"Whiteness"

One of the workshops on Saturday morning at NAASCon talked about groups [specifically Asian American student organizations] moving beyond their own personal "silos" and working with other groups that are not "Asian American" [or something] in nature in order to achieve liberation for all groups. The workshop description talked about building a "stronger[,] more cohesive movement community to work towards collective liberation and greater access for our people."

I do agree with this sentiment. We absolutely do need to move out beyond the scope of just being Asian American student organizations. The coordinators asked us to look at oppression like a tree. At the top, the branches, you have different communities, and the different ways in which oppression affects us. Though we may be of different communities, the truth is that we are all connected through the trunk and roots of this tree, and the oppression that we feel comes from, ultimately, an institutionalized form of oppression.

We were urged to form an "intersectional social justice movement." I certainly agree with this sentiment. One of the subsequent workshops talked about how this thought might be problematic. To say that oppressed groups only come together at certain intersections doesn't speak loudly enough to the issues and problems. We can't only work together on certain situations when our paths happen to cross.

So that's something to think about. Let's branch out beyond this "Asian American" group, or "Asian American" student movement, and try to form a larger group by incorporating other oppressed peoples. Of course, something such as this is much easier said than done. We have at least some group overlap amongst our individual members [with feminist groups, other groups of people of color, and LGBTQA groups], but it's more of a matter of getting the whole group to back a movement, not individual people with some group overlap supporting different movements. Again, easier said than done, but it is important to look at this in the bigger picture with, ultimately, the same root cause: "Whiteness"

It's not "white people" as a whole who we want to pick on here, that's certainly not the case. It's more about tackling the interpretation of an "American" [one from the United States] as an able-bodied, white, Protestant, heterosexual, English speaking male. "White supremacy" in this context is not about a bunch of guys running around on horses with white pillowcases on their heads, it's more about "whiteness supremacy" at least in the "mainstream" [whatever that is] view of what an "American" is or should be. Another word to use here is "hetero-normative," but I'm not quite sure how to use that properly in a sentence. It's this view of "whiteness" that comes out through legislation, and through the media, and it's this view that needs to be challenged because, let's face it: we're not all male, some of us are individuals with disabilities, some of us are not white, some of us are not heterosexual, some of us are not Protestant, some of us do not speak English, and some of us are a few of these things. [of course, we can take this further, within individual movements where certain aspects of the "normative" thought still prevail, but we won't, at least not right now]

Sorry if this seemed like a little bit of a rambling entry, but hopefully it makes a little sense.