It’s just that there’s really no real challenge to how the structure in Seattle continues to assist whiteness and white male dominance in particular. When you say ‘white supremacy’ or ‘white privilege’ in Seattle, people still think you’re talking about the Klan. There’s really no skills being developed to shift the conversation. How can we be acknowledged to be so progressive, yet be identified to be so white? I wish that’s the question more Seattleites were asking themselves.”
- From “Deeply Embarrassed White People Talk Awkwardly About Race,” by Jen Graves

ESPN has certainly hitched its’ promotional wagon to Michael Vick, but first things first: don’t blame Touré for the question, “What If Michael Vick Were White?” – or for that pic above of said hypothetical “White” Vick.

“I had no knowledge of or say in the title of the story and the horrific, misguided picture of Vick in whiteface, which dismayed and disgusted me when I saw it,” he explained in a column for CNN. “I think careful readers will note that the story and the image don’t really interact. They’re like two people who kinda know about each other but don’t really know each other. But this has happened to me before.”

He made a similar disclaimer on Twitter, according to Colorlines:

My essay on Vick is nowhere near as inflammatory as the pic of him in whiteface which contradicts me saying you can’t imagine him as white.

I wrote an essay about Vick & race. ESPN the mag titled it & added art without me (normal procedure). Judge me on the story not the art.

In his CNN piece, Touré also mentioned that he wanted to talk about football more in his Vick column, but that ESPN “was less interested in that.” Reading his essay on the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback again, I think his editors let him down in the process.

Touré’s column starts by describing the “deeply African-American approach” of Vick’s game:

Vick’s style reminds me of Allen Iverson — the speed, the court sense, the sharp cuts, the dekes, the swag. In those breathtaking moments when the Eagles QB abandons the pocket and takes off, it feels as if he’s thumbing his nose at the whole regimented, militaristic ethos of the game.

Denied the chance to place Vick’s game into a historical context, this graf makes Vick seem like the NFL’s answer to Julius Erving, when really he’s not even the first mobile black quarterback on his own team. Surely Touré didn’t forget about Donovan McNabb or Randall Cunningham?

Instead, it’s David Fleming who gets to make that connection in an otherwise hagiographic profile of Vick’s comeback, mentioning that he has become “the next link in a quarterback chain that runs from Fran Tarkenton to John Elway to Steve Young to Randall Cunningham.”

Crucially, three of the four quarterbacks in that chain are white. And all but Cunningham are in the NFL Hall of Fame. What would probably be different, if Vick were white, would be that the gaggle of football pundits ESPN employs to opine on the National Football League – always referred to by its’ first, middle and last name, like it was an unruly child or a serial killer – would frame his exploits differently: instead of showing “preternatural poise,” as Fleming puts it, White Vick’s mobility would show “how hard he works in the off-season;” his on-field celebrations would show us he’s “just having fun out there.” And so on.

So what Vick is doing on the field isn’t new; he’s just doing it at a higher level than anybody else right now – in large part because he’s a team that encourages him to do so, a fact Vick himself acknowledges (even if, as he told GQ, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell nudged him in Philadelphia’s direction.) So it’s unfortunate that Touré didn’t get the chance to discuss Vick’s professional good fortune in his column.

It’s also unfortunate his editors stuck that column with not only the re-colorized Vick pic, but a headline asking a question Touré himself shoots down:

This question makes me cringe. It is so facile, naive, shortsighted and flawed that it is meaningless. Whiteness comes with great advantages, but it’s not a get-out-of-every-crime-free card. Killing dogs is a heinous crime that disgusts and frightens many Americans. I’m certain white privilege would not be enough to rescue a white NFL star caught killing dogs.

The problem with the “switch the subject’s race to determine if it’s racism” test runs much deeper than that. It fails to take into account that switching someone’s race changes his entire existence. In making Vick white, you have him born to different parents. That alone sets his life trajectory in an entirely different direction.

But would it, really? I’m not so sure, and neither is Caperton at Feministe:

Switching someone’s race does not change his “entire existence” – it changes his race. And that’s not for nothing. Take a guy in Michael Vick’s childhood neighborhood and turn him white, and he’s going to have different experiences than his black neighbors. Pick any white kid at an almost entirely white high school and turn him black, and his experiences will be different from those of his classmates and of kids at majority-black schools. But that’s not everything. It’s not the entirety of existence. Flipping a man’s race switch from black to white doesn’t also put him in a four-bedroom home in Peoria with a CPA for a father, a librarian for a mother, a brother, a sister, and a pomapoo, and it doesn’t stop an indescribably busted person from torturing dogs in his swimming pool for fun and profit.

Touré claims to have speculated, “What if Michael Vick were white?” He really speculated, “What if Michael Vick grew up in a two-parent home in a better neighborhood with better friends and no dogfighters around?” and then assigned that as his working definition of “white.” In his mind, White Michael Vick never would have had a dogfighting ring in the first place, because in his whiteness he would have grown up free of the poverty, negligence, and violence that defines Being Black.

Touré, in fact, asks a question similar to Caperton’s later in his ESPN piece: “If Vick grew up with the paternal support that white kids are more likely to have (72 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers compared with 29 percent of white children), would he have been involved in dogfighting?”

Though that “72 percent born to unwed mothers” stat is questionable, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote two years ago, it’s not guaranteed that a two-parent household would have dissuaded White Vick from doing something criminally wrong away from the field, as Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger has (allegedly) shown us. If Vick’s dog-fighting operation had been located in the right county, he might have run into an (allegedly) more-forgiving police force. But how much of that is race and how much of that is geography?

In the end of his ESPN column, Touré asks us to look at Vick as “someone in the third act of the epic movie that is his life,” calling his return “heroic.” Personally, I can’t go that far – not just because of what he’s done, but because of moments like this one, captured by GQ’s Will Leitch, who talked to Vick after the quarterback is asked at a speaking engagement, “Are you mad about what happened to you?”:

I ask him if he buys this argument, if he believes he was treated unfairly. Most people convicted of dogfighting don’t spend a year and a half in prison. They aren’t forced to declare bankruptcy. I ask him if he was sent to prison for too long.

“One day in prison is too long,” he says.

Yes, but I mean for this particular crime.

He sighs. I’m not the first person who’s tried to lead him down this road. “For a while, it was all ‘Scold Mike Vick, scold Mike Vick, just talk bad about him, like he’s not a person,’ ” he says. “It’s almost as if everyone wanted to hate me. But what have I done to anybody? It was something that happened, and it was people trying to make some money.”

See, no matter what ESPN wants to tell us, there is a middle ground when it comes to Vick. Nobody can deny his ability, his intelligence, or his dedication to getting his career and his life back. But white, brown or black, remorse is remorse. And not even a Super Bowl trophy can make its’ apparent absence in that explanation any shinier.

“Slave Earrings” are in Vogue. Literally. According to the Italian fashion outlet, “Jewellery has always flirted with circular shapes, especially for use in making earrings. The most classic models are the slave and creole styles in gold hoops.”

Emphasis mine, ridiculousness… all theirs.

Two weeks ago, Vogue Italia found itself under a deluge of criticism for declaring “Slave Earrings” in fashion. Originally, they thought to qualify the name they gave them. “If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern United States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom. Colored stones, symbolic pendants and multiple spheres. And the evolution goes on.” Does it go on to declare “necklaces with detachable chains,” “hillbilly slingbacks,” and “Holocaust tattoos” in fashion? None of that is me, by the way, this is taken from the 21 pages of comments, nearly all chiding the wording choice in English and in Italian.

Allow me to fill you in on the latest: Vogue Italia gave an apology earlier last week that was more like an “Oops!” than anything. The style bible’s editor, Franca Sozzani released a statement Monday that said, “We apologise for the inconvenience. It is a matter of really bad translation from Italian into English.” Again, emphasis mine, but let’s be honest, the emphasis should have been theirs. They continued, “The Italian word, which defines those kind of earrings, should instead be translated into ‘ethnical style earrings.’ Again, we are sorry about this mistake which we have just amended in the website.”

From the myriad of complaints, tweets, and articles that has inspired this fashion nightmare, it was pointed out the word “ethnic” translates to “etnico” and slave is “schiavo” in Italian. Completely dissimilar words.  So obviously, Sozzani’s statement needs to be taken with a… grain of salt. My thought is, in the surprise this wording… mistake… caused, they had to say something. Like equate ethnicity to slavery. Oops! I think Iman said it best to Style Bistro: “Slave does not make it ethnic. Mind you, it’s not lost in translation–the word slave, we know what it is. They might as well have called them n***** earrings.” Snap. We should know by now that it’s best not to anger Iman. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson would be none too pleased, either.

Really, these earrings do originate from the time of slavery, however… let me throw out an example. Right now, I’m wearing a Calvin Klein buckled leather bracelet. I am not wearing a Calvin Klein shackle cuff. See the difference, Franca? I know this all may be confusing, but maybe the word should have been edited out before released to the public, as editors are wont to do. And what if, (and this is completely hypothetical of course) the model on the site was black?

Now do you see why that term shouldn’t have ever, ever, ever have been used? I felt wrong even cutting and pasting another face into this. Imagine how we feel knowing that you wrote, edited, approved, coded, and posted the article without even so much as a “Uh… guys?”

As of last Wednesday evening, the post holds a message saying, nay, shouting:

“WE’VE DECIDED TO REMOVE THE ARTICLE FROM THE SITE TO PROVE OUR GOOD FAITH AND TO SHOW IT WASN’T OUR INTENTION TO INSULT ANYONE”

Now, there’s a real apology. I think.

I so want to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, this isn’t their first language. Ignore the fact that it appeared in Italian as well. But, this is the same team that came up with mainstream fashion’s first all black issue. And they also started Vogue Black, even though I side-eye the name a little bit. I was talking to Sexual Correspondent Andrea Plaid about this, and she bought up something rather interesting:

“Vogue Italia is doing the post-racial mulitple-oppression sell: under the guise of thinking they’re being all ‘We did the Black Issue, so we’re cool in doing this’ using the myriad of oppressions of women of color to sell some damn gold-tone hoop earrings named after…WoCs’ oppression! And that oppression, in many cases, melded sexual oppression (Antebellum US, the Japanese and Korean “comfort women,” etc.) This, coming from the magazine whose brand is all about the sexy framed as stylishness.”

Though they may not deserve it, as a gesture of good faith, I took a peek around Vogue Italia’s trends section. Maybe this was just a one-off terrible mistake. And I found another post about… Jungle Bracelets. My first inclination was to shout “Why!?!” But, false alarm, as I read, there was nothing really- “…manchettes in python for a night marked by tribal rhythms,” huh? “Turn your evenings into “jungle nights” characterized by tribal music, wild dancing and a bit of aesthetic rebellion,” you say?

Less malevolent, sure. But I’m uncomfortable anyway, and while relatively tame, is this something to be angry about? Maybe. But, to be honest, should I be bracing myself for racism on their website now? Slave Ethnic Earrings should be completely gone from the site as that “gesture of good faith.” As of Wednesday afternoon, the Ethnic Earrings post is still up, complete with the slide show.

It shouldn’t be, so let’s all just face the fuc— I mean facts. Face the facts. I’m sorry, it was a really bad translation. But I caught myself.

Image credit: Vogue Italia and Joseph Lamour

Welcome back to the final White panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

Megan Carpentier, friend of the blog, formerly of Jezebel, now executive Editor of The Raw Story; Sam Menefee-Libey, friend of the blog, one time contributor, and blogger at Campus Progress; Jill Filipovic, friend of the blog, and Editor of Feministe; Porter, technologist and friend of Latoya; Lauren, founder of Feministe and long time friend of the blog; Allison, long time friend of the blog; and DC, Allison’s brother.

Have you ever been considered a race traitor for flirting with/dating/marrying someone outside of your race? Or, have you observed that behavior from others?

Megan: Back in 2007, I went out on a couple of dates with an African-American man that I met at a bar that was (at that point) on the front of a wave of DC gentrification — on our second date, we went to a decidedly interracial party in a then-gentrifying part of town: we left to “take a walk” (i.e., make out absurdly against various trees in between hand-holding and talking) and we got hollered at by two women on a porch who strongly felt that I shouldn’t be jacking “their” men — let’s just say they used some words that I won’t repeat and hadn’t ever had directed at me before, and which definitely killed my mood. Then they called him, effectively, a race traitor. It felt shitty all around, though I think he was madder at them for what they said to me than vice versa.

As Sam and I both hinted at above, in many white communities, expressing that thought is simply unacceptable and thinking it is even beyond the pale, really. So my sole experiences with it have been as the partner of the person to whom it’s been directed (the guy I just mentioned, my HS ex I mentioned earlier, a college boyfriend who was Latino whose mother was quite upset about my race). So while I understand the roots of the sentiment more as an adult than I did as a teenager, it still seems like a crap thing to say to anyone, regardless of their race.

Sam: I think most of us on this post are urban-dwelling twenty-something professionals, unlikely to encounter that kind of sentiment. It’s probably a question worth asking, it may just require a different sample set.

Jill: I’ve never been called a race traitor for dating someone non-white — at least not to my face. The closest I’ve seen is women expressing frustration with men from their same racial/religious/cultural groups routinely dating women who are outside of their racial/religious/cultural group — with the idea that those men are rejecting women who share their racial/religious/cultural characteristics (and to be clear, I don’t think that’s anywhere in the ballpark of calling someone a “race traitor”). Interestingly, most of the examples I can think of where there was some discomfort or critique of interracial dating have come from women — I don’t know if that’s because I just tend to socialize more heavily and more intimately with women, or because dating is still cast as a game where men hold most of the power and get to pick what “kind” of woman they want, or a little of both. But it seems notable.

Porter: To my knowledge, I haven’t been considered a race traitor. Perhaps it’s occurred but went unexpressed. Not having to worry much about that does feel like a fortunate case, at least somewhat. Not sure if that is white privilege. Probably, in part. Also, I think moving so much has made me a bit more immune to what most groups think of my demographic traits (even if I worry about being boring or uncool), except my parents, which may have taken me longer than many to be more detached from.

The Korean gal I dated in high school definitely got some race traitor pressure, for which I felt a bit guilty, and also, rather angry. Notably, the tight group of Korean kids (mostly male) didn’t coordinate behavior towards me. They weren’t exceptionally cold to me, nor particularly embracing. She heard it, not me.

I think I’ve witnessed more criticism of interfaith dating than interracial dating from my friends and social networks at an earlier age, which is a bit more surreptitious. While one’s faith, especially at a younger age, is inherited from parents like race is, a faith has the appearance of being more of a choice, and thus, easier to criticize some for and be scandalized by. Or, another take: since I was in largely white communities, they had to find SOMETHING to discriminate by!

Daniel:  I’m not entirely sure who I would be a traitor to! Again, perhaps the answer may be because I grew up in a bubble where interracial relationships were part of “the norm” and that labeling didn’t happen so often. Who exactly would I be betraying though? I certainly don’t feel like I have an obligation to the “white” race in any way, and certainly not in my desire to have the partner of my choice. Perhaps this might be different in a more tight-knit community. For example, if I grew up with the framework of “everything about you is white” and it was an integral part of my existence, perhaps I would feel some guilt for introducing someone “other than white” into my life. Such an idea is quite terrifying to me, for I can’t honestly say that I know someone who is completely devoid of influences from other racial communities.

Allison: My community of friends and extended relatives doesn’t adhere to all of the dominant social norms. I’m white with friends and relatives of color,. In this circle, some of us are straight and some queer, some able-bodied and some disable. Some are working-class, some are more comfortable, and some are struggling to make ends meet. We’re all in this together. Through friendship and kinship with this community of complex, well-rounded individuals, I’ve experienced a profound awareness: when it comes to challenging a lifetime of internalized identity politics, the only person I have to worry about betraying is myself.

Anything else you’ve noticed that we didn’t cover above?

Megan: One thing I’ve noticed which has come up in a lot of the other panels is any discussion of class or its intersection with our dating choices? Which, not to generalize, may be because I wasn’t exactly born into class privilege, so it stands out to me a bit more, and it’s something I have struggled with in terms of dating as an adult. But Lauren and Jill both noted implicitly in their answers to the first question (and I alluded to as well at some point), racist stereotypes and assumptions about interracial dating often have a class component to them within white communities, even as — as the Esquire article and the writers on the Black Panel noted — dating outside your race in seen as a class privilege for particularly African-Americans. Which, to a certain degree, belies my experience when I am visiting my hometown and the surrounding areas: many of the interracial couples there aren’t college-educated and don’t come from money, but rather come from similar class-disprivileged backgrounds to one another. And not that those couples don’t encounter familial resistance or raised eyebrows on one side or the other or both, but it does make it somewhat easier for me to resist the characterization that interracial dating is exclusively a function of class privilege or “dating up,” though certain racial pairings remain less common.

In terms of class, all of the interracial relationships I’ve had (and many of my intraracial relationships) have been with people who come from class backgrounds similar to mine: first or maybe second generation to attend college, limited funds growing up, public schools, saddled with school debts to try to claw our way up the economic ladder (or who got to where they’re at by a less conventional means, be it military service or forsaking higher ed because the money wasn’t there). I’m more comfortable with someone else who expects to have to hustle and struggle to get ahead than someone who expects to just do well, which I often view as a function of growing up comfortably middle class or above and never struggling for money. It just some times feels like there’s a secret coded language among well-off people some times, to which because of my childhood economic status (and, to some degree, cultural traditions) I don’t have access, and which (when dating) leads to the same series of arguments, misunderstandings and lack of communication.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that it hadn’t come up, especially reading the contributors to the other panels’ takes on the intersection of class privilege and race. I had never thought about it that way… but then when I thought about it in my life, I actually sort of had the opposite experience? Which perhaps speaks to my own class background and how I was raised more than anything else.

Allison: Both of the partners I referenced in this discussion were the teenage children of single mothers. We were all conscious of the fact that money was not in abundance, but we shared what we had when we had a little cash to go around. In both relationships, going out to eat meant I usually paid for the both of us because I’ve worked steadily since I was 16 and made sure to save what I could. It’s not too much different now that we’re all adults. The last time M and I had dinner, I paid. He works in television, but it’s more for experience than a high paycheck while he works his way up the ladder. He’s always appreciative of my generosity. In return, he’d always be the first to offer me a ride somewhere (I hate driving) or else surprise me with a visit from 4 hours away. We may not always have the same amount of money in the bank, but it’s never been a question for me that we’re equals.

Sam: I have a few lingering thoughts. One is that we didn’t actually talk with/to each other, which is disappointing. There are certainly things said I’d like to engage with, both to challenge, and to praise. We also didn’t really address the Essence article, which is totally fucked up (the article that is, not necessarily our not addressing it). The main thing that’s sticking out for me right now, though, is the dearth of systemic or political analysis here. It pops up here and there with a few sociological concepts, but it’s mostly implicit or lacking from our series of personal stories. Personal story telling is an incredibly important tool for political work, one that I both use and teach often in my work, but I feel like our stories, no matter how rich they are, aren’t really serving any particular, explicit, coherent agenda/point/argument/claim (or even several conflicting ones). The “So What?” seems to be somewhat elusive here.
I have some real anxiety about trying to supply any of this single-handedly, and I should note that, for now, I’m focusing my comments on this particular roundtable. I’m glad that white people, both het and queer, think about race when they date People of Color. I also think it’s a pretty low bar to clear. (I’m trying really hard not to snipe at any other contributors to this post. I’m writing this the night before the roundtable closes, likely after everyone has done their final read through and please note that this is in no way fair.) The questions that concern me when thinking about interracial dating are, in this arena what constitutes racial/social justice? These are really sticky questions in which its helpful to examine how we dealt with racialized dating dilemmas, but I think we need more here. I know that I hesitated to take up much space (until now that is) with long stories and as a result my experience is described in mostly broad and abstract terms that aren’t discernibly Queer or illustrative of any of the subtleties of the situations. I’m assuming that my fellow contributors also left their descriptions brief and somewhat truncated.
My point here is that there are some particular threads between our stories that we can tease out that are directly related to the Essence article. One is that race overlaps with and affects socio-economic class. There are many others, which, again, I’m hesitant to begin examining here because of the absence of other answers. For now, I’ll leave this to commenters to elaborate on.

Welcome back to the White panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

Megan Carpentier, friend of the blog, formerly of Jezebel, now executive Editor of The Raw Story; Sam Menefee-Libey, friend of the blog, one time contributor, and blogger at Campus Progress; Jill Filipovic, friend of the blog, and Editor of Feministe; Porter, technologist and friend of Latoya; Lauren, founder of Feministe and long time friend of the blog; Allison, long time friend of the blog; and DC, Allison’s brother.

Megan: My first college boyfriend had immigrated with his family from Taiwan when he was 4: in Boston in the mid-90s, I definitely caught and was weirded out when we would get one of Those Looks on the subway (white women dating Asian guys being a less common interracial kind of relationship, he explained, though Boston’s not exactly known for being a bastion of racial tolerance, so it might not have been that specific, either). His family adored me — not so much for me, though I think I tried hard to be nice, but because dating a white blonde girl represented a level of American assimilation achievement that they wanted for their son, and they expressed it that way at some point to him (and he, foolishly, repeated it to me).

But I’ve spent the entirely of my adult life living and working in urban areas, where interracial dating is relatively common, my friends are pretty liberal and most people who know anything about me know better than to say shit to or in front of me that I’m not going to like. I wracked my brain trying to think of anything particularly stereotypical that’s been said about one of my partners, but the best I could come up with was a roommate who said about my Latino then-boyfriend, “It looks like you two have been fucking your brains out for months” because of our pretty clear physical chemistry whenever we were hanging out. I guess that would play into a stereotype about Latin men — especially as we hadn’t actually slept together at that point — but we were pretty absurd around each other (and me as much as him), so it’s harder to call it out as an example.

I should qualify: I’m pretty weird about introducing the men I date to my friends, and have a tendency not to do so until after at least the 3-month mark (a bar not achieved that often). So there are, like, 3 guys in the last 10 years who have dated me long enough to have actually spent any time with my friends or close acquaintances (outside of my roommates/the friends who introduced us), let alone my family. So I also just don’t have a lot of recent data in this regard, outside of strangers giving me the side-eye for making out with/holding hands with someone who doesn’t present as white. I’m sure I have relatives who would break out some stereotype crap, and even some people in my extended social circle who might stupidly do the same, but I just don’t have the data.

Sam: When I was dating Women of Color, pre-critical consciousness, I was in spaces where interracial dating was “normal” and I wasn’t particularly attuned to how race was functioning while I was with my partners. After I stopped being a completely oblivious jackass, the places where my sexuality was public were mostly spaces of resistance, and I rarely spent time with partners in open public spaces. As such, I rarely encountered the sort of stereotyping problems that I’ve heard friends and comrades discuss, and which I’m sure others in these roundtables will discuss with razor-sharp insight.

Paradoxically, I encounter more awkward situations with my current primary partner than I have in the past. I’m now working at a very mainstream non-profit and dating a white bio-woman (two things which bring me no end of self-doubt, guilt, and authenticity crisis, even though my partner and I love each other a lot and discuss these things often). It’s the most public, long-term relationship I’ve been in and we’re in mainstream spaces more. She’s part Portuguese and sometimes is read as a Woman of Color and both of us are frequently read (correctly!) as queer. This leads to all sorts of funny situations that baffle people around us (including parents) but since we’re insulated by class and race privilege and both work and live in social justice/activist communities, it is rarely damaging to us.

Jill: I’ve been in New York for nearly the entirety of my dating life, in a community where interracial relationships are commonplace, so any reaction at all has been minimal. Since my first Big Relationship, I’ve dating men of color and white men with varying degrees of seriousness, and the reactions are pretty much the same — although with the men of color there are sometimes comments (always from white people) about how we’ll have cute babies that will look like Benetton ads. That’s about as racially explicit as it gets.

And of course sometimes boyfriends and I have actually left New York, and reactions vary — during a layover at George Bush International Airport in Texas, we got a lot of raised eyebrows and outright stares, and it was very uncomfortable. We also studied abroad together in Italy, and public displays of affection were met with some visible confusion. Which isn’t to say that there are never raised eyebrows in New York, but negative reactions (or any reactions at all, really) are much less common, and not much different than those I’ve gotten being out with white men.

Porter: Friends have made jokes about dating someone exotic, but I was sure each time that the joke was mocking the idea that interracial dating would be a concern, not actually mocking interracial dating.

I think my family goes slightly out of their way to communicate their supposed comfort with it, which seems like a pretty well-meaning approach for someone who does actually have some concern. Haven’t dated someone of a different race for a long enough time to know if that reaction would change as things like marriage and kids might come up.

Megan: Actually, having wracked my brain, I did come up with one incident in my peer group of racism that just completely flummoxed me. I’ll redact some details for her privacy, but let’s call her a friend from my post-secondary education days with whom I retained contact into my early professional life (and, for context, she was a mixed race child of a Catholic Asian mother and white father from an urban area). I was having a small party over a holiday weekend and invited a (married, African-American) friend and co-worker to join us, a crew of mostly people from college and grad school. When she arrived, I was standing just out of sight talking to my co-worker, and, when she rounded the corner, she stopped short, kind of flinched and was like, “You didn’t tell me you’d invited someone like this.” I’m not sure if she didn’t notice his ring or thought we were dating — my ex and I had broken up a couple months earlier and I wasn’t seeing anyone specific — or what, but I can only imagine her reaction if I’d then introduced him as my boyfriend. As it was, we just stared at her like she was a crazy person and I stammered an introduction, and I think I spent weeks apologizing to him at every opportunity for having subjected him to racism in my own apartment. She and I haven’t really spoken since. Reading what others have said (in this panel and the others), it pretty clearly falls into that hierarchy-of-race thing that others have touched on and experienced, but having been presented racism at a young age as a strict binary (something Bad White People feel or do to other races), it was just very unexpected, even in my early twenties.

DC: I think that Jill and I had a similar experience with environments and the role of the interracial relationship. Growing up in Washington, D.C., interracial relationships were commonplace. I think that I’ve received more looks for being with my partner of the same sex than I ever had when holding hands or having other public displays of affection with a straight woman of a different race. However, I have heard similar stories of friends going out of town to visit friends or take a vacation, and their comfort-zone of expressing themselves in their relationship suddenly gets thrown out the window when dropped into a new environment.

Allison: My friends were accepting. But I noticed that my mother showed a more defensive and protective side. I still remember when my younger brother was snowed in with his white girlfriend across town during the same week that she called me at M’s house — and she never called to check in without concern — to insist that I come home before midnight. My Dad got a picture of M* and I at my senior prom. It isn’t displayed anywhere in the house. Stuff like that. It gives me… pause.

Porter: I have dated interracially. But living in New York, I experienced something new that prevented some: I have been told by a handful of Jewish girls that we were getting along too well and it had to stop, because they couldn’t seriously date a goy.

Sam: Yes, this is definitely akin to anxiety I experience. And I don’t think this type of reasoning is very helpful. Now, just because I think it’s unreasonable doesn’t mean I don’t still give myself grief for it, but I try not to give it too much thought, with a few caveats. White people have a lot of personal work to do around racism. It fucks us up in all kinds of ways that are really hard to deal with. The last thing we ought to be doing is externalizing our fucked-up-edness on the People of Color we’re close to. If we have stuff we need to deal with, if we haven’t done a fearless and searching personal inventory of our whiteness and our own personal racial formation, then it’s probably not a good idea to be dating a Person of Color. If we’re doing the best we can with that stuff and deal with it pretty well most of the time: ok. It’s something we should always be open to continued work on and ought to be in open and honest dialogue about with the people closest to us, both white and People of Color, but dealing with it opens up opportunities for more ethical relationships. The personal and communal practices we engage in that resist, destabalize and construct alternatives to those structural and cultural things the commenter mentioned are probably varied and localized and are definitely an important part of coming to personal terms with one’s own whiteness. If a white person is engaged in good personal and political, individual and communal work fighting racism and dealing with their own whiteness, I think they effectively address a lot of critiques about interracial dating for themselves.

Megan: The alternative — segregated dating? — seems so absurdly fucked up to me that I can’t hold that thought in my head for very long. I think it’s important to resist the white beauty standard, and I make an effort not to date individuals of any race who racially essentialize dating (men of color who only date white girls, white dudes who can’t imagine being attracted to X race). But I have trouble approaching dating as a zero-sum game or as a competition, and I just can’t get with the idea that we should all stick to our own race for the good of the women of another. Like, if everyone supposedly means well but the end result looks discriminatory, it can’t be a good thing.

From a more structural perspective, the white beauty standard isn’t going to be solved by individual white women eschewing interracial dating. It’s a structural problem rooted in white and class privilege and limiting people to dating within their race isn’t going to solve the structural problems (nor eliminate white people and people of color from being attracted to one another — not everything about attraction is about looks, for one). It might actually exacerbate the problems inherent in the standard and the community tensions.

Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t be cognizant of your race privilege as a white person, or that there’s no area of constructive criticism or engagement on these issues (see also: don’t date men that profess themselves exclusively attracted to one race!). But it does seem like the solution proposed by the commenter (and others) — date only white men — is both unhelpful in addressing the structural problems with the beauty standard/intracommunity discord/limited acceptability of certain combinations and in being a throwback to a day in which interracial dating was frowned upon.

Work to change the system, to expose its underpinnings; advocate for more diversity in media images and image makers; check your own privilege and grip it less tightly. See beauty outside of the pages of Vogue, and share it with others. Love other people who do the same.

Jill: That’s actually something I’ve thought about a lot. The “only date white people” suggestion isn’t a particularly good solution, but I do think it’s crucial to interrogate who we’re attracted to and why. I’ve known too many white dudes who only date Asian girls (or girls of whatever race, but there’s a particular breed of white man Asian fetishizer that I seem to encounter a lot) because “I just like them better,” and, well, I don’t think it’s that simple either (not to say that all white dudes who date Asian women are fetishizers, obviously, or even that I’m usually in a position to judge who’s fetishizing or who’s not — I’m talking about a specific kind of white dude who will talk about how he only dates Asian women because he loves that they’re so small and sweet and “act like ladies” etc etc). Obviously relationships are highly individual and we’re attracted to who we’re attracted to, but there are also themes to how these things actually play out — as Megan said above, it seems less common to see white women with Asian men, for example, than white men with Asian women. And there are different class assumptions that get projected onto black/white couples vs. Asian/white vs. Latin@/white, etc etc. I think checking that is important, and recognizing that dating both outside and inside of one’s racial group can bring up more than “just” racism (or racism that’s also informed by classism, assumptions about religion, etc).

That doesn’t mean “don’t interracially date.” It does mean at least devote a little brainpower to this topic, and realize that no matter how much of a Good Anti-Racist White Person you are, you’re still part of this system, and that means that you’ve not only gotta do some extra work, but also that there’s no easy perfect way to be a Good White Person Interracial Dater. Anxiety and guilt over The System is not going to be particularly helpful to your relationship. And romantic relationships are so particularly intimate and unique that zeroing in on race because you need to be The Anti-Racist White Person can throw up blocks to intimacy — your partner Jack should be “my partner Jack” whose racial background informs his life, not “my black partner Jack,” if that makes sense. That isn’t to say “be colorblind,” because just no; it is to say that there’s a fine balance between recognizing the complexities and difficulties of interracial relationships, and going so hard into Good Anti-Racist White Person mode that you make the race issue about you, and you let your partner’s racial identity eclipse your partner as a whole and complicated person with a history and a set of characteristics that are interwoven with race but far from solely defined by race.

Porter: I think that’s a pretty sweet sentiment to express. “I have this inclination, but is it causing others harm?” I don’t have a whole lot to add to the above… examine the inclination, which usually includes indulging it. Worry less, do more. I think it’s when Big Systemic Concepts get in the way of Enjoying (or at least, Trying Out) Life that humans experience a subtle, needless suffering.

If someone gives her grief, she can go Socratic on them and see if they can explain why she, personally, is exemplifying their preconception.

DC: Honestly, it’s never crossed my mind. I’ve certainly never felt like I should be guilty for who I am and am not attracted to. Philosophers and scientists together have studied the ways that love that drive someone crazy in the exact same way that it can bring a nation together. Azar Nafisi put it really well when she said, “Cultures should meet with the best that they have to offer.” I think that by hiding the way that we love to bend to societal expectations or to avoid the potential consequences is ultimately more damaging than trying to make people hear you. Make them hear you, or live in the silence.

Allison: I’m with Porter — interrogate your privilege, yes, but don’t let it stop you from living life to the fullest and enjoying a meaningful relationship between two equals of different backgrounds. When it comes to race, I understand that the dominant culture reveres my whiteness and endows this attribute with purity, inherent beauty, and an elevated social status. I also have to be mindful of reducing partners of color to stereotypes; I recently had a heated exchange via Twitter with a white rapper who claimed to be sick of “feisty Latinas” throwing their dinners at him (actual quote: “I love yall but dios mio you have the shittiest disposition’s ever”). He was irritated that I even suggested it was problematic.

Welcome to the White panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

Megan Carpentier, friend of the blog, formerly of Jezebel, now executive Editor of The Raw Story; Sam Menefee-Libey, friend of the blog, one time contributor, and blogger at Campus Progress; Jill Filipovic, friend of the blog, and Editor of Feministe; Porter, technologist and friend of Latoya; Lauren, founder of Feministe and long time friend of the blog; Allison, long time friend of the blog; and DC, Allison’s brother.

Megan: My parents were liberals, so they went to a great deal of effort to teach my sister and I about equality and to drill into us that racism/homophobia was really, really bad. Of course, growing up in a small, almost exclusively white semi-rural town, there wasn’t a lot of putting-that-into-action that could go on, but that’s what we were taught. When I started dating the one black guy in my graduating class (and stayed besties with my friend once she came out), I definitely sensed that the values behind the rhetoric were being tested in ways they didn’t necessarily plan for. (It didn’t help that he was far from the best guy to me and that my relationship with my parents was already strained almost to the breaking point at that time, so it’s hard to separate those things from what I felt was their hesitation about his race in any specific way, but that was 17-year-old me’s impression.)

Of course, that was also the first time I ran up against “Mom doesn’t like me dating white girls,” too, which came as a kind of shock. It had never occurred to me that anyone but white people could be inappropriate about race or even racist (see also: 17, from a small, semi-rural mostly-white town), so to have someone’s mother basically refer to me as “that white slut” her son needed to stop dating, I wasn’t sure what to even do about that. I mean, other than sneak around behind her back and prove her right.

I should say: my parents were also very conservative about what media my sister and I were allowed to consume: we didn’t have cable; I wasn’t allowed to see R rated movies before I was 17 (in theatres or on video, insofar as they could prevent it) or PG-13 movies before I was 13; I didn’t hear pop music at all until I was 7 or 8. Magazines were limited to, like, Highlights and Ranger Rick. Books were about the sole thing I was allowed to consume without question (until my dad caught me reading Heinlein for the graphic depictions of sex with no understanding of the underlying misogyny, so they imposed limits eventually). So questions about cultural messaging are weird for me, because so much of media was occurring outside of my limited vision, and what I was taught about right/wrong came down from my parents, from books and from age-appropriate television. All of which, in the 80s, boiled down to “racism is bad, and if you think people of x race are that different from you, you’re racist.” It never really occurred to me that interracial relationships were or should be problematic to anyone but an unreconstructed racist.

Sam (White, Queer, College-Educated Man): Almost all the messages I encountered, whether directed at me by teachers/parents/community or soaked up from broadcast media, were standard white liberal pablum. Interracial relationships were fine because we’re all people or race doesn’t matter or [insert colorblind platitude here]. My parents gave race and personal relationships more thought than most other adults in my life, but they rarely brought it to the forefront of conversation or gave it the kind of sustained focus a white kid probably needs not to turn out totally messed up by White Supremacy. I don’t blame them for this and am extremely thankful for their capacity to have thoughtful and challenging discussions about race and racism, but they certainly weren’t raising me in an actively anti-racist manner. Most of what I encountered outside of a family context was the careless sort of Gramscian “common sense” that is toxic because of its thoughtlessness and self-centeredness rather than because of any sort of explicit ill intention.

I grew up in a Los Angeles suburb that was both racially and economically diverse and quite lesbian/gay-friendly, so my friends and social milieu at school and in the places I hung out were multiracial and culturally and economically diverse, something I didn’t come to appreciate or think of as unusual until attending a very white private college. I’m the son of two middle-class, lefty college professors. I was materially comfortable but not excessively so growing up, but of high socio-economic status because of my parents’ profession and community of academics.

Interracial dating was a pretty normal thing amongst my friends and I had several friends from school, church and my neighborhood who were multiracial and whose parents were in an interracial marriage. Interracial gay couples were not even unusual. Again, these relationships and atmospheres didn’t seem particularly unusual or notable in a multiculturalism-obsessed 90s, where I assimilated all kinds of messages that told me this was how it ought to be and had nothing to do with politics or inequality. As long as I had friends who were People of Color and listened to jazz and attended international fairs, etc., I had no issues. I think that without race ever becoming the focus of any sort of sustained focus or coming into question, I took most of this for granted and didn’t feel particularly strongly about any of the messages I heard, since none seemed to take a particularly strong stance and none seemed to conflict with each other. Racism, of course, was a terrible thing and I wasn’t a racist (of course not!) but was race a problem? Not really. Then were interracial relationships? Definitely not.

I should stress that I don’t remember all the messages I received, but that the above general impression is an accurate (if a little flippant and over-simplified) rendering of my memories of childhood. I didn’t really date before I graduated high school for a number of reasons, so the questions of love and sex and race never collided in a way that would register as important to a narcissistic, angsty teen. My story is about as banal as it comes (read into this as you will).

Lauren (het, white): It would be fair to say that much of my early social justice education was done through the act of interracial dating and the discussion around it. My parents were older, and were raised in the Jim Crow south, even attending high school in a rural Arkansan town during the state-enforced desegregation and the Little Rock Nine. Their wishes were often communicated by my mother, who tried to convey many stereotypically racist ideas about sex and dating, and about black people in particular. Black men were untrustworthy and sexually deviant, they would hurt me, don’t ever bring one home. The underlying sentiment was that there was no telling what my good ol’ boy father would do to the young man of color I chose to date or to me, the unruly fast-assed daughter that brought him home. My older sister tried to talk to me about it once, saying that no matter how nice or accomplished this theoretical date of mine would be, it would never be acceptable in our house to date a black man. I remember teenage me balking at her, disbelieving the extent of my parents’ racism. I genuinely didn’t understand the various rules and guidelines of racist dating. No matter how nice? There was one guy I dated on and off for a couple of years at the end of high school who was Latino-American, and I remember some conversation among my family about whether or not it “counted” for me to date a “Mexican” who, other than his very floral name, read “white”.

I was raised in the North, on the campus of Purdue University in Indiana. Rural as the state is, I was fortunate to have had access to the university’s social and education resources, and the effects of living with one of the more diverse campuses in the Midwest (we used to boast the largest foreign student population in the U.S., but I don’t know if that is true any longer). My friends were racially diverse, thus my dating pool was racially diverse, and my friends and I dated as we wanted overall without a lot of racist social interference. My folks were horrified when I came home one night at barely eighteen years old and announced that I was pregnant and was going to keep the baby. The father was a Chinese-American college student five years my senior. They kicked me out of the house and I couch-surfed for the remainder of my pregnancy. The offense was twofold: 1) I was pregnant out of wedlock 2) by a person of color.

Jill: My parents are liberal Seattlites, so any conversation around interracial dating generally amounted to, “We just want you to find someone who makes you happy and who you love.” The rest of my family, though, is less open-minded — my sister and I were repeatedly removed from family events when my uncle or grandpa would start using the n-word, and it was pretty clear that for their kids, interracial dating was not an option (my parents used to voice hope that my female cousin with the racist dad would marry a black guy, which they meant as “Your uncle needs to quit it with the racism and his daughter marrying someone black would at least make him shut his trap,” but in hindsight was pretty messed up, at least for the hypothetical black guy. Unsurprisingly, the cousin in question married a white guy).

I’m not sure anyone ever said it out loud, but I always got the sense that there was a hierarchy of which racial groups were the most acceptable, and that black people were at the bottom (there were comments from my immediate and extended family about how it would be unacceptable for a guy to pick me up for a date “blasting rap music” or calling me his “bitch,” which is racially loaded enough to read loud and clear). And from my peers the messages were much stronger. A white high school friend dated a black guy, and her brother immediately asked her if she was going to turn into “one of those girls who wears her hair in a slicked-back tight ponytail” — a class signifier, where I’m from, of being “trashy.” White women who dated black men (and to a slightly lesser extent, white women who dated Latino men) were definitely marked as low-class; the same wasn’t true of white women with Asian men. Black women with white men weren’t nearly as visible, and where I grew up it was pretty commonplace to see white/Asian relationships, so I saw less of a stigma there.

My first serious relationship, which lasted for almost all of college and a while after, was with an Indian guy, and that was generally ok with my family (his family was less thrilled about it). But the fact that his family wasn’t particularly happy about it gave my family slightly more room to air their concerns — that the cultural differences would be too big to surmount, that his family would never accept me, that I wasn’t being treated as well as I should because he couldn’t be totally honest with his parents about our relationship. So the message I got about interracial dating was basically that interracial dating is fine in theory, but very hard in practice — and that its acceptability varied pretty widely depending on the race of your date.

Porter (male, het, white, 31): For a little context — I’m the youngest of two, and we were a pretty nomadic family. We moved about every 2 years, and sometimes more often — almost entirely within the “Big 12”: Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Missouri. Also stints in Wyoming and Alabama. Being from Texas was a point of pride for my parents, and for me. Never really lived in an urban environment, but definitely middle class suburban, upper class suburban (top 10% of household earnings, not top 2%), and quasi-rural. We went to company-paid country clubs, and stressed about house payments and college tuitions.

We were consistently and somewhat saccharinely religious, if not deeply (until my sister and I both became pretty die-hard in high school, setting the stage for an agnostic pivot later on). We always had a church home and participated regularly, and worried about new agers and Satanism infecting us, but also, dancing was fine, drinking was fine, R movies were fine at most ages (esp. for me; less so for my sister), and we made fun of Baptists over dinner as the ones who were going to love Heaven, since they weren’t having any fun down here.

So, race. From my family, a few different keyframes come to mind. My parents were consistent in saying that race doesn’t matter, and dating across racial boundaries is OK, even if these messages weren’t consistent with other ones.

• My dad loves jokes about racial stereotypes, and passed that on to me, for better or worse. This made my mom uncomfortable…
• …even though my mom was the one who worried to me if my sister had enough white friends, and called her the “President of the International Club” of our very white high school. Concern about one’s kids not fitting in is a strong one, I think.
• I recall my mom, a middle school teacher, saying interracial dating & marriage were totally fine, but that she really worried about the impact on their children.
• I’ll never forget my dad’s company (a commercial insurance broker) trying to sell a custom suite of insurance products to an association of black churches. (My dad also tried to develop strike insurance for union members; he thinks insurance products can do good in the world.) He commented, jokingly and also in real disbelief, that written correspondence from the association’s people would spell “ask” as “aks”. Far moreso, he was shocked at what he felt was an unjust amassing of wealth by paid church leaders in poor black communities, and felt the insurance product never came together as a result of their, in his mind, greed. I was about 10-11 years old when hearing this.
• I dated a Korean Catholic girl in high school. I remember being very nervous to tell my parents, but I started with my dad one night, and he was just happy about it, and for me. This was a huge relief, so I’d clearly expected their rhetoric about being OK with race to butt up against reality in a negative way.
• Her family was not OK with it. So, we snuck about.
• Months after we started dating, my parents remarked that they could see why white guys would like Asian girls, because Asian girls are more conservative and sweet. Facepalm. They meant well and I acted agreeably in appreciation of the gesture, although I found the comment a bit offensive and short-sighted.
• In 2008, there was no way my folks were voting for “Barack HUSSEIN Obama”. Complicated.

As for friends / peers, I recall a few things:

• Very little friction amongst high school friends, and later, around dating any race. I was in band and it was a lifestyle for us, though, so we were already a more diverse, nerdier group, staying within ourselves and slightly removed from perhaps rougher social pressures.
• There was definitely friction about dating people of a different faith in high school.
• In high school, most students knew who the girls were that only dated the small number of black boys, and some of us — me, regretfully — thought that strange and conspicuous, and made fun behind their backs.

DC: To be honest, I don’t think I really heard much in the house about interracial relationships growing up. My closest cousin, Cristina, was of mixed descent. Her father (my uncle) was half African-American and half Japanese, while her mother (my aunt) was half Spanish and half Irish-American. We spent a lot of time at their house when I was younger, and we all got along just fine like other families. Another one of my great uncles was African-American and married my great aunt, a Spaniard, and their children were also close with us. In church, we were constantly surrounded by other interracial couples and their children.

Despite having these people constantly in my life, I never realized that “interracial relationships” was even a term that separated people’s lifestyle choices into categories until someone told me. I never really thought about what it meant to date “interracial” because in my mind, particularly as a child and adolescent, there was no difference. When one of the kids at school questioned why a “white boy” would have any interest in a “black girl,” I remember being really confused. Why wouldn’t I? She was pretty, after all, and until the same kid told me that “it just isn’t supposed to be that way” and that “it’s mixing,” it never crossed my mind to think about it.

As I grew older, my oldest brother began to date a young and beautiful Caribbean-American girl. They dated throughout high school, and when my brother moved away to live with my father and attend community college, she came to visit once that summer. My father, who had lived a separate life away from my aunts and uncles for many years after my parent’s divorce, did not warm to her immediately. I would certainly never classify my father as a racist, but this moment certainly made me question where exactly his values changed from mine. I would later notice the way he worried more about my younger half-siblings in their choice of partner when the partner was of a different race. However, I never grew up in this environment where a certain race warranted a particular implication.

Allison: The messages I received were very well-intentioned, but often limited in their scope. (I should mention that I’m DC’s sister, so we share the same relatives mentioned above!) I know that my aunt faced some criticism when she got involved with my uncle: both of them were young, working-class Jehovah’s Witnesses, but she was white (first-generation immigrant from Spain) and he was Japanese-African American. I can’t quote any of the specifics about the scrutiny she received for dating him because I heard about it the way so many other family stories are passed down: secondhand from other relatives. I do think you have to consider the specific demographics of a Jehovah’s Witness dating pool — baptized Christians aren’t allowed to date outside of the religion, but single men (“brothers”) who were both age-appropriate and JW were in short supply. So there was a kind of open-mindedness within my extended family, driven by equal parts doctrine and Law of Scarcity, that stretched to make room for interracial relationships — in large part because being unmarried was not an option for the women in my family after a certain age. Did their acceptance for new in-laws of color always translate into anti-racist thinking? Judging by some of the comments I’ve heard my white relatives make over the years, I would be hard-pressed to say that love always conquered privilege.

Megan: Obliviousness helps, I guess? It never occurred to me when I was younger and dating interracially that anyone I’d want to be friends with would care, and I figured anyone who cared isn’t someone I’d want to be friends with. I think that still holds today, but with more compassion: I can understand why the women of color with whom I’m friends might have misgivings about me dating outside my race because of the beauty standard/cultural messaging stuff, and I wouldn’t want to contribute to making someone feel bad (which is not to say I’d take it into account in terms of whom I would date, but I’d understand the issue and be willing to talk it out). But if a white friend was weirded out by me interracially dating, I’d lose their phone number.

In terms of dating someone more seriously, I think dating interracially can add a layer of complexity in terms of one another’s families and making an effort to be respectful and value and participate in one another’s cultural traditions and practices — particularly if really long term decisions like marriage and children are on the table. And I’m cognizant that as the white person in the relationship, I probably have a lot further to go to understand, respect, value and participate respectfully. It doesn’t give me pause, obviously, but it’s one of those things that it’s important to think about and verbalize inside the relationship and to be willing to accept (constructive) criticism about.

Sam: Before I started going through my “good white person” phase (and before coming out as Queer), I didn’t think about my interracial relationships as particularly denoted by race. Sex and dating were scary enough by themselves that they tended to push out other reasonable areas of concern. When I started dating Women of Color, I was spending my time with liberal-non-profit-types who mostly demonstrated a similarly “race-neutral” attitude, so there was no friction there. The go-along-to-get-along attitude actually postponed any and all catalyzing events that would force me to examine the significance of race both personally and politically, so this lack of friction wasn’t helpful or nice.
After/while moving blessedly quickly from “race-neutral” to “good white person” to “white anti-racist,” I became much more concerned with race and personal relationships, sexual and platonic. Add on top of this that I was coming into a Queer, polyamorous sexuality and I was very, very concerned with power and relationships, whether racialized, gendered or otherwise. I had sexual relationships with several Men of Color, Women of Color and one Genderqueer Person of Color over the course of a few years in several different cities and countries and each and every time race was a significant factor that my partners and community and I discussed as openly and honestly as possible. My fears and misgivings were often about my own thoughts I would fuck it up, anxiety about my privilege, anxiety about my own anti-racist or queer authenticity, etc. These fears and misgivings were many, frequent, and extremely varied, making them difficult to rehash quickly in this context. I’ll leave this train of thought here, open to questioning/problematization by interlocutors and commenters.

Jill: I also didn’t really think much about it when I started dating someone non-white. It was my first real relationship, and my first most things — the fact that he was Indian was pretty low on my list of things to stress out about, at the beginning. The fact that he was a New England prep-school-educated kid from the East Coast and I was a middle-class public school kid from out West felt like more of a cultural divide than his race or religion, and I was way more concerned with the whole “I’m a 19-year-old virgin who has never dated anyone and now I’m away at college and I found this amazing person who I feel like I could maybe be with forever and oh god what do I do now how does this work?” But as the relationship progressed, it did become an issue, especially when we were years in and dipping our toes into conversations about marriage and kids and a life together. He was pretty straight-forward early on that things would be easier if I shared his cultural background, and since I didn’t he wasn’t totally sure we could really have a future. As much as that was hurtful at the time, he was right — of course that would have been easier. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t be honest with his parents about the fact that I wasn’t just a “friend,” and I didn’t understand why he couldn’t grasp that I felt deeply disrespected by that refusal to disclose our actual relationship (in my culture, saying your girlfriend of several years is just a friend and not introducing her honestly to your parents is taken as a sign that you don’t respect her or are embarrassed by her). He couldn’t understand why I was insulted by his decision, when for him it wasn’t about respecting me but about respecting his parents’ wishes and his family’s distaste for discussing relationships. So going in I was pretty open-minded; he was less so, and his hesitations were pretty justified. It was not easy. And juggling the conflicting needs of his family and me (in addition to his own needs) was very tough on him — much tougher than it was on me.

The reaction from our peers was fine and rarely notable. Strangers on the street would sometimes make comments (and my high school friends had a hard time spelling his name), but mostly it was a non-issue.

Porter: Other than my initial experience in high school about dating a Korean girl, where I worried about what my folks would say, I’ve had very few misgivings since. I’ll confess to having a slight bit of pride when I date a girl who isn’t white — not so much that it drives my choice, but I’m aware that the feeling is there.

Since my humor is South Parkian in a sense, I tread carefully before a gal reveals her sensitivities around that type of humor, but I also won’t end the night before I’ve tested them.

I don’t think I’ve been treated differently, positively or negatively, as a result of interracial dating (I’ve dated Korean, Indian, Persian). Class and worldview differences provide more social anxiety for me than race does, with two notable exceptions: taking a black woman or a Muslim woman home to the folks would make me anxious, no matter how consciously I’m resolved on accepting any range of reaction. I just sense that those are the points of greatest friction.

DC: Well, I certainly didn’t feel like I had anything to be concerned about. My first interracial relationship was with an African-American girl, back when I was still fooling myself about my sexuality. We were 12, in sixth grade, and crazy about each other. I was short, hadn’t really hit puberty yet, and had bleach blonde hair. She was tall, had large breasts, and a calm, quiet personality. I remember trying to get my mom to agree to let me marry her then, and it was all very fairytale-esque. My mom never expressed any sense of disinterest or worry that I was dating someone of another race, and seemed more concerned about my potential misunderstandings of a marriage license at the ripe age of 12.

I don’t really remember getting much in the way of criticism from my then-girlfriend’s parents, either. Again, I think her parents thought that we were young and hormonal, and that this phase of “puppy love” (as I remember it being called) would come to pass. People at school thought it was cute, or funny, or gross. (Remember that in sixth grade, girls are starting to become more than someone to tease to a young man’s mind, but they haven’t quite reached that point yet.) I honestly can’t recall a bad experience from that relationship that was related to race.

When I was 16 and open to my sexuality as a gay man, I began dating a Filipino young man. I was infatuated with him and everything about him, though I had never dated anyone of Asian-descent. Again, I don’t think the infatuation was with his race, but rather with the excitement that came with a new relationship. As I was very much “undercover” in my sexuality, my family never met him, and the few friends that did thoroughly enjoyed him and his company. We never talked about the role of race in our relationship.

My husband is of mixed “white” and Latin-American descent, while I am a mix of primarily Spanish and Irish “white” descent. As we both speak Spanish and lived similar lives in smaller Spanish-speaking communities in the United States, race has never come up. Most people in our group of friends are shocked to find out that we both come from such a background, and though he is very connected to his Latin-American side (as I am to my Spanish side), no one on either side of our families or groups of friends has had concerns solely based on the issue of my or his race.

[Just as a side note: as I’m re-reading this and thinking about my answers, it might sound like I “had it easy.” I think the biggest difference (for me) was that I never really labeled relationships as “interracial” when approaching one. Until the label had been introduced to me, I never felt any sense of separation between couples of the same race or couples that included one or more races. I feel frustrated that even such a label exists, as it separates my relationship from someone else’s solely based on a single fact.]

Allison: I haven’t had any long-term, conventional relationships that were interracial, but there were two close friends I was involved with romantically in high school and college. I had some anxieties about what each of their parents would think of me, an introverted white girl who dressed in thrift store cast-offs, coming home to get their once-over. But it wasn’t really an issue in either case. M’s mother let me bum cigarettes even though I was underage. I asked her questions about journalism — she worked for a major paper and had some insight as a long-time employee of the industry. She didn’t comment on her son’s obvious feelings for me, but she did leave us alone in the living room several times (and we all know what happens when you leave two horny teenagers alone together for more than 30 seconds). The mother of my other friend (Bengali) gave me books, tea, and praise for my student-produced play. Considering that her mother was loathe to praise my friend’s best work, it came as a shock to both of us that my overwrought little high school play had earned her positive accolades. The core of these two mothers’ acceptance was always obvious to me.

Like many people all over the country, I knew a little about the Flo Kennedy legend long before I met her in the flesh. In fact, the name “Flo” alone was enough to evoke images of outrageous and creative troublemaking in almost any area, from minority hiring to ban-the-bomb. Just as there was only one Eleanor or Winston, one Stokely or Marilyn or Mao, there was only one Flo.

Of course, her fame was more limited. But for those who had been in the Black Movement when it was still known as Civil Rights, or in the Consumer Movement that predated Ralph Nader, or in the Women’s Movement when it was still supposed to be a few malcontents in sneakers, or in the Peace Movement when there was more worry about nuclear fallout than Vietnam, Flo was a political touchstone–a catalyst in the lives of people who knew her, and a source of curiosity for those who did not.

For one thing, she was a lawyer–one of the few women and even fewer black people to get into and out of Columbia Law School in the fifties–though she had not even finished working her way through college until she was over 30 years old. (Ironically, Columbia first turned her down because she was a woman; then relented because she threatened to denounce the Law School as racist. “But it was clearly prejudiced against women,” Flo remembers. “My white girlfriend from Barnard had better grades than I did, and she got nowhere.”) For another thing, she was always taking the unpopular cases and feeding or housing a variety of social strays–long before such unconventional behavior was common at all, especially among lawyers.

At 42, she married a Welsh writer 10 years her junior, whom she recalls fondly, though accurately, as someone who was very kind and talented when he was sober, which wasn’t often. Eventually, his drinking caused their separation and, a few months later, his death. Though she had very little money and generous habits that made it impossible to keep even the small fees she earned, Flo turned all her husband’s money and future royalty rights over to his mother. Whether it’s a bowl of her homemade chili, a bed for the night, bail money, or free legal and life-fixing advice, the real instances of Flo’s generosity probably exceed their own legend.

By the time I met her in 1969, she had become well known as a founder of the National Organization for Women–though, characteristically, she had left to form other feminist groups when NOW’s rough early days were over and the going got too tame. Because we both wanted to emphasize racism and sexism as parallel problems of caste, we ended up speaking together in what Flo referred to as our “Topsy and Little Eva” team. Several times each month, we would go off to campuses and communities in Texas or Michigan or Oregon, with Flo describing herself as “tired and middle-aged” as I tried to keep up with her energetic, nonstop, and generous-hearted pace.

–From “The Verbal Karate of Florynce R. Kennedy, Esq.”

 Image Credit: Mujer y Palabra

As I said on Twitter, Gloria: In Her Own Words, the new documentary about feminist activist Gloria Steinem running exclusively on HBO this month, is a “precise” work on her life and The Second Feminist Movement (and what I mean by this is the mainstream Second Wave Movement) in the last 60+ years.

Dana Goldstein took the doc to task in The Nation for not addressing race and racism in the movement Steinem helped shape:

Though there are interviews in Gloria about how upper-middle-class, straight feminists came to embrace lesbian rights and economic justice for poor women, there is no explicit discussion of an equally enduring and arguably more fraught issue: the relationship between feminism and struggles for racial equality. The film does feature archival footage showing 1970s white feminists arguing that men’s only bars are the equivalent of Jim Crow lunch counters. Doesn’t that contention cry out for debate, for analysis—for something? We see Steinem appear alongside her 1970s “speaking partners,” the black feminists Flo Kennedy (pictured above–Ed.) and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, but we don’t hear much about how these women (who were so often overshadowed by the more famous Steinem) navigated their dual identies as women of color within the feminist movement.

Steinem notes that her own brand of feminism was more radical than that of her elders, women like Betty Friedan, who were concerned mostly with the plight of white, college-educated housewives. Yet there are no interviews with either Steinem or other movement veterans that reflect explicitly on the relationship between feminism and civil rights. We hear about how Steinem’s sexy good looks helped propel her to prominence, but not about how her whiteness helped make feminism seem less threatening. We also learn nothing about the sophisticated set of critiques women-of-color, such as Angela Davis and bell hooks, have long made regarding mainstream feminism: that its focus on abortion detracted from their own struggle for maternal rights and that the assumption that women represent a united interest group often downplayed the struggles of non-white women in overcoming racism.

The reason why I called this doc “precise” is because I didn’t expect it to be nothing more and nothing less than a reflection of the mainstream Second Wave feminist movement…which was, in reality, notoriously short on analysis of race and racism as it functioned within it. When it was addressed, the rhetoric talked about white men and their race vis-à-vis “male privilege.” Some of the white women within that movement may have deeply empathized with and felt themselves in solidarity with the struggles of people of color—Steinem presents herself as such a person—but, as cravenly cynical as it seems, those struggles were also a media-friendly “hook” so people could grasp why women were fighting for, say, equal pay and the right to safe abortion. And, as critiqued again and again, loaded with white female privilege.

For Second Wave mainstream feminism, the mere presence of women of color showed how “diverse” women can come together to fight for the “common” goal of equal rights for “women.” That was “race talk” enough to show the movement’s good faith regarding this.  When it came time to really deal with how race, racism, and white female privilege infused mainstream feminism, the usual response was variations of, “We’re all sisters here. Talking about race divides the movement!” Out of that frustration of failing to address the issue came the influential works like The Combahee River Collective; Pat Parker’s Movement in Black; Gloria Hull’s, Patricia Bell Scott’s and Barbara Smith’s All the Women Are White, All the Black Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave; Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: An Anthology; Gloria Anzaldua’s and Cherrie Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back; Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider; Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens; and Anzaldua’s La Frontera/Borderlands.  (And, as some hip-hop and other feminists would tell you, some Second Wavers still hold that viewpoint.)

These and other books by and about women of color that came out of the that time period were viewed as writings of outliers, not really touching the mainstream rhetoric or the “concerns” of that movement, which is reflected  in the doc by omission. The writing of Angela Davis, which Dana Goldstein mentioned, helped shape the Third Wave of feminism. Though Angela Davis was in the same demographic as Steinem—both are Baby Boomers–during the throes of the Second Wave (in the 60s through the 70s), Davis was speaking about Black Power. Though her autobiography shows a consciousness around feminism and intersectionality, it was later in her public intellectual life that Davis became famous in feminist imaginations—and required college reading–with her classic books Women, Race, and Class and Women, Culture, and Politics.

It’s the same thing, really, with bell hooks.  Though she was critiquing the Second Wave hard, she was an outlier as far as the mainstream Second Wave was concerned.  hooks was 19-year-old undergrad when she wrote Ain’t I a Woman in the 70s and had it published a decade later—long after the mainstream Second Wave, with Steinem’s help, formed its rhetoric and platform of “equal rights” and became part of the academy.

That’s why I’m not surprised that the film didn’t include these foremothers of the Third Wave or pay attention to, let alone analyze, the issue of race and racism.  This doc isn’t that doc about the race/racism/feminism conundrum.  In that sense, I can, strangely enough, somewhat forgive Gloria for not addressing that issue. That almost insta-kyriarchal critique we in anti-racist and some other progressive circles do and are used to isn’t Steinem. This doc is, simply put, a longer periscope of the mainstream Second Wave through Steinem’s view.

And the way Steinem and her feminist compatriots have seen it is that all women were “women.” There wasn’t a whole lot of difference, as Steinem and some others in the mainstream Second Wave framed it, between the issues that a woman of color had and a white woman. And, probably coming from a working-class background as Steinem was , she probably felt she was in solidarity because her white femaleness was mitigated privilege where white women from that socio-economic group were (and are still) viewed as “trashy.”

However, as much as the film did not address race and racism in the mainstream Second Wave and how Steinem may have shaped that conversation, I do think Steinem herself did shift her ideas about race and feminism–and the film didn’t reflect that, either. That moment came when she was publicly called out by Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry on Democracy Now! for her New York Times op-ed challenging then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s qualifications to lead the country (transcript here):

Steinem, as per the Second Wave rhetoric, starts to say that “women struggle as women.” Dr. Harris-Perry checks that—she, who has not only the lived experience as a woman of color in the US, but more than likely studied the writings of hooks, Davis, Anzaldua, Walker, Smith, Hull, Moraga, and many other feminists of color.

I think the best example of Steinem’s post-debate shift is what I saw at the screening of the doc last Thursday. A friend of mine, Loop 21’s Keli Goff, asked Steinem about her thoughts on the anti-Black anti-choice billboards and how activists should move forward against future ones. Steinem responded by asking Goff if she heard about the activism that happened in NYC. Goff said no. That’s when another friend of mine, SisterSong NYC’s Jasmine Burnett raised her hand and got Steinem’s attention. All Steinem said to the audience was, “This is what we call networking.” Burnett got up and spoke very eloquently to Goff and the group on how a cohort organization, Trust Black Women, and SisterSong NYC helped galvanize people to take down the sign, the feelings of the pro-choice mom whose daughter’s photo was on those billboards, and the current situation with the ads.  The only other thing Steinem did was ask Burnett to mention SisterSong’s Loretta Ross. Other than that, Steinem fell back for Burnett: an older white feminist—an icon at that!—stepped aside for a younger feminist of color. And Steinem looked rather content in that role. I suspect that, if that call-out didn’t happen, Steinem would have interrupted Burnett and attempt to talk about the signs affecting “all women” and said and done other off-putting things.

Gloria: In Her Own Words is, if not a form of haigiography, a “legacy film”: Steinem is getting her bequethal in order for those people who may never pick her books or will wade through 60+ years of documentation about the second wave. With that understanding, I enjoyed the film: I understood her a little better. She, like me, came from Toledo, OH; she took care of her mom, who suffered a nervous breakdown; she suffered the loss of her dad, who she didn’t see transition due to being on the road for feminism; she married late in life and became a widow a short time after she married. Those details humanize Steinem when people are so used to discussing her as a controversial figure or icon to love or hate or debate about. The doc is a good summation of one person’s wide-ranging and deeply influential life.

As for the future of feminism, this is Steinem’s benediction: “Don’t listen to me, but listen to your own hearts about what’s best for feminism.” And, if it’s in our hearts to make that film about race, racism, and feminism, then I think Steinem would fall back about it.

Image credits:  Ms. Magazine and missomnimedia

So look, David: Chinese people eat weird food. There is a saying that “Chinese will eat anything with its back to the sky,” and another that says “Chinese will eat anything with legs but a table and anything with wings but an airplane.” These are Chinese sayings, I might point out — a sign that Chinese aren’t exactly unaware that the “delicacies” that send prim Westerners to their fainting couches are a little off the beaten path.

But Chinese are far from the only culture that eats weird food, and fuck, given that you’re from North Carolina, have you looked at what American Southerners traditionally eat? No? Chitlins! Possum! Muskrat! Bull testicles! Oh wait, you’re from suburban Raleigh, so probably not, given that most of the more exotic dishes in Southern cuisine, like in many culinary traditions, was the offspring of necessity — invention midwived by destitution. If you’re hungry enough, rodents will start to look tasty, as will chicken claws, stray innards and balls. And once you’ve eaten them long enough, all these things evolve into nostalgic signifiers — especially after you’ve pulled yourself out of poverty. They go from things you have to eat all the time to things you choose to eat once in a while, to remind yourself you don’t have to eat them all the time.

And this is what’s truly ugly about your piece, David: For someone who’s spent a lot of your career puncturing middle-class aspiration and self-delusion, your essay is unpleasantly blind to the fact that all of China is just a few generations removed from dire, desperate want, and that many people, like the peasant family you had such a bad experience sharing a meal with, continue to subsist on an annual income that’s a tiny fraction of what a sophisticated awesome American literary superstar like you loses in his sofa. And in a country of 1.3 billion people, even having braised pig’s stomach to occasionally go with your daily rice is a fucking luxury.

–From David Sedaris Thinks Chinese People (and Food) Are Repulsive, Which Makes Me Sad, Because I Used to Like David Sedaris