last year i tweeted this and it ended up being way more controversial than i thought it would be. it began as a one off tweeted thought, which i expanded on after someone asked me to un the replies. i ended up having an interesting week, with people accusing me of being an antifeminist, among other things. i even had popular feminist (and former mutual follow) Mikki Kendall randomly quoted me that December and misrepresented my arguments. she decided to deploy a conservative maneuver by insinuating that my statement centers adults rather than children, even though black parents are often pathologized and denigrated regardless of sex/gender, and black children, like their parents, have always had to work to achieve anything closer to “normative status,” including the status of “child.”
a lot of the time when i argue with black people who are classed above me they pull this “i used to be poor too” or “i live(d) in the hood too” move. but my objectives are beyond their personal gripe with me or against poor black people (particularly poor black men). there was nothing “fatally flawed” about my argument, which is based on extensive data. i pointed out class bias, not just to make a personal judgment of Mikki Kendall (who took it that way because she didn’t have any real argument), but against a carceral system that I pointed out targets black mothers as well as black fathers. she chose to skip over my actual statement in order to center her own experience, even though i was discussing black mothers at large. Mikki Kendall is a veteran. her first child was by a racist, abusive white man who she felt wasn’t racist so long as he only hated and disliked black men and not her personally. she is college-educated and middle class, and is not personally affected by these issues. she and several commenters are, in fact, socioeconomically biased and repeating racialized, neoliberal arguments in the name of feminism, because they feel that, so long as they only attack black men, they aren’t antiblack or class biased. my target is the racist state. my arguments were simply beyond them.
she refused to hear any explanation or correct herself after doing so, continuing to tweet from behind a block and standing firm in her bullshit. she had not interacted with me in any meaningful way in the 2+ years before that, distancing herself (like many other black women, queers, and feminists) from me as my content grew more centered on the material impact of negative racialization, poverty, and white supremacy, and less gender (female) focused.
i believe that @Karnythia had already decided not to engage my argument honestly from jump. there are a lot of people who lowkey have a problem with me on that app, and when i attempted to explain myself i was waved off.
one of my favorite responses:
i stand firm in my statements. i believe that the omission of the negative impact of child support debt and incarceration which disproportionately affects black and poor fathers in America when discussing the negative impact of the child welfare system on black and poor mothers is egregious and negligent. i think that any conversation about the racialization of privacy, medical racism, and reproductive justice/rights can only be partial and half assed of it does not address the collective impact of all of these entanglements. if the parents are affected by systemic racism that affects their children. you cannot discuss black children without discussing black parents and vice versa.
like, how does this not raise red flags?
i linked this thread as well because it's relevant:
here's some reading to add to my initial analysis. screens and also the Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9o1le1h6i1r7rpo/AAD7wLn7ikOQsr3qJheJDurxa?dl=0