Reading: Transgender Warriors (Leslie Feinberg) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State / Preface, Chapters 1-3 related tags: #HNvPtS
Today, a great deal of “gender theory” is abstracted from human experience. But if theory is not the crystallized resin of experience, it ceases to be a guide to action. I offer history, politics, and theory that live and breathe because they are rooted in the experience of real people who fought flesh-and-blood battles for freedom. And my work is not solely devoted to chronicling the past, but is a component of my organizing to help shape the future.
A good view on the problem of a lot of theory. It often feels separate from what it's supposed to be discussing.
Before we moved to Buffalo, my family had lived in a desert town in Arizona. There, people who were darker skinned and shared different customs from mine were a sizeable segment of the population. Yet in the small world of the projects, most of the kids in my grade school, and my teachers, were white. The entire city was segregated right down the middle — east and west. In school I listened as some teachers paid lip service to “tolerance” but I frequently heard adults mouth racist slurs, driven by hate.
Not the point of the book, but it's wild how shit doesn't change much. Ze was writing in the 90s about the fucking 50s/60s, and my experience in the 90s/00s was much the same... And then my experience as a teacher was, too. Hell, I was one of the white teachers in a mostly non-white school, and it bothered me then.
Spotted Eagle explained that the White Mountain Apache nation was small and isolated, and so had been less affected early on by colonial culture. As a result, the U.S. government didn’t set up the mission school system on the White Mountain reservation until the late 1930s or early 1940s. Spotted Eagle said she experienced her first taste of bigotry as a Two-Spirit in those schools. “I was taken out of the mission school with the help of my people and sent away to live with an aunt off reservation, so I didn’t get totally abused by Christianity. I have some very horrible memories of the short time I was there.”
I think a lot of people do not realise just how recent a lot of mission schools were... and they also do not realise how the extreme genocidal violence honed there was later replicated, even in less obvious ways, in the public school system (and also in private).
What was responsible for the imposition of the present-day rigid sex/gender system in North America? It is not correct to simply blame patriarchy, Chrystos stressed to me. “The real word is ‘colonization’ and what it has done to the world. Patriarchy is a tool of colonization and exploitation of people and their lands for wealthy white people.”
Another thing that people don't often recognise, even though we should. All of these bigotries are interconnected. They present differently for different people and in different geographical contexts, but they are entirely connected. It's strange how few people (again, mostly white people) will not recognise this.