You may be eager to be “anti-racist.” According to a highly praised academic, if you’re a woman and you're white, that isn't in the cards. In the case of menstruating women, literature professor Robyn Wiegman has a good handle on the subject. She was once the Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies at Duke University.
In addition, according to her Princeton University bio: “Professor Wiegman will be a Class of 1932 Visiting Fellow in the Council of the Humanities and the Department of English (teaching Autotheory). Her research interests include feminist theory, queer theory, American Studies, critical race theory, and film and media studies.”
On March 28, Robyn Wiegman delivered a speech at Princeton on the topic of “Who's Afraid of Rachel Dolezal?”
According to The College Fix, the presentation was based on an essay written for Duke University's South Atlantic Journal. “The special issue called for participating scholars to critically explore ‘objects, methods, figures, and thinkers that academic feminism has disavowed, jettisoned, or relegated to the category of our past-tense.’ In other words, the guest editors of South Atlantic Quarterly wanted scholars to pick some person or thing that contemporary feminist theory doesn’t like and explore…why contemporary feminist theory doesn’t like it without either condemning it or approving of it. The issue is as of yet unpublished.”
Robyn chose Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who had lived her life pretending to be a black woman until she was discovered to be Caucasian in 2015. Robyn certainly was not on Team Rachel. But she did say Dolezal escaped a trap. As the Fix explained it: “Wiegman…[argues] that the reason why contemporary feminists dislike Dolezal so much is because Dolezal effectively escaped the white-woman trap by claiming to feel black. Wiegman…links Dolezal to ‘the impasse of whiteness,’ which is essentially a no-win situation created by antiracism in which modern intersectional feminism now apparently demands that ‘white feminism’ be dismantled to allow ‘black feminism’ to exist.”
The pale people aren't in the best position, so says the Fix: “[T]he only way for [whites] to participate in antiracism is for them to agree with it utterly and feel neverending shame for having been born white. They have to accept that they are a symbol of the oppressive system, a symbol of ‘whiteness,’ and are thus inherent supporters of the structurally racist status quo. …[W]hite women–are not allowed to ‘fix’ the problem of their own whiteness. They simply must live in it and stew in their own guilt over being born the wrong race.”
Robyn is absolutely right. When anti-racism maligns melanin-light malignancy, which Caucasian cancer cell is able to assert that it is anti-racist? We're told that whiteness is the nation's cancer.
We're working to stop it: “Professor Explains to Audience That We're ‘Dying of Whiteness',” “A Whistleblower's Story [of] Racial Justice Lesson from Coca-Cola ‘Try to be More White',” “Very White College Professor Smolders Against the Lie (and the ‘Disease of Whiteness),” “UC Berkeley Professor Told Students to Eliminate Whiteness, Which Means Wiping Out White People,” “For Lent the Chicago Church is ‘Fasting From Whiteness',” ‘Catholic University Speaker Calls for Christians to ‘Crucify Their Whiteness’,” “Mental Health Journal's Article on ‘Parasitic Whiteness' Sighs That There Isn't Yet an End-to-End Cure'.”
When it comes to “woke,” is Robyn, a Caucasian woman, a true believer? As per the Fix, there's a chance: “Wiegman noted in the essay that she was trained in cultural studies and poststructural theory, which is to say that her training is in postmodernism and cultural Marxism, the philosophical sources of antiracist ideology.”
Is she also trapped? In any case, it seems society is trapped in a state of evil: anti-racism is supposed to defeat white supremacy; however, there's no definitive solution to eradicate whiteness from America. Additionally, we're told that the structures of the country are a source of inherent racism, the proof of this coming from the discovery of these structures. But no one will make them public so they can be removed immediately.
How can we make progress? If wokism and anti-racism are right on the mark, it appears we're forever “trapped.”
