When Patricia Arquette won her Oscar for her role in the movie "Boyhood" she used her platform to call for wage equality for women.
So far so fantastic.
BUT she also said, "It’s time for....all the men that love women and all the gay people and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”"
- like black people (including black women)
- like latino people (including latino women),
- like asian people (including asian women)
- like gay people (including gay women)
had survived oppression and come out the otherside relatively oppression free(?) in part due to the assistance given by white females-- and now the bill had come due for the rest of us to give back to white women.
Clearly the sentence was awkward and not exactly what she meant to say.And she might have apologized for how it "sounded" as white racial apologies always head off that same cliff.
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| VIDEO KEY for the CALL IN |
But the
it-is-time-for-them (people of color and gays) to give-back-to-us (white women) was as crystal clear as it was heart felt. Gays and people of color were in the not-one-of-us zone. And many a white-woman in the audience did not hear this no matter how many times they replayed this speech.
A book or two or three by black people about white suffragist support of abolition and Ida B Wells' anti-lynching crusade might serve to education everyone on where white female support has been good and where it has been even shakier than it is now.
Until then, only Akilah can use pizza and burgers to call a few of our paler sister's in.
Definition
Calling in -- "A less disposable way of correcting another human being that has made a mistake. Calling people out, is sometimes necessary and correct. But calling-in needs to be in activists repertoire" (paraphrased from BLACKGIRLDANGEROUS.ORG) .
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