How to Get a BLACKzilla off our backs? White Feminist Racism, Sisterhood and the Demonization of Black Women

A radical feminist of color and friend told me she wondered how the women of the off our backs collective could sleep at night after how they had treated me. She wondered how they didn’t choke on their own tongues every time they tried to speak the word “sisterhood.”

The racism in and among some white "radical" feminists, from now on here called "white supremacist feminists" believe that the ends justify the means because they are on the right side when it comes to ending gender oppression. They have maintained that all oppressions are outgrowths of patriarchy and so focusing on anything other than global male supremacy is "off topic" or "a distraction" or "is divisive of The Sisterhood." The white supremacy in and among some white "radical" feminists has a long and painful history. It goes back many decades, well before what has been termed "The Second Wave." But within the last forty years it includes Robin Morgan making claims that "Sisterhood is Global."

Many white supremacist feminists make this claim without explicitly naming white women's white supremacy as a force detrimental to and damaging of any sisterhood between white women and women of color, locally, regionally, and internationally. Susan Brownmiller relied on racist stereotypes of Black men, as perpetrators of rape against WHITE women, in her very influential book on rape called Against Our Will. Audre Lorde courageously called out the racism in Mary Daly's book "Gyn/ecology." Mary Daly did not respond to that private, very respectful correspondence in the next few months. That is a fact that is not contended. It has more recently been reported that Mary eventually did respond and that the letter exists, but we cannot know at what point during the publishing of Lorde's book Sister Outsider that letter arrived in Lorde's mailbox. And, at any rate, why the hell did it take Daly four months or more to respond?

What we can know is this: there needed to be a public confrontation by an established radical feminist woman of color of white supremacist feminism. Many white supremacist feminists consider Audre Lorde "without integrity" for making her letter to Daly public in Sister Outsider. I see it precisely the opposite. I believe Audre knew the importance of that moment. She knew too much white supremacist shit had already been thrown in WOC’s faces. She did what she had to do: for ALL women.

These are some of the most well-known examples of the clash between radical feminist women of color and white supremacist feminists. There are countless other stories, of course, which have gone unrecorded, of white women maintaining control of their version of "radical feminism," going so far as to reject "sisterhood" with radical women of color whose politics don't completely align with those of the white feminists. For example, white feminists often use "being anti-pornography" and "anti-prostitution" as THE litmus test by which one is determined to be "radical."

Why does that litmus test not ALSO include "being conscious of and fighting against white supremacy"? Who ought to define the terms that make "Sisterhood" meaningful and powerful? Race and class privileged women? Academic white women? Only Western women?

If the power to define terms stays in the hands of white women, what chance do women of color, radical feminist women of color, have of being in leadership positions in various radical feminist campaigns, publications, and organizations that are currently white dominated, white majority, AND white supremacist? The story of off our backs is a story of bravery of white women to take on their oppression by white men. It is also a story of how white supremacist feminism has been able to get away with calling itself "radical feminism." Well, no more. The white supremacist feminist party is over.

Many prominent and influential white supremacist feminists have defined and designed a platform, an agenda, and spheres of focus and concern which keep white women at the center, or which invisibilize their white supremacy. Barbara Smith, bell hooks', Andrea Smith's--and countless other WOC’s--decades long call to bring women of color into the center, out of the margins, has been unheeded by many white supremacist feminists in positions of relative power and control, and it's long past due for those white women to no longer own the definition of the title "radical feminist." If women of color are not at the center of your work, your movement, then there's nothing "radical" about it, with regard to the impact on women of color's endurance of white supremacy, which means women’s experiences of harm and hegemony in the world.

There IS an impact on women of color, of course, of maintaining the notion that white women = all women, and it is an oppressive one. It is anything but "sisterly." And it is a source of deep pain and profound betrayal among Robin Morgan’s imagined global sisterhood.

This control of terminology and agendas, and the domination of white women in radical feminists spaces is done year after year, decade after decade, even though white women are and have always been a global minority among women worldwide. U.S. white women are quite willing to call out men of color around the world for how they oppress their sisters, as if the women of color in those men’s lives don’t. Why don't U.S. white women also call out their white sisters on how THEY oppress women of color worldwide? One white supremacist feminist recently called what white women do to women of color as "tangential," overtly minimizing the impact of white women’s racism on WOC.

Like their white suffragist foremothers before them being shady and racist is explained away and the white supremacist sisterhood is upheld. By white supremacist sisterhood I mean a decision-making body that in both composition and values does not represent either the racial or cultural diversity of women’s experience nor of the city in which that collective has been based for nearly four decades.

The off our backs collective, founded in 1970 and based in Washington, DC continues to be overwhelmingly white in its make-up and is self-righteously white woman-centered in its mission! Their very first issue states, “We seek through the liberation of women, the liberation of all peoples.” However, white supremacist feminism can never claim to speak to or for the liberation of Black women and other women of color because white female domination when unowned and unchecked can be as virulently harmful to people of color (WOMEN) as anything their white fathers or sons can come up with!

I saw too few women of color during my time at oob to make much of how they felt in relation to the overwhelming sentiment I’d overhear from the white women. That sentiment as noted above was that gender identity and male supremacy--not race--were the dominant oppressive forces in (white) women’s lives. There was a self-unconscious ease with which the declarations of “woman is the nigger of the world” were made in front of my Black self by white women. It became crystal clear that they would not put up much if any resistance to the stiflingly white interpretation of feminism and gender. Was that the work of women of color only? Still?? And, if that was to be my work, my assignment, then shouldn’t I have supposed that they wanted to hear what I had to say on the matter? To the degree I found safe (for me) ways to express my alarm at their racism, shouldn’t that have been met with a collective THANK YOU, SISTER!

Apparently not.

For example, I was in the office helping them stuff envelopes for donations for oob in the fall of 2008, before the U.S. presidential election. The overwhelming sentiment around the table as expected in a room full of white “radical” feminists who identified strongly with Hillary due to race, gender, and age, was pro-Hillary and anti-Black, I mean Barack. At the time I shared much of their shock and frustration with the virulent sexism that was directed at Clinton in the media. However, I also felt like their distaste for Obama and defense of Hillary was reminiscent of the racist white suffragists who felt betrayed by white males for giving Black men the vote before them. In other words, their acute awareness of the glaringly sexist campaign directed at Clinton did not mean they’d notice racism directed at a Black person, male or female! I should have taken this as a warning of things to come.

I’m no longer impressed when people point to the fact that oob is the oldest feminist publication in the U.S. This lack of being impressed comes with having witnessed first-hand what their brand of sisterhood they practice. Their brand of feminism requires the silencing and stigmatizing of any woman of color who speaks out against their racism. Given that their brand really means if you are not white or not willing to bite your tongue about their white supremacist ways you’re going to be dissed and labeled in ugly, racist, misogynistic ways, they’ve just come reflect any other old white tired racist institution to me! How is their resilience necessarily a good thing when they remain exclusive, suspicious, and backwards when it comes to race? There are many old white male institutions too. Why is it any better that they are old and white just because they claim to speak for women? Why does their organization being run (for four decades) by white women get them a pass with regard to overt and subtle forms of racism?

Their last question during the interview process before handing me the keys to the kingdom/cave as an official collective member was if I had any ulterior motives? Let’s put aside, just for the time being, the inherent racism in any POC being asked such a question by anyone who is white, especially when the interviewer is in the more powerful position not just due to race. At the time I took this to just mean they were concerned that, in fact, I was just a closet sex pozi. But now looking back realizing that I had already made my radical feminist opposition to the sex industry very clear from the start I see the question as a reflection more of their suspicion of my possible ulterior motives as a Black person not as a sex-positive (pro-liberal, pro-porn, pro-prostitution) person. Would I as a Black woman whose identity was muddied by the reality of race threaten the collective’s value system in which the interconnectedness of oppression is dismissed in favor of a narrow focus on gender identity and male supremacy? Was that what they meant by “ulterior motives”? That’s for them to answer. And if white women’s race privilege becomes irrelevant to their politics self-awareness, isn’t that just so convenient for a collective of almost exclusively white women and their allies?

That was my experience of their question: I felt like I was in a probationary period in which I was supposed to prove my loyalty which really meant my ability to be silent on matters of race and white supremacy.

Although I was previously declaring and saying that I was the first Black female member of oob’s collective I’d discovered that this actually is not true. But I shouldn’t be faulted for assuming that! Why? Because after my experience with oob’s collective, production team, and volunteers the vast majority of whom were white, I couldn’t have imagined that another Black woman could have existed and survived with her radicalism and dignity intact for long in such an oppressive space. In fact, I remember feeling that if a Black woman was on the collective in the past her mark was definitely not made or it evaporated as soon as she left. Boiled out is more like it. The default mode of oob is white women = all women. So any challenges in the past would have been purged by oob’s larger more righteous mission which is white supremacist feminism.

There’s no way for me to know how many other Black women and other women of color have been on the collective of off our backs. And I’m sure oob is not to about to say because I doubt the numbers are impressive. (But, hey, oob members: prove me wrong—tell me, how many Black women have worked with the collective as members? And how long did each of them last there? What are their names? May I contact them to compare notes? If not, why? What have you got to hide?)

But what I do know is that the majority of the women listed in the masthead for the collective have always been predominantly white. There’s nothing “radical” about tokenizing and cherry-picking women of color who won’t rock the boat of white supremacist feminism. That’s not radicalism; it’s racism. In forty years in DC even a handful of Black women in non-leadership roles is a pathetic representation of diversity or radicalism if oob is really about overthrowing the dominant white supremacist capitalist patriarchal paradigm!

Oob is overwhelmingly white in a city known for its anti-establishment organizing and community-building by POC. This includes a bookstore called SisterSpace and Books on U Street NW, the operators, a black lesbian couple were evicted from that space due to the gentrification of the neighborhood. What is the history of oob’s solidarity with SisterSpace and Books and other WOC-run organizations in DC? This is an open question to the oob collective for whom sisterhood is so valued in statement. The question is, is this value also evidenced in their forty years of presence in a Black-majority city where Black women outnumber white women? Is it reasonable to assume that over forty years some significant sisterly bonds would be made by the white women of oob to their Black DC sisters?

I had actually asked Karla Mantilla directly that question related SisterSpace and she seemed uncomfortably dismissive of them stating that she had tried to reach out but they never seemed interested.

In the collective, currently, there is only one woman of color and the white women who comprise the majority are just fine to put her out there as “the representative” of the collective, who, along with some mysterious white stranger named “Theresa,” is going after me. Yet more white supremacist racism on their part. If they are so sure the fault is with me, why not take up that matter as white women, with recognizable names? Why welcome the only WOC to speak for them? She can speak for herself. Why can’t they?

The collective that exists today sleeps just fine because no matter who they betray or who they harm they are still white and one thing white supremacist feminists and the white men’s ways of being they claim to rebuke can agree on is that white is always right. The white sisters want you to know they won’t be like their white male oppressors, even while they employ the same tactics. And who benefits from that arrangement? Certainly not WOC and radical feminist efforts to dismantle white and male supremacy.

Their behavior of late reminds me of how the US government tells its citizens that in times of war or in times in which the nation faces what it perceives to be the imminent threat of terrorism all claims to operating out of some global standard of human rights policies are off. Instead torture, wiretapping, and infringing on the civil liberties of everyday Americans becomes a justifiable and righteous cause to ensure the nation’s safety. So-called “radical” white supremacist feminists like those who stand in solidarity with the oob collective also believe that freezing out a lone Black female member of the collective, allowing her to at least perceive a racial dynamic that is hurtful and oppressive to her is not more a contradiction to the politics of sisterhood than racial and religious profiling of American citizens is to democracy!

I’m not arguing that a small group of white “radical” feminists operate with the nearly same level of power as the US government. Far from it. Feminism in general has almost no voice in the media, and when it does it has a white and liberal not radical face. What I am arguing is that when an oppressor’s cause becomes so self-righteous that it needs to call up its mythic symbolism of unity against an enemy, its claim to being humane is trumped by the actual practices employed. In this case, it’s not white America that is seen as being under threat by POC nationally and globally. (How things really are!)

Instead we see an example in which some white women strengthen their sisterly supremacist bond by freezing out “the other,” the lone Black woman, the ‘guerilla in their midst.’ Or, as white supremacist “radical” feminist Kate Guntermann phrased it, “Blackzilla” in an exchange I had with her on Facebook. She used this term, seriously, to me, to refer to Black women who she believes choose race over gender by siding with sexist Black men rather than bonding with racist white women.

It should be noted here that my exchange with Kate Guntermann was what compelled me to set the record straight with my “radical” white feminist sisters. Please don’t get it twisted: my radical feminism as a Black woman is not to be used as an invitation for white feminists to appropriate my feelings of betrayal by misogynistic Black men into their agenda of dismissing their white privilege!

When I was initially invited into the collective, most of my writing was directed at Black male chauvinism, misogynistic hip hop, and street sexual harassment by men. None of these issues indicted white women on any level. So upon reflection the only thing that might explain the collective’s swift disdain for me might have something to do with the way my criticism had recently turned towards white women’s racism. I am left to wonder: was my critique getting too close to their privileged comfort?

For Guntermann and for other white racist feminists, a “Blackzilla” is a bully to white women, a Black woman who, somehow, against all systemic odds, has power over white women to control and manipulate them—to make white women behave the way we want them to behave. Right. If Black women had that kind of power white supremacist feminism would be a thing of the past! This allegation of “the overwhelming power of the oppressed” is the raced version of men’s rights fools claiming that “women have so much power over us!” But trying to get white women to see that? Black women don’t even have THAT power!

What we as women of color have in the U.S. is the ability to be targeted for abuse by three groups: white men, men of color, and white women. But to hear those groups talk, you’d think women of color have all the power in the world! This essay should demonstrate that white women clearly have power over women of color, and a story I tell later will demonstrate how Black women are the targets of Black men. (That women of color suffer the evils of white men globally hopefully doesn’t even need to be argued.)

When such strategies of political distortion are employed, whether by the U.S. government or the oob collective, those with greater structural power remain mired in their corruption and mechanisms of denial. Such governments or groups also maintain the oppressive myth that they are inherently good, and all those they target are inherently evil. So whether it’s the Muslim world, the nation of Iraq, or a lone Black woman, we become the enemy that will use any and all strategies to destroy white and male supremacist power that, despite the paranoid fears of the oppressor and the wishes of the oppressed, just won’t go away. In the case of oob and its white supremacist defenders, they can actually believe they are waging the good fight against a demonic enemy. What doesn't seem to factor into their distorted mindset is that, at the end of each day, they still hold the power, not "the evil enemy."

Whether you believe in the idea of democracy or in the idea of sisterhood the shock and hurt is the same when you find yourself mistaken for that enemy. Cast into the chilly waters of exclusion is any claim by the oppressor group that it is behaving ethically, morally, and with the greater good in mind. One’s color and religion, if not dominant, are seen as suspect, or worse. And one of the weapons the oppressors have is that they can disparage and demean any who would speak out against them. My silence then becomes a form of complicity with their ability to function oppressively. And so my silences are now broken for the sisterhood that is not so pale and tied to white male supremacy in ways white feminists generally refuse to own and be accountable to.

In mid February of this year I responded to an email sent out by Karla Mantilla of off our backs magazine to a small group of radical feminists that she was reaching out to on behalf of the collective in order to get the news journal up and running again:

I'm e-mailing you specifically along with others because I know you are a committed radical feminist. We would like to keep this institution as a resource available for radical feminist thought, especially at a time when radical feminism has so very few resources.


I immediately wrote back and began to attend weekly meetings. I also volunteered at their office.

In April I accepted their invitation to join the oob collective.

Working with off our backs fulfilled a need I had at the time which was to connect with other likeminded women who I didn’t have to explain, defend, or apologize to for my radical feminist position on most things.

But the thing about being Black in predominantly white spaces like “radical” feminist spaces tends to be is that if you’d been invited, you’re conditioned to feel grateful and want to work towards earning that position. That means you give white people around you the benefit of the doubt and stop listening to your gut in favor of fitting in. This was a vulnerable period in my life where genuine radical feminist sisterhood would have been a really great thing to have.

Laurel Long is a white Goucher student who worked as a summer intern at the oob office. When I found out I’d be working with her as a volunteer I added her to my buddy list on google mail. Her very first words to me about the photo of myself I had up as my chat avatar was, “Wow! You look like Angela Davis!” As anyone who isn’t white supremacist and who knows me can attest, I look NOTHING like Angela Davis! But I guess to someone like Laurel all Black women look alike. She wasn’t referring to anything having to do with our ways of being in the world. She was speaking solely about my appearance and how I apparently would be mistaken anywhere for Angela’s daughter.

I only wish I had told her she looked like Mary Daly!

Later on when news that one of the summer interns they hired was Black, Laurel mentioned to her in the interview that because I was there, “she wouldn’t the only Black person.” (Did she mean there might be someone else there who took white supremacy seriously as a divisive force among women?) Laurel would also say things to me like, “Right on sister!” or “You go, girl!” which Karla overheard. As the only Black female in this circle hearing that kind of racist misogyny from a white woman as ignorant of race privilege as Laurel was, the woman who’d earlier told me I looked like Angela Davis, I was deeply offended, hurt, angered, and turned off.

But not wanting believe that her comments were a reflection of anything but ignorance not racism I kept my mouth shut.

I always sensed a strange uneasiness from Karla towards me. It was as if her mouth was saying words her body language betrayed. She admired my “fire,” my writing, and my dedication to helping them out with the publication yet I always felt like she was still suspicious about my motivations. We could chalk this up to my own insecurities born of living as a Black woman in a white man’s world, but then again, I was allowed passage into the inner sanctum of the collective only after being asked about the possibility of me having “ulterior motives.”

Because white “radical” feminists feel like they have no female or male masters, unlike Black women who apparently feel terminally bonded with Black men through our share racial oppression, they believe they can do feminism better, with fewer distractions, like caring for our men, as if white women don’t do that also—whether it be their father, brother, husband, boyfriend, or son! I suspect that her uneasiness with me was her trying to make herself believe that I was indeed a committed radical feminist and not some sex-positive Black Nationalist who was trying to overthrow the paper and turn it into the African Sister’s Collective for Promoting Pornography as Sexual Liberation!

With another white collective member, Melissa Rodgers, I always got the feeling she was one of those race-privileged females that looks down on Black women because we have the “burden of race” like it’s a disease or something--a disease that makes feminism not sink in enough for us to be radical and real like white women who by representing the purity of all women again do feminism better. As if white women aren’t raced! As if white feminists’ politics aren’t hampered by their racial allegiances!

During my time there I never failed to hear some variation on the complaint from these white women that racism is taken more seriously than sexism. I remember Melissa Rodgers always complaining about the sexism at her workplace. One day she just broke down and said what I’d always suspected she’s been dying to say about her office in front of me: that the socially oppressive hierarchy was based on age and gender not race! Men, minorities, older people above women. She said it in that defiant way that white “radical” feminists do when they’ve gathered the “courage” (please note sarcasm) to admit publically that they are more oppressed than even Black people—male or female! As if denying your white privilege becomes anything less than racism simply because you call yourself a feminist? In fact, far too many white feminists are known for saying “That’s absurd! I just cannot be both a feminist AND a racist!” Right. And white gay men can’t be misogynistic because they’re gay. And Black men can’t be oppressive because they’re Black in America. I’m here to tell you that you can indeed be both! There’s actually no way around it. If you’re white, you’re imbued with the power to be oppressive whether you like it or not, whether you own it or not, and whether or not you’re also anti-racist. When white feminist activists play that I’m not racist—I can’t be” card, they ought to be called out as practicing white supremacist feminism or white supremacist female self-aggrandizement!

Barbara smith writes:

The reason racism is a feminist issue is easily explained by the inherent definition of feminism. Feminism is the political theory and practice to free all women: women of color, working class women, poor women, physically challenged women, lesbians, old women, as well as white economically privileged heterosexual women. Anything less than this is not feminism but merely female self- aggrandizement.

Melisa always talked as if she was being persecuted for being a young (white) woman. I wonder where Melissa would position a Black woman—of any age—in her office on this hierarchy since “women” were at the bottom? Of course it never occurred to her to ask the people of color in her office how they felt. I wanted to state to her the obvious when she first made this comment, that of course she felt the most oppressed because he hadn’t bothered to ask anyone else how they felt! And her belief that she could speak on behalf of women and position herself beneath all other oppressed groups in her work environment was just a reflection of her white skin privilege.

How typical. When she made this particularly offensive analysis I said nothing, although Karla looked at me uncomfortably. Would the angry Black woman show her fangs now? Nope, not yet! And if you’re wondering if I’m projecting my own concerns onto Karla, I ask you: What stopped her from calling out Melissa on her racist ridiculousness!?

But as the youngest member of the collective, Melissa’s racism will unfortunately insure that white supremacist feminism continues to reference the experiences of white women as “women’s experience.”

In fact, I think my passivity in the face of this tense energy and offensive commentary from the women at oob came from the fact that I was often just very angry at Black men. If I was harassed on the street on the way to their office, by the time I got there I wanted sanctuary. I wanted a place where I could talk about how much I hated how men behave and be understood. If that meant I’d have to bite my tongue in the face off glaring racist ignorance so be it. That is but one example of how a woman of color working within a white-dominant, white-majority space has a silencing effect on her. To any white feminist reading this: just translate—you work in a male-dominated, male-majority work space. Is there anything intimidating about that? Would you blame your white sisters if they just shut up in the face of those men’s chronic and unexamined sexism? Would you have the energy to do it each and every time? Might you decide to just let it ride, so you can get your paycheck and hopefully not have to put up with yet another male jerk at home?

I wasn’t aware or always conscious of how much it took out of me to only be allowed to bring part of who I am into to oob’s space without hurting one of my poor, well-intentioned white feminist sisters’ feelings.

Then one day I had a falling out at Facebook with a white woman for whom the term “white supremacist feminism” must have been coined. I had an oob meeting that very night. But I cancelled. I just didn’t want to be around white women. I needed a break. Especially around white women that I knew might not get it. And I didn’t want my “angry Black woman” or my inner Blackzilla to come out. Not just yet!

A list-serve for the oob production team was started so that the women on board to produce the next issue could communicate. Legendary white "radical" feminist blogger Cheryl Seelhoff aka "Heart", who didn’t even live in DC, was put in charge of assigning tasks and developing a theme and structure for the next issue.

Our goal was for the next issue to go out in June 2009.

In mid April, after the articles for the next issue were written and sent off to Cheryl, she disappeared.

When the production team members began to write in to the list wondering what the status of the issue was Cheryl finally responded by saying that she was going through a very painful and difficult family situation.

Within 24 hours Karla Mantilla and the other white women on the list immediately responded with supportive words of understanding and sisterhood. And compassion and outreach was indeed what should have been provided to Cheryl, given her life circumstances. I have no critique at all of the level of contact white women gave to Cheryl. It was the sisterly thing to do.

The concern for Cheryl’s situation and feelings coupled with a desire not to appear dismissive or cold meant that the June deadline for the issue’s release and arrival in subscribers’ mailboxes, like we’d promised, came and went. It wasn’t until late July that anyone finally moved to do anything about getting the issue going again.

Then in late June there was the crash of the Red Line train on the DC Metro System. As some of you know I later realized I missed being on that train by only a few minutes when I decided to cross the platform to head in the opposite direction. Tragically, the life partner of an oob collective member, Carol Anne Douglas, was on that train and died from the crash. It was announced on the production team list serve. Everyone expressed their shock, sadness, and sympathy. The oob collective sent flowers. I posted the tragedy as my Facebook status and asked everyone who believed in feminism to please send along their words of sisterhood towards this woman who had committed her life towards women’s liberation.

In mid-July the list started to rumble again with team members wondering what if anything we were going to do about that next issue? Cheryl still had all of the articles that had been written for the issue and we were still waiting on her to tell us what to do next.

Once we realized that she would not soon be unburdened by the difficulties of her family problems, and that it was unrealistic to expect her to continue to take on responsibility for the release of the next issue under those circumstances, the DC collective members got up the courage to write Cheryl a letter notifying that we’d be taking over the reins of the issue from this point forward until she was in a less stressful place and could once again join the team.

The white women in the oob collective handled the very delicate situation of having to notify Cheryl that she’d no longer be in charge in a very considerate way. They behaved exactly as you’d hope a group of feminist women would behave. The ideal of sisterhood was alive when Cheryl was having a hard time. They demonstrated care, concern, and compassion. They had such a deep concern for her feelings that it even took us a while to agree to ask her to let us take over even though her paralysis, though justified, was holding us up and keeping the subscribers waiting for an issue they were promised. I admired the sisterhood that this care reflected and I was encouraged by the realization that I too might be able and allowed to seek some support from these women if I ever went through anything terribly challenging.

However, I must admit that by this time I was personally running out of steam for oob. I had still been attending meetings when we had them and was volunteering to help with office tasks. But I was busy working on my own writing and working two jobs. I was watching my blog take off and feeling as if there was a community of radical Black women out there at least online who I could bring all of myself to, at least virtually. My blog was becoming a clearing house for Black women telling their stories of street harassment and other harsh realities of our lives—as Black women—and part of me was relieved to know that I could be angry and fully present when I expressed myself through my blog. No need to bite my tongue because I was dealing with white women for whom “race” was an obstacle to sisterhood not a reality they had to be concerned with as if their lives depended on it.

In addition, I was often confused about where things had been left off and where exactly they were headed next when it came to oob. Communication was always through email, or happened at the next meetings, and those were rarely consistent because of everyone’s busy schedule.

Then on September 10th after working for my primary employer for four years, my supervisor laid me off without warning. (It turned out to be a much larger company downsizing of employees than I had first known: over forty in all were fired.) After being in complete shock for the next 48 hours, on the 12th of September I sent out an emailing to many friends and family, including my allegedly supportive sisters at oob stating:

If you’re receiving this email it’s because you’re someone I just want to inform about the sudden state affairs in my life:

On Thursday September 10th the law firm I worked at for four years and nine months decided to lay off 44 of its employees.

My supervisor called me into his office at around 1pm that afternoon and informed that I would be 1 of the 44.

My position had suddenly and without any warning been eliminated and I no longer had a job.

I sent this email directly to all the members of the oob collective as well as through the production team address.

Only two people responded. And neither of them was from the collective. I felt very hurt at a time when I needed to know people were there for me.

In the state I was in anything would have made me feel better. But the silence of the women I was supposed see as sisters: Laura, Angie, Karla, Melissa, and Jennie was deafening. Only Laurel called. And we chatted online about me losing my job.

Though that exchange with Laurel, she informed me that Karla had just had a birthday party, and I quickly realized I hadn’t been invited. I went back and forth in my mind: of course she has the right to invite only who she wished to be with her on her birthday. And, why didn’t she invite me?

The party issue aside, I knew that Karla was on gmail and was also active on Facebook so I wondered what stopped her and the others reaching out to me. The utter lack of outreach and support left me baffled: what was so different about my situation from that of the white women who were quickly responded to with care?

After four days, I wrote to the production team list again and bcc’ed Karla and the other collective members. I simply asked if the collective would be meeting that week.

No response. From anyone.

Finally, after waiting over a week, I sent the following email to the production team list and collective members. Collective members would have received all emails sent to the production team list as well, so there’s no way the people I addresses this to wouldn’t have gotten it:

I’m not sure what’s going on with oob (magazine or collective) at this point because my emails were met with silence.

I was hoping to be more active with it now as I have free time.

But since certain individuals have suddenly for some mysterious reason decided to become M.I.A, rude, and unresponsive towards me, I’m officially removing myself from the production team and the collective.

as always in struggle,


I expected very little to nothing at this point, but a friend pointed out to me: Why wouldn’t they reach out in concern? Why wouldn’t they want to meet with you to discuss what was going on, at least to learn to do thing differently in the future with someone else? I had no answers. And none were forthcoming.

Again: complete silence. One person from the production team responded a few days later but by then I was beyond baffled. I was angry.

When Cheryl or any of the white women had written into the list about their problems they’d received an immediate wave of sympathy usually with 24 hours from Karla and others.

But I, the only Black female present in the collective was given the silent treatment after informing them of what I thought at least deserved a response: Maybe just a note of sympathy that I had lost my job. Was I really off in having this expectation?

In past I had forwarded some of the sexist-racist hate mail I’d receive on my blog to the production team list and to oob collective members. I never received a response and again this was ok. I was not crying for attention. Not everything deserves a wave of support. Just knowing someone else is reading and relating to what you’re going through is often enough to get you to the next day. But a “sister” (literally!) being laid off in a capitalist not to mention sexist-racist economy is no small matter—at least to any Black woman! Did the collective’s whiteness really prevent them from registering this firing as somehow “not so important a crisis”?

After being laid off, feeling completely shocked, vulnerable, self-doubting, and depressed I reached out to people I had known for months, who I thought would at least reach back with a kind word of encouragement. Instead what I got from my white “radical” feminist sisters was stone-cold silence.

The production team was completely white except for one other woman of color that joined later. The collective was white except for Angie Manzano, before I arrived. The women I saw support one anther were all white. So I guess my sorry Black ass expected too much.

I was freezed out of the collective after I lost my job by a group of white women who’d later go on to label my desire for modest compassion, general encouragement, and ANY acknowledgment of messages sent in the most virulently misogynistic-racist way imaginable. On Facebook they deemed me to be suffering from “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” Really. Talk about using the master’s tools to dismantle women of color’s credibility!

White men came up with these “disorders” always measuring mental health by a delusional standard of how they think they behave: unemotional, non-reactive, calm, rational, reasonable. Tell that to any woman who has had her face broken into pieces by the fist of a man. Tell that to any woman gang-raped by cheering men. Narcissism is probably one of THE defining features of white manhood. But here my white sisters, tokenistically and in an astoundingly white supremacist manner using Angie Manzano as their cover, are identifying me with that very label. How cowardly and patriarchal of them.

I knew for certain that I’d been officially removed by them from the actual collective only when I saw a new Facebook group for oob created and my name not included among the list of collective members. I guess that’s what the oob collective calls consensus when they are dealing with a Black woman. Let me remind the collective and its white supremacist supporters and apologists: Karla and her silent white sisters who collaborated to shun and purge a Black woman from their collective could have contacted me at any point during the whole process. They stood in solidarity and silence, allowing me to wonder what the hell was going on.

The textbook approach to removing a Black woman from a white supremacist feminist group, these tactics may be employed:

1) Freeze her out with silence in her time of personal crisis.

2) Ignore her charge that the dynamics of racial exclusion are at work.

3) Gather together in secret to officially remove her from the collective without any notification to her.

4) If there is any other women of color around, make her be the front person for what white people do all the time: purge POC from their supposedly elite circles.

5) If need be to reinforce your own delusions that all Black people are dangerous, change the locks—you never know what an angry Black person might do! While whites steal global resources desperately needed by people of color, some Black person may decide to rob a white person on the street or burglarize their home. And we all know the latter is a far more serious offense than the former! Black folks get harassed for walking around in stores too long. Whites commit genocide and are awarded badges of honor.

6) Finally, be sure to mischaracterize her in ways white men have done to women of all colors for centuries: call her reactive and imbalanced at least, and psychotic and dangerous at most. But, to make sure those labels stick, be sure to liberally add in a hefty dose of white men’s misogyny by using their diagnostic terminology to psychoanalyze and label her. Who cares if you aren’t qualified or appropriately educated to pass such defamatory and slanderous, if not also libelous determinations. White is right, after all.

People of color often caution one another about what white people are capable of, and how the white supremacist bond is one of the hardest to break. (Not that you’ll hear any group of white feminists state that truth!) How dare I as a Black woman expect from them what they gave so freely to each other? How uppity and “irrational” of me to think that after the time and energy I put into the magazine (obviously enough to be invited on board as a member of the collective!) I’d deserve to hear at the very least a small peep from them when I wrote to them that I’d lost my primary means of financial support?

How dare a woman of color make the determination that her white sisters are still so dangerously bonded with the race privileges and entitlements of their white brothers. (And they think women of color are too attached to our men!) What else can we call these members of oob other than white supremacist feminists?

As a Black female member of the very white collective I was made to feel so devalued and unworthy of basic human consideration when I reached out for support. Given that gross lack of compassion, I felt compelled to walk away from a circle of women who enjoy throwing around the word “sisterhood” like confetti at a children’s birthday party. I was allowed to walk away as if my presence and then my non-presence were equally valueless to them.


White feminists of all persuasions would call it sexism if a woman felt forced to leave a space because her experience was devalued by men. White feminists would condemn any male-dominated institution for not trying hard enough to retain a lone woman’s voice, her energy, and her place there. But the white women of oob (and their defenders) are held to a different standard of social accountability to a “minority” simply because they call themselves feminists.

Although oob markets itself as being one of the last beacons of true sisterhood and radical feminist resistance please don’t be fooled. What they clearly stand for is the maintenance of a white supremacist sisterhood, one that would and did unceremoniously cut off a Black woman invited into the collective. And they did this after she was without primary employment. They will tell you that they care so very much about “those women in pornography and prostitution” but do they give a fuck about the conditions which give rise to women of color ending up there? Apparently not. So maybe if I get a job as a stripper, or a street prostitute, then maybe they’ll recognize me as “a sister worth fighting for.” Maybe. I wouldn’t count on it. Because their analyses of women of color in the racist-classist sexism industries is far from advanced, is often condescending, and doesn’t comprehend of oppression in terms of gender, sexuality, class, AND race.

By what measure can any feminist call such mistreatment of a human being “radically” feminist? It is not only far from radical, it completely conforms to white female middle class notions of what constitutes a real crisis worthy of attention: for white women it’s emotional “triggering” or rape. But for the vast majority of Black women like myself who come from a working class background, losing your job in an uncertain economy is tantamount to a tragedy on the level of both those things. And of course white middle class feminists are scratching their heads in confusion: how can you even compare them?!? Guess what? I just did.

What leads a Black woman into conditions where sexual violence, gross exploitation, racist abuse, and men’s entertainment are all synonymous with one another? What are the options available to women who are unemployed and who do not have family money to fall back on for support during the rough patches? What are the options for women scorned because of their disenfranchisement due to class, sex, and race, who are also seen as only sex objects for men’s use and when those men are white, we are also seen as worthy of white class-privileged women’s contempt? What else leads a person down the path towards commercialized rape otherwise known in sex pozi circles as sex work but amounts to a whole lot of desperation and degradation? These oh-so-caring white women of the forty year old collective called off our backs cared to know nothing of my situation or access to resources because I was what: dangerous, narcissistic, not appropriately deferential in my view of things, therefore willing to call out white women in status updates on my Facebook page?

Even as I admit to still being stunned and confused, I’m also angry. Extremely
angry. To the white women of oob: that’s an appropriate response to how you’ve mistreated me; there’s nothing irrational or narcissistic about it. Sorry to burst your privileged bubble.

I now realize that contrary to how oob markets itself to garner support from its largely white female base the publication isn’t in crisis mode only because the world is afraid of radical feminist politics. Virulent antifeminism is only part of it. Oob is also in a crisis because of egos, hypocrisy, and the fact that its direction continues to be backwards not forward, exclusive and paranoid instead of welcoming, transparent, and accountable to the community of women it should be serving—such as, say, the community of women in the city which it calls home. The community of women oob has been and remains accountable to is overwhelmingly white, defiantly self-righteous in their racism and adamancy that “Patriarchy [alone] is the problem.” One could conclude that while this writing may empower other women of color, white women will continue “not to get it” and find ways to go after the messenger, rather than deal with the message. I’d say we can expect more racist ridiculousness on the part of the white women who are supporting oob.


Even if this account falls on some ears made resistant to listening by race privilege, I’ve still told my side of this very sad story. Writing is fighting for me and the good white women of oob (and their defenders) should have known better than to think that I wouldn’t fight back!