Monday, December 23, 2013

Things are looking up for 2014

Yesterday it was the good news that more and more people are realizing what a bad movie Love Actually is.

Today I see that black bloggers have called out that unethical journalist and all-around shameless bomb-throwing attention-monger Mikki Kendall. Things are looking up for the new year.

Readers of this blog will know that I have a personal issue with Mikki Kendall - when I got into an online argument with some who claimed John Lennon and Yoko Ono were racists, Kendall used the search engine - link aggregation power of her karnythia Tumblr account to brand me as a "racist" in Internet search results.

I've never been a racist, I oppose racism, I think the concept of race itself, while a handy tool used to oppress various ethnic groups by the powers-that-be, is actually scientifically invalid. Not to mention that we are all ultimately out of Africa, and in the United States especially, the idea of racial purity is a joke. Plenty of people thought to be "white" in the United States have black ancestors, and even more people thought to be "black" in the United States have white ancestors, thanks to the access that white slaver-rapists had to black slave women.

Finally, I believe that to a much greater extent than most Americans are aware or are willing to admit, black people built the United States, and jazz and rock and roll are only two of the most recent gifts given to the culture by a group of people who were treated like absolute shit for most of US history. I'd be fully in favor of some kind of tax credit for African Americans to acknowledge this reality.

None of my beliefs matters to an extremist professional hater like Mikki Kendall though. And smearing me is such an easy, satisfying thing to do.

But the personality that is petty and vicious enough to smear people without knowing anything about them will show itself in many other ways: I've already mentioned Kendall claiming in Salon that some anonymous doctor was out to get her for wanting a legal abortion. And after Amanda Marcotte defended Kendall against criticism, Kendall turned around and attacked Marcotte.

And then there was her ethnicity/gender-based hate-a-thon on Twitter. I was pleased to see that in spite of Nation writer Auro Bogado and Guardian writer Chitra Nagarajan joining the mindless, ethnic/gender-based scape-goating madness there are others who didn't participate in the Kendall-generated hysteria.

The Blogmother of What About Our Daughters has a nice take-down of Kendall:
I was on blogcation when the whole #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag broke out. #ThankYouLAWD! For those who missed the earlier uprising, the hashtag was basically a laundry list of grievances Black feminists have against White feminists. The grievances range from the substantive to the petty - real and imagined. 
Well apparently NOW/Feministing/ the NSA/Who Cares At This Point  hosted a panel and they discussed #solidarityisforwhitewomen...
She posts Tweets from Kendall complaining about other people using "her" hashtag.
So apparently you can't discuss a hashtag on Twitter unless the creator of the hashtag is present and approves. And I'm being facetious here folks- this is far deeper than the hashtag, but instead of addressing the underlying grievances, we're fighting over a hashtag... 
...Marginalized Black women don't give a rip about a bunch of privileged BLACK and WHITE women fighting over a hashtag. And if you want to scream "we're not privleged," I don't believe you. I know two things about you right now A) you have an internet connection and B) you can read. You're privleged... 
...The hashtag creator isn't writing a book because it would be controversial and she thinks it wouldn't sell. #GurlStop! #You'reNotSerious 



Kendall then responded to the blog entry and Blogmother shot back in the fed-up and exasperated tone that any sane person eventually develops towards Kendall and her self-aggrandizing stunts:
Maam. You have ridiculous sense of ENTITLEMENT. And are seriously detached from reality. In SEVEN years of blogging- I have never gotten pre-clearance to blog about whatever-in-the-hell I want to blog about. And I'm not going to ask permission from you NOW! Get a grip! Your supporters are cheering you right over a cliff. #YouDontWantNONEofThis. Go back to whining to feministing. 
Thank you, Blogmother!

Apparently one of Kendall's followers, who are as rabid as Kendall herself, threatened Blogmother for daring to call Kendall out:
Well my Halloween was made even scarier this year because a hood feminist ( his words not mine) has declared that if I don’t stop talking about #solidarityisforwhitewomen something bad is gonna happen to me. 
Here is the tweet he sent to my personal account. He added the “.” in front of my Twitter username intentionally so his Twitter followers would see his threat to me.
So let me see if I have this right. "Hood feminists" have a Black male in their ranks that is running around the internet demanding that Black women be silent... or else. And he’s doing this in their name.
A bit later on she calls Kendall out for her typical disregard for facts and proportion:

*sigh* Your Twitter followers make a public #$*&^ of your hashtag by outright lying about material facts related to the #solidarityisforwhitewomen panel organized by the National Organization for Women (NOW).


  • yes you were invited (albeit in an incredibly TACKY manner on Twitter - NOW should have done a better job in that regard.) - it is not true that you were not invited.
  • yes, NOW acknowledged that the hashtag was your creation- it is not true that they did not give you credit. 
  • No, Feministing.com was not an organizer of the panel - it is not true that Feministing.com was an organizer. 
  • Yes, Feministing.com hosted a discussion about the hashtag on a video chat- there’s no law preventing them from doing so. 
  • No, you never indicated to anyone that you did not want the hashtag discussed online without your prior approval - whether the law requires it or not. - if you wanted a courtesy contact from them, then that should have been made clear. It is not customary online to get pre-clearance to discuss a “hot topic.”
You didn’t make clear that you don’t actually want to be in solidarity with White feminists, you just want to use the hashtag to discuss why you aren’t. You don’t want resolution or reunification, you want to critique the breach. You’ve got people talking about your creation without knowing what it means, and that’s not entirely THEIR fault. If you want to define what it means- then DEFINE IT or someone else will define it for you. 
 I love this blogger - I just donated $10 to the What About Our Daughters blog.