This is something I found on one of my newest favourite blogs, Restructure!
When most people imagine a world without racism, they imagine a world that looks very similar to our current world. Indeed, most people think that racism no longer exists today in "post-racial" America or "multicultural" Canada.
However, in a world without racism, people of colour would not be concentrated in subservient positions, and white people would not dominate positions of power. It is not the case that people of colour (e.g., Asians) are serving food to white people because they enjoy being servants, nor it is part of their "culture" to be in the food industry; it is an sign of social inequality that white people are not serving food to people of colour in the same proportion. It is not the case that women of colour are taking care of white children because they are naturally nurturant and self-sacrificial; it is a sign of social inequality that white people are not nannies of children of colour in the same proportion.
...
This means that antiracist communities should not recreate this same hierarchy in which whites areauthorities over people of colour. It is not the job of the white antiracist to extract the words of people of colour, "translate" them into his own words, and "interpret" them within his own framework to advance his thesis. When the white antiracist assumes that the words of a person of colour need to be paraphrased by a white person to count as human understanding about race and racism, it is a reproduction of white supremacy.
Full blog entry here [1]. Check out the comments section as well.
Links:
[1] http://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/white-antiracists-appropriate-the-words-of-people-of-colour-to-advance-their-thesis/
[2] http://rabble.ca/print/babble/anti-racism-news-and-initiatives/restructure-appropriation-words-poc#comment-1011966
[3] http://rabble.ca/print/babble/anti-racism-news-and-initiatives/restructure-appropriation-words-poc#comment-1012189
[4] http://rabble.ca/user
[5] http://rabble.ca/user/register
Very good! I am presently dealing with a similar issue: hostility to women-only space in feminist organizations by people who feel that the movement's image needs spokesmen paraphrasing women's experience and analysis to make it more acceptable (for the male-stream...).
"If truth were self-evident, eloquence would not be necessary." (Marcus Tullius Cicero)
Great blog! Just another one of those learned habits where the means of resisting the comfortable ways and means doesn't always materalize for recognition and analysis, and if it did, it would need to come in the form of a seperate terminology outside of the real experiences, one that we'd create ourselves that hasn't been appropriated. Originality, now that's asking a lot...
Maybe the process of interpreting what exists and using it to unlearn, rather than being left to our own devices in figuring it out, in self-analyzing on our own terms, is an approach to be undertaken with caution as well. Because really, we'd just arrive our own unshakeable conclusions, and you know where that usually ends up. Paraphrasing from within though, is there any use in it, or is it fraught with the same pitfalls?