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and then, two months later....

reminder:

8.2. Unsolicited Materials. Netflix does not accept unsolicited materials or ideas for Netflix content and is not responsible for the similarity of any of its content or programming in any media to materials or ideas transmitted to Netflix.

…and you’ll find similar clauses out there for other production entities. They are trying to safeguard themselves. There are people out there who are certain that a hit film or TV series is based on their stolen idea. The easiest way to avoid that is to make sure that their ideas can’t get to you.

Please don’t get this twisted. If you aren’t Black, please do not equivocate and blow this off as some random occurrence. This is not a “one off” occurrence. This is not an “isolated event” that only occasionally happens. This is modern day America, as in right now, today. Yes, it often happens that there ARE organized schemes targeting Black people, but it isn’t always some grand scheme that’s orchestrated or organized by big banks behind the scenes. Sometimes it’s millions of unrelated individuals, exercising their personal biases, acting in racist ways. Whether it’s racism enacted by bank rules, or enacted by racist individuals, this is systemic, structural, endemic racism that blunts Black families from accruing the generational wealth that so many white people take for granted.

Me: I need to go home. There’s a hurricane coming and my basement apartment is on the coast, so I’m worried about my cats. (To myself: And maybe needing to evacuate.)

Boss: Is your house and your cats more important than this job?

Me: YES.

Boss: ...oh. Okay. Uh...see you tomorrow...

Different boss, several years later, a conversation that happened multiple times:

Me: Hey, it’s starting to really snow outside, I live on a steel hill, and I only have 2-wheel drive. If I don’t leave now, I can’t get home.

Boss: Is getting home more important than getting your job done tonight?

Me: Considering I value my life more than I value this paperwork being digitized? YES.

Boss: ....

Me: Bye. See you tomorrow.

Boss: Uh, yeah, okay.

Different atttempt:

Boss: Why don’t you just get a hotel after work?

Me: Do I get a raise so I can afford it?

Boss: No.

[caption: “middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummelling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have]

This is so accurate it’s unreal. British feminism is generally 20 years behind, not just on trans rights but on many things. It’s not a coincidence that the “feminists” writing transphobic nonsense in the Guardian and New Statesman have also made sneering comments about intersectional feminism.

Here’s Helen Lewis in the New Statesman complaining that intersectional ideals demand too much of feminists. And here’s Hadley Freeman in the Guardian complaining that intersectionality leads to too much “feminist infighting.” Julie Bindel deliberately conflates intersectional feminism with liberal feminism, so she can sneer at both. We know Caitlin Moran rightly got pilloried for saying she “doesn’t do race.” Same shit from Zoe Williams.

There’s a lot of good work done by feminist women of colour in the UK - you can read much of it on Media Diversified or gal-dem. You could also follow Guilaine Kinouani or Judith Wanga or Sara Ahmed on Twitter. But these voices are not the predominant voices in British feminism. They’re not getting regular columns in the Guardian or giving takes on BBC news.

Who gets the columns? Helen Lewis. Caitlin Moran. Julie Bindel. Hadley Freeman. Zoe Williams. This post is already too long, so I won’t get into the history of these women when it comes to writing about race, sexuality, disability and religion. I could list pages and pages of shitty things they’ve said. The point is, these are the women who speak for British feminism. These are the women who get top billing.

It’s not good enough. We deserve better. We deserve more working class voices, more diverse LGBTQ voices, disabled voices and women of colour’s voices. We need to amplify them wherever we can, because these white middle class assholes in our newspapers are trying to claim that they’re doing this bullshit for us.