The problem with white feminism

[FrackOff]

Listen to this amazing podcast on white feminism, the link with the right wing, racism and colonialism pca.st/vzbdlq7j

You need to hear the whole thing to get the whole argument

donquixotedelamancha - talk about taking one for the team! That was above and beyond.

Compare that load of privileged baloney with Pragna Patel.

Poor old Frack - no cigar and not even close.

It's about 80% white in the U.K., isn't it?

80% white British but another 6% "other white", so 86% white overall.

www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/national-and-regional-populations/population-of-england-and-wales/latest

I bottle-fed years before mumsnet existed and met lots of breast is best mothers/recruiters/shamers (I didn't really care) at mother and baby groups, in parks and in the midwife profession.

This went on pre mumsnet and they are not EVERYONE HERE ALISON. Again representation, breast feeders are expressing (!) their opinions, not everyone's. They don't claim to "own" feeding any more than white women "own" feminism and the digital platform they speak on certainly doesn't OWN anything.

I don't want to be your sister Alison. Conversations with you would be a bit weird.

Not to mention the number of Muslim and orthodox Jewish women who will be excluded from public spaces once men are admitted to facilities that were previously women-only?

No. Non white women were mentioned frequently, but only as an abstract concept personified by Alison. There was not one mention of specific challenges faced today.

Yeah the mix up between suffragists and suffragettes is so annoying. At the time of the suffragettes, black people were not prevented from voting (although obviously they were subjected to structural racism). But there is no way that the suffragettes in the UK were fighting for the right of white women only to vote because that would have required there to have been laws preventing black men from voting at the time, which there weren’t. If I were a suffragette listening to this sort of shit 100 years later, I’d be turning in my grave. What an over-privileged entitled idiot.

I listened until the suffragettes (inclusive of the Indian and other minority women of the time) being mixed up with suffragists (the US equivalent.).

I haven't wasted my time listening to it, but this is exactly the kind of thing I meant when I described Phipps as intellectually dishonest earlier. There is a growing number of academics who (either to attract funding or to reproduce their own world-view) argue from ideological standpoints without bothering themselves with facts, research or logic. I'm not even sure it's ideology, actually, in this case, because there generally is at least some internal coherence to an ideology, even when it is, by definition, false. It's not surprising that public trust in "experts" is being eroded, or that it then becomes possible for certain groups to deny climate change.

Twatticus that is just England and Wales. It is much higher in Scotland.

'm not even sure it's ideology, actually, in this case, because there generally is at least some internal coherence to an ideology

Yes, my feeling was she just strings together buzzwords and repeats small pieces of more reasonable arguments without the nuance or context. There was no logical sequence of thought to explain or justify ideas. Several points seemed directly contradictory.

It's hard to summarise fairly in a clear way without veering into parody.

Their arguments are 'myopic and inherently white'.

Wow. So she's actually telling black women that they're not doing black feminism properly?

I would say more, but to be honest, I think we now know all we need to know about Alison Phipps.

It’s interesting because the one UK academic conference that I have heard of that was accused of being overtly racist and very hostile to POC was the 2019 Transgender Conference organised by Edinburgh University. The conference promised to be ‘intersectional’ but was apparently anything but, with some speakers blaming their overt racism on MH issues. Check out the hashtag #transcon2019 for all the dramz at the time. But I bet none of that will be in Alison’s book....

I wouldn't shame Alison Phipps for using a bottle, no harm in that if you can't get the glass to your mouth. Seems like she's had a few bottles too. 🤷‍♀️

Twatticus that is just England and Wales. It is much higher in Scotland

Indeed, and being so homogenously white Scotland quite famously has no ethnic tensions whatsoever. No one has ever been discriminated against for their ethnicity. It is a perfect paradise. Just ask the Irish Catholics.

Wow. So she's actually telling black women that they're not doing black feminism properly?

Not explicitly. That was her argument against all older feminists who achieve great things but then 'do unspeakable things' by 'oposing trans rights'.

The way the q was framed made me immediately think of Linda Belos.

Alison seems to be a bit hacked off that the plan to make opposition to TRA overreach literally unspeakable isn't working out as expected.

(Honestly, "unspeakable things", it's like a Victorian potboiler.)

Aah yes, being white. The new ‘original sin’ 🙄

Here you go, Alison, you politically illiterate, ahistorical twit.

feminisminindia.com/2019/02/04/7-indian-suffragettes-british/

Does she not find it galling to sit there as a white woman, basically claiming to speak for black people. The woman interviewing her seems a bit dumb and a people-pleaser, but if I were her, I would have asked Alison whether, as a white middle-class academic, she feels that it's up to her to be writing this book and making this argument on behalf of women of colour.

I am listening to the podcast in the background at the moment. She is so so dumb and so disingenuous. I wonder if she truly believes this crap.

Pragna Patel's FiLia speech is really good. Thanks for sharing.

I don't identify as a white feminist 🙂

So a question for Alison and or Frackoff.
Tears epitomise white femininity. They evoke the damsel in distress and the mourning, lamenting women of myth. Niobe wept unceasingly after her children were killed by Artemis and Apollo; even after being turned to stone, tears poured from her petrified face. Penelope waited for her husband Odysseus for two decades in her ‘bed of sorrows’, which she watered with tears until she fell asleep. In an article on #MeToo, Jamilah Lemieux commented: ‘white women know how to be victims. They know just how to bleed and weep in the public square, they fundamentally understand that they are entitled to sympathy.’

www.redpepper.org.uk/the-political-whiteness-of-metoo/

This describes exactly the fetish of subordination that autogynephilia depends on. And yet when this is a man identifying as a women for this very purpose you are their "sister"?

And 90% of women in UK can shut up and let Bergdorf speak for them in the HSTS/non-AGP GAMP version of "feminism" you promote?

When I was a student (many years ago) we had an American lecturer who talked a lot about the Americanisation of Europe. I think we're now seeing the Americanisation of academia. There are so many 'academics' and students who seem to have no awareness that the US experiences of feminism, racism, suffragettes/suffragists exist within an US vacuum and that other countries have different histories, political movements, etc.
'White feminism' when used by white women just seems to be another way to tell the majority that they're being the wrong type of feminists.It seems to be used by feminists who court male approval and have no campaigning or RL experience of feminism and no experience or knowledge of women's rights or lack of them in other countries and no appreciation of grassroots organising here or across the globe.

There's Rachel weeping for her children too. (Jeremiah, quoted in Mathew as prophesying the Massacre of the Innocents)

Uh, so the idea that women wept when awful things happenedin times when they had no power is problematic?

Only white women Errol.

Presumably black women shed no tears and just stoically carry on. Good old stiff upper lip for them. Because treating dark skinned women as inherently different to light skinned ones isn't racist at all.

And telling people not to show emotion when bad things happen to them is great too.

I can’t cry on demand, despite being white. If I cry, I can’t actually stop myself from doing it. It’s not like I love the feeling of tears on my skin or anything. Alison can fuck off.

so the idea that women wept when awful things happenedin times when they had no power is problematic?

Yes, that is exactly her point. From the above article:

the domination of mainstream feminism by bourgeois white women shapes [it's] political grammar...For instance, that rape is perpetrated by ‘bad men’ who should be exposed...That they ought to be punished as severely as possible.

political whiteness...is produced by the combination of supremacy and victimhood.. studies of whiteness have highlighted the central role of narcissism in white identity..Whiteness is predisposed to woundedness

These tears hide the harms we perpetrate through our involvement in white supremacy...The cultural power of mainstream feminism is linked to the cultural power of white tears...

I am not saying that white women do not suffer sexual violence....We are entitled to be angry; we are entitled to cry. But we are not entitled to politicise our pain