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A seed can both be launched from a slingshot and planted in the Earth. Like wilderness quietly blots out the traces of man, women of color organizing, can outgrow oppression and turn the three pillars of white supremacy into a new growth forest.
Client: Killjoy Prophets: a new collective that shifts hetero-patriarchal Christianity into women of color feminism – founded by asian-american activist, Suey Park.
Concept is based on this article: Hetero-patriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy (Rethinking Women of Color Organizing) by Andrea Smith. See below for an excerpt from that article.
DETAIL AND PROCESS:
The following is the conclusion from Hetero-patriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy (Rethinking Women of Color Organizing) by Andrea Smith:
Women of color-centered organizing points to the centrality of gender politics within antiracist, anticolonial struggles. Unfortunately, in our efforts to organize against white, Christian America, racial justice struggles often articulate an equally heteropatriarchal racial nationalism. This model of organizing either hopes to assimilate into white America, or to replicate it within an equally hierarchical and oppressive racial nationalism in which the elites of the community rule everyone else.
Such struggles often call on the importance of preserving the “Black family” or the “Native family” as the bulwark of this nationalist project, the family being conceived of in capitalist and heteropatriarchal terms. The response is often increased homophobia, with lesbian and gay community members construed as “threats” to the family. But, perhaps we should challenge the “concept” and of the family itself. Perhaps, instead, we can reconstitute alternative ways of living together in which “families” are not seen as islands on their own. Certainly, indigenous communities were not ordered on the basis of a nuclear family structure is the result of colonialism, not the antidote to it.
In proposing this model, I am speaking from my particular position in indigenous struggles. .Other peoples might flesh out these logics more fully from different vantage points. Others might also argue that there are other logics of white supremacy are missing. Still others might complicate how they relate to each other. But I see this as a starting point for women of color organizers that will allow us to reenvision a politics of solidarity that goes beyond multiculturalism, and develop more complicated strategies that can really transform the political and economic status quo.
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