whoosh

afrodiaspores:

feministx:

We are a group of established feminist activists, educators, writers, bloggers and lecturers. We are speaking out as the result of the behaviour and posts coming from some of the online feminist community, which we view as unhealthy for the movement. After some thoughtful consideration, we can…

The unconscionable appropriation of Audre Lorde has already been noted eloquently by numerous WOC and others with common sense. For me, as galling is the invocation of “X” as a pseudorevolutionary statement, as an ‘established’ group dedicated to ventriloquizing the most anodyne analyses of power relations (when they are not passing off the insights of women of color as their own) once again proves itself clueless—in this case, as too often, by deploying tropes derived from African-American historical struggle to legitimate their dubious ideological project. As Mattias Gardell writes,

As membership [in the Nation of Islam] grew, the former practice of routinely replacing a re-convert’s slave-name with a holy name was altered. As a rule, a new member was now given an “X” in exchange for the slave name. “X” for ex-slave, “X” for the unknown family-name slavery deprived along with freedom, “X” for the quality inherent in each Blackman that the Devil was still unaware of.

For many, the religions and cultures of the African Diaspora remain simply a grab bag of empty symbols to deploy and discard at will, the better to dispatch critics of African descent. Yet “X” was not simply an alias; it was itself a formidable sign, the opposite of the anonymity behind which the authors of this statement now cower. Although there is no disgrace in pseudonyms for the truly imperiled, the name should not be stolen.