The List of Facebook Features article in Wikipedia includes a section for Groups. It includes a very brief section about Groups in general, explaining what they are and how they work. There is no mention of intersectionality and the research that’s gone into learning about how people self-identify in and around Facebook Groups.

There are very few links in the section as well.

The Talk page associated with the article has no mention of the Groups section. In addition, the article has been flagged for having multiple issues, as detailed below:

This article possibly contains original research. (August 2012)

This article’s lead section does not adequately summarize key points of its contents. (March 2015)

This article contains content that is written like an advertisement. (March 2016)

A knowledge gap that could be remediated would be to include information from this week’s reading “Black Women Exercisers, Asian Women Artists, White Women Daters, and Latina Lesbians: Cultural Constructions of Race and Gender Within Intersectionality-Based Facebook Groups” by Jenny Ungbha Korn.

Specifically, I would add the following:

“Facebook Groups offer users, particularly women of color, an online space in which to self-identify along gendered and racial categories. This then contributes to both the online and offline social dialogues around issues related to these identities and how they intersect.”

And then of course add a link citing the text.

I’m feeling nervous and unsure about editing my first Wikipedia article. If possible, I’d love feedback about how that potential addition sounds prior to me going in and starting to edit the article.

WORKS CITED

“List of Facebook Features.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 22 Oct. 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Facebook_features.

Noble, Safiya Umoja., and Brendesha M.. Tynes. The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online. Peter Lang., 2016.

Jessie Daniels describes how white feminism maintains its postion of power even in online spaces. Using examples that they discuss in depth (Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In book and movement, Eve Ensler’s One Billion Rising, and The Future of Online Feminism report), they establish that “The historical antecedents of white feminism are rooted in colonialism.” (Noble, p 44) Daniels goes on to state that “To the extent that liberal feminism articulates a limited vision of gender equality without challenging racial inequality, White feminism is indistinguishable from White supremacy.” (Noble, p 45)

As such, it stands to reason that white feminism impacts online spaces in such a way that it causes lateral violence in social justice movements. Heather Dalmage describes in their essay “Patrolling Racial Borders: Discrimination Against Mixed Race People,” that “Everyone who has learned about race, U.S. style, looks for clues about how to racially categorize others. Some white people . . . may send that the color line is shifting and fear losing their racial status.” (Adams, p 110) Meanwhile, “For people of color, the desire to make distinctions may concern a quest for allegiance and unity, a means to determine who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ politically, socially, and culturally.” (Adams, p 110)

But when that division between “us” and “them” becomes broad, as in “the oppressed” versus “the oppressor,” and fails to recognize the nuanced and specific ways in which white feminism, and racism as a whole, discriminate against and oppress various communities in different ways, marginalized groups become more susceptible to inflicting lateral violence upon each other.

While it is important to stand together in terms of denouncing and resisting oppression as a whole, strategies for how to resist should necessarily vary from group to group. And groups would be better serves by recognizing when their “survival strategies and resistance to white supremacy are set by the system of white supremacy itself.” (Adams, p 99)

Ideally, as described by Andrea Smith in their work “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing,” “. . . we would check our aspirations of other communities to ensure that our model of liberation does not become the model of oppression for others.” (Adams, p 99) Without such a model, lateral violence across social justice movements occurs.

White women in particular need to learn more about how their oppression as women is so vastly different than the oppression forced upon Black women, Indigenous women, the LGBTQ+ community, etc. And how if they continue to ignore how their approach to toppling the patriarchy is rooted in white supremacy, they are doing nothing more than becoming oppressors themselves.

WORKS CITED:

Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online; Ed. by Safiya Umoja Noble. PETER LANG, 2016.

Adams, Maurianne, et al. Readings for Diversity and Social Justice. Routledge, 2018.

In the third reading, “The Social Construction of Difference” by Allan G. Johnson, from Readings For Diversity and Social Justice, we learn more about privilege and how it takes shape.

People, especially white people, often bristle when they are confronted with the idea that they hold privilege. We, as white people, tend to associate the notion of privilege with wealth.

Privilege, however, is about power. And even though many white people, especially those who struggle financially or in other ways, feel powerless, they still maintain a power, a privilege, that people of color do not possess and do not have access to in America.

The most amount of privilege is held by white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied men. Women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, and those with disabilities all have reduced amounts of privilege, if any at all. And as those identities interact more and more with each other, any privilege one holds is reduced. For example, an Asian homosexual man with no disabilities has less privilege than the white, straight, able-bodied man – but more privilege than a Black, queer woman who uses a wheelchair.

All of these instances of privilege and oppression play out in a variety of ways across the lives of people who live at these intersections and within these social constructs.