An Analysis Of Roxanne Gay's 'Bad Feminist'

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I want to make it clear, to those who may question my positionality, that I do not believe that my journey as a white person is somehow special or better than anyone else’s. I do not believe that I hold some sort of special looking glass through which the solution to whiteness can be seen. I am a production of whiteness, and I am also a human being, which means I have many, many, flaws and blind spots that I continue to work on while simultaneously being inhibited by this blindness in my effort to see past it. What I do believe, as Roxanne Gay so beautifully said in Bad Feminist, is that, “I am just trying— trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself: a …show more content…

I am not perfect, but that does not mean my voice does not have a place in the conversation about whiteness. No one’s voice is perfect, and the sooner we stop attacking each other’s imperfections, the sooner we will be able to talk about the issues, like racism, that need our immediate and serious attention. In the hopes of communicating to the Canadians, “who call themselves white,” what it means to possess whiteness, I will deconstruct how the child – me – in Figure 1 was trained to embody the, white, Canadian narrative of multiculturalism and citizenship (“On Being” 180). I will argue that the practice of teaching whiteness to other whites stems from a Canadian imaginary in which the white Canadians who “…imagine that history

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