“White feminism”
Another entry in the ledger I’m suddenly keeping to follow this “Blame Feminism” thing: Laura Turner at Religion News Service repeating the stupid bad mistaken platitudes about Meryl Streep and those t shirts and the racism and privilege and general evilness of feminism.
About the Emmeline Pankhurst quotation on the t shirt, Turner informs us
It’s a nice sentiment “in a bubble,” as Ira Madison III wrote over at Vulture. But neither Britain nor America exists outside of a bubble when it comes to things like rebels and slaves, and Streep or Mulligan or their publicists or someone in marketing ought to have thought of that before these women donned these shirts and posed with smiling faces. “The message that Streep and company are co-signing,” writes Kirsten West Savali at The Root “…is that one cannot be both enslaved and a rebel; and tucked between those lines lies the erasure of a dual existence that black women have been forced to navigate in one form or another throughout history.”
No. No to every word of that.
No, it’s not “a bubble,” it’s a particular bit of history of a particular country, which does not have to adapt or conform itself to the different history of a different country. The UK is allowed to make a movie about British suffragettes and then advertise it without consulting Americans. It’s that simple.
And no, the Pankhurst quotation does not say that one cannot be both enslaved and a rebel. That’s an asinine claim, a claim that ignores the way language works. Obviously Pankhurst was a rebel because she was a woman in a system where women did not have equal rights before the law – obviously she was a rebel and a slave at the same time, and that was the whole point of the sentence. It’s true that she didn’t explicitly talk about black women in that sentence, but then she didn’t explicitly talk about white women either. That’s not automatically “erasure.” The particulars matter.
White feminism in the West has a long history of erasure of women of color. When Pankhurst spoke the words she did, she was most likely pretty ignorant of what it meant to be a black woman in England.
“Most likely”? Do you get the feeling that Turner doesn’t know a damn thing about Pankhurst and is just assuming that she was a stereotypical White Feminist? Do you get the feeling that she’s relying on the usual cues – people are outraged on Twitter therefore there must be fire?
That mindset still plagues feminism to this day, so that the white women who too often grab the megaphones are unaware of or unwilling to listen to their sisters of color.
White women too often grab the megaphones? What a crock of shit. All women are prevented from getting anywhere near the megaphones, is the reality. Bashing “white feminism” at every opportunity isn’t the best way to improve that reality.
As many have already noted on other threads it is problematic to judge a person in 1900 by the standards of progressive 2015 society. I have seen marked change in what progressive society considers appropriate behaviour since the 1970’s FFS. That doesn’t mean we have to agree with or approve of the beliefs, views, attitudes and behaviours of past generations. We can acknowledge the bad with the good, but should avoid smugness by remembering that there is still room for improvement and future generations are likely to judge us just as harshly as we judge those who came before.
If anything I think it appropriate to cut some slack to the progressives of past generations. We may (rightly) consider them racist or deficient in some other way by our standards. Yet they were able to determine a progressive course of action and fight for it at enormous personal costs, despite lacking the legal and societal supporting framework we now take for granted. A framework largely created and existing because of those progressives of yesteryear that we now revile.
As far as Emmeline Pankhurst’s views on black women. Who knows. Certainly not I. It is worth pointing out that the census data of the time did not record ethnicity, but that the UK had a population in 1900 of 38 Million and most of the estimates put the total black population at that time around 20-25,000, or somewhat less than 0.1%. Even if Pankhurst was not prone to the racial superiority beliefs common amongst white people at that time she could be forgiven for framing her fight around women’s rights in general terms, rather than a specific inclusion of black women’s rights. Just saying.
Keep this up, Ophelia. I agree absolutely. I find it extraordinary that people who suppose themselves to be generous-minded and on the morally right side of things are so oblivious to their own chauvinistic narcissism or narcissistic chauvinism.
The relentless pursuit of ideological purity GUARANTEES the failure of all progressive projects. The pearl-clutching here, driven by profound ignorance and hopeless self-righteousness, is one. more. demonstration.
The snottiest right wing carping about PC has justification when we see this level of self-sabotage.
I’m noticing a trend here. Apparently, it’s bad when activists campaigning against [X] social ill to fail to consider the intersection of [X] with [being black in America], i.e. it’s bad for a [feminist] to fail to consider [black feminism in America]. The fact that [X] is being fought in another nation doesn’t seem to change this; it all needs to consider the social climate in America.
I first noticed this years ago when an Australian KFC ad was running. As you may or may not know, Australia is a major cricketing nation, and as Americans probably don’t know, cricket is very international. The teams that have what is called ‘test status’ (basically meaning the best of the national teams) are:
Australia
England
New Zealand
Pakistan
India
Bangladesh
Sri Lanka
West Indies (a bunch of Caribbean nations grouped together to field a single combined team)
South Africa
Zimbabwe
Notice that most of the teams come from nations that are not white? In fact the predominantly white teams are outnumbered by African / south asian. This means more often than not, an international cricket match will have at least one non-white team participating.
So, on to the ad I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojqMGlqYHPg
This ad is entirely reasonable. One of the teams involved is Australia of course, because ran in Australia; the other team is the West Indies because there was an Australia / West Indies match coming soon; and as mentioned, most matches will involve at least one non-white team anyway. A lone Australian fan is surrounded by Windies fans, that’s a bit awkward, let’s fix that awkwardness by sharing food. The Australian fan is white because Australia is predominantly white, the Windies fans are black equivalently, and the food being shared is fried chicken because the company that made the ad is KFC.
Nothing out of the ordinary there aside from contrived acting, but apparently ads running anywhere in the world need to have American social issues in mind at all times (including racist stereotypes that don’t exist outside of America).
American activists, you may be doing good work on American issues, but please pull your fucking head out of your arse, the world is broader than just your nation.
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