Against White Feminism
Page 15
On October 21, 2020, an independent medical review board tasked with looking into the allegations found “a disturbing pattern” in which women were being pressured to have gynecological surgery.42 They said it was possible that the ICDC was complicit in what was happening, referring women to the gynecologist even when they did not have gynecological complaints. The staff required women who were resisting the surgeries or exams to have psychiatric evaluations. The review board’s analysis of the medical charts of the detainees found a lack of adequate documentation of their histories, their level of comfort with gynecological exams, and most of all their need for surgery. “Surgery,” the board wrote, “was overly aggressive without any demonstrable medical necessity.”
For its part, ICE has set about deporting the women who have made the complaints in an effort to delegitimize their claims. After all, if the women are not able to provide interviews and participate in the court process, ICE can proceed with their cover-up. According to a Columbia law professor working on the issue, the speed of deportations has increased following President Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, and ICE is actively destroying evidence so that its illegal procedures are not questioned.43
It is worth remembering that forced hysterectomies have precedent as recently as the 1970s, when Latinx women in Los Angeles were forcibly sterilized because they were held responsible for the increasing population.44 Like the Indian women who were all labeled prostitutes and the Namibian women who were made subject to genital examinations by British colonial authorities, officers from ICE and detention staff see migrant women as less than human. The old patterns of domination do not disappear with time.
The story about forced hysterectomies at the Irwin County Detention Center broke the week before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg on September 18, 2020. While the death of the justice provoked debate among white feminists about the future of reproductive rights in the United States, almost none connected feminist organizing around reproductive rights to the forced hysterectomies allegedly being carried out at the behest of the American state on minority women in captivity. Amid all the discussion about bodily freedoms, the use of state power to prevent women of color from reproducing was somehow lost.
White women’s “feminist advocacy” around “cultural” crimes like honor killing and FGC actually compounds the injuries done by the crimes themselves in stripping their survivors of agency. In addition to suffering the cruelty and depravity of the crime, local women find themselves devalued or silenced by foreign “saviors” who see them as victims unable to advocate for themselves. In aid contexts, feminists of color must follow the lead of programs and advocacy plans led by white women if they are to access funds that permit them to work on the issue. At the same time, others in their communities might perceive them as beholden to white feminists, and thus anti-culture/anti-tradition because of their exclusive focus on crimes.
At American domestic-abuse shelters, first as a resident and then seven years later as an attorney working at a different shelter in the same area, I could not help but notice that there was no white abuse or Brown abuse or Black abuse; it was all just abuse. The same despicable taxonomies of misogyny, entitlement, and dominance appeared again and again in abusers’ language and in their behavior. Women who dared go against their partner, or any other abusive family member, were afraid for their lives, just like I was. They worried about custody of their children, the future beyond the shelter, the economics and the logistics of surviving while always looking over their shoulder.
The rhetoric around violent crimes, just as in the sphere of international development, of war, of sexual freedom, celebrates white women as having gone further in their battle for equality than feminists of color have. This hierarchical relationship with women of color suits the interests of white men, whose violence is seen as qualitatively different from and superior to the violence of people of color. Meanwhile, white women who imagine themselves terribly lucky not to fear honor killings or FGC can imagine that the crimes committed against their bodies are somehow less of a cultural and social problem than those committed against Black or Brown bodies. Thus divided, white and non-white feminists are much less likely to create trouble at home or take collective action against patriarchy at the global level.
The hope for change has to come from discarding such hierarchies. It must come from building collective organizations that can resist the pressure placed on vulnerable and traumatized women to act as proof of white feminists’ superior enlightenment, empowerment, and international status. Only then can feminists attempt to create the dialogic spaces in which solidarity can flourish. Only then will it be possible for women to work with one another, to discern what is universal in the issues that confront them and to realize the possibilities of cooperation.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I Built a White Feminist Temple”
In 1979, poet, feminist, and civil-rights activist Audre Lorde addressed New York University’s Institute for Humanities Conference. In her speech, titled “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde had asked: If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of color?1
The cult of individualism, and the resultant form of feminism made notorious by women like Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In, and to some extent by Gloria Steinem before her, encourages every woman who reaches power to believe she got there on her own and without any free passes. The suggestion that racial privilege may have played some role in her rise, that white men are more willing to cede power to white women, is an intolerable threat to this mythology of the self-made superwoman. Late capitalism’s individualist reading of success is very much a part of the American dream of self-improvement through hard work—promoting the illusion that the system is fair and rewards effort in a linear and consistent way, rather than driving productivity to the disproportionate profit of already-wealthy white men.
As they themselves benefit financially, white feminists, in their own lives and careers, have managed to ignore the realities of what we now call intersectionality.
In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw, then a law professor at Columbia University, wrote a groundbreaking critique of three court decisions on Title VII (anti-discrimination) cases, in which she showed that within existing legal frameworks, Black women could only be protected from discrimination to the extent that their claims aligned with either Black men or white women.2
In Moore v Hughes Helicopter, the issue came down to whether a Black woman could claim to represent all women in the way white women did when alleging discrimination under Title VII.3 Moore, the plaintiff, had alleged that her employer practiced race and sex discrimination by not promoting women and Black employees to senior positions. At trial, her attorneys introduced statistical evidence that showed that there was a significant disparity between men and women in promotions and Black men and white men. Moore was asking the court to certify “Black women” as a class so she could then pursue a discrimination case on their behalf. The court refused to do this and the case went up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that because Moore had asked for class certification on behalf of “Black women,” there “were serious doubts as to her ability to adequately represent white female employees.” In other words, white women could represent discrimination against all women, but Black women could not. This was because when white women alleged gender discrimination, it was a pure gender claim, unlike when Black women represented all women.4
In her analysis, Crenshaw pointed out that Black women such as the plaintiffs were located at the intersection of both racial discrimination and gender discrimination. To limit them to legal consideration within just one of these categories denied the plaintiffs equal justice with individ
uals who occupy just one protected class, because it did not make any attempt to understand the particularities of their position. Crenshaw wrote that no justice could be done to Black women, or any women of color, if it did not consider both race and gender in its analysis. She called this idea “intersectionality,” explaining that “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take that into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinate.”5
Crenshaw’s analysis did not just take legal theory to task when she exposed the conceptual limits of single-issue analysis; she emphasized the necessity of transforming existing systems of power at every level of society. She recounted the experience of Black feminist activist Sojourner Truth when she addressed a women’s rights conference in Akron, Ohio, and famously asked “Ain’t I a Woman?” Many white women present wanted her to be silenced because she would draw attention away from the cause of suffrage and toward the cause of emancipation from slavery. Crenshaw’s point was to underscore how “the difficulty that white women have in sacrificing racial privilege to strengthen feminism renders them susceptible to Truth’s critical question. When feminist theory and politics that claim to reflect women’s experiences or speak to Black women, Black women must ask ‘Ain’t We Women?’ ”
Adding Black women on as appendages to systems that have long excluded them and calling it “diversity” is not the answer. Building on the work of earlier Black feminists like Audre Lorde, Crenshaw’s focus is on how minority women suffer at the hands of a system that was never made to accommodate them or has no capacity to make them whole. “These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure,” Crenshaw writes, refusing to believe that the mere recognition of identity is the sum total of what a society and a state can do in response to discrimination.
In the thirty years since her seminal article was published, Crenshaw’s conceptualization of structural inequality and systemic racism has become integral to understanding the experiences of women of color within a white-dominated world. In a 2005 article focusing on the complexities of intersectionality, feminist theorist Leslie McCall called it “the most important theoretical contribution that Women’s Studies in conjunction with related fields has made so far.”6
Feminist theorist Christine Bose has further expanded on the theory to note its relevance to feminists beyond the United States, emphasizing that “U.S. scholars should not be surprised that an intersectional approach is useful to European, Asian, or African scholars studying inequalities in nations with diverse native populations or polarized class structures, or with increasing numbers of migrants and contract workers from other countries.”7 Scholar and author Momin Rahman has applied intersectionality to being queer in his crucial essay “Queer as Intersectionality: Theorizing Queer Muslim Identities.”8 Others are focusing on understanding intersectionality as a research methodology or as the basis for policy initiatives on gender inclusion.
And yet even as Black women apply intersectionality to understand their experience of discrimination, white women must analyze the other side of the coin: their experience of privilege. Discussion of the intersection of whiteness and womanhood remains a taboo, particularly when it prods at the complicity ordinary white women who have benefited from white privilege play in propping up a racist system. This is particularly true in the elite, professional circles where white Western women are most likely to identify as feminist but are so ensconced in their bubbles of privilege that they cannot make the empathic leap to consider that discrimination they don’t see is real and has negative effects on the lives of others who do not enjoy white privilege.
Part of the problem, as Crenshaw shows us, is that “the authoritative universal voice, usually white male subjectivity masquerading as non-racial, non-gendered objectivity, is merely transferred to those who but for gender share many of the same cultural, economic and social characteristics.“9 In other words, white women take on the voices of white men and that is considered progress. Institutions that were once male-led and are now female-led continue to practice the same kinds of exclusions, derisions, and erasures. Yet everyone congratulates themselves on having chalked up a win for feminism, for all women.
Crenshaw’s descriptions in theory match my own experiences in practice. The women I worked with while serving on the board of Amnesty International USA were familiar with feminist theory and how a male-dominated system encourages white women to reenact the same exercises of silencing and domination that they have themselves experienced. And yet it is still so tempting for white women to interpret their own ascent as a matter of pure merit, and their own quest for parity as the most urgent priority. It is so easy to be unconcerned with domination, silencing, and oppression when they are perpetrated on those you barely see. So effortless to replicate those unthinking, convenient sins as you forge ahead toward the glass ceiling, teeth gritted. Late capitalism’s individualist reading of success is very much a part of the American dream of self-improvement through hard work promoting the illusion that the system is fair and rewards effort in a linear and consistent way. In reality, all of it is a ploy to drive productivity so that the white men at the top of the pyramid continue to get ever-wealthier.
As a consequence, white feminists have ignored intersectionality as it pertains to their own lives, careers and choices. Many white feminists are upset by the accusation that white women have largely upheld and endorsed the racial inequities that were in operation at a time when men dominated all and everything. Most, including the chairman of the board whom I served under at Amnesty International, would vehemently and passionately endorse intersectional feminism as a concept. But in practice, ambition, self-preservation, or the need to hold on to an ideology of self-made success seems to intercede. There is no ceding space or voice or power: feminists of color who want to function within this system must cater to white feminists and laud their ascent regardless of the situation of women of color.
Coming to understand Crenshaw’s arguments has given me strength and purpose. And yet, throughout my years as a lawyer, as an activist, and as an author, I’ve had to question whether to continue to participate in white structures that prescribe a limited and tokenizing role for women of color. Like many other feminists of color, I have wondered whether these existing structures can be dismantled and remade from the inside or whether they must be abandoned altogether.
As we deconstruct various aspects of the feminist movement and expose the role of whiteness as a hegemonic, regulating force within feminism, the question still remains unresolved: should feminists of color construct feminisms of their own and forget about cross-racial solidarity, or should they persist within structures that are led by and tailored to the needs of white women?
“I built a white feminist temple and now I am tearing it down,” wrote Black feminist Layla Saad in a blog post that went viral in 2018. In the post, Saad spoke about her experience of building a life-coaching business called “Wild Mystic Woman.” Saad used solely Black women’s imagery in her branding, and she, a Black woman, was ultimately in charge of things. Yet the truth, Saad confessed, was that she catered mainly to white women, not intentionally but by default. “The unintentional default in most online businesses (regardless of who runs those businesses) is that whiteness is centered. White imagery, white clients, white perspectives, and white narratives of success, empowerment and spirituality dominate this industry. This is because this industry reflects the white supremacy ideology that white is seen as ‘universal’ and applying to all, and non-white is seen as ‘other’ and applying only to those who are non-white.”10 Saad’s confession was a commitment to do better, to “tear down the white feminist temple” that her endeavor had become. It signified that even with a commitment to racial and gender justice, it is most often easier to inhabit the systems that we find ourselves in than to dismantle them because of their
inequity.
Many white women perform wokeness quite well, carefully asking for the correct pronunciation of your name in front of others and posting black squares on their social-media accounts on the one day when anti-racist activism becomes briefly fashionable. Even more are in the habit of appropriating the culture of Black, Brown, or Asian people to boost their own cosmopolitan credentials: Instagram grids awash with butter chicken and turmeric lattes, peppering their speech with “bae” and “twerk” and “fuckboy” and “basic”—all words appropriated from Black slang. But there is a sense in which the reverse is true. Brown and Black women also engage in adopting white standards in their own lives, and so are co-opted into the perpetuation of their own oppression. Sometimes they assimilate these beliefs from being constantly bombarded with them by cultural forces, while at other times they oppose them but do not feel safe in speaking out.