An Open Letter to Wildfang

by Tara Miller
AFO Staff

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by Mari Shepard-Glenn
AFO Guest Contributor

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Dear Wildfang,

We write this letter to you as two queers of color in Portland, Oregon who at one point supported you. Over the course of your life, we have each felt increasingly marginalized by and distanced from your brand. We have on occasion reached out to you with our concerns through social media, received little to no response and moved on. We have discussed these issues with our peers in the queer community and communities of color and distanced ourselves from your brand by no longer supporting you through purchasing your products, following you on social media, and receiving your e-mail newsletters. We’ve gone about our lives pretty unconcerned with your existence, only occasionally groaning at some problematic posts, inaccessible prices, and token people of color sprinkled through your promotional material.

This time, however, we feel we can’t be silent. Your recent campaign headlined “WE ARE ALL…” has strayed too far from problematic posts and into literal silencing and erasure of the communities we belong to and care so deeply about. Your campaign asserts, “We are all immigrants. We are all women. We are all gay. We are all polar bears.” But we are not all of those things; there is a difference between saying something and meaning it.

We understand your intention with this campaign, which essentially rests on good/bad comparisons between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, is to encourage your consumers to vote for Clinton and against Trump, who we agree is a vile, racist, sexist human. But we aren’t interested in discussing our or your votes here. We argue that by simplifying these issues and ignoring the real opinions and experiences of marginalized communities you further perpetuate our and their oppression, rather than challenging the white supremacy, heteronormativity, and misogyny that you argue only Donald Trump embodies.

Because the reality is, we are not all all of these things. If you are not an immigrant, you do not know what it is truly like to be an immigrant, and suggesting that you do dismisses the real, unique, and marginalizing aspects of immigrant experiences.

Creating a campaign around “oneness” erases the discrimination that marginalized communities face; it suggests that oppression can be remedied by pretending we are all the same and we are all treated the same, rather than acknowledging the oppressors’ responsibility to reform their own systems and cultures, those responsible for oppression. If you want to challenge the way that immigrants are treated in the United States, address the specific actions, rhetoric, racist beliefs, and policies that enforce and encourage that abhorrent treatment and what non-immigrants can do to change them.

While we understand that your campaign’s “We are all…” slogan attempts to bring people together, the ads actually bury our communities’ varied identities and oppressors’ responsibility to effect change, by insisting that we are the same.

In an effort to mirror the organization of your original post and clearly explain its problematic aspects, we have separated the remainder of our response below into the sections you highlighted as the original “key issues” in the upcoming presidential campaign: Immigration, Women’s Rights, LGBTQ Rights, and the Environment. Before delving into each of these, we must acknowledge the gaping silence when it comes to the “issue” that is one of THE most important for us and for so many Americans: Race.

The fact that race is not highlighted as one of the issues that should determine votes in the upcoming presidential election exemplifies white silence on this issue and the white-washing of this ad campaign and your brand. As Desmond Tutu said and as so many people of color and white allies have explained over and over again to our white peers, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

And perhaps you were willing to do just that in this campaign because it was obvious to you that statements such as “We are all Black” and “We are all Brown” are deeply problematic and downright false. Another issue that you fail to highlight is ableism. Is it possibly because the statement “We are all Disabled” feels more problematic and less sexy than the statements you chose?

We write this letter to you, Wildfang, not to attack, call out, or vilify, but rather to urge you to examine the ways in which this campaign fails to combat the widespread oppression it claims to challenge, and instead perpetuates our communities’ marginalization. We ask you to remove this post from your website immediately, apologize to the communities you have erased and silenced. We finally ask you to commit to abstaining from white-washed political activism and, if you are committed to using your brand for real political organizing, work with our communities to devise campaigns that center us and our needs.

***The images below are reproduced from Wildfang’s campaign and our responses are following***

IMMIGRATION

• First things first: we are not all immigrants. If you are not an immigrant, you don’t know what it’s like to be an immigrant. As mentioned above, suggesting that everyone knows the immigrant experience does not lead to an enlightened, shared understanding of that experience, but rather, minimizes the real, marginalizing, and at times empowering aspects of immigrant experiences.
• Also: there is not ONE immigrant experience. There are many many many immigrant experiences and because they encompass so many intersecting identities, suggesting that certain policies benefit all immigrants denies that complexity.  
• And on that note: when you say Donald Trump is “racist against brown people,” you suggest that all immigrants are brown. Most importantly, this erases the existence of black immigrants, who DO exist and are also detained and deported at higher rates than other immigrants.
• On the topic of skin color: while it is important to acknowledge that immigrants can be and are any skin color under the sun, making the “face” of immigration the lightest skinned person of color you can find is a tool of white-washing that is used most often to garner sympathy from white people. While this may seem like an okay tool to use in some contexts (anything to convince the white people, right??), by using a light-skinned person to illustrate the importance of immigration issues, you perpetuate the idea that there only some types of immigrants deserve humane policies, basically those that can assimilate.
• Finally, and simply, it is insulting and disingenous to suggest that Hillary Clinton has always done and will always do what is best for current and potential immigrants to this country, when she is responsible for increasing violence and state repression in many of the countries, such as Honduras, that people are forced to emigrate to this country from.

WOMEN'S RIGHTS

• So, again, we are not all women. Aside from the problematic suggestion that cis-men understand what it is like to be a woman-identified person, this statement is extremely problematic for transmen, because it undermines their true identities by putting them back into a category that doesn’t fit them.
• The failure to mention issues affecting transwomen in an argument specifically focused on “women’s rights” also perpetuates the disgusting erasure of transwomen, which is especially problematic when coming from a self-proclaimed queer brand.  
• While we’re on the topic of exclusion and erasure, this section also leaves out non-binary folks, who can be and are regular targets and victims of sexism and misogyny.
• Finally, as a queer woman of color and non-binary person of color, we feel 100% excluded from this analysis on women’s rights as there is no mention of the distinct disparities, discrimination, and oppression faced by women and non-binary folks of color. How can you talk about the gender wage gap without acknowledging the color wage gap between white women and women of color? 

LGBTQ+ RIGHTS

• Again, we are not all gay. If you are not gay, you do not know what it’s like to be gay. Suggesting you do minimizes the real discrimination and marginalization that gay folks experience. And suggesting that being gay is a universal experience erases the many many many variations of the gay experience. A white cis-gay man does not and will not ever know the experiences of a gay trans-woman of color. Suggesting he could is deeply offensive.
• Number two: white-washing. In a world where queers are forever represented by white white white white white people and couples, it is so incredibly frustrating for us queers of color to be told by queer brand ads, tv shows, and organizations that we don’t “fit” with the (white) queer aesthetic, to constantly surprise people when we out ourselves, to be told that we don’t “read” queer. Unfortunately the image used here perpetuates all of that.
• When you say that “a gay version of the bachelorette...won’t be the same without a proposal,” in the headline for this section, you suggest that gay rights stop at marriage. In fact, gay organizations’ push for marriage equality over other policies that could have effected more lasting change for marginalized queers exemplifies that homonormativity that characterizes much of Wildfang’s endeavors. BTW: Homonormativity “addresses the problems of privilege we see in the queer community today as they intersect with White privilege, capitalism, sexism, transmisogyny, and cissexism, all of which end up leaving many people out of the movement toward greater sexual freedom and equality.” 
• And on the note of homonormativity, the fact that the organization you choose to donate part of your proceeds to is the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) only illustrates your perpetuation of this problem. In accordance with the white-washing and white silence in your campaign, HRC has “been silent about issues relating to the prison system and police violence (which should matter to them because queer people are disproportionately criminalized and incarcerated). This shows a lack of intersectional understanding in the organization, that the organization is led by and privileges White middle-class experiences, and that it does not actually intend to challenge systemic, structural oppression.” 

THE ENVIRONMENT

• The “we are all polar bears” statement here is not offensive.
• What is problematic here, is the silence on environmental racism. The environmental movement, similar to the gay rights movement, has been historically silent on and unconcerned by the environmental perils faced by communities of color. These are primarily due to the lack of resources and political influence many communities of color have to fight against corporate interests, such as in North Dakota, and governmental inaction, such as in Flint, Michigan.
• Where are your comments on the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was re-routed from North of Bismark due to concerns about its effect on water supply for the town’s mostly white residents and is now being constructed on the Standing Rock Reservation despite international protest?
• Where are your comments about water in Flint, Michigan, where government officials knowingly allowed contamination of water in a community inhabited predominantly by people of color?
• And finally, why are proceeds of your recent sales also going to Greenpeace, an environmental organization known to ignore and literally stomp over the concerns of communities of color? As one recent example, drone footage proves that a Greenpeace marketing campaign did permanent damage to Peru’s ancient Nazca Lines, with no permission from the Peruvian government and to the horror of many Peruvians and others across the world.

Again, we write this letter to you, Wildfang, not to attack, call out, or vilify, but rather to urge you to examine the ways in which this campaign fails to combat the widespread oppression it claims to challenge, and instead perpetuates our communities’ marginalization.

We ask you to remove this post from your website immediately, apologize to the communities you have erased and silenced.

We finally ask you to commit to abstaining from white-washed political activism and, if you are committed to using your brand for real political organizing, work with our communities to devise campaigns that center us and our needs.

--Concerned queers of color