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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

White women- it's all your fault

477 replies

WeldMeDaphne · 19/08/2017 22:27

I will preface this by saying that I am indeed a white woman. And I realise this affords me a lot of privilege.
Among a lot of the rhetoric around the Events unfolding in the US (mostly Charlottesville), I've seen a number of open letters to white women about our complicity in the neo-nazi and white supremacist movement in the US and elsewhere. Clearly those women marching last week on the nazi side were white, but there was a lot of suggestion that those white women not marching but associated with men marching (wives girlfriends etc) were just as culpable as the men wielding torches and assault rifles. I guess I would like some help understanding how this is a white woman issue rather than the white men being responsible for their own actions? I get that one of those pieces said those men are going home to pie cooked by their doting wives but I just feel as though a man who holds those views and has no issue with demonstrating them publically is unlikely to be a caring loving husband?
I am fully prepared to listen to all view points and I totally understand that the people on these marches are white, but they're mostly men, right? Sonhow is this women's fault?

OP posts:
quencher · 24/08/2017 11:47

I also despair that again women are getting blamed, specifically white women. White women weren't Trump's main voter Base. I explained this too. But if it had racist intentions and misogyny and the women still voted for him. What I would ask, is where is the solidarity that people still bang on about. For both race and sex from the women who should have seen this as no go area?

What I also said, is that white men are already being blamed. When racial justice is called the target will is white men /even though white is used as general term. When black lives matter matches happened, the people being called out on where white men. (I also, know that black women fall to the bottom of black lives matter list of campaign for justice. Which I know falls under sexism/ mysogynior).

@YetAnotherSpartacus your list of black male privilege, I do not deny that because I have had it being talked about within black feminist groups. No one (any me) is saying every each group does not have their ills. I know black women have their own demons too, so do black men. I was asked about the privileges that is why I posted. By the way, I don't think black men are saints and we should all by down to them. My gran would turn in her grave and it would be a disservice to all the work that had been done.

YetAnotherSpartacus · 24/08/2017 11:56

@YetAnotherSpartacus your list of black male privilege, I do not deny that because I have had it being talked about within black feminist groups. No one (any me) is saying every each group does not have their ills. I know black women have their own demons too, so do black men. I was asked about the privileges that is why I posted. By the way, I don't think black men are saints and we should all by down to them. My gran would turn in her grave and it would be a disservice to all the work that had been done

The issue here and we were talking about privilege (recognising Quentin's recent post arguing for a shift towards disadvantage) and these things are not about ills or demons - they are about privileges that black men have over women - white and black - and which are also shared by white men. And as I think you agree black men can be misogynist and sexist just like white men. And yet, they seem to get called out less over it than white women do over racism AND as soon as a white women starts to talk about her oppression she is reminded of others less fortunate and told to privilege their oppression - I don't see this happening to black men or white men - i.e. they are not reminded of others less fortunate and told to privilege our oppression.

quencher · 24/08/2017 11:56

Feminism was the worst thing to happen to the Black community expecially in America. It was never our fight on the first place, and this thread reaffirms my point why I and many other Black women are not Feminists. I have never seen such a long thread on feminist chat. The reason this thread continues is because the people on here are not used to their views challenged by women of colour I know sometimes it feels like you are knocking your head against wall. Feminism is just a name. (Even though to some people it has become taboo of a word and evil) but It's the actions that count. There have been lots of black females who have done amazing things that would be considered feminist before the word was coined. It's what you want out of life as woman and the ability to be able to have access as everyone else. I also, know race gets intertwined with sexism for black women and the need to fit in both spaces. I actually think one of the things about being a feminist is the ability to not give fuck if people don't want to listen to both sides. (sorry for swearing)

QuentinSummers · 24/08/2017 11:58

Maybe it's due to echo chambers, but the articles I see about why white men vote trump can be very sympathetic. They suggest white working class men gave lost their jobs and are disenfranchised so who could blame them for voting for a racist sexist if it brings their jobs back?
Whereas white women are condemned.

I think gones post was very interesting. I assume gone is from a traveller background. In which case, despite having white skin, she would experience intense racial prejudice in the UK where travellers are viewed extremely negatively.

QuentinSummers · 24/08/2017 12:00

quencher thank you for continuing to engage on this thread. I always value your contribution but especially on threads like this that have become entrenched on both sides. Flowers Cake Wine

quencher · 24/08/2017 12:03

I am going to check her twitter feed and in which context she said them in. I know I have been blocked on twitter so many times for being at logger heads with black women/ feminist.

quencher · 24/08/2017 12:07

I have just reread by posts again and sorry for all errors. I will go and find the pendants corner to hung my head in shame.

quencher · 24/08/2017 12:15

and which are also shared by white men. And as I think you agree black men can be misogynist and sexist just like white men. And yet, they seem to get called out less over it than white women do over racism AND as soon as a white women starts to talk about her oppression she is reminded of others less fortunate and told to privilege their oppression - I don't see this happening to black men or white men I guess it depends what sort of things you read and what your main focus is.

I have also noticed that racial threads that focus on things like Charlottesville only happen when it's makes big news or only what people find relevant. Some black male issues that have been challenged would not have made sense to post about because people would have to deem them relevant. If it has hit the dailymail or guardian. It seems a none issue or not about us or people we know.

I think it's amazing how balckish the tv show is challenging black males plus looking at sexism and racism. What I also like is the challenging of black perception of other people and how sometimes they can get it completely wrong.

YetAnotherSpartacus · 24/08/2017 12:20

have also noticed that racial threads that focus on things like Charlottesville only happen when it's makes big news or only what people find relevant

I'm actually not quite sure what you mean in the post above, but there are many acts of mundane sexism and misogyny that happen to women that don't get posted about and the media does seem to be a focal point for posts generally on FWR.

quencher · 24/08/2017 12:22

@QuentinSummers thanks! I love the feminist board but sometimes it can be hard. What I take from it is that my basic understanding of feminism is hopefully similar to everyone else's who follow the same ideology. If it's true, then that's a start.

Gonegonegone · 24/08/2017 13:56

Quencher I don't doubt children &woc are treated worse by police in America. That doesn't mean white women are privilaged just because they don't get as much abuse, and I I don't think fear of men is something that can be compared so I think just saying women are disadvantaged by being scared of male police is enough. I understand there are horrific reports about what black females go through at the hands of police, I retweeted the recent one about the woc 11minute 'internhsl' for something very minor. But as a woman alone with make police I don't think any of us think it's ok we are white they won't hurt us because we have privilage.

It is also difficult to discuss race issues in America from the pov of the UK (and while I'm not born British and have friends from many other cultures, including friends of mixed race, i don't live in the big cities that have much greater variety in race. So it's a different make up here, different prejudices. I'm not saying for a second that racism isn't just as present but it likely isn't the same discussing it from our pov. Like others I appreciate your posts as you are talking & listening rather than the aggression from others who clearly won't hear us.

YetAnotherSpartacus · 24/08/2017 14:03

so I think just saying women are disadvantaged by being scared of male police is enough

Women are disadvantaged by the police. Just check out how Slutwalk began. I phoned up once to report a male neighbour threatening me with violence and knocking on my door all hours. I was young and very, very poor then, so my address probably gave away my social class, but I was basically told to call back when I had the bruises to prove it ("wait 'till he's actually taken a swing at you love"). I reported a flasher and was laughed at.

Copperbeech33 · 24/08/2017 14:05

It is not possible for people if colour to be racist given we didn't create or benefit from the system of White supremacy

????? what are you on? of course it is possible for absolutly anybody to be racist.

racism is a human problem it isn't a problem from one group or another.

I think you have just proved that yourself, by that ridiculous display of racism

Gonegonegone · 24/08/2017 14:59

Yes sparticus that's what I was saying.

Rasism as class oppression only works one way and so can't have reverse racism. Poc can be prejudice against white people and other poc but that's not class oppression

SerfTerf · 24/08/2017 15:01

Racism is racism.
Class oppression is class oppression.

They can intersect. They can multiply each other. But they're not the same.

Copperbeech33 · 24/08/2017 15:07

The two most recent complaints of racism I have had upheld, against black people.

  1. The black midwife who dismissed a mother's concerns with " well frankly, I don't believe white women should be allowed to breed anyway"
  1. The black bus driver who refused to stop the bus if whenever the queue at the bus stop was all white, or if only white people wanted to get off.
woman12345 · 24/08/2017 20:31

Racism is power plus prejudice, and we know what female oppression is like, so, looking forward to and training for the fight back. Smile Fascist racists do have their uses. This crew have been a political education like no other.

Better out than in, as they say. Grin

quencher · 24/08/2017 21:53

@Gonegonegone
And evette Dionne endorsing alot of this. As I said already earlier that no one addrsssed I have gone on her twitter feed and she has linked articles from teen vogue websites. The article states exactly what I have pointed out here on this thread. Almost point for point but better and more coherent and eloquent. The two articles has to be read together to give understanding and anyone who does not understand it then has no idea of black female feminism or the history of if it or why white women where mentioned or why they are at constant logger head. I would post some of it but people will have to read it themselves. To me they are basic knowledge and I agree with everything Dionne and Jackson have written. They are not new to any black feminist who wants to understand their past and history instead of having one sided history.

The two are linked and should be read to together for beginners.

Bits of the first article

Women Have Always Been a Part of White Supremacy
Current events may be relatively silent on the role of women in white supremacy, but history is quite loud.

When you look back at the images from the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend, you might get the impression that women were largely absent. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t always been present in white supremacist ideas and actions in very important, albeit less memorable, ways.

Like many violent racial events in this country’s past, history will record Charlottesville as a mixture of toxic masculinity and anti-black and anti-Semitic rage. This is the sort of rage that paints white supremacy, and all of its trappings, as the domain of (white) men. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

For the most part, women are not mentioned in history unless they are martyrs, heroines, princesses, or feminists. When they are upholding a system as violent and exploitative as white supremacy, they are pretty much ignored altogether. But they show up on occasion, and technology has helped with that.

But women and white supremacy were bosom buddies long before we had the technology to capture them on film. Which continues on to give examples....

What is critical here is that white women were working in the plantation household to normalize white supremacy. Thus, even when the peculiar institution of slavery was eradicated, the culture and logic underlying it prevailed.

One of the most prominent groups to participate in the preservation and purification of the failed white supremacist regime was the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894. The Daughters worked alongside organizations like the Klan to grow white supremacist frameworks in the South. They were integral in erecting statues and monuments to commemorate the Confederate generals and soldiers who were their own family members. While they claim these efforts were about history, they instead sanitized our memory of those states that had seceded from the Union, and downplayed the Confederate states’ enduring commitments to those ideologies even after the war ended.

During that time, the perception that black Americans would dispossess white Southerners was met with swift racial violence in the form of lynchings.

The earliest and arguably most thorough account of white women’s role in the lynchings of black American men came from anti-lynching activist and journalist Ida B. Wells in A Red Recordd^.
www.teenvogue.com/story/women-white-supremacy-history-america/amp

Second article

OG History is a Teen Vogue series where we unearth history not told through a white, cisheteropatriarchal lens. In this piece, black feminist writer, editor, and critic Evette Dionne explains how many famous white people working for women's suffrage were actually racist, too.
www.teenvogue.com/story/womens-suffrage-leaders-left-out-black-women/amp

By not addressing this issue, some white suffragists were able to present voting rights as an extension of white supremacy. Anthony and Stanton championed equality for black Americans, even signing an 1864 congressional petition that pushed for the passage of the 13th Amendment. But the ratification of the 15th Amendment, on February 3, 1870, turned the tide because it secured voting rights for men of all races — but didn’t extend that right to women. “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ask for the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman,” Anthony famously spewed. Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National Women Suffrage Association, argued that, “You have put the ballot in the hands of your black men, thus making them political superiors of white women. Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political masters of their former mistresses!” When the 15th Amendment passed, white suffragists began pushing harder for voting rights for white women, to the exclusion of black, Native American, and Asian women.

Black women publicly fought for their right to vote, and often. In her 1867 speech at the American Equal Rights Association, Sojourner Truth argued that giving black men the right to vote without affording black women the same right only promoted black men's dominance. “I feel that if I have to answer for the deeds done in my body just as much as a man, I have the right to have just as much as a man,” she said. “There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”

But many white suffragists didn’t advocate for the ending of lynching because protecting white women’s virtue was often the excuse used to justify the brutal act. In the white imagination, black men’s insatiable sexuality was a threat to white women’s purity, according to historian Lisa Lindquist-Dorr’s book White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-19600^. After the passing of the 15th Amendment, Rebecca Ann Latimer Felton, the first woman to serve in the Senate,pushed this dangerous message: “I do not want to see a negro man walk to the polls and vote on who should handle my tax money, while I myself cannot vote at all,” she said. “When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue — if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts — then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.”

quencher · 24/08/2017 21:59

And to someone up thread who questioned about the voting re- Trump and connection to racism. it does feature in the article and I will post it on its on because I thought it was important to separate it from the rest.

This explains what I have tried to say and I am not the only one who believes it.

Immediately following the election of Donald Trump, commentators and pundits alike were stunned, asking, “Who are these 53% of white womenwho voted for Trump?” Shocked that these women would support a man who had been recorded saying it was totally permissible to “grab ‘em by the p*ssy,” some believed — at least in this case — gender solidarity should outweigh racial ties.

But why are we still (seriously) asking that question now? Is it because we simply cannot fathom that many white women have a vested interest in white supremacy because it benefits them, too? Can we not envision a world where white women benefit from white privilege and power — whether they intend to or not? Are we so committed to our own logic and beliefs that we cannot believe the actual historical facts of the matter?

Current events may be relatively silent on the role of women in white supremacy, but history is quite loud. White women are number two in a deeply entrenched racial order in the United States. And when we talk about whiteness being threatened or violent public protests to preserve that order, we are always talking about women, too.

woman12345 · 24/08/2017 22:26

we not envision a world where white women benefit from white privilege and power quencher brilliant, thank you. " When we know better, we do better" Oprah. ( I know she's not fashionable, but I love her)

Gonegonegone · 24/08/2017 22:46

Quencher it's not the articles she linked it's the comments from woc following, claiming it's white women's fault because they don't report their DV husbands and because they don't leave them. And numerous similar posts even when myself and others pointed out that women are most likely to be murdered after they leave their abuser. and evette Dionne liking their posts about how white women are responsible for their husbands white supremacy and she blocked several of us just for saying women aren't guilty for their husbands violence.

There's also numerous threads with woc and white women slating James fields mother for not preventing him being a murderer, even though she was victim of his dv, disabled and wheelchair bound and had reported him repeatedly to the police. None of these threads blamed the white male supremacists just their white female victims.

quencher · 25/08/2017 00:08

evette Dionne liking their posts about how white women are responsible for their husbands white supremacy and she blocked several of us just for saying women aren't guilty for their husbands violence.
I can't find the direct likes for domestic violence. This is what I found as link or a link to a link on her page.

this one which is close to what the argument is about. It still has a point.

Undergirding this troubling belief that women aren’t central to racist movements is another: That racism occurs in a vacuum. Those who think white supremacy is a “white guys’ thing” must ask themselves about the nature of the fantasy they have constructed. Do we really believe the men holding torches in these photographs live in some sort of single-gendered society, or that the women they interact with hold no sway in their communities? There may be fewer of them marching with lit torches, but rest assured women are playing a powerful role wherever they can enact their agendas. If the 1920s Klan showed us anything, it’s that racist ideologies are nurtured in communities — not in isolation — and woven into a society’s very fabric. We will never understand the mechanisms that enact racism until we understand the whole societies from which they spring.
Take the “alt-right,” for example. Figures like Anne Coulter have been touting Trumpian ideas long before Trump made any moves toward the White House. Lauren Southern has become, according to Vice, the alt-right’s “not-so-secret weapon.” As a Harper’s feature recently highlighted, a group of “self-made female pundits” with a white-nationalist agenda are seeking to amplify their voices. Across Europe, a wave of women leaders promoting an anti-immigrant, white-populist hard-line are trying to galvanize women voters.
The women within these movements have warned of the foolishness of ignoring them. Not long after Donald Trump was elected, Lana Lokteff, a woman member of the “alt-right” gave a speech intended to galvanize other women. She told the crowd, “Our enemies have become so arrogant that they count on our silence.” After all, as Lokteff said, “When women get involved, a movement becomes a serious threat.”

www.thecut.com/2017/08/charlottesville-attack-women-white-supremacy.html

FlatPacker · 25/08/2017 10:20

I think it interesting to analyse the role of women in the white supremacist movement. I checked the video upthread where Lokteff chillingly calls for women to join the movement. She clearly appeals to some fundamentals that most women want: security, a nice home, a healthy family (4 / 5 women have children). She knowingly and actively exploits the fear of a changing world - she talks about survival a lot. I can see this rhetoric resonating in a minority of viewers. I see it less about women making a choice between living in a sexist world or a world where white hold onto privilege. These women are embracing both worlds. They see a sexist world is one where they profit through their children. A world where they don't have to work. A world in which they know and understand the rules (if I fulfil my man's needs, he'll stay with me).

A feminist is always going to look at other women with sympathy. They will try and understand why they feel happy living in a sexist world, are they living of fear of DV, have they experienced abuse as a child, and so on. I don't see this as feminists trying to help wriggle white women out of being accused of racism or enabling white supremacy to happen. Though I can, at the same time, understand why it may seem that way to POC.

QuentinSummers · 25/08/2017 16:23

Hmmm. I don't think white supremacy is a white guy thing, I think it's a white people thing and there's no reason to suggest white women are any less likely to be that racist than white men.
My problem is suggesting that non-racist white women should be able to fix the problem of white supremacy. I don't know how we could do that.

Gentlemanjohn · 25/08/2017 18:30

Erm...not quite sure I follow. If the women weren't marching with the men then of course we can't say they're culpable in absence of evidence of their support for neo-fascist ideologies. If they were marching with the men, then (providing they were not doing so under duress) they're racist arseholes. Women aren't to blame for men's behaviour, but they are to blame for their own.