I’m always leary of white women who want to co-opt everything for themselves. Can’t black/women of color have something that JUST belongs to us? Why would you want to be identified as womanists? You don’t understand the culture and interior of black women’s lives enough to take ownership of the term “womanist.” Be okay with feminist and let womanist be for BLACK feminists or women of color.

And what needs to happen to get the rest of the world to catch up is the eternal activist’s conundrum.

I don’t think feminist should be abandoned in an effort to make others feel included, at some point labels are just that, but I want to see real action and alternatives on how women of color and poor women are incorporated into larger feminist aims and progress. I just feel like everyone recognizes/can speak the “language” (class! race!queer! able bodied!)but no one is doing much to have a damn conversation.

In my funky metaphor, womanist is there, a dialect–familiar but different enough that some translating needs to occur on both sides. What happens during and after that conversation I don’t know. I’ve seen plenty of lively discussion where feminists/womanists “get it” but what needs to happen to get the rest of the world to catch up?

/rambling. I’ve just sort of been off put lately by the way that WOC and poor women (and to some extent men) seem to be marched out when a point needs to be proven or to demonstrate awareness and then promptly ignored when we make too much noise.

Whether or not feminism needs a new word in order to rebrand itself (away from feminist=hairy-legged lesbians) is another issue that this has made me wonder about. (Should we need to? No. Might it help? Unclear.) Then my brain went to the whole Catholic church Buddy Jesus part of “Dogma”… and then to the idea of “Individuals who would like to disassemble the patriarchy”, but that’s a little long.