FUCK SEAL PRESS
April 9, 2008 at 10:58 pm (blogosphere, feminism, internationalism, white feminism, white woman syndrome, whiteness, women of colour, writing)
I have to say, after the whole Yes Means Yes imbroglio, I swore to myself that I would never ever get involved in another US feminist blogwar. If US women of colour — who clean up after white women, who take care of white women’s kids, who cook white women’s food, who teach white women in schools, etc. etc. — are invisible to white women, then international women of colour must really be off the radar! And I’m okay with that, because there’s not much I need from white North American women, nor do I want to be part of their “feminist” movement, and I’m sure as hell not gonna fight them for it. I have my own battles to fight, and plenty to gain, right here.
[Notice how I've just given up on promising posts that I know I won't deliver on? Blogging is just not my priority lately. This one only appears because it's a very spontaneous response to some web shenanigans.]
But I did get involved. After seeing the asinine behaviour of Brooke Warner and Krista Lyons-Gould, editor and manager of Seal Press (the people who brought you Full Frontal Feminism and Love And Consequences), I made a comment on their blog post about the issue. (In case you didn’t catch it, they were incredibly racist and rude on Blackamazon’s blog.)
Along with other comments made by other women of colour, mine was deleted. Discussion in closed forums revealed tales of others’ deleted comments.
My comment was about the gross double-standards being perpetuated by Brooke and Krista, and the Seal Press “team”. In The World According to Brooke and Krista, only they are allowed to have feelings, and they get to lash out at anyone they want to when their feelings are hurt. They don’t have to face any consequences for lashing out, because they’re more important than everyone, especially women of colour, on account of they own the means of production. Women of colour should be grateful to Brooke and Krista for even condescending to speak to us, because they’re so busy running their press that they have no time to try to work with women of colour, who are basically unpublishable anyway, their books will never sell. Oh, but when they do publish women of colour, they get to use that work to flounce around proclaiming how virtuous and anti-racist they are, because clearly women of colour are choosing to work for them and not those other white people over there.
Secondly, my point was that they basically got a whole lot of business advice for free in the comment thread on their blog. People were critical, but many came with a genuine spirit of engaging and educating, and gave a lot of professional-quality advice to the Seal editors. I wanted to emphasise that they should at least acknowledge the people who gave them this advice, since appropriating and then taking the credit for the contributions of women of colour tends to be somewhat endemic amongst white feminists. It’s a bit of a hot-button issue right now.
Now, it hardly needs to be pointed out that deleting comments that are critical of you and that put pressure on you to act in a certain way really really doesn’t inspire trust in people who you just insulted. In fact, it might even be called a negative discourse that is engaged by haters.
…
Ohnoes, it looks like only white women can affect the precise level of whiny melodrama that it would take to make assertions like that. I’ll have to settle for actual critique. 
In that vein, I’m going to invite anyone who’s had their comment deleted to post it here. Say what you think about Seal Press!
Me, personally, in the spirit of skewering double standards, I’m gonna settle for the immortal words of Blackamazon: Fuck Seal Press. You just made yourselves irrelevant.
I have a feeling that if the irrelevant feminists are the ones getting book deals, then pretty soon all the feminists doing groundbreaking work will stop paying attention to what gets published in books and start looking at other media that feminists have used to express themselves. I mean, that’s what feminist historiography has done — find women outside the malestream and analyse their strategies for survival, growth, change and challenge. Radical woc internationalism may have a ways go, but compared to this crap we’re basically on fire.
Edited to add: And in the spirit of acknowledging your sources, I want to quote Jessica Hoffmann’s An Open Letter to White Feminists:
[The] dominant, white-led feminist movement is consistently unresponsive to the grassroots while it works within and strengthens the very structures that violently maintain social hierarchies.[...]
In the summer and fall of 2007, I found myself invited to participate in a slew of meetings and conference calls organized by small, new majority-white “feminist” groups around the United States; over and over again, members wondered earnestly how they could draw more women of color to participate in their projects. Around the same time, I read and heard a whole lot of white feminist media makers explaining that “we” need to show young women “why feminism matters.” Sometimes I asked them why, in the face of a series of egregious, in some cases highly publicized examples of state violence against marginalized people (e.g., Jena 6 and the New Jersey 4), prominent white feminists are MIA in and largely ignorant of the work and analyses of major, often feminist-of-color-led movements against state violence? And, I wondered, what is your feminism for, and why does it matter? Because feminists of color don’t seem to need convincing on that point — they’re engaged in profound, intergenerational, cross-cultural grassroots work that is transforming not only feminist movement but all social-change movements. [emphasis mine]
It’s not just the “haters” saying this. So does it make it easier to digest if a white woman says it?
Aaminah said,
April 9, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Love it.
magniloquence said,
April 10, 2008 at 1:51 am
Yes, exactly.
belledame222 said,
April 10, 2008 at 7:16 am
oh christ, they deleted comments now, too? this just gets better and better, doesn’t it.
Charity said,
April 10, 2008 at 11:12 am
Hi, thank you for writing this, I am not a blogger or anyone of consequence but I had posted at the Seal Press site after seeing the whole debacle at BA’s and my comment was also deleted. (Now the whole blog post seems to be gone, too.) I agree - Seal Press is irrelevant; the blessing for me is that through the other comments I have read, I have found so many REAL activist blogs and feel 1000X more enriched for reading those than any of the “Insta-books” Seal Press is putting out. (That’s a term I believe Chris Clarke coined….giving credit where it’s due!)
Feminist Nation :: Jessica Hoffman: An Open Letter to White Feminists :: April :: 2008 said,
April 10, 2008 at 2:57 pm
[...] below, as I wonder if, as She who Stumbles writes, it’s indeed "easier to digest if a white woman says it". The Letter is for [...]
outfox said,
April 10, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Oh damn, but well put. Irrelevance sells because it reduces feminism to a brand and consumer product: fine for markets, appropriation and waste of opportunity for empowerment goals.
Did you see brownfemipowers’ article in make/shift issue 2 about how WOC can use blogs to network without being hampered by this white drama? Was inspired by her points, congruent to yours here, about how radical awareness raising succeeds outside those media. Now her site seems to be down, hope that’s not related.
WOC ‘Engage best through negative discourse’: Seal Press at Hoyden About Town said,
April 10, 2008 at 10:28 pm
[...] via She Who Stumbles. [...]
So True: "You all engage best through negative discourse" said,
April 11, 2008 at 5:19 pm
[...] were incredibly reasonable when they said the following (note: somehow something in that quotation is supposedly "racist" - I sure as hell don’t see it) "I appreciate the dialogue, ladies. First off, the blog [...]
Chris Clarke said,
April 12, 2008 at 3:15 pm
That’s a Theriomorph coinage, Charity. (I may have appropriated it once or twice without crediting her. My bad.)
The Revolution Will Not Be Published « She who stumbles said,
April 12, 2008 at 11:35 pm
[...] seem lax enough that a pointless provocateur got through when I didn’t. After the Seal Press imbroglio, I’m just a little bit sensitive to being censored for making reasonable criticisms, so [...]
Charity said,
April 13, 2008 at 6:17 am
Whoops…sorry Chris and Theriomorph! Anyway, it’s a great term.
g2-9c64b8d472e9a817898dbc5c7643b0ea said,
April 15, 2008 at 12:08 am
oh please. if I had the time to pick apart your asinine post here, I would. The womyn at Seal Press said nothing racist, simply something stupid. Their first comment was nothing and “you all engage best through” happens to be partially true about the blog world. Yeah, I’m sure Krista meant to say “All you non white people like to bitch and be negative” yeeeahh suuure that’s what she meant.
This entire thing is ridiculous, and I, as a WOC, REFUSE to use innocent altho naive 20 year olds as whiping posts just cause they’re white N privelaged. Hmm, cause, ya know what, I know how it feels to be attacked for soemthing I said dumb and have it amplified simply cause of my color.
~Maricruz
Fire Fly said,
April 15, 2008 at 1:21 am
{smh} I’m not sure if you’re in the habit of barging in and calling people “asinine” when you don’t know shit about what you’re talking about, but I would suggest you rethink this practice.
Since you don’t seem to be in possession of a clue, or basic reading comprehension skills, I will give you one or three.
1. The offhand comment by Blackamazon (”Fuck Seal Press.”
was made because of things that went on at the Women, Action and Media (WAM) conference last month. A woman of colour presented a proposal to Seal Press and was not merely rejected, but condescended to and told her ideas wouldn’t be salesworthy.
2. That woman was Adele Nieves, a published woc, who made this comment:
“Seal Press has NOTHING on WOC!!!
Mucho Love,
Adele”
3. Seal Press made the following comment:
“Seal Press here. We WANT more WOC. Not a whole lotta proposals come our way, interestingly. Seems to me it would be more effective to inform us about what you’d like to see rather than hating.
—B”
So from the beginning, it was about race; about the way white women treat women of colour.
All this was before the comment about “negative discourse”. And if you’re thinking that perhaps it demonstrates a great deal of defensive hypocrisy on Brooke and Krista’s part, to go out of their way to both condescend to a woc presenting a proposal, and then insist (in allcaps even!) that their demand for the work of woc was sincere, then you’d be right.
This was never about what Brooke or Krista “meant”. It was about the consequences of their actions. Women of colour had already reached out to them and been treated badly, and then not only did they represent their actions as being appropriate, but they also insisted that they were entitled to more woc’s work simply because they control the press.
Again, as with all conflicts about race between white women and woc, this has a long history of happening to woc seeking to be published by white women’s presses: white women insisting that they’re welcoming to woc, while backhandedly rejecting woc who don’t fit their agenda; and then casting woc who object to this practice as irrationally angry and menacing.
Not only does it mean that the work by woc that does get published ends up being narrower, but also that attempts to change the practice are stymied.
So if practicing forms of social control that affect poc in particular ways, and then limiting their efforts to change the situation isn’t racism, what is it? If defining ‘women’ and ‘lesbians’ as not including woc isn’t racism, then what is it? If white women come into woc’s space and demand work, time, and education from them, what is that if not racist?
Edit: Details of what happened at the WAM conference have emerged, and the ‘anonymous’ woman of colour whose work was rejected by Seal Press has come forward. Her name is Adele Nieves.
Tara said,
April 22, 2008 at 9:45 am
Full disclosure, I didn’t learn about the Seal Press fiasco until several days ago, so haven’t been able to follow it in full. Also, I am white. And a woman.
I *did* see an excerpt of Kelly and Brooke’s comment response, which was selected by another blogger to defend how “reasonable” their response was. Good God. The “you-ing” and “us-ing” in itself is enough to make a person choke. But the complete lack of an awareness that race issues exist as something other than an intellectual exercise, or the fact that “well-intentioned white ‘liberals’” like themselves can perpetuate a system that takes away the voices and means of others, that was even worse. The saddest thing is, I don’t find it hard to believe that two people who seem to identify so strongly as feminist and aware individuals can be so deluded. There is such an undercurrent of moral superiority in white so-called liberal culture, in which “because I am not a racist and because I understand that we should all be equal, all my opinions are privileged and I am right. I am not required to think any more deeply or involve anyone else’s voice, since I’ve already got it figured out. Therefore, if anyone calls me on racist behaviour or ignorance, they are being oversensitive and hurting my feelings. Poooor me.” People like Kelly and Brooke need to realize that *nobody* is privileged enough in their ideas and all-mighty wisdom to be able speak for other people (or speak *at* other people) with impunity.