#iaopoc

Indigenous And/Or People of Color. Cover ALL of the bases!

As a poc, the thing about appropriation is—it comes off as shallow at best. Know where your labels come from; everything you want to think defines you in some sort of way or helps you figure out your identity, know where it comes from. Or make it up yourself (in my heart I say, what’s the difference? The princex thing died down when white people found a new term from what I saw and people were like “See? Was that hard?”) There’s a difference between expressing yourself and just wearing a label like a piece of clothing, like it’s your style and not your identity. IAPOCs might be more attuned to this because society is a white-washed binary, which maybe forces us to realize the difference between our cultures and society-at-large? Pretty much any marginalized group of people are more attuned to this, whether white or iapoc. A lot of privileged white people are good about checking their privilege, but iapocs don’t have any privilege to check. We have to check our lack of privilege sometimes, actually. 

For 20 years I had immersed myself in the writings of early United States women's rights activists -- Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) -- yet I could not fathom how they dared to dream their revolutionary dream. Living under the ideological hegemony of nineteenth-century United States, they had no say in government, religion, economics, or social life ("the four-fold oppression" of their lives, Gage and Stanton called it.) Whatever made them think that human harmony -- based on the perfect equality of all people, with women absolute sovereigns of their lives -- was an achievable goal?

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Then I realized I had been skimming over the source of their inspiration without noticing it. My own unconscious white supremacy had kept me from recognizing what these prototypical feminists kept insisting in their writings: They caught a glimpse of the possibility of freedom because they knew women who lived liberated lives, women who had always possessed rights beyond their wildest imagination -- Iroquois women.

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As a feminist historian, I did not at first pay attention to such references to American Indian life because I believed what I had been taught: that Native American women were poor, downtrodden "beasts of burden" (as they were often called in the nineteenth century). I did not know what I was looking for, so of course I could not see it.