UCLA Feminist Identifies as Heterosexual, Blames ‘White Feminism’ for Trump
Posted on | December 6, 2016 | 2 Comments
UCLA sophomore Graciela Barada is not LGBT.
A feminist student at the University of California at Los Angeles has admitted she is heterosexual. Sophomore Graciela Barada confessed her heterosexuality in Fem (“UCLA’s Feminist Newsmagazine Since 1973”), in a Nov. 17 column about the recent presidential election, entitled “Dear White Liberal Friends, Family, and Peers.”
“Our feelings are confusing and overwhelming to say the least,” Barada wrote of UCLA students “experiencing uncertainty, fear, anger, despair, frustration” because Republican Donald Trump won the election. “Since Tuesday, my social media timelines have been flooded by a seemingly perpetual stream of fake-woke liberal white feminist proverbs that, frankly, are painfully problematic and extremely frustrating.”
Saying she is “opposed to virtually all that [Trump] embodies and the so-called Conservative ‘values’ he stands for,” Barada wrote:
Like many of you, I have yet to come to terms fully with what Trump’s victory will mean for the future of our planet and for millions of people (both domestic and abroad) in years to come. . . .
My own privilege has protected me from enduring many of the daily horrors that countless minorities have faced since the election. The daughter of Spanish-speaking immigrants, I proudly identify as a woman of color and “first-generation” American citizen. I am also financially secure, cissexual, heterosexual, able-bodied, and in the process of completing my undergraduate education at a world-renowned institution. And despite the presence of Trump supporters and sympathizers amongst my peers, the UCLA community is overwhelmingly comprised of other students of color.
Only 8,000 white students are enrolled at UCLA, where whites are a minority (26%) of the university’s 30,000 undergraduate students, the majority of whom (56%) are female. Asian students are 32% of UCLA undergraduates, Hispanics are 21% and black students are 5%.
“White feminism” has been under attack since the Nov. 8 election, as feminist critics of Hillary Clinton’s campaign have pointed to exit-polls showing that Trump got a majority (53%) of white women’s votes:
White women preferred Trump to Clinton. And who is Hillary Clinton if not a representative of white-woman-ness, that is, of so-called White Feminism? . . .
In Slate, L.V. Anderson interprets the results to mean that “[m]ost white women don’t want to be part of an intersectional feminist sisterhood.” . . .
To be a Donald Trump woman was to be heterosexually desired. To be a Hillary Clinton woman . . . was to throw on a pantsuit and ask to be valued, instead, for your abilities.
“White feminism played a huge part in this election: it focused on the issues of being a white woman and disregarded all the hate and oppression that white women inflict on others,” Etienne Rodriguez wrote the day after the election at the teen feminist site Affinity.
Graciela Barada similarly condemned her white classmates at UCLA:
For the white women still donning the “I’m With Her” slogan, please inform yourself of the ways in which your demographic chose Trump (a misogynist candidate) over Clinton-Kane, whose political platforms embraced progression of women’s rights in America. In actuality, this adamant focus on what the GOP victory means for “women everywhere” often exclusively refers to the circumstances of white women and is thus the embodiment of white feminism. This white feminist stance is a reflection of white privilege, a privilege that many white liberal women seem reluctant to admit exists and prevails in spite of the oppressions they may face due to their gender and other marginalizing factors. . . .
Trump-like figures are the product of our White Supremacist capitalist patriarchy, 230 years in the making. . . .
Recognize the legacies of oppressive American power structures for what they are. When I speak of complicity, I do not mean that each white American is single-handedly responsible for committing verbal and physical violence against marginalized groups. Rather, I am hinting at the fact that the “white” identity — and the place of many white people in our great American tale — is rooted in the oppression of less dominant groups.
Graciela Barada’s mother is a white immigrant from Spain and her father, a businessman in Washington, D.C., is a black immigrant from Cuba. Graciela Barada’s suffering of “oppression” from “White Supremacist capitalist patriarchy” consists of attending a university in Los Angeles where annual tuition is $39,518 for out-of-state students and room and board are $15,069 a year. A majority (58%) of UCLA students are non-white, and yet “white privilege” is still the problem.
“White feminism” was the topic of a discussion last month hosted by UCLA’s Intergroup Relations (IGR) program, the Daily Bruin reported:
Students discussed feminist issues and considered their visions for gender equality at student-run event on the Hill on Wednesday.
The Intergroup Relations Program hosted a dinner dialogue about what they call white feminism. About 20 students attended the event held at Bruin Plate. . . .
At these events, students can talk about topics they might be uncomfortable with, said Celia Cody-Carrese, an intern with Intergroup Relations and third-year geography and environmental studies student.
Cody-Carrese said the organizers chose white feminism as the topic of Wednesday’s event because they think feminism has traditional ties with white supremacies. . . .
Intergroup Relations leaders discussed how celebrities approach feminism. Some asked the group what the difference was between the empowerment messages in Taylor Swift’s vs. Beyonce’s music.
Some students said they thought Swift’s music does not have the same impact as Beyonce’s because of her privilege, even if her music has messages of empowerment. Conversation later spread into European patriarchy as an instrument of subjugation during the colonial era in world history.
Cody-Carrese said she thinks the word “feminism” is usually applied to white women. . . .
Cody-Carrese said she thinks white feminism disregards the concept of intersectionality. For example, a white woman cannot completely understand the specific plight of a black woman, she said.
Taylor Swift vs. Beyoncé and colonial subjugation by European patriarchy — this is what parents send their children to UCLA to learn:
Mitali Gupta, a UCLA Senior who attended the event, told Campus Reform that feminism’s link to white supremacy was indeed discussed during the meeting, adding that she agrees that such a connection exists.
“As a woman of color I was curious to know what ‘white feminism’ really was,” Gupta explained. . . .
Anna Yeakly, the director of the Intergroup Relations Center, said in a statement to Campus Reform that the dinner dialogue program is in its 5th year, and that the program is a partnership between various administrative offices on campus.
“White feminism was a topic suggested by the students, based on their interest in discussing the issue of intersectionality that is often left out of conversations about feminism” Yeakly said.
According to the Center’s website, recent dinner dialogues have focused on issues such as the “Intersections of Social Media, Culture, and Social Justice Issues” and “Race and Police Enforcement.”
Arguments over racism have not distracted feminists at UCLA from their main agenda, i.e., accusing men of rape. Seventeen rapes were reported at UCLA in 2014, the same year the California legislature enacted its controversial “affirmative consent” law, which effectively criminalizes all sexual activity on university campuses in the state:
The way this bill defines “affirmative consent” could open the door to a flood of sexual assault accusations, but provides no clear way for the accused to prove they obtained consent. . . .
In fact, asked in June, the bill’s principal co-author, Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, had no clue how one could prove they received affirmative consent.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Lowenthal told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. “I think it’s a legal issue. Like any legal issue, that goes to court.”
But if one of the bill’s co-sponsors can’t explain how to prove one obtained consent, how is a college student supposed to figure it out?
UCLA has numerous programs to encourage accusations of rape, including “Sexual Assault Awareness Month,” as well as Campus Assault Resources & Education (CARE). Ariana Damavandi, a staff writer for Fem (“UCLA’s Feminist Newsmagazine Since 1973”) has identified the problem as “rape culture . . . centered around a heteronormative narrative, meaning heterosexuality is unconsciously prioritized as the most normal and acceptable sexual orientation and non-heterosexual narratives are often ignored.” Sophia Galluccio, another staff writer for Fem (“UCLA’s Feminist Newsmagazine Since 1973”), demands “Zero Tolerance” for “rape culture.” Another article in Fem (“UCLA’s Feminist Newsmagazine Since 1973”) blamed “toxic masculinity and the hegemonic roles . . . that delineate how men are supposed to behave themselves — as violent, unemotional, aggressive, dominant, tough, sexual, and confident”:
As a result, men feel pressure to actively enforce their masculinity, which often occurs through this sexually explicit, misogynistic or racist language. . . .
This derogatory language normalizes behaviors associated with sexual violence and racial discrimination, and preserves a rape culture in which men behave in ways under the assumption that sexual aggression and objectification are natural qualities of masculinity. This is one reason for the alarmingly high rates, underreporting, and limited punishment of sexual assault on college campuses. When faced with charges of sexual assault or rape, college men often face little scrutiny, excused by a “boys will be boys” mentality, implying that they are simply acting out of a natural sexual impulse.
Did I mention that Fem has been “UCLA’s Feminist Newsmagazine Since 1973”? This is kind of relevant, because if college girls writing articles in a magazine were the solution to “rape culture” (or “toxic masculinity” or anything else), don’t you think that 43 years of this would have eliminated these problems? What they have done instead is to create a climate of irrational hostility toward men, where male students are a minority (44% of undergraduates at UCLA), so that there are nearly 4,000 more women than men on campus. Yet anyone who thinks heterosexuality is “normal and acceptable” is accused of “rape culture” by UCLA feminists, who insist that sexual assault occurs at “alarmingly high rates” at their school.
Behold the staff of Fem — do they look “oppressed” to you? Do they appear to be victimized by a “heteronormative narrative”?
Earlier this year, the staff of Fem participated in the International Women’s Day march, carrying signs denouncing “capitalist exploitation” and declaring, “It is our duty to fight for freedom from the imperialist white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy.”
Capitalism is wrong, according to the staff of Fem (“UCLA’s Feminist Newsmagazine Since 1973”), and heterosexuality is also wrong:
At some point in human history, men decided that women belonged to them. Today, in the United States, women are allowed to have property, money, and lots of other things they couldn’t have in the past, but for some reason we haven’t quite gained control of our bodies.
Heterosexual men control women’s bodies in a variety of ways, including restricting our access to abortion and healthcare, sympathizing with accused rapists, and objectifying and trivializing our sexuality. That last one is especially true for non-heterosexual women, who are consistently a target of objectification and fetishization for heterosexual men.
The author of that article is Laura Jue. Click here to see her photo. Is she “a target of objectification and fetishization for heterosexual men”? Or is this merely a paranoid delusion, like Graciela Barada’s claim that she is a victim of “the legacies of oppressive American power structures . . . rooted in the oppression of less dominant groups”?
Speaking of “less dominant groups,” UCLA’s football team went 4-8 this season, losing to Stanford, USC and Cal-Berkeley. Maybe if their punter hadn’t been arrested on a bogus rape charge . . .
Anyway, Graciela Barada says she is heterosexual, but why? How? More importantly, who? Has any guy at UCLA ever admitted to having sex with a staff member of “UCLA’s Feminist Newsmagazine Since 1973”?
I doubt it, but if it happened, I blame “toxic masculinity.”
"Male Feminists," IKWIMAITYD. https://t.co/zOM24jct2X
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— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 6, 2016
(Hat-tip: The Political Hat.)
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