‘White’ Feminism

[Sociallydistancedcocktails]

I was recently on a thread which got me thinking about this.

Do you think ‘white’ feminism exists?

And your thoughts on the article below. I am quoting an excerpt

“White feminism is a term that has been on the tip of everyone's tongue since actor Emma Watson addressed past criticisms of her feminism in statement to her book club about the topic in early January. Though it's difficult to find an exact definition for "white feminism," it has come to describe a not-quite-feminist mindset that doesn't take into account the ways the women of color experience sexism, and how it differs from the way white women experience it. Simply put, white feminism is for white women who don't want to examine their white privilege. The term "intersectional feminism," which stands in opposition to white feminism, was coined by civil rights advocate and law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to help describe the experiences of Black women who not only face sexism, but systemic racism.

Understanding the ways race, gender, and other factors (such as disability, class, or sexuality) intersect is crucial to making our feminism more effective and impactful”

www.bustle.com/p/what-is-white-feminism-here-are-7-sneaky-ways-it-shows-up-into-your-life-7921450

I am not even clear on what the difference is between systemic, structural and institutional.

I understand why identifying institutional racism, sexism etc leads to positive changes, but the other two seem to be usually used very vaguely.

They all mean the same thing at least to me.

Built into the systems (how large things are organised or work eg benefits system), structures (how society/ education for example are structured) or institutions. They all are the same thing. Things so big it's hard to step back and see it as a whole and then see issues built in here or there). Society. The legal system from start to end. The distribution of wealth. The impact of changes to taxation. Whatever.

Do I really have to read the rest?

If I saw that posted I would say

It's lightweight, an opinion piece rather than anything that seems to be thought through or even consistent or really seem to grasp the concepts. It's USA focussed.

If you want to talk about feminism and race on a UK website in anything approaching a meaningful way then find something from the UK, and make it something that is more... Everything. Than this.

Yes I think that's a good description NiceGerbil

Do I really have to read the rest ...

I meant about the difference between structural, systemic and institutional, but I think you've got the measure of this listicle.

I read the article. It basically says that the cure for white feminism is for white people to admit they're racist. Each bullet point is illustrated with a photo of a non white man.

It's truly guff.

Ah well there may well be ones it'd be a wiki job for me. Sorry can't help more! Possible I'm wrong obviously about them being basically the same.

The rest of the article isn't so bad actually. I don't agree with it all but can see arguments. The tokenism point would be a really interesting discussion another time.

It's as if the author had to put the title, intro and point one as fighty clickbait then is about to make the points she wanted to make.

Interesting.

It's almost as if the author had to do the big

The epitome of 'white feminism' to me is being so sheltered from the harsh realities of some women's lives and the way they are discriminated against from birth because of their sex, that you believe being a woman is just something you 'identify as' by having long hair, wearing a dress and other signifiers of femininity.

Institutional racism surely refers to racism that occurs within an institution because the institution has not applied specific measures to prevent it - the police for example.

A system is something with multiple parts that all play a specific role and interact with each other in an identifiable way; not all systems are big. They are studied through systems theory, which doesn’t seem to have been applied in the case of ‘systemic racism.’ The whole point of referring to something as a system is that you can then identify the parts, processes and interactions and make it far less mystifying.

Structural is far more nebulous and could really refer to any big thing whether it is self organising like a system or not, and regardless of whether or not the big thing is an institution.

Did the government recently announce there is no evidence of structural racism? It is hard to know whether or not there is without pinning down what the specifics of what structural really means.

If it doesn’t mean anything more specific than how a large thing like society works then whether or not it exists is going to be pretty difficult to demonstrate.

I am hoping people are meaning something a bit more than racism is big and organised.

The intro to the book I keep banging on about was good on that Morris.

Too long to type! She says she wrote what she felt and the aim was never to guilt white people and to take it like that kind of missesc the point entirely. She didn't write aimed at White people. When a lot of people took it that way and started sending her stuff saying omg I'm so sorry she was ... Taken aback.

Obviously paraphrasing and she puts it much better so hope I haven't fucked up what she meant (arrgh!) but so much of feminism has been subverted, bastardised, the arguments and language have been stolen and used against women/ feminists in a variety of ways.

The fact that lots of otherwise sensible women seem to run with it is depressing but not a new thing.

It's here, LibertyMole
www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities

It says this near the beginning:

‘The Commission was keen to gain a more forensic and rigorous understanding of underlying causes of disparities. However, we have argued for the use of the term ‘institutional racism’ to be applied only when deep-seated racism can be proven on a systemic level and not be used as a general catch-all phrase for any microaggression, witting or unwitting.’

No it's not organised here at the moment. It's built into the systems (or whatever) in ways that are hard to spot but nevertheless seem to end up with one or more groups getting the shitty end of the stick even though it seems 'fair' at a look.

Then the ism kicks in again when the reason X group is often doing rubbish compared to the others is because they must be doing something different/ wrong etc.

That intro says it all.

'general catch-all phrase for any microaggression, witting or unwitting'

Ie we know (before starting) that lots of this is a fuss about nothing.

@Sociallydistancedcocktails

How’s that intersectionality? That’s just a list of issues

Intersectionality in identity means complex and often conflicting interests because of a vector of social positions. Being disadvantaged and privileged, being oppressed and an oppressor at the same time. And being aware of these

What you've described isn't intersectionality

I think you've missed the central thrust of Kimberlé Crenshaw's argument

What you've said is just (part of) the explantion Crenshaw gave for the failure of extant analytical frameworks to accurately model oppression in black woman, as can be seen in the opening to her essay below:

This focus on the most privileged group members marginalizes those who are multiply-burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination. I suggest further that this focus on otherwise-privileged group members creates a distorted analysis of racism and sexism because the operative conceptions of race and sex become grounded in ex-periences that actually represent only a subset of a much more complex phenomenon.

Intersectionality put simply is that; the sum of multiple oppressions is greater than the constituent parts

Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated

And this multi-axis framework of analysis is by no means limited to race and sex.
An analysis of the list of issues from @Novelusername is exactly what intersectionality is about and for

Quotes from the original essay on intersectionality:
Crenshaw, Kimberle () "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, "University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8.
Available at: chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol198/iss1/8

I said organised because that was your definition of a system...

‘how large things are organised...’

gahhhh
link fail
chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf
That should work

I'd tend to think of systemic as a synonym for something like 'widespread', and institutional as meaning the kind of institution, like the police, which has a collective identity, but probably goes beyond just one employer or company to having some kind of broader working culture.

I'm using the term 'structural' in some posts a technical sense relating to the history of marxism, but also in a more general sense to mean the interactions between 'classes' (like sex, race, social class, and so on), as large more abstract relations between groups of people that go beyond individual agency. (disclaimer, this may not be what others on the thread mean by it!)

So for example, I'd say that it's more than possible to be subject to a number of structural oppressions (of women by men, of black people by white people, of poor by rich), but still not be actively discriminated against or even subject to direct racism or sexism - the structural oppression manifests in the general ways in which, say, women don't get as much opportunity in life, lose out on jobs, don't earn as much because they have children, suffer from poor self-esteem because they don't fit the desired social model of womanhood. (Of course most structural oppression is a combination of direct and indirect discrimination.)

Institutional culture seems to have the possibility that you can change it - it's a much smaller culture. Structural oppression seems to me to be more about the whole system of intersecting axes of broader inequalities, such as the binary relationships between man/woman, white/black, able-bodied/disabled, and so on. It works at a social level as a combination of all of the effects of inequality that join together.

@NiceGerbil I got bored reading that fluff and read the article that was linked to Kimberlé Crenshaw (bit baffled as to why the original essay wasn't linked)
Far better read than the original article
isreview.org/issue/91/black-feminism-and-intersectionality

What you've said is just (part of) the explantion Crenshaw gave for the failure of extant analytical frameworks to accurately model oppression in black woman

Crenshaw was working in a field where this was at the time a reasonably novel idea. Whereas this concept had been understood and subject to a great deal of analysis for decades, under lots of different names, in feminism, critical theory, various forms of continental philosophy, sociology and anthropology (in fact pretty much all disciplines which had developed out of some contact with Marxism and/or structuralism or anthropology/ethnography). Kudos to her for bringing it explicitly into legal scholarship. But there was already a huge body of work by black women writers in sociology and related disciplines on this already which she was drawing on.

Yes, that makes sense cakedays, although I really wish people would not use systemic if they actually mean widespread, because they are not synonyms.

I think structural refers to how components of a system are organised but not the components themselves, for example a system could have a hierarchical structure of which the police force would be one instruction which is a component within a broader system.

So it might be easier to resolve the institution of the police, but harder to resolve inequalities that arise as a consequence of how the police interacts with social housing provision in terms of feedback loops, increasing complexity etc.

Structure might then refer to the difficulties in reordering a society in which certain ways of organising it have become entrenched.

‘ large more abstract relations between groups of people that go beyond individual agency’

This I find useful for understanding structural - relational and beyond the individual.

That should have said... the police would be one institution not one instruction!

Yes, exactly - like NiceGerbil said, the systems (or whatever) in ways that are hard to spot but nevertheless seem to end up with one or more groups getting the shitty end of the stick even though it seems 'fair' at a look.

Haven't we all seen situations, say at work on an interview panel, where the male candidate gets the job, and he was clearly great, and everyone's happy, and agrees that he was the best and most qualified, and half the panel are women anyway, and none of them would ever directly discriminate and would be horrified at the suggestion that they were doing so, because they aren't sexists! Yet still the man has got the job; and funnily enough the last eight times a man got hired as well, but "what can you do, we'd appoint more women if they were out there?" and all that...