This has been said so many times but I'm reading some troubling comments about the news from Norway (https://tinyurl.com/norwaycolonialism) and I suppose it needs to be constantly pushed.

Gender based violence can never be discussed outside of colonialism because gender based violence is foundational to colonialism. Norway's training of refugees in European "sexual norms" is part of a long history of the West understanding Black & brown masculinities as "backwards" and white feminism as the answer. White supremacy would have you dwell on the particular ("But who did Norway colonize anyways?" "Isn't it harmless?") without addressing bigger systems and ideologies. Whiteness is the privilege to observe the particular and not experience the structural. The West isn't a saint because it's taking in (a few) refugees because it was the West who drew the borders the refugees are being forced to cross to begin with!

The fact that this is a thing and is considered okay has everything to do with colonialism. The fact that your immediate response is to think it's a good idea to "train" Black & brown men into "sexual norms" is a good idea has everything to do with colonialism. The fact that you are unaware about the long and brutal history of the West "training" the Global South into gender and sexual norms (read: imposing Victorian sexual ethics, codifying the gender binary, importing homophobia and transmisogyny, etc.) has everything to do with colonialism. The fact that it's easier for you to think of Black & brown masculiniteis as sexist/homopohbic moreso than white European culture (the most (trans)misogynist of all!) has everything to do with colonialism. It reveals a deep and misplaced anxiety that white supremacy has always held: that immigration is really about penetration, that opening white imposed borders for Black & brown men is inviting in rape. (Newsflash: White people already did this very thing: it's called colonialism!) Colonialism IS rape culture.

White feminism is never the answer unless your solution to ending gender based violence involves mass criminalization, detention, torture, bombing, occupation, and war. White feminism is never the answer because it actually can and will never be about the liberation of all women and femmes: it will always only be about the conditional safety of white women and femmes. Never forget: White men have used the alleged "safety" of white women as an excuse to occupy the whole world haven't they? In the West, white women's safety is dependent on participation in nationalism and imperialism.

The critique from Black & brown activists is NOT that we should excuse immigrant men of their sexism, but rather why is there a double standard where immigrant and refuge communities have to be "taught" and not actually white European men who have committed and continue to commit some of the largest acts of sexual and gender based violence in the world? (I call for immediate mandatory training of all white politicians immediately!)

The political frameworks and organizing strategies that Black & brown activists have so generously offered to the world offer a strategy of understanding and addressing patriarchy that actually takes into account imperialism, capitalism, and more. These frameworks refuse to isolate "gender violence" from other structures of power like: war, prisons, and borders. The problem is: white feminism does not trust Black & brown people to do the work of undoing patriarchy in their communities.

We demand a gender politics that understands that the West is actually one of the most backwards and savage places to women and femmes (look at the US prison system, US militarism, the US detention system). We demand a gender politics that holds the crucial differences between being a white woman being harassed by "scary immigrant men" and hundreds of thousands of people (men, women, and otherwise) having to flee from their countries of origin because of Western imperialism endorsed by white women themselves. We demand a gender politics that understands the long and ongoing sacred tradition in the West of demonizing, criminalizing, incarcerating, and murdering Black & brown masculinities for being "sexist" or "homophobic." We demand a gender politics that understands that "patriarchy" and "homophobia" are not worse in Black & brown communities -- they are found across societies, cultures, and peoples in different expressions that can only be addressed by local people and strategies.

The West is not "more sexually liberated," nor "better for women and LGBT people." The West is better at concealing the routinized sexual and gender based violence committed by white masculinity. The West is better at branding itself as a safe haven while simultaneously torturing everyone else.

Things like what are happening in Norway are not innocent and isolated occurrences. They are part of creating ideas and stereotypes that justify racial violence. Aid, respect, and support of refugees should never be conditional on how "feminist" they are and I worry this is increasingly going to become the case.

Dear concerned white feminists: please handle the rampant epidemic of misogyny perpetuated by white men. It's getting out of control and these savages need to be civilized!