Against White Feminism
Page 17
All this took place in just my first few months of working at the firm. Each time, after writing down the details of the case, I would tell the client to expect a follow-up call confirming whether the firm could take her case. The next morning, I would meet with my supervising attorney to go over the facts of the cases. I soon learned that it was not the client interviews but the post-briefing meetings with my supervisor, that would dissipate my idealism. In that first terse chat, and many thereafter, the senior lawyer would ask me: How much proof did she have? Did she know of others who had suffered similarly? Did her employer have a sexual-harassment policy that was posted in a visible location or in a handbook available to employees? Had she complained to a supervisor? Did she have a copy of that complaint? And, crucially, would she be able to pay costs?
If there was proof—a cell-phone recording, a couple of coworkers willing to corroborate and testify to having heard or seen something, or, better still, to being harassed themselves—and if there was no sexual-harassment policy or designated Human Resources officer, then things were looking good. If the complainant had the capacity to pay at least a little bit toward the legal costs, we would have had a done deal.
Most of my clients could not pay, not even a little bit. And civil-rights cases usually involve large costs, not only in terms of attorney time but also thousands of dollars to pay for transcripts of depositions and experts. There are costs associated with the filings themselves, costs associated with arranging and paying for video depositions in which the defendant can be questioned on the record with the statements serving as proof admissible in court. Experts are indeed very expensive and often necessary to prove, for example, the post-traumatic stress that often resulted from harassment and discrimination. Attorneys’ fees themselves can theoretically be waived until an outcome is reached, but the rest are up-front costs that require immediate cash flow.
The practice of contingency fees means plaintiffs do not have to pay until there is a payout from the defendant being sued, and the intention is to make sure that anyone, particularly those who do not have the thousands of dollars to pay for up-front costs, can afford to pursue justice. Our firm had a tight budget (my desk was in a corner of the library and some clients “worked off” their bills by filing and making copies) but we did in theory take cases on contingency. We would not reject clients because they could not pay these costs, but we would accept them a lot faster if they could.
That first woman’s case, the warehouse worker experiencing sexual harassment, was not, on its face, strong. The legal elements were all there, but there was little corroboration; she did not know of any harassment policy, but I suspected one would be fished out when her employers heard of the complaint. When she returned a few days later, I had to give her bad news. There would be significant difficulties in pursuing the case and likely high costs involved. Would she be able to pay? The answer was no.
The impact of class is further inflated if a person belongs to a racial minority. Twenty-one percent of all Black people in the United States live below the poverty line, along with 17 percent of Hispanics and 24 percent of Native Americans/Alaskan Natives.10 In contrast, only 9 percent of whites live in poverty. The further below the poverty line that one falls, the greater the likelihood of experiencing “deep poverty,” where one’s earnings are less than half of the poverty-line number. Forty-four percent of those below the line are estimated to be in “deep poverty.”11
According to the Center for American Progress, women of all races have higher rates of poverty than men across all races and ethnicities. Twenty-three percent of Black women live in poverty, along with 17 percent of Hispanic and nearly 25 percent of Native American/Alaskan Native women.12
These numbers are important because they represent the extent of the problem. According to the statisticians who put together the numbers, one of the primary reasons women of color fail to get out of poverty is the failure of economic redistribution mechanisms such as government programs for food stamps, welfare benefits, subsidized housing, and so on.13 The importance of improving these increasingly neglected programs cannot be underscored enough; they must be revamped and improved if women of color are to achieve parity.
Similar circumstances prevail in the United Kingdom. The recent implementation of benefit cuts and austerity measures have pushed an estimated 14 million people into poverty.14 Black and Asian households in the lowest one-fifth of incomes have seen a 20 percent decline in their living standards.15 A study on the impact of austerity led by women from communities in Manchester and Coventry found that 40 percent of African/Caribbean women, 46 percent of Pakistani women, and 50 percent of Bangladeshi women are likely to live in poor households.
These statistics reveal how gender justice provisions available through the legal system are most often needed by women of color who live in poverty. At the same time, within the American framework of sexual harassment and employment discrimination, there are few ways for these women to access the justice system and have their claims heard. The capitalist model means that even those law firms that offer contingency fees to their clients look at the issue from an investment perspective, determining whether their investment of a lawyer’s time along with all the other expenses is likely to yield a profit for them.
In the case of the Hispanic woman who worked at the warehouse, the lack of evidence up-front meant that a just outcome was not guaranteed in her case, but the financial inability to have the case filed in the first place meant it would never come before a judge, never be heard or considered; a just outcome was absolutely impossible. This by and large is the situation of most BIPOC women who face race- and gender-based discrimination—they do not have any recourse.
In her book Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange, critical theorist and political philosopher Nancy Fraser considers why redistribution is not usually included in discussions of oppression. Fraser focuses her attention on “the broad decoupling of cultural politics from social politics, of the politics of difference from the politics of equality.”16 Instead of simply taking “recognition” to mean “identity politics” or “redistribution” to equate to “class politics,” Fraser takes her “paradigm of redistribution” to mean “not only class centered such as New Deal Liberalism, social democracy and socialism but also those forms of feminism and anti-racism” that look to fairer economic relations to bring about racial and gender equity and justice.
One of the impediments to gender justice is the unfortunate distance between “activist tendencies that look to redistribution as the remedy for male domination” as opposed to those that look “at recognition as a means of resolving gender difference.” Politics focused on identity-based groups like gender, sexuality, religion, and race, tend toward demanding recognition. But the reality of people’s material conditions, although often correlated with identity groups, nonetheless varies widely within each group.
In Fraser’s view, “gender” is a hybrid category in which women suffer both underrecognition and maldistribution. Gender justice requires both recognition and redistribution.17 A recognition-and-redistribution-based approach would insist, for instance, that workplaces and educational institutions make special accommodations for women of color as a group and then ensure that they have additional rights that would ensure the financial support to help them reach gender parity. One literal iteration of this could be some form of free legal assistance to women of color who face harassment or discrimination in the workplace such that they have the ability to bring claims against employers. Others could be priority adjudication for women who face both race and gender-based discrimination at federal agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In her 1981 NWSA speech, Audre Lorde spoke to precisely this phenomenon.
When an academic woman says, “I can’t afford it,” she may mean she is making a choice about how to spend her available money. But when a woman on welfare says, “I can’t afford it,” she means she
is surviving on an amount of money that was barely subsistence in 1972, and she often does not have enough to eat. Yet the National Women’s Studies Association here in 1981 holds a conference in which it commits itself to responding to racism yet refuses to waive the registration fee for poor women and women of Color who wished to present and conduct workshops. This has made it impossible for many women of Color—for instance, Wilmette Brown, of Black Women for Wages for Housework—to participate in this conference.18
A hundred anti-racist conferences will do little good if the people of color they aim to empower cannot afford to be in the room.
Almost half a million people attended the Women’s March in Washington, DC, in January 2017. The overwhelming majority of them were white, middle-class women. Teresa Shook, the retired attorney who came up with the idea for the march, wrote later that “the reality is that the women who initially started organizing were almost all white,” and that she had initially called the march “Million Women March,” a name that had already been taken by a large protest held in Washington, DC, in 1997 by Black women.
Aurielle Marie Lucier, writing in Essence magazine, talked about the passive racism she experienced at the march, from being pushed into a trash can by a “nasty woman” to being racially profiled by an elderly white feminist, and concluded that the white women had “marched for themselves alone.” The emphasis on uteruses and pussies was also grating to Lucier, as it assumed that all women have them (thus excluding transwomen).19
Lucier was just one of the Black women who spoke out. Research on the environment before and after the march shows how Black commentators who were critical of the event were shut down. One of them, Bridget Todd, expressed fears prior to the march that marginalized women would be subject to arrest and actions by the police simply because the white women who had not voted for Trump wanted to make a point. “I’m sorry white women some of you helped get us into this mess . . . perhaps it’s not your voices that need to be amplified in the aftermath”20 Todd received a lot of pushback for daring to say this, most of it underscoring the color-blind precept that the march was for “all” women. Todd was accused of “divisiveness, reverse racism and being angry at white women”21 The war of rhetoric continued on the pages of the New York Times, where Emma Kate Symons wrote, “You are a woman and regardless of color and ethnicity and sexual orientation we should be one voice.”22
It was just the sort of scolding that many women of color are quite fed up with; its central mistake not dissimilar to the preachy color blindness of critics of the Black Lives Matter movement who insistently use the slogan “All Lives Matter.” It ignores the simple truth that those who benefit from their skin color cannot preach color-blindness, thus covering up their racial privilege.
The leaders of the march were proudly and publicly committed to an intersectional ideology, and yet they had not considered that Saturday, a day of rest for the middle classes, was just another working day for those in the service and hospitality industries—for cleaners, transport workers, carers, and those engaged in many other kinds of low-paid and often insecure work usually performed by people of color and immigrants. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic revealed that more than half of America’s “essential workers”—including grocery-store clerks, janitors, and fast-food workers, generally paid minimum wage—are women, and of those women a disproportionate number are Black. Yet they were not seen as essential to the Women’s March. So while many white women were attending the march on a day convenient to them, others, most likely women of color and immigrants, cleaned their hotel rooms, bussed them around town, and cooked the tacos or noodles or pizza with which they would reward themselves after a hard day protesting injustice.
Intersectional approaches are hard work, but they are possible. In the case of the Women’s March, it would have been useful to get the leadership of LGBTQI organizations involved. Even more important, a good strategy would have been to approach large corporations like Amazon, McDonald’s, Burger King, and so on, as well as major hotel chains, to allow their employees to have time off for attending the march. The fear of appearing anti-Women could have been sufficient in many cases to ensure that women of color had some opportunities to participate. The march could also have created better connections with the leadership of groups like Black Lives Matter so that those affiliated with that organization had a visible, agenda-setting role in the march.
Many of the white women who marched in 2017 wanted to show their political opposition to the election of President Donald Trump. Yet even while they did so, those who claimed color-blindness failed to acknowledge that for Black and Brown women, the election of Trump presented an actual threat. Even worse, they did not use the activism of that moment to acknowledge the role white women’s support for white supremacy had played in the election. In 2020, when Trump lost, it was again revealed that white women increased their support for Trump, with 55 percent of them voting for the president’s reelection.23 The number is particularly revealing because, following the 2016 election few white women (such as those quoted above) saw racism as a problem among themselves. It is also notable that more than 80 percent of Black women, the highest percentage by demographic, voted against President Donald Trump.
In subsequent years, the Women’s March initiative has splintered into a number of separate organizations, each running its own demonstration on the anniversary of the original march. In 2020 there were questions about the continuing relevance of the march; some thought its goals, such as encouraging women to run for office, had already been accomplished.24
In the late 2000s, when I first started volunteering with Amnesty International USA, they operated something called the “own-country-rule” for country specialists. This meant I was forbidden from doing any work related to Pakistan simply because I was from Pakistan. It was a discriminatory rule that applied to immigrant people who may wish to work on their own country, but not to white people. The majority of white people worked on issues related to the United States all the time. The “gender” specialist worked on issues facing white women but also extended herself to other countries whenever she wished.
It was also a departure from the general white emphasis on expertise as qualification for all things. The consequence of the rule was that white people who were interested in working on a country, but who did not know the language or had never been there, were now the “experts,” while natives of those countries who had immigrated to the United States could not apply/contribute their knowledge. Later on, as the rule became harder to defend, it was alleged that it existed to protect the volunteer from reprisals in their country of origin. (Volunteers could easily have made such assessments of risk themselves, given that all volunteer work on human-rights issues does involve some risk.) Brown and Black people were thus being excluded from policy discussions for their own protection. In 2009, when I was elected to the board of AIUSA, the rule had, after much urging, been changed.
However, there is an important distinction between what Nancy Fraser calls “affirmative change” and actual transformational change. The former is perfunctory, form-filling, intended to silence and appease; the latter requires the dissolution of underlying structures and hierarchies for a complete reformulation. Whether it is the National Organization of Women or an organization like AIUSA or even the Women’s March, all require transformational change. This means reconsidering everything, from the way meetings are organized and conference calls are set up to the way public demonstrations are organized. The go-to for most organizations, sadly, is affirmative change: the installation of a Black woman at the top or the creation of a committee to look into “diversity” (AIUSA convened many of these, fostering the impression that something was being done, when all that was done was to establish another committee whose findings would not be available for months and sometimes years).
The change that we need, that feminism needs, is transformational change. The analysis of where and how to make this change must be intersection
al, considering race and class and gender, and the redress must be both redistributive and recognitive. These are the demands of the moment but none of them can be met without a revival of the collective and, most important, a return to the political.
One afternoon in the fall of 2020, I had a discussion with an older white woman academic about a topic she considered terribly controversial and I not at all. The issue at hand was simple: during our conversation, I had confessed that I no longer used the “three or four waves” of feminist analysis in my writing and speaking about feminism. That structure, I told her, represented a way of looking at history primarily through the lens of white and Western women.
She was aghast. In her mind, my rejection of this particular historical frame, which is a mainstay in gender-studies courses all over the United States, was a precursor to turning all white women out of the feminist movement, even though they were not personally responsible or culpable for the wrongs of white feminists past, and even though they had, in her own words, “made the movement.”
Her words, or rather her anger, have stuck with me. First, it is impossible for any change to occur unless white women, particularly older white women, let go of their paranoid belief that racial equality within the movement is some sort of surreptitious strategy to displace them.
Second, if feminism is to be redeemed, timeworn/outmoded/colonialist ideas of history, tradition, and contribution have to be transformed and new frameworks created to take their place. White feminists who lay claim to having “made the movement” are reflecting the structural privilege and power they have claimed at the expense of women of color. And as Kimberlé Crenshaw says, “The value of feminist theory to Black women is diminished because it evolved from a white racial context that is seldom acknowledged.”25 In order for any of these ideas to be of use to us, we need to face up to the environments in which they were generated. Creating a new narrative that is self-aware and unwilling to constantly repeat the injustices of the colonial past is essential to organizing women around the idea of solidarity.