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Fossidarity wrote

Right because then it would be the white people who choose the moment and probably the terms to do that, and thus still exercise their power in that way. Makes a lot of sense to me.

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CopPuncher wrote

from a good book, Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalisation and the Genealogy of Dissent:

It's therefore not surprising that, just as in other instances when protestors have moved from martyrdom to confrontation, the suffragettes' turn to militancy led to harsh criticism. Violent action, many suggested, annulled the benefits of mythic feminine status-that gift that "enabled" women to transcend dirty politics through ontological purity. By refusing the status of both victim and muse, the suffragette became nothing short of a political and symbolic anomaly. She appeared on the world stage by defiantly extricating herself from the rubble of a historic contradiction that has yet to be resolved. Producing a new and intelligible category from the nineteenth century antinomy between "Woman" and "the political" required decisive action. And so, even as they sought recognition from constituted power, the suffragettes nevertheless understood that "Woman" as representational category needed to be more than a myth, a muse, a node in the organization of consumption. Through systematic and uproarious interjection, this new woman entered history not as an abstract universal but as a conscious actor-a force to be both recognized and reckoned with. According to historian Melanie Philllips, suffragettes like Teresa Billington-Greig began to recognize the ontological scope of their claims when their actions led, them into direct conflict with the state. Sitting in Holloway prison for assaulting a cop at a demonstration, Billington-Greig concluded that, since women were denied the rights of citizenship, "logically they had to be outlaws and rebels" (2003: 182). Billington-Greig refused to testify at her trial, arguing that the court had no jurisdiction over those it did not-and could not-recognize as its citizens. Reflecting on a similar feeling of ontological transformation a few years prior to Billington-Greig's arrest, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence could not help but to feel inspired. Suffragette action had changed her: "Gone was the. age-old sense of inferiority, gone the intolerable weight of helplessness in the face of material oppression ... And taking the place of the old inhibitions was the release of powers that we had never dreamed of," she wrote (2003: 172). she wrote (2003: 172). Despite the remarkable differences in their objective circumstances, Pethick-Lawrence expressed a sentiment that neatly anticipated the dynamite that Fanon would commit to paper 60 years later. It's therefore not surprising that, according to Phillips, by 1908 "civil disobedience gave way to threats to public order." These included "destruction of property such as window? breaking and occasional violence against members of the government" (189). During this period, many suffragettes argued that violence was not the antithesis of rights (as many liberals had claimed) but rather their precondition.

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Fossidarity wrote

Nice, thanks! That one is going on my reading list.

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CopPuncher wrote

Aye, it's worth the read for any white person in industrialised countries.

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