Given her status as a feminist and queer icon, I'm a little surprised that early on this mess didn't a lot of traction beyond Facebook and Tumblr, but singer-songwriter Ani Difranco had planned a feminist songwriting retreat at former slave plantation in Louisiana. WTF?
Kat Endgame from Proud Queer Monthly, one of the first sites to cover this latest feminist race fail, said Nottoway, like most former plantations, sanitizes its own history:
As in many such historical sites, the immense suffering and brutal history of slavery has been sanitized to be as inoffensive as possible to the wealthy white people who get married or vacation there. You really wouldn’t want to spend a lovely weekend getaway (at upwards of $309.70 a night) sleeping with the tortured ghosts of American history, would you?Ani herself never commented or responded to the complaints on her Facebook page until late Sunday, when she issued a wholly dissatisfying apology and statement that the event was cancelled. But by that time, the damage had already been done. Here's how her apology should have read , but thinking that holding a songwriting retreat -- one that prices out most of her fans -- at a former plantation was a good idea is inexcusable. Said Monica Roberts from TransGriot:
When Black women expressed their concerns about having this event on ground where our foremothers were raped, tortured, had the children they bore sold from them, the response was predictable from vanillacentric privileged white women rushing to defend DiFranco and this jacked up event.Full disclosure: I'm not much on an Ani fan, but I follow quite a few artists who've said or done problematic things throughout their careers. Do I think this is any different? Yeah, I do, because once you position yourself as an ally or an advocate, you're held to higher standards. Granted, they're standards everyone should be held to, but when "one of the good ones" screws up, the disappointment is palpable.
No comments:
Post a Comment