Find and delete the word “women”
Now it’s the National Women’s Law Center.
Starting in just 10 minutes we'll be tweeting with @ABetterBalance to support pregnant people in the workforce! Join us with #PDA38!
— NWLC (@nwlc) October 28, 2016
Starting in just 10 minutes we’ll be tweeting with @ABetterBalance to support pregnant people in the workforce! Join us with #PDA38!
The National Women’s Law Center avoiding the word “women.” When talking about pregnancy.
38 years after the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, too many people are still forced to choose between a paycheck & a healthy pregnancy. #PDA38
— NWLC (@nwlc) October 28, 2016
38 years after the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, too many people are still forced to choose between a paycheck & a healthy pregnancy. #PDA38
It’s the National Women’s Law Center. They’re allowed to talk about women. They have to talk about women, if they’re going to do what their name indicates they’re going to do.
Tell Congress to ensure reasonable accommodations for all pregnant people at work: https://t.co/yFiCVtFSQh #PDA38
— NWLC (@nwlc) October 28, 2016
Tell Congress to ensure reasonable accommodations for all pregnant people at work: http://bit.ly/1QudXzn #PDA38
They’re helping to erase their own constituency.
Who else does this? Who else is this stupid and masochistic and self-abnegating? No one! Anti-racism activists don’t do this, LGB rights activists don’t do this, labor activists don’t do this, nobody does this except women. And everybody else looks on approvingly as women compliantly erase themselves at the behest of others.
The National Women’s Law Center is going to have to re-name itself the National People’s Law Center. No feminism for you.
Imagine for a moment if they did. Imagine if black activists against police brutality came up with All Lives Matter and then resisted it being called Black Lives Matter on the grounds that that would not be inclusive enough.
And just a reminder, in spite of it being called Black Lives Matter, affiliated web pages are great about publicizing unjustified police violence against Latinos, whites, etc., showing it’s quite easy to advocate for associate issues/victims while maintaining focus on the core problem.
Holms, exactly. Just imagine it. The grotesque awfulness is blindingly obvious…yet when it’s women? Oh that’s fiiiiiiiiiiiiine.
And not just fine but also mandatory, and reason to punish people who don’t comply.
Holms/Ophelia – I’d be interested to hear the counterpoint, but to my eyes,
“workplace rights for pregnant women => workplace rights for people who become pregnant”
is more akin (at least in intent, if not in effect) to:
“black lives matter” => “the lives of blacks, latinos, and people of other non-white ethnicities matter”
And, conversely,
“black lives matter” => “all lives matter”
would be more akin to
“workplace rights for pregnant women” => “workplace rights for everyone, even CEOs!”
or
“Stop with the focus on stamping out FGM, I think you should be speaking out about all genital mutilation!”
or, most concisely:
“But what about the MENZ???”
[an extension that occurs to me; “Blue lives matter”, IMO the most noxious variant of anti-BLM sloganeering, might be akin to “We need to ensure that all the men who pick up the slack whenever women miss work due to pregnancy are amply compensated!”]
I’m not aware of whether there have been BLM counterparts in Hispanic or other minority communities subjected to comparable levels of racist police brutality. However, were such a campaign to materialize, I sincerely doubt BLM advocates would consider such movements, or even token efforts of BLM leadership to work inclusive phrases like “non-white” in acknowledgement of race-based police brutality experienced by other minorities, as “grotesque”, “awful”, or yet another example of erasure of black people…
But that’s not a thing. Latinos and other poc don’t do that. Progressives don’t “correct” BLM that way. Certainly black activist groups don’t. The National Women’s Law Center is comparable to black activist groups in this scenario, not non-black activist groups saying Be More Inclusive. It’s only conservatives who try to “correct” BLM, but when it comes to feminism, many “progressives” fall all over themselves telling women to stop talking about women.
Of course it isn’t a thing. BLM activists advocating for the “All Lives Matter” mantra isn’t a thing either (Holms’ first word was, “imagine”). The structure of the analogical argument I was responding to was, “Women are doing X. Women doing X would be a lot like BLM activists doing Y. Obviously Y would be a bad – grotesquely awful, even – thing for BLM activists to do. So too, X is an awful thing for women to do.” My response to that is, “Women doing X would be a lot more like BLM activists doing Z than BLM activists doing Y. And BLM activists doing Z would not be grotesquely awful. Thus the analogy fails.”
My point does not stand on Z being any more or less imaginary than Y. Nor does it stand on Z being a “perfect fit” of an analogy in it’s own right. If my argument is flawed, the flaw would be in my claim that X is more like Z than Y (and if you do think I’m mistaken on that, I’d be interested to hear why).
Okay… and, granting that, I ask: how would that be so horrible? How would it be “grotesquely awful” if a group of black activists, perhaps impassioned by stories of other minorities being subjected to the same racism-fueled police brutality (and in many cases bearing added burdens like illegal immigration status / deportation threats), were to argue that BLM ought to change its language to be inclusive of those other minority groups? Leaving aside the effectiveness (i.e. whether it would grow the movement or dilute the message), would anyone say their arguments amount to self-defeating echoes of “black people need to stop talking about black people”? Or that their appeals for such change are just voluntary erasure?
I think (hope) we can at least agree that it’d come across a whole lot differently than a BLM activist arguing “We should be chanting, ‘All Lives Matter’; otherwise we’d be excluding the oppressive white majority from our movement”?
Let’s say a faction of woke Samoans decided BLM should change its name to Brown Lives Matter. Would anyone call that erasure? Of course anyone would. Black people in the US have specific, particular issues that other groups, even other brown groups, don’t share. BLM is about one such issue. Yes, of course a move to rename it would be seen as erasure, and rightly so.
Samantha, Holmes, Ophelia, On BLM vs other POC, lately there’s been a trend for black people to dump on any person who’s not dark enough with language such as “white feminist” even thought those “white feminists” were not “white” but Latino, North African, Middle Eastern, First Nation/Native American, etc, etc, etc. When I questioned this on a Dolezal discussion, I was told first that POC means anyone not white, then two posts later, was told that POC is mostly for black people because POC are not nice enough towards blacks.
0.0
I was dumbstruck. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
So the comparison to BLM and this article, needs to take into account Dolezal. Trans-sex is fine, trans-age is fine, trans-furry is getting there, but don’t touch trans-race is nonsensical (as per biology), so I was told in that discussion that trans-colour would be a better term.
I guess tanning is now inappropriate too! Specially for women.
We live in a post-factual world.
Would you agree that that’s still worlds removed from a BLM activist arguing “We should be chanting, ‘All Lives Matter’; otherwise we’d be excluding the oppressive white majority from our movement”?