Dame Shirley Bassey and The Propellerheads – History Repeating

If you are somewhere where you can listen to music I invite you to hit play before you continue reading. “It’s just a little bit of history repeating” in the voice of Dame Shirley Bassey is the perfect soundtrack for this post.

The word is about, there’s something evolving

Whatever may come, the world keeps revolving

They say the next big thing is here

That the revolution’s near

But to me it seems quite clear

That it’s all just a little bit of history repeating

The newspapers shout a new style is growing

But it don’t know if it’s coming or going

There is fashion, there is fad

Some is good, some is bad

And the joke is rather sad

That its all just a little bit of history repeating

And I’ve seen it before[…]

Some people don’t dance, if they don’t know who’s singing

I am going to go back in recent history to 2008. In order to do that, I am going to quote from Jezebel, of all places. Mostly, I am picking this article as a source because one of the usual charges when Women of Color produce media analysis is that we use “biased” sources or that we “see things” where there are none. So, what better place to quote from than a source that I have pointed out numerous times as problematic (to say the least). This article, from 2008, talks about how brownfemipower had been writing about US immigration issues for a long while (years) when a white feminist, Amanda Marcotte suddenly went mainstream with the exact same topic and focus. Hugo Schwyzer got involved (LOL) to be the “arbiter” of the “harm” done to white women by “mean women of color” who saw through the content appropriation. bfp sustained a consistent attack where she was painted under the most cruel light and eventually closed her blog. 

Jezebel quotes brownfemipower (link to her current blogs can be found here). 

“I never said that it’s important to recognize that I had the idea first. I don’t give a shit who came up with the idea first—even if it WAS me. I don’t give a shit who thought of what first. I don’t fucking want credit for anything outside of existing. (For those who care, what I really said: There’s a lot of women of color (and men of color!) who have talked about immigration. There’s a lot of women of color and men of color who have examined how sexualized violence has been the foremost result of the "strengthening” of borders. There’s been a lot of us who have insisted for a long time now that immigration is a feminist issue, goddamn it, get your head out of your ass.“

Fast forward to 2014. Hugo Schwyzer is back on Twitter (LOL x 1 million) endorsing the article at The Nation which yet again, stigmatizes “mean Women of Color” on social media/ Twitter. I blogged about being called “a bully” by the Deputy Editor of New Statesman and about the corporate and financial interests of the publication. And on Thursday evening, this was published at NS “Why we must end the detention of female asylum seekers in the UK” written by a white feminist.

I do not own this topic. However, I will refer to my quote above from bfp:

I never said that it’s important to recognize that I had the idea first. I don’t give a shit who came up with the idea first—even if it WAS me. I don’t give a shit who thought of what first[…] (For those who care, what I really said: There’s a lot of women of color (and men of color!) who have talked about immigration. There’s a lot of women of color and men of color who have examined how sexualized violence has been the foremost result of the "strengthening” of borders. There’s been a lot of us who have insisted for a long time now that immigration is a feminist issue, goddamn it, get your head out of your ass.

If you know what I write about, you’ll know women of color feminists, womanists and mujeristas (myself included) have been writing and talking about immigration in the European Union for years. As Dame Shirley Bassey sings it “it’s just a little bit of [feminist] history repeating”.

In case you need a quick refresher of my approach to immigration policy (or because you don’t feel like reading years of archives), I had a few things to say on Twitter. Here’s the Storify with the gist of it. In the meantime, I’ll just sing along with Dame Shirley Bassey.

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