I want to start with a quotation from
Salon's Britney Cooper:
So I am left wanting to ask Patricia Arquette where all the white women who’ve been fighting for every other group of marginalized people are, because some of the most prominent black women organizers in history spent a fair amount of time trying to compel these women to be in solidarity. Notwithstanding the utter absurdity of her claim, her remarks demonstrate a point I made in an earlier column: “white women’s feminisms still center around equality…Black women’s feminisms demand justice.”
My diary will be short today because I want to concentrate on intersectionality and why white feminists (as I am)
must start being unreserved supporters of the issues of women of color. I promise to end with some excellent sites that honor women, especially the NAACP's work honoring black women and Leonard Nimoy's work on full bodied women. Follow over the squiggle for more.
The equality versus justice issue is real. Patricia Arquette's Oscar speech decrying the pay differential for women in the industry was initially positive and enthusiastic as indicated in this Salon article. She responded to criticism in this set of Twitter tweets reported in Salon. At the center of the criticism was Arquette's seeming indifference to the parallel and just as (more) urgent concerns of feminists of color as described by Britney Cooper in Salon. The lesson here is really, we are all in this together and every time a white feminist with access (e.g., an Oscar winner) speaks on an equality or rights basis, we leave out feminists of color.
And what many white feminists don't seem to get is the issue of intersectionality. The way in which civil rights law is set up leaves women of color having to choose which person she is: a woman or a person of color. Under the law, and please correct me if I have this wrong, she must choose in order to file a complaint. But women of color experience both sets of discrimination. So a justice-based approach encompasses both--the possibility that some of us do experience both and seeking an individual right forecloses action on the other unaddressed right. Sexism and racism affect our sisters and it puts women of color in a much worse position than the typical white feminist. I expect that people will disagree with me but I have been teaching women of color as a part of my classes for a long time and I know that I do not face the discrimination in all sorts of forms that they do. It isn't that people, white feminists and male feminists included, didn't intend for racism to be linked with sexism, but our ideological Americanism is so set in individual rights that it was thought to be a plausible solution to problems of discrimination. We need to think beyond individual rights. If we do not rethink this problem (and by we I mean white feminists), our project is doomed because we opted for individual rights over more important justice.
In the academic world, we have been talking about it, and not very successfully, for a very long time, 25 or 30 years or more. The vehicle we have to achieve justice is based on individual rights and without changing the approach, we are stuck. As I read reactions and listened to reactions to Arquette, I recognized the same old problem. Listening to Team Blackness I heard the voices of those who are forced to remind everyone else about these issues. It hurt to recognize that over and over again we leave out women of color when we make a plea for gender equality. So I ask my fellow Kos members to read and think about justice versus rights.
In Other News
Men continue to think that it is their "right" to approach women anytime and anywhere as described on Daily Dot. Thanks, Tara.
Male online harassers don't like being on the receiving end of net harassment as reported on Salon and want their personal information removed from the web reported on Jezebel.
The Texas Bar Exam doesn't allow for the needs of nursing mothers taking the exam as noted by the ACLU. Those of us who have nursed babies can think about what it must be like to take the most important exam of your life to date without any way to accommodate nursing--leakage, pain, embarassment.
Better News
UltraViolet is running an airport campaign with signs giving the status of women in that state as reported on Huffington Post. Smart!
The NAACP is honoring black women here.
Leonard Nimoy's photographs of full-bodied women, honoring them is displayed here. Science and first officer Spock will be missed in many venues.
Many thanks to Tara and ramara for sites. Everyone--have a good week! Let's all stand together.