Lying White Women

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/wireStory?id=4383753
"Woman's Gang Memoir Is Fake, Recalled"

I have many feelings about this, and all of them are negative. In no particular order:

Stuff like this makes me sick. In the first place, does this woman have no integrity at all? Plagiarism disgusts me. There are so many of us out here, doing real work, busting our asses to be innovative and original, to bring a new perspective, to contribute something to the ongoing dialogue. This hurts all of us. It puts us all into question. And by “us,” I mean writers and researchers in general, of any race, gender or orientation.

Secondly, this angers me as a middle-class, college-educated white woman. Thanks, Margaret, for perpetuating the stereotype that we all want to scramble over the backs of people of color to get rich and famous. We only do community work to make ourselves look good, or to get something out of it materially. We care nothing at all about the real lives of the people we’re supposed to be “helping.” I love being suspect every time I attempt to work in concert with my brothers and sisters of color because of selfish crazy women like you.

This next angers me as a white woman who researches the lives and experiences of people of color. I hate that something like this will continue to cast suspicion on my own work, which, by the way, is valuable. Why do I care to incorporate the experiences of people of color into my research? Because they don’t exist at the moment. Pick up a book about the Rwandan genocide. I’ll bet you that there’s virtually no mention at all of the civil war that created the context for the genocide. No words of the men and women in the north who were victimized by the RPF (the “heroes”). No mention at all of the Tutsi women corralled and kept to be repeatedly raped by the radical Hutu militias. Nothing. We know it happened, but their voices are completely absent from the literature. It is imperative to understand the events from their perspective because they have insights that foreign researchers, and even male researchers, will never have. Their words and voices (literally) are vital to our understanding of what genocide means, what civil war means, what neo-colonialism means.

What Margaret Seltzer did hurts what I do, and what many of my friends do. Will people want to even talk to us anymore, or will they fear that their experiences will be co-opted, yet again, by imperialistic white academics?

This angers me because it plays on our racist mistrust of one another. It is appalling how easily this white woman’s story was believed, how willingly her story of white victimhood by black gang boogeymen was accepted by the publisher. How interested would they be in her story if she was Black? Lesbian? Transgender? What about her “half-Native American” story? Is that true, or is it just another marginalized group she could use to make her life more “interesting?”

And for the record, why is her story so interesting? Why do publishers think that violence and corruption and the destruction of communities is interesting? “Oh, it’s so compelling! This little white foster girl got all caught up in the LA gang wars but was able to get herself out and go to college! Maybe we could make it into a movie with Ellen Page!” What about the countless women who every single day work to keep their families off the streets, keep their children out of poverty, to educate themselves and improve their communities? Isn’t that an interesting story? Wouldn’t that be a compelling memoir?

I hate this. I hate this lying little white woman for making us all look bad. I hate her for perpetuating the stereotype of violent and out-of-control Black communities when, as someone who worked for an anti-gang community organization, she should’ve known better. I hate that she felt the need to make this story about her instead of about the nameless and faceless women of color who live this existence every day. I hate that the publishers didn’t feel the need to fact check because she was this innocent little white girl. I hate that when focusing on this, we turn our attention away from the epidemic of gang violence that is the reality of so many lives in Los Angeles and so many other cities. I hate that I have to feel guilt by association because this woman shares my skin color. I hate that I have to go through another day angry at the blatant racism that permeates our world. And I hate that when I try to do something about it, I’m told that my efforts are futile or irrelevant.