‘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

Although the previous point about hair was interesting... do you mean it takes 2 hours to make your hair acceptable to white feminists? To western society ? Or to fit with your own cultural norms ?

Intersectionality is important, but you’ll notice we never hear about “male anti racism”.

GrumpyHoonMain I'm not trying to be competitive about it or deny any of your experiences, which I can well believe. We don't often hear about the racism/class prejudice/sexism working class white women face, however, because it's considered taboo or 'racist' to talk about it. It has been latched onto a bit by people like Tommy Robinson, which doesn't help. It is, however, very real. I've been groped at the swimming baths, groped on the street, catcalled practically every time I've left the house, been locked in cabs with the Asian driver not letting me out asking me if I've ever been with an Asian man. I've had a much older man I was working with try to kiss me, and men from these communities who I've been working with treat me with derision and completely undermine me from the get-go. I'm sure what we have experienced is different - white women are sexualised in a pornified way - and I believe you when you talk about your experiences, but white women are still treated as less than human due to race, sex and class by men in those communities, and making it taboo to mention that doesn't help women, only misogynistic men. I think it's important for your experiences to be included in feminism, but mine should be too, for the common goal of calling these behaviours out.

My intersectionality is - person of colour, a woman, educated and relatively affluent.

In US - I’ve mostly been seen as a professional elite. I’ve been massively supported in my career, usually by white men
In UK - mostly seen as person of colour. I’ve been bullied and patronised especially by white women in my career.
In my country of origin - I’m first and foremost a woman and face all the sexism that goes with it. Although as part of the elite I am quite privileged and shielded from a lot of it.

I feel that white feminism is probably similar to the feminism in my country, an expression of upper middle class female privilege and an attempt to expand that (but only for that group) while virtue signalling

Yes exactly - originally this came from a Marxist analysis of class (structural) oppression - in which social class, sex, race, sexuality etc. were all "classes".

If we want to get into this intersectionality business in a real way - can these things really all be looked at from a Marxist class analysis perspective? Even sex IMO only can be to a certain point, but it is fundamentally different than class - a Marxist answer to class is to destroy it, do we really want to erase femaleness and maleness.

Isn't that part of the problem we are seeing now? And isn't this the approach that has created Critical Theory?

If, on the other hand, it is all just a matter of saying some people are oppressed by more than one circumstance, well, no shit. I'm not sure there was ever really a need for a special word for that.

I'm just not convinced that this is a matter of a good idea turned to bad purposes.

Isn't it a case that we might want to destroy the gender classes

And if you do that you remove large proportion of sexism

?

So as a woman with a privileged background what have you in common with working class women ?
Could you not also be seen as one of those " feminists" virtue signalling? In what way is your feminism different from the feminism of the privileged classes?

@Sociallydistancedcocktails

My intersectionality is - person of colour, a woman, educated and relatively affluent.

In US - I’ve mostly been seen as a professional elite. I’ve been massively supported in my career, usually by white men
In UK - mostly seen as person of colour. I’ve been bullied and patronised especially by white women in my career.
In my country of origin - I’m first and foremost a woman and face all the sexism that goes with it. Although as part of the elite I am quite privileged and shielded from a lot of it.

I feel that white feminism is probably similar to the feminism in my country, an expression of upper middle class female privilege and an attempt to expand that (but only for that group) while virtue signalling

Upper middle class people in many cases have a lot of access to power, as employers, in politics, or through money, to do what they think is right and good. Either in a self serving way or just in a way that seems best from their limited perspective.

So they can have more ability to instantiate their ideas than people without that access, and social movements can tend to favour their outlook disproportionately.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean their observations are never accurate or their solutions worth pursuing. There are some things that education and access to funds and social credibility can contribute that are quite useful in a social movement, even beyond the obvious.

GrumpyHoonMain

Theres a huge amount of Indian feminist theory, and I haven't read much recent work published in the last decade. What would you recommend I read now that you think is good?

and making it taboo to mention that doesn't help women, only misogynistic men. I think it's important for your experiences to be included in feminism, but mine should be too, for the common goal of calling these behaviours out.

Yes, this is the heart of the matter for me.

@midgedude

Isn't it a case that we might want to destroy the gender classes

And if you do that you remove large proportion of sexism

?

Possibly, that is certainly what some people think is the idea.

I don't think it's possible, and analytically it depends on accepting a rather narrow version of what counts as "gender." If we look to the anthropological sense of the word, which is a lot more complete in terms of an explanation for what it is and how it works, you could not get rid of gender without also getting rid of either sex, or culture - because that is what gender is, it's the way human sexual dimorphism expresses itself culturally.

From this perspective, efforts to wipe out cultural tropes about sex - say, men are physically stronger than women, or that motherhood is not the same experience as fatherhood - may well have contributed to some of the current confusions about sex and gender.

There has also been a longstanding faction of feminists, and some of their ideas are quite accepted even among feminists more generally, who believe that it is by erasing functional social differences between men and women that you will see progress around women's issues. So - women should all work as much as men and in the same jobs, we must have way to commodify childcare, we must have bottle feeding and birth control, maybe one day even artificial wombs. And then men and women will be on an equal playing field.

With social media and access to education there is room for lots of different aspects of feminism; there isn't one feminism, and the voices of women of many races have a platform. Still; the middle-class voices may be heard more, but working class women of different ethnicities are also capable of effecting change, if they can get their voice heard on social media as a starting point.
A lot of really active UK feminism is based around changing or creating laws which affect all women.
As PPs have said, many truly influential feminists were, and are, black women.

I think the insult 'white Feminist' is just about creating division.

Intersectionality, and the problem of white feminism has been talked about for decades by writers like Angela Davis, bell hooks.. It’s not a new woke thing.
It’s annoying and unhelpful when it’s used as a buzzword/to discredit/to dismiss, but it doesn’t mean it’s not something examine.

If people here are worried about divisions between women, maybe older feminists could be less dismissive of younger feminists (and vice versa).

Duck, hum yeah. Certainly you can't make it work / get rid of gender in a patriarchal capitalist society

I amnt sure that statement that men are stronger than women is cultural though, although thinking all men are always stronger would be ..,

Making me think... there are classes where there are real innate differences.. sex, disability and age , and others where all differences are cultural .. sexuality , religion and race

Class is interesting as it is culture /society that creates the real differences through education and time to think about things beyond survival which are the luxury for higher classes ?

These days "white feminist" seems to be used as an all-purpose put down for women who are on the "wrong" side of the trans issue. In fact, I think that ghastly academic at Sussex whose name escapes me attacked Allison Bailey for being a white feminist, which shows how ridiculous it is.

@Marimaur

Intersectionality, and the problem of white feminism has been talked about for decades by writers like Angela Davis, bell hooks.. It’s not a new woke thing. It’s annoying and unhelpful when it’s used as a buzzword/to discredit/to dismiss, but it doesn’t mean it’s not something examine.

If people here are worried about divisions between women, maybe older feminists could be less dismissive of younger feminists (and vice versa).

Of course it's been around for a long time, doesn't mean it isn't being exploited to undermine women.

I think the insult 'white Feminist' is just about creating division.
I agree. I think that, naturally, white women will lack knowledge and experience as to what life is like for women of colour, so there will be blind spots. That blind spot will also apply if you are a white 'intersectional feminist'. This gap in the knowledge should be rectified by including women of colour and making sure they are heard. I don't see supposedly non-intersectional white feminists any more guilty of leaving women of colour out than white intersectional feminists, but it seems to be an insult thrown around by the latter to the former. The latter seem very keen to display how non-racist they are at every opportunity, which makes me suspicious of a guilt complex. I'm also pretty sure that their black people can see through the shallow nature of such virtue signalling too.

That should say "a certain group of noisy women who won't go quietly"

*the black people who see this, I meant

There's a lack of nuance in this debate, partly because it's been exported wholesale from the US. A Black family whose kids go to a school in London will find (on average) that their kids (girls and boys) do better academically that the kids of a white family in rural Leicestershire or a.n.other county in rural England. This is because of geography, not race. Black children outside of London are worse off too. The education system in London, thanks to investment and targeted efforts, is much better than it is in White working class areas outside London. This analysis obviously fails to take account of structural inequalities ewhich Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority people face elsewhere, within all of our institutions. but if you're a young Black woman in London, your chances of going to university are higher than a young White woman in Scunthorpe. So let's not talk about "White feminism", if we're not also comfortable talking about socio-economic background. It's not ok to write of White women in deprived areas, or assume that their experiences are the same as other women. Equally, it's not ok to imagine patriarchy, which treats male as the default, isn't discriminatory against all women.

Essentially, I think it too often becomes about white women proclaiming "Look at me! Look at how not racist I am! I'm so much better than these other white women over here, I'm one of the good ones!" It's all about them and their self-image. I'm not saying they all don't care, I'm sure some do, but it's become a trend all of a sudden, it's a fashion. Perhaps they are trying to redeem their past sins. When you've always tried not to be a racist, you just carry on trying to get on with it, same way you always have.

Might be useful for people to read this thread as a comparison. White feminism might an insult used by misogynistic men but it's also a phrase that clearly has meaning for a lot of black women as well. Having said that I do agree that there were black and asian women who were prominent in the first and second waves and that needs recognising by all sides. Maybe we have ended up with 'white feminism' for the same reason we have ended up with Tory women PMs before Labour, the campaigns that were successful are viewed as 'white feminism' because they were the changes that were most acceptable to the pale male and stale people who really run the country.

As someone who doesn't know much about this, here is my naiive impression.

It seems to me that perhaps there may be issues that white women focus on in this country that don't seem to be important or top priority to women of colour, or maybe some issues that are very important to women of colour that are not picked up by mainstream 'white' feminism. A example of that could be problems in pregnancy/childbirth for black women not being picked up / taken seriously. (Though the fact I have heard of this suggests it is belatedly being picked up.) This probably needs to be addressed by making sure that more black women are given platforms to be heard well within the feminist voice.

However when someone is celebrating a 'first' for women, I really don't see how it helps to complain that that woman was not a woman of colour. We need to get through both sexist and racist barriers to things. So in the UK we managed a female Prime minister before a non-white one, whereas in the USA they managed a black President before a female one. Both are progress.

It seems to me that this board is pretty accepting of threads raising issues. Maybe we need more non-white, female posters to post about specific issues (and potential solutions) where they feel overlooked to help us all understand them better.

@midgedude

Duck, hum yeah. Certainly you can't make it work / get rid of gender in a patriarchal capitalist society

I amnt sure that statement that men are stronger than women is cultural though, although thinking all men are always stronger would be ..,

Making me think... there are classes where there are real innate differences.. sex, disability and age , and others where all differences are cultural .. sexuality , religion and race

Class is interesting as it is culture /society that creates the real differences through education and time to think about things beyond survival which are the luxury for higher classes ?

Part of the reason so many people don't immediately "get" the problem with men in women's sports is because they've believed this idea that acknowledging that men are physically different from women is sexism.

But more geneally I would say that in Marx, the thing about class isn't really about how much money people have or their education. It's not about cultural beliefs leading to discrimination.

It's relational - it's the nature of the employee/employer, or capital-owner/worker, or even land-owner/peasant, and similar types of pairs. It's inherent in that pairing that there is a certain kind of power differential. That may lead to other real kinds of differences between the groups and also cultural beliefs about say, what peasants are like as opposed to aristocrats, which may be entirely fanciful cultural myths in some cases.

If, theoretically, those kinds of pairs cease to exist, everyone is a labourer and everyone is also a land-owner, say, you should no longer see the other differentials, either real or fanciful. You have destroyed the very basis of the differentiation.

That's clearly impossible if biological realities are at the core of the difference. You can't get rid of sex. (Should we really want to?) So unless the differences are pretty darn minimal there may always be outcome differentials around that, and there will be some sort of set of cultural ideas around that difference too, because human beings create culture out of their collective experiences.

What we might think of as classical anti-racism has tended to take a somewhat similar approach to a classical Marxist approach to class, as it sees race in itself as being a kind of specialist construct intended to justify certain class categories, or reflecting them in some instances. By undermining race categories, while you may not destroy class, you will have begun to unhitch class from one's particular physical characteristics which seems like a good thing overall.

@JaninaDuszejko

Might be useful for people to read this thread as a comparison. White feminism might an insult used by misogynistic men but it's also a phrase that clearly has meaning for a lot of black women as well. Having said that I do agree that there were black and asian women who were prominent in the first and second waves and that needs recognising by all sides. Maybe we have ended up with 'white feminism' for the same reason we have ended up with Tory women PMs before Labour, the campaigns that were successful are viewed as 'white feminism' because they were the changes that were most acceptable to the pale male and stale people who really run the country.

That thread descended into farce. Hard no here, thanks.