The Colored Girl Speaks.

This Friday night was very challenging for me, in that I was teaching a class on Race Play for the local Women’s BDSM organization, the Exiles. It is the class that makes me the most edgy, and not just for the obvious reasons. It is tough enough to present at ALL for kinksters. But I knew that there would be some people there for whom this was a very difficult topic. I also knew that I was a little anxious about doing a demo. It is a tough line to walk between doing something meaningful and doing something over the top.

Then as I was getting settled in, I learned that someone had written an e-mail message in protest of the class and sent it to the Women’s Building, a community center and the location of my class.

Re: RACE PLAY….THE FINAL FRONTIER   !!PROTEST!!!! THIS EVENT  it i

Posted by: “{REDACTED]”  EYE-JUDGE-EWE@someemailprovider.com

How Can I help?   I am writing to this group to stop the promotion of tolerance to racism.

It is like stepping in hot water and becoming tolerant to it, we step into the pool of

acceptance of racism , we become it, remember the kensington experiment.

Where students pretended to be guards and actually became the characters they

played and killed their fellow students. This is so wrong, promote healthy race

relations, instead of tolerance and sexualizing it.

Be The Change!!!!

I am writing in regards to the ridiculous notion that acting out one’s fantasy

of racism in sex has any merit or positive outcomes. It is just wrong, to

immerse oneself in the area of sexualizing and allowing racist scenes for

the benefit of one’s sexual or psyche’s needs is proposterous. It is damaging the

years and LIVES given for ending racism. It is encouraging it to continue and grow.

Remember the Kensington experiment in which students portrayed guards and inmates and the

students actually assumed the character’s valance and

even killed their student counterparts in this powerful experiment.

It shows us that assuming a character or a behavior is very

powerful. that is has powerful consequences, and horrific outcomes.

I implore us to stop this group of people who promote racism and

violence towards women as a good thing, as a pretend, healing, normal

way of releasing one’s fears and hidden monsters. This actually

releases and normalizes the monsters into our daily thoughts. BE THE

CHANGE, do not feed the problem. If you feed your racist, violent

thoughts, they grow!!!!If you have the fears around your inner

racism, help someone of a different race and learn that there is no

difference that cannot be accepted through compassion.

Great.

I must say….if I have to be anywhere where there is a possible threat of Shit Going Down,  a gym full of righteous babes, furious femmes, bad-ass butches and Riot Grrls isn’t a bad locale from which to defend oneself.

The funny thing is, if she’d come to the class, she’d have heard me address all of those points. But that matters little, because she wants to deny me the right to be a fucking freak.

But, I took many deep breaths, had a bottle of water, and plunged in.

Now, I gotta toot my horn here for a second, because I’m not good at it and need to practice :-)

I am not great at taking credit where I’ve dona a good job. I am often pretty crap about even feeling good when other people tell me I’ve done well.

But it is quite rare to receive a standing ovation from a great many of the people in the room when you wrap up a class. It is also insanely crazy to have people who are my mentors in the Leather Community, women who have paved the road on which I now walk come up to me and say things that blow my mind. It was so fucking powerful I still don’t know how to talk about it.

I feel honored. I feel as though the difficulty I have had around issues of race and play, all the people who talked huge amounts of shit, all of the tears I shed feeling like yes, there must be something terribly wrong with me to have these desires….that all of that was completely worth it when person after person came up to me and thanked me and told me that they thought what I was doing was important, that they really heard and were pleased to listen…

I kinda kicked ass, y’all.

Shit! I mean, to have so many people give so much love what overwhelming.

I felt very honored, very special, very humbled, very proud.

To all of the women who were there: THANK YOU.  Thank you to my friends, co-workers, mentors, heroines, everyone. You are amazing amazing women.

After the class I spent almost another hour talking to people, coming down.

Then, as we were finally kicked out of the building around 11:00.

Of course, the class wasn’t entirely over, was it? In front of the venue, an odd moment of Zen.

A very very intoxicated person came up and clutched my arm. A transwoman of color, I wasn’t sure if she’d been in the class or not but almost immediately assumed NOT, as someone that massively fucked up would have stood out like a sore thumb.

She grabbed my arm

“Thank you…thank you token sister! Thank you token sister…Thank you token sister…Thank you token sister…Thank you token sister…”

She repeated for well over a minute. I trued to be compassionate, then gently asked her to move on.  She then asked for a burrito. I declined to provide her one.

She then turned to look at the group of women with whom I was talking.  “This is disgusting…you should be ashamed..this is a travesty…thank you token sister…”

The tone was darker now and my addled swirling brain finally grokked that I was the token sister among white women on the street.

Which is kind of…something.

We wound up moving away down the street.

I was stunned.

I laughed in a sort of shell-shocked breathlessness.

“Who the fuck does this happen to??  Who the fuck else teaches a class about race play in BDSM then gets called out for tokenism by a self-described trannny on the street?!?! Who else?!?!”

No one else I know.

And I know a lot of people.

And it was a fitting and perfect psychic seal on the arc of the evening.