Personal vs Political business : Tokenizing and White Knights

excerpted from mamita mala

Remember when the internet was about personal experiences and tying those into wider, more universal realities?

When I started online many years ago it wasn’t about action alerts and news. It was about my life. It was about me as a single young activist boricua mami feeling mad isolated as I protested, mami’ed, spit poetry and fucked. Yes, I said it fucked. It was how I came into contact with amazing other mamis and eventually how I helped start VivirLatino, which has since blown up to a level that still bugs me out. Like for real, to think I go to national conferences and am on radio shows because so many years ago I started writing about my life is una locura. And I am constantly reminded that the way the internet has changed, shifted from personal to political to careerist and that changes how we deal with one another.

The internet used to be about communication and connection. It was a space that was an extension of real life experiences and where the way we talked with each other mattered. It was why the mami’hood was born, because white “radical” mami spaces had no problem using racial epithets and men had no problem moving their attacks on mujeres to new spaces. Pero now, with people making careers out of blogging, with the blogosphere being about what orgs pays you to parrot their message, suddenly talking about how we interact with other in public is considered divisive and airing dirty laundry and not fucking critical in terms of how we build movements together.

I call bullshit.

I call bullshit porque I have never been good about that line between the personal and political. It has gotten me into trouble, has made me feel unsafe physically, and has led to heartache, and not just my own. Pero if we cannot talk about how we interact with each other personally, how the fuck can we expect to work together to move shit forward in the struggles?

What people don’t realize is that after I was rolled up on with a camera at Netroots Nation, I walked away from the exchange and sobbed and shook. The same way I sobbed and shook at the DNC when who I was twisted into a disgusting sexist/racist stereotype. At NN09 the person who was calling me out said he was criticizing the blogger, not the person in front of him, yet it was body language he imitated in a grotesque way as if my physical being was not the same person who makes the decision to sit in front of this computer everyday, not because I have a boss telling me I have to churn out a certain number of posts or present a certain message pero because it has to fucking be done for me and for others. It’s an ugly, scary place to be in, a space that triggers a legacy of colonization and abuse that is painful.

So when I am told in a caucus, after I raise the point that we need to talk about how we work with other, that bringing up a personal/political attack isn’t appropriate, it feels like I am being beat down. When I am told that my raising a point about how Latino men and women work with each other is divisive in a “Latino” space I wonder where the fuck am I supposed to bring these issues up? When I am told by another Latina that my raising these issues stems from a lack of strength, I am silenced, made invisible and it hurts and enrages.