The burden then fell on me to explain why feminism was so divided, and why feminism needed a race analysis in the first place. I was asked: ‘What lies at the bottom of the divisions, and why has the phrase “check your privilege” become so popular?’ That was the second red flag. This framing suggested that racism wasn’t a concern for my white peers. Having worked with Laura Bates in the past, I knew that this wasn’t the case. Despite my discomfort, I put forward my case for the need for a race analysis in feminism. But my point was quickly picked up on by Caroline Criado-Perez, who said that people had used an anti-racist perspective as a reason to harass and bully her online.
The context of her comment was very disturbing. Earlier in that year, Caroline’s women-on-banknotes campaign had drawn national headlines. The press coverage attracted a misogynist sentiment, and what started out as a win quickly descended into one of the most high-profile British cases of online harassment. When the Bank of England announced plans to put an image of the author Jane Austen on the ten-pound note, the women-on-banknotes campaign claimed this as a success. But because of the harassment that followed as a result of the campaign’s work, Caroline had been sent death threats. She received messages that told her that bombs had been installed outside of her home. She was repeatedly messaged by anonymous ill-wishers who were encouraging her to commit suicide. Eventually, two people pled guilty to sending her some of the more vicious tweets. They were sentenced to twelve and eight weeks in prison respectively, under the Malicious Communications Act.
On that New Year’s Eve Woman’s Hour, Caroline’s comment, aimed at discrediting her online abusers, came across as equating my work and politics with these vicious and abusive messages. I felt implicated in the harassment against her. In the BBC studio, it fell to me to account for Caroline’s horrific experiences, putting me in the position of defending the arguments (that I didn’t share) of people I didn’t even know. I was completely lost for words.
This was the cost of representation. The overwhelming whiteness of feminism – on a radio-show segment that would have been all white if it wasn’t for my presence – was not considered a problem. I had wanted to discuss how feminism wasn’t exempt from white privilege, but instead I found myself on the receiving end of it.
There was an Internet storm about the interview immediately after we came off air. Some people were as shocked at this assertion as I was. Others were convinced that I was a liar and a bully who had been waging a war against Caroline online – not true – and that by balking at her intervention, I was playing the victim. I hadn’t wanted to at first, but after some encouragement from friends, a few hours later I wrote a short blog post clarifying what went on.
Think about the last time you heard a comprehensive description of the nature of structural racism in the mainstream media, I wrote. These issues just don’t get the kind of airtime that feminism does in the UK press. Think hard about the last time you heard a person of colour challenge the virulently racist rhetoric around immigration in this country, or just state the plain fact that structural racism prevails because white people are treated more favourably in the society we live in. I was afforded the opportunity to do this live, on national radio. I didn’t take it lightly.
After a concerted effort from many a white woman to portray black feminist thought as destructive and divisive, I’m aware that accepting these media requests is a double-edged sword. It was Audre Lorde who said: ‘If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.’ Though it sometimes feels like I am entering into a trap, I’m hyper-aware that if I don’t accept these opportunities, black feminism will be mischaracterised and misrepresented by the priorities of the white feminists taking part in the conversation . . . I’m tired of this tribal deadlock. I meant what I said on the programme: the only way to foster any shared solidarity is to learn from each other’s struggles, and recognise the various privileges and disadvantages that we all enter the movement with.
Caroline apologised in the early evening, writing on Twitter: ‘I just wanted to apologise if this am it came across at all like I was suggesting the abuse is something you have been party to. I didn’t mean to imply that at all, but I can see that given I responded to your comment, it might have seemed like that. I didn’t want to suggest I have ever felt abused by you – I haven’t, because of course you haven’t abused me. I just wanted to take the opportunity to talk about abuse I have experienced and how damaging I think it is, because I think it needs to stop. But perhaps could have picked a better moment/way of saying it. So am sorry for that.’
Despite her apology, the day got worse.
The former Conservative MP and self-fashioned right-wing feminist Louise Mensch saw fit to swoop in and support Caroline. She began to tweet at me. ‘Reni was wrong and Caroline was wrong to give in to her bullying. I wouldn’t have.’ I told her she was stirring. She responded: ‘I would hope that I am stirring against your frankly disgraceful attitude and I am not lying. You are bullying, trying to silence.’2
For the crime of daring to suggest that racism is still a problem in Britain, I had been smeared by a former Member of Parliament. Simply using my voice was tantamount to being a bullying disgrace. Old racist stereotypes were being resurrected, and I found myself on the receiving end of them. I was a social problem, a disruptive force, a tragic example of a problem community.
Years later, while writing this book, I contacted Caroline Criado-Perez in the hope of getting her perspective on the Woman’s Hour debacle. She didn’t want to speak to me about it.
Even though I write about my experiences with so much contempt, feminism was my first love. It was what gave me a framework to begin understanding the world. My feminist thinking gave rise to my anti-racist thinking, serving as a tool that helped me forge a sense of self-worth. Finding it aged nineteen was perfect timing, equipping me with the skills to navigate adulthood, stand up for myself and work out my own values.
I found feminism a few years before the Twitter and Tumblr generation really took off. It happened in a rather old-fashioned way. As an English literature student, I’d been assigned a stack of books to read for a module on critical theory, which led me to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. As unlikely a situation as it was, the book spoke to me, and I found myself furiously agreeing with the long-dead French existentialist. When she wrote, ‘To be feminine is to show oneself as weak, futile, passive, and docile . . . any self-assertion will take away from her femininity and her seductiveness,’ it sounded like she was describing my entire existence.
I couldn’t find any people in my immediate vicinity who agreed, though. Criticising the misogyny in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew in a university seminar drew disapproval from my peers, with the majority of my female classmates concluding that ‘that’s just how it was at the time’. So I sought out feminism elsewhere, spending my student loan money on travel to feminist conferences and events happening around the country. During those years, I met tons of inspiring and passionate women, some who are still my good friends today. Being at feminist events was a relief; to be in a space where people just got it – the shared anger, frustration, the burning will to do something, anything, to change the messed-up world we live in. This passion took me to tiny, draughty church halls in little villages in the north-west of England, huddled in a circle surrounded by women my mum’s age, and on trains to London, to huge gatherings packed to the brim with hundreds of women – young and old, some new to the movement and some who’d been engaged in activism longer than I’d been alive.
But something wasn’t quite right. Feminism was helping me to become a more critical, confident woman, and in turn, it was helping me come to terms with my blackness – a part of myself that I’d always known was shrouded in stigma. I’d grown up with white friends who had assured me that they ‘didn’t see me as black’, and that I ‘wasn’t like other black people’. Up until then, I’d understood myself as someone
who was ‘pretty for a black girl’, as someone who ‘spoke well for where she came from’. I couldn’t quite understand why these distinctions were made, but I had a feeling it was to do with class, education – and latent racism. The feminist circles I’d thrown myself into were almost all white. This whiteness wasn’t a problem if you didn’t talk about race, but if you did, it would reveal itself as an exclusionary force.
A lot of white women in feminist spaces couldn’t understand why women of colour needed or wanted a different place to meet, so they would find ways of subtly undermining the self-determination of those who chose to organise separately. At one feminist gathering, there were paper sign-up sheets for every break-out session, designed to keep tabs on the numbers of people attending each one. On the sheet for black feminists, someone had taken the time to vandalise it with their ignorance, simply writing: ‘Why?’ At another event, a friend held a break-out session called ‘the colour of beauty’. With a big stack of fashion and beauty magazines piled in front of her, it was a pretty simple premise, aimed at deconstructing Eurocentric beauty standards. It was primary-school level, really – ‘what are the similarities and differences in these pictures?’ As others in my group pointed out the models’ slimness, I, the only black person in my group, said, ‘They’re all white.’ ‘And they’ve all got long hair,’ added a white women eagerly. Laboriously, I explained, ‘Yes, but you can grow out your short hair if you want to. I can’t change the colour of my skin to fit this beauty standard.’ I’m still not sure if she understood what I was saying.
On and on it went like this, tiptoeing around whiteness in feminist spaces. This wasn’t a place to be discussing racism, they insisted. There are other places you can go to for that. But that wasn’t a choice I could make. My blackness was as much a part of me as my womanhood, and I couldn’t separate them.
In my activist days, I joined a small group, named black feminists, so I could speak my truth in a collective full of like-minded women without fear of social punishment. This was a space solely for women of colour. We met once a month to vent and support each other. It was a space I desperately needed.
Meeting with black feminists every month was not unlike the old-school feminist activist method of consciousness-raising. Consciousness-raising was first used by New York Radical Women in the mid-1960s, who in turn took the tactic from America’s civil rights movement. In black feminists, we would talk about whatever was happening in our lives. When we met, we began to learn from each other, and I began to realise that other women were experiencing the same things I was. Together we asked why. We took what we thought were isolated incidents, and linked them into a broader context of race and gender.
I met my friend, writer and teacher Lola Okolosie, in that space. ‘I’m not sure if those first meetings people were saying “this is structural racism”,’ she said when we met to reflect on the purpose of the group. ‘I think that out of meeting every month, and all of the things that we did in between, analysis started coming, and we were quick to start using that term.
‘I just remember people describing what it was, and then everybody else in the room saying “yes, that’s happened to me, isn’t it infuriating.” People were coming at it from lots of different levels. Some were very academic, and some hadn’t read any key feminist texts. People’s knowledge was very varied. But we were all kind of describing the same hurts, the same frustrations, and the same anger-inducing moments. That, to me, was just absolutely powerful. That it wasn’t seen as moaning, that it wasn’t seen as reading too deep into things, it was just like yeah, people get it.’
We discussed why it was so important for us to meet without feminists who were white. ‘That gaze does so much to silence you,’ Lola said. ‘Even if you’re really confident and really vocal, there is still a holding back that you have to do. Because as a normal human being, you kind of don’t really like confrontation. And there’s an element of just speaking the truth of what it means to be a black woman in the UK that it would be ridiculous, as a white person, to not read that as implicating you.’
In black feminists, we used the word intersectionality to talk about the crossover of two distinct discriminations – racism and sexism – that happens to people who are both black and women. For black feminist academic Dr Kimberlé Crenshaw, it was her studies in law that led her to coin the now mainstream term. When we met in London’s US Embassy, she told me, ‘That work started when I realised that African American women were . . . not recognised as having experienced discrimination that reflected both their race and their gender. The courts would say if you don’t experience racism in the same way as a [black] man does, or sexism in the same way as a white woman does, then you haven’t been discriminated against. I saw that as a problem of sameness and difference. There were claims of being seen as too different to be accommodated by law. That led to intersectionality, looking at the ways race and gender intersect to create barriers and obstacles to equality.’
This was a word to describe the previously undefined phenomenon, although black feminist activists, scholars and theorists had written and spoken about the very same thing years before Dr Crenshaw gave it a name. In 1851, black abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth addressed the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention.
She said, ‘I think that ’twixt de niggers of de South and the women of de North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about? That man over there say that women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have de best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? Then they talks ’bout this ting in de head; what this they call it?’ (‘Intellect,’ whispered someone near.) ‘That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or niggers’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?’3 The speech was published twelve years later in the National Anti-Slavery Standard.
A century on in 1984, black feminist, activist and poet Audre Lorde wrote in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches: ‘Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of colour to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.’
In 1979, in her essay ‘Anger in isolation: a Black feminist’s search for sisterhood’ from the essay collection But Some of Us are Brave, Michele Wallace wrote: ‘We exist as women who are Black who are feminist, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle – because being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one has done: we would have to fight the world.’
Then bell hooks stepped forward in 1981, writing in Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism: ‘The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that . . . women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labelling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization. It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to reappropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, do
mination, and oppression.’
And in a law lecture delivered to London’s Birkbeck University in late 2013, Angela Davis expanded on the history of how black women have articulated their experiences over the years. In 1969, she explained, American civil rights activist Frances Beale wrote a pamphlet called Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female. Later, the Third World Women’s Alliance created a newspaper called Triple Jeopardy. For them, the struggle was not just against racism and sexism, but imperialism too. Elizabeth Spelman’s 1988 book Inessential Woman challenged the methods of adding on oppressions a year before Dr Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’.
America, with its grid-like road system, neatly packed full of perfect rectangles and squares, was the right place for the birth of this metaphor. Every person knows of a place where all the roads meet. A place where there’s no longer one distinct road, but instead a very particular spot, a space that merges all of the roads leading up to it. Black women, in these theories, were proof that the roads didn’t run parallel, but instead crossed over each other frequently. And the aforementioned women writers’ work thoroughly illustrates how much richness and depth there is to be found when examining those intersections, instead of denying they exist, or forgetting them altogether. For too long, black women have been the forgotten, and have had to come up with strategies of being remembered. In the analysis of who fell through the cracks in competing struggles for rights for women and rights for black people, it always seemed to be black women who took the hit.
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race Page 12