CodeApology: #CodePink Apologizes for “Insensitivity” to “Women of Color”

[freshwest]

9. Their suddenly realizing the wrong of white women schooling black women is at least 40 years late.

I joined NOW in the early seventies. It was mainly middle class men and women. We attended open meetings, most usually in homes. After a span of time, i lost interest and got into more fruitful organizations.

When women of color, gays, socialists and others wanted to form coalitions, they soon, at least in my area, withdrew their support. Back then the concerns were about equal pay for equal work, as with the changes coming that lowered wages for men and required women to work outside the home and be independent.

For a while, for some, that was enough progress. And it did help all women, up to a point. The white women in the NOW groups I knew were more concerned with the glass ceiling in the executive suite. They worked on that and it served middle class women well to get into the upper middle class or management or what have you.

They seemed, in my area, to not want to delve into issues of women of color, those that had been abused, or grew up in poverty, or emigrants, or did not have good educations, but needed the help of unions and other coalitions to help make their lives better. They did not associate with our class.

What happened with NOW later, I don't know. But there were arguments even then as to how white women did not share the same problems as women of color. They didn't want to embrace the larger pictures of racism and being discriminated against.

That is not to say that the fruits of feminists did not benefit women, they did and many women of color benefitted. But another thing happened that is more disturbing. By the late seventies a back lash to all civil rights was building, some from white men, and other traditional liberal groups. They felt they were being squeezed out of employment by less qualified POC and women, too, to be fair. These people voted for Reagan to maintain the status quo many of fought against and that affected POC and women of color greatly. The rest is history.

Black women and the other women of color were in many instances treated brutally and simply ignored historically. They had no help from groups of white women who only saw the gender issues, not race. There was a loss of solidarity, it was getting uncomfortable.

Race was always a larger issue for women of color. They were doubly discriminated against. It was well known. For CODE PINK to be clueless about this and act as if they didn't know, shows an elitism that they are in denial about.

The charges they make against a black president, like it or not, cannot be percieved as if we are in a 'post-racial' world. At one time I had a high opinion of them, during the Bush era. Although they didn't really change anything then, either.

They didn't encourage the real change that happens at the ballot box. It took the people who they were separated from, the ones that NEVER get media coverage, to make it happen. It is those people, who do not make celebrity status, that are most in need of hope and change, it's no joke to them.

It's easy to criticize and shred everything that someone does when you have the luxury of being able to stand aside and find fault. At this point in history, many of us cannot indulge ourselves with the self-righteousness we are having to listen to spouted so often.

We have to change the basics of life or die. Small things to some, who are not in need - food, housing, health care and education for our children that will enable them to survive. Things the middle class takes for granted or screams bloody murder about when they see it slipping through their hands - and they should, they do not want to join the masses who have been caught in poverty for generations.

CODE PINK has not saved any lives, anymore than their friend Rand Paul has. I know the lives that Barack and Michelle have or will save mean nothing to the media, and not much unless they can use them, to professional agiators like Medea Benjamin.

So that's where I fall in this, on the side of humanity that does not have a voice. But we aren't going to lay down and die. And we won't forget when someone spits in our face.