All together now, let’s breath a sigh of relief that such a website does not exist. At least not as far as Google can tell me. A search for the words “brainy black bitches” pulls up the website, “MY BLACK SLUTS,” a pornography site with its own set of linguistic problems that I won’t get into.
So, why bring up a website that does not exist? Because this weekend, some of my activist friends excitedly thought that I had found it and/or brought it into existence. Yes, some of my activist (read: leftist/revolutionary) friends excitedly clicked on a link in my google talk status, hoping to find an actual “brainyblackbitches.com.” They then messaged me to tell me how disappointing it was that the website wasn’t real! Indeed, not one person seemed to breath a sigh of relief.
The first time it happened, I didn’t think much of it because I was still in a state of mind guided by how it came to be my status in the first place. In the course of thinking about the need for women of color to network online, I proposed to my white boyfriend that I start a website to serve the community. Since he’s a funny guy, I asked him for suggestions of smart titles.
His first suggestion was “brainyblackbitches.com,” which we giggled over. Why? Because it is the stupidest possible name. Because it was so ridiculous that we had to laugh. Because the idea that an anti-racist activist like me would produce such a site is, well, laughable. Ryan actually put it pretty well himself when he messaged me, “Here’s an idea for what not to call a website for women of colour in science. Also, I like alliteration.”
What’s not funny is that people are disappointed that I hadn’t, or that someone hadn’t made such a site. As complaints rolled in, I started to wonder — does the left know the difference between itself and the KKK? Deep down of course (I hope) the answer is yes. But I’ve started to wonder whether the artists walking around saying they should be able to do blackface and say “nigger” and all of this other crap are actually getting their cues from the left, and not in fact from the KKK-like right extremists that so many are quick to blame.
Where exactly would they be getting these hints? Well, there’s this fascinating movement working toward “taking ownership of the language.” So, nigger is good when a lefty uses it, and bad when a righty uses it. Somehow, this disempowers the language because now everyone is using it and sometimes it is offensive but sometimes it is disempowering the offensiveness. All of this is determined by the fact that people on the left are obviously trustworthy, unlike those evil people on the right. By the same logic Bitch Magazine, apparently “Provides commentary on our media-driven world from a feminist perspective” (thus ensuring that I have yet another reason to feel uncomfortable calling myself a feminist).
The truth is that some words have lost their power. I have no problem using “queer.” That probably has something to do with the fact that “queer” is as bad as “gay” to the homophobes. There really is no good word. The words are used equally as slurs and positive self-identifications. Additionally, people have more and more realized that there is nothing wrong with being strange, that is queer. That is far from the case for the word “bitch” or the word “nigger” or even the word “colored.” It’s worth noting that none of the people who were excited were Black, and I’m pretty sure my Black friends would have been furious if they thought I had anything to do with such a site.
Adrienne Rich once called English “the oppressor’s language,” and I get that people are desperate to make it their own. But getting tied up in trying to take back the language, I think, is a quick way to:
a. Confuse potential allies
b. Give cover to potential anti-allies
c. Provide a theoretical distraction from what my friend Narinda calls “the racism truck hurtling at us.”
So let’s not get confused. Just because ANGRYBLACKBITCH is “practicing the fine art of bitchitude” over at Blogger doesn’t mean everyone who is interested in social justice is interested in using these words to describe themselves. I may agree with ABB about a lot of things, but I’m perfectly satisfied to be a woman, and to struggle for recognition as one (even in the world of science, where, well, the facts should be obvious). Indeed, having Sojourner as one of my middle names has always given me a sense of ownership over the question that Ms. Truth once asked, “Ain’t I a woman?”
I don’t need to be a bitch to be recognized as an equal. I’m a brainy Black woman, thanks.
{ 2 comments }
Really, the ‘brainy’ in addition to ‘black bitch’ really had my hopes up for some better-informed humour on identity politics, but I get where you’re coming from. However, my complaint is that everybody starts off from entirely different places, and somehow ends up being either left or right. I know very well that my politics are different from the KKK, and I also know very well that my politics are different from many ‘lefties’, yet I am still left. I remain deeply suspicious when people start claiming ‘leftist’ politics because quite frankly, that tells me nothing and as you’ve pointed out, it can really be a smokescreen for retrogressive politics. Postpartisanship comes in many forms, and has the all-too-familiar postmodern ID crisis, but truth is, sometimes it works. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t – ‘bitch’ is really about having a certain attitude… which I’m not sure astrophysics can down.
As one of the people involved in the exchanges you describe, I’ve been thinking about this. One the one hand, it’s possible to imagine a website with that url which would be an edgy, in-your-face blog, rather than, say, the web community you want to create or its tragi-comically misnamed mirror image. And the fact that you don’t want to do that particular act of reclamation doesn’t mean that someone couldn’t do it or use that kind of space in an interesting way. That said, I think you have a good point here. “Reclaiming hate words” loses some of its power as a political practice at a certain point, when it stops being a rare, generational reclamation by impacted groups themselves and starts to become a mark of hipsterdom (or hipster appreciation/consumption of certain practices, but not others, among those groups). So, it seems entirely possible that some of us who lamented that you weren’t directing us to a real website might have had a fucked-up, preconscious, libidinal attachment to the idea of a website named “brainyblackbitches.com” – sort of, wanting the next, more radical / x-treme thing, wanting POC or women of color in particular to provide it to us so we can consume it, etc. That is a chastening thought, worthy of meditation.
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