She stereotypes feminism beyond recognition
Sonia Sodha on “white feminism”:
Blaming women for the ills of the world might appear an odd feminist call to action. But an idea gaining traction is that the “white feminism” dominant in the United States and the UK is not only a driving force of societal racism, but responsible for a host of other bad things, from the war on terror to the hypersexualisation of women in popular culture, to the dreadful abuses of power we see in international aid. It’s part of a growing tendency on the left to look for scapegoats at the cost of building the solidarity needed for social change.
It’s that and it’s also part of a longstanding tendency on the left to treat women with just as much contempt and hostility as the broader culture does. The revival of feminism (aka “second wave” feminism) was born out of that contempt and hostility on the left in the 1960s and 70s.
[I]t’s quite a jump to move from the observation that women are no more immune to racism than men to holding the feminist movement accountable for the plight of women of colour around the world. A new book, Against White Feminism, by Rafia Zakaria, makes precisely this case. To stack up the argument, she stereotypes feminism beyond recognition as a shallow, consumerist and exclusionary movement dominated by selfish white women who care little about scrutinising the male violence perpetrated by white men.
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The mainstream anti-racist left has a bad track record of hanging out to dry women of colour challenging misogyny within their communities, for fear of upsetting cultural sensitivities. Examples abound: the Newsnight investigation that revealed several Muslim female councillors who have experienced pressure not to stand from Asian Labour party members, which prompted the Muslim Women’s Network to call for an inquiry into systemic misogyny in the party that was met with overwhelming silence; the smears the MP Naz Shah has faced from local Asian men in her party; the negative response to the anti-FGM activist Nimco Ali from her local Labour party. The white privilege discourse makes this more not less likely, because it makes people more scared of being culturally insensitive.
In other words it’s far less painful and damaging to be seen as misogynist than it is to be seen as racist. Lefty men have been choosing the first over the second as long as there have been lefty men.
[W]hite feminism critiques strengthen patriarchal forces by falling into the trap of the privilege Olympics. We need analysis of outcomes by class, race and sex to understand the extent of inequalities, but it should never be overextended to imply all white women are more privileged than women of colour…
Yet that is exactly what lazy polemics about terrible white feminism do: they empower men to use the fact that all white women are supposedly high up in the privilege pecking order to tell middle-aged women to shut up or, even worse, accuse them of weaponising their abuse and trauma. It doesn’t help women of colour, either: it implicitly posits Asian male crime against women as somehow lesser than white male crime, because Asian men are victims too.
…It is telling that Zakaria chose not to engage with a critical book review by Joan Smith, the longstanding campaigner against domestic violence, instead launching a personal attack on her “old and white” appearance.
Solidarity for…some.
I wonder whether it isn’t the relative wealth and social position of White women, compared to the position of women of other races, that enabled them to devote the time and energy to women’s groups and women’s issues, so that feminism looked like a White women’s effort. The things that second wave feminism worked for:. Equal pay, access to financial resources, access to and protection of the right to abortion, equal education, entry into male-dominated careers, breaking down gender stereotypes, creation of domestic violence shelters, reforming laws in all these areas, and so on, did not benefit White women exclusively. Women of all races and all walks of life. Conversely, I can’t think of any women’s issue that was of concern to Black, Latina, Native, Asian (or any other racial or ethnic group) that so-called “White” feminism was not also working on. Maybe I’m just ignorant. Originally, “intersectional” feminism meant addressing any of those issues of concern to women of color, or women of economic disadvantage, that, just in case, deserved but we’re not receiving sufficient focus, attention, or resources. I.e., second wave feminism was never just “White” feminism. Women of all races and all walks of life benefit from improvement in all these areas.
@1 it is a really good point that women’s activism, and its success, depends on how much time (and money) women have to devote to it. I spent some time in a volunteer women’s group, and it was noticeable how much work women had to do to arrange volunteer commitments around their first three priorities: children, husband, work. Things did, amazingly, get done–but those three things had to come first, and the organisation had to accept that we’d get what was left over. This particular organisation was founded in the 1920s–someone pointed out to me that the women who founded it had plenty of time, as they were some of the ‘lost women’ whose potential mates had been killed in WWI and consequently never had families or children to take up the vast majority of their time.
However valuable and corrective such self-examination of feminist history is, the pedigree and accuracy of the concept of “white feminism” is beside the point. Whether this background history is true or not, many of those using “white feminist” as an epithet won’t care. So long as it provides more things that opponents of genderism can be painted with, it has been deemed useful, and used, even against women who are not white. How accurate are blanket characterizations of gender critical feminists as being “right wing”? How true is the claim that expansionary, European, imperial, colonial, cishetreonormative patriarchy destroyed an innocent, sexually naive, pre-columbian world of Queer, Noble Savages? How much of what is called “transphobic” actually transphobic? It doesn’t matter; deserved or not, the accusation of transphobia is enough to poison the well, and offers sufficient pretext to avoid any real discussion. That’s the point.
I don’t know if you saw this article from The Conversation earlier this month:
https://theconversation.com/rethinking-ukuthwala-the-south-african-bride-abduction-custom-165496
The whole thing is about how a decade ago media reports surfaced about young women being kidnapped into marriage, a traditional Xhosa practice known as ukuthwala. A lot of the media at the time proclaimed that this was a perversion of the cultural practice, that ukuthwala was supposed to be closer to elopement with the bride being willing.
The author of that particular article did something none of the cultural apologists thought to do, and went and spoke to older Xhosa women about it.
Which should have been pretty obvious all things considered.
I sometimes feel that a lot of the time the left wants to fight racism and xenophobia, and it does so by trying to sanitize other cultures, essentially creating a more palatable image of impalatable realities. This is sacrificing the members to save the group – as people coming forward saying, “No this is actually a problem”, aren’t exactly helping the narrative.
Ex Muslims from what I can see, are well aware of this phenomenon.
Personally I think a narrative is less important than a person, and thus I can’t help but feel, are white feminists the ones who don’t do this? Who look at stuff that is clearly bullshit, and have the temerity not to wheesht?
Thanks for the link to The Conversation; good points made re cultural apologists.
I’ve heard about bride kidnapping elsewhere, and the Wikipedia article on the topic says the practice is worldwide, but is most common in the Caucasus and Central Asia. It’s quite distressing to read how widespread the practice is, I didn’t realize.
The Wikipedia article mentions a NYT article from 2005 that looks extremely familiar and may be what I read that made me aware of the practice in the first place.
Abduction, Often Violent, a Kyrgyz Wedding Rite
Bruce Gorton, it seems to me like it is also infantilizing other cultures. “They” live in a state of ideological purity, just like children, until “we” come along and corrupt everything with our “advanced” cultures. Only…children aren’t pure, either. They are capable of being cruel and malicious, they tend to accept stereotypes at face value, and they are extremely good at “othering” someone who doesn’t look like them.
The idea that even the corruption of the societies has to be 100% the fault of the west is failing to recognize the humanity of the cultures, as humans have flawed perceptions of the world, can be greedy and selfish, and make mistakes. Growing up neither creates nor fixes that situation; being western doesn’t give us a monopoly on human flaws, any more than Christians have a monopoly on human virtues.
Sackbut, if you want to be even more aware…science is beginning to think a lot of matings with dolphins are also abduction and rape. I don’t know if this has been verified yet, and I’m too languid to go check this morning, but thought I would throw that out there for fun.
@iknklast #7 –
Natalie Angier has written about dolphins and yes, that would be a good description of how males abduct and rape females, and strategies that females use to counter such activity:
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/18/science/dolphin-courtship-brutal-cunning-and-complex.html