Knitta Please & Embrace vs. Solidarity

Alexis presented a concluding (?) post on the Knitta Please saga, but I wanted to update readers, and expand on some thoughts.

Magdalena Sayeg wrote a rebuttal to concerns raised about Knitta Please as a take on the slang phrase ‘n—– please.’ Her rebuttal boils down to the following:

• She is Arab-American.
• Knitta Please is her embrace of “street culture.”

The response is evasive because the concerns were not, as addressed in the rebuttal, ‘is this individual racist.’ That’s a completely different conversation. Racilicious captures the the artfiul reply, which tackles assumptions “because of their oppression by nativist, zenophobic elements in the American mainstream, Arab Americans are incapable of oppressing African Americans or others with their language or their deeds [and that] some Arab Americans don’t enjoy and abuse an element of white skin privilege.”

One of the most difficult issues for people of color is skin privilege. Elements of white skin privilege happen among people of color, especially as tools to separate oneself from “people of color” (Black people specifically) and to separate an ethnic group from Black people. Acculturation of non-Black people of color in a white-dominant space and misstating of racial oppression as strictly an institutional question muddle these issues even more. Volumes have been and could be written on this issue.

One needn’t read very far before having concerns about Knitta Please and graf culture, as a safe replacement of a subculture that has been facing racial profiling, criminalization and police violence for years. The response is evasive as well for failing to explain what one intends by and defines in such embraces of graffiti culture.

What does it mean to embrace a subculture? It is hard to say if an homage at kindest, as is implicitly presented, or insensitive parodying at worst, as some have said, is simply presented as a nod to “street culture” for convenience.

In some cases, unambiguous public support for a community, at risk to oneself, is an embrace. Consider the activists who stood by movements that faced repression and did it openly, even at the risk of smears, arrests and worse. One need only read books like Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle to be reminded of the many courageous women who stood by their political convictions and the movements with which they embraced at incredible personal danger. Although no one is under a pretense Sayeg is Victoria Garvin, or the knitting folks are the Weather Underground to the graf culture’s Black Panthers, it makes one wonder do subcultures that face hardships need more people embracing them or do those subcultures need active engagement and solidarity?

One could say, with more people engaged in the acts of a subculture, it becomes harder to police. Fair enough. But to use its language (e.g. “bombing,” etc.) in a manner that indicates one’s own activity is a more socially acceptable option than the subculture whose language one cribs feels less like an embrace and more like something less kind.

By the way, Knitta Please is still seeking submissions for its book. The last one came out in September through Arsenal Pulp Press.