Reading: Lugones on 'infantilization of judgment'

White feminists and queers, listen:

“Infantilization of judgment is a dulling of the ability to read critically, and with maturity of judgment, those texts and situations in which race and ethnicity are salient. It appears to me as a flight into a state in which one cannot be critical or responsible: a flight into those characteristics of childhood that excuse ignorance and confusion, and that appeal to authority. If the description “child” is an appropriate description of white/Anglas in the context of racism and ethnocentrism, then to ascribe responsibility to them for the understanding and undoing of these phenomena is inappropriate. If a child, the white/Angla can be guilty of racism and ethnocentrism innocently, unmarked and untouched in her goodness, confused with good reason, a passive learner because she cannot exercise her judgment with maturity. But, of course, she is not a child. She is an ethnocentric racist.

Infantilization of judgment is a form of ethnocentric racism precisely because it is a self-indulgent denial of one’s understanding of one’s culture and its expressing racism... In infantilization of judgment, the racist attempts to hide that she understands racism as a participant.”
 

 

- María Lugones, "Hablanda Cara a Cara/Speaking Face to Face: An Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism" in Pilgrimages / Peregrinajes: Theorizing  Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (2003)

Reading: Razia Aziz on 'white feminism'

I don't know how many times I have quoted this but it remains as relevant as ever.

“In attempting to shift the ground of feminist discourse, the adversary has at times appeared to be white feminists but is in fact, I would venture, white feminism – by which I expressly do not mean any feminism espoused by white feminists. I refer, rather, to any feminism which comes from a white perspective, and universalizes it.

I do not propose that white feminism is a clearly defined, coherent and internally consistent body of thought that feeds off conscious racist intentions. It is, rather, a way of seeing which, however inadvertent, leaves identifiable traces. It subsists through a failure to consider both the wider social and political context of power in which feminist utterances and actions take place, and the ability of feminism to influence that context.”

- Razia Aziz, "Feminism and the challenge of racism: Deviance or difference?", in Black British Feminism: A Reader (ed. by Heidi Safia Mirza, 1997)