Against White Feminism

[Allycott]

Yesterday I heard an interview with the author of this book. I listened to her views and rationale for writing the book.

Has anyone read it?

And we have a long tradition in Britain of mixed-race bands: The Equals, The Foundations, UB40 etc. We allow black musicians to play rock, which was officially forbidden until very recently in the USA. Lenny Kravitz's "Are You Gonna Go My Way" won a Grammy in the "R&B" category.

Here we are:

Black talent, so to speak, has an infinitely better chance at success in the US than the UK.

@VladmirsPoutine

Black talent, so to speak, has an infinitely better chance at success in the US than the UK.

In acting, for sure. But Hendrix had to come to London to play rock.

Jaysmith71
That's crazy about Kravitz!

There does seem to be a general move in the US to almost a voluntary resegregation (or sometimes not so voluntary - I remember Youtuber Lauren Chen not being happy when arriving at the Hall of Residence of her LA University only to discover she'd been automatically allocated to the Asian wing).

I wonder if this is the overarching plan or just an unfortunate unintended consequence.

I used yo believe that about mixed race bads in the US, but I no longer believe it after watching Summer of Soul and looking at Sly and the Family Stone, and also Stevie Wonder's band in the early 70s. A possible difference is that US mixed race bands were more likely to have a black singer?

Stevie Wonder's best work came in Innervisions/Talking Book/Songs In The Key of Life. All these albums were heavily infuenced by his British (and white) sound engineers.

During the recording of "SITKOL" there was a big argument over Stevie's hanger's on, his drug-dealing entourage who would creat havoc in the studio. The engineers complained to Stevie. The entourage complained to Stevie. He sacked the engineers, and the result was The Secret Life of Plants.

....good point about Sly & The Family Stone.

The rule is: White men can play black music. But not vice versa.

Can you think of a black musician in a notable US rock band?

Well... don't forget Chuck Berry... we still had the Black and White Minstrels 20 years plus after his heyday.

Notably more segregated once MTV hit perhaps?

Clarence Clemens in Bruce Springsteen's band

@midgemagneto

Clarence Clemens in Bruce Springsteen's band

.....Yes!

Touche

Jaysmith71
Tom Morello was guitarist for Rage against the machine.

(The Spin Doctors' drummer was black but the fact I can't name him suggests he wasn't the biggest of names).

I listened to Rafia. Competition for senior jobs is fierce. Humans are fiercely competitive. They don't "cede space" to their competition. She's living in an idealistic fantasy if she thinks that will change.

@TheCountessofFitzdotterel

Is there some Priti/Pragna Patel confusion here or does she talk about both?

There does seem to be.

The book review linked by OP discusses PRAGNA Patel, of Southall Black Sisters as a 'white feminist'.

Priti Patel is no feminist, but neither is she white.

Priti Patel, and her position as the first woman from an ethnic minority to be Home Secretary, was discussed in the interview between Emma Barnett and Rafia on Weekend Woman's Hour.

I honestly do know the difference between Pragna and Priti, and so does Emma Barnett!

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000zm0p

Go to 27 minutes in, IIRC, to hear the segment.

I'm sure you do, Purgatory. I'm not sure PrincessNutella does though!

"We allow black musicians to play rock, which was officially forbidden until very recently in the USA."

What? Black musicians invented rock. In the USA. Who would officially forbid black musicians from playing it? This is so silly. As far as US mixed race bands go, here are just a few:
Booker T and the McGs (very early)
Kc and the Sunshine band
The Dead Kennedys
Rufus
Love
Santana
Tower of Power
Chamber brothers
Doobie Brothers
TheElectric Flag
Sweetwater
The Allman Brothers
E Street Band
Kid Creole and the Coconuts
Sly and the Family Stone
Rufus featuring Chaka Khan

Just adding that IMO rock 'n' roll was invented by Rosetta Tharpe, a black woman.

@Fitt

I listened to Rafia. Competition for senior jobs is fierce. Humans are fiercely competitive. They don't "cede space" to their competition. She's living in an idealistic fantasy if she thinks that will change.

I think the dividing line here is often between mothers and not-mothers, tbh.

Looking at, say, senior female politicians, how many are mothers? Those who get to the higher levels are mostly childless. For probably fairly obvious reasons.

There's a long list of criticisms you could level at Priti Patel, but "white feminist" (a double insult seemingly) just reveals more about the accuser and their mindset.

It reminds me of a radio interview during the 2016 US presidential campaign in which a (male) interviewer was totally unable to deal with a woman who was head of a group called Latina Women for Trump or somesuch. She confidently articulated her economic reasons for preferring the Trump manifesto, and cited stats about the problems caused by Mexican crime in American border towns. She described herself as proud to be a Mexican American who came there legally, and asked why she should automatically support illegal immigration because of her ethnicity. The interviewer was audibly struggling to process the concepts of a woman not voting for Clinton, and a woman of colour supporting Trump's immigration policy.

• political culture needs to change. Devolved power, flatter structures, proportional representation, maybe more coalitions, steps taken to make it safer to be involved in politics, and in a wider sense we need to look after and nurture the mother/child/family unit far more than we do now (that doesn't just mean paying for minimum-wage childcare) so that mothers/families can actually be involved in civic/public/political life.

The harsh uncrossable line between 'domestic' and 'public' life isn't really healthy. I suppose it also exacerbates limiting stereotypes (inc gender roles).

How do we get society to value the contribution of women, mothers and all carers? Feminism seems to have got stuck on a 'make it so that women can act like men' model of economic productivity latterly - we should be dismantling that, we should be making the model fit women's lives. (This would, coincidentally, probably benefit men).

I suppose neo liberal capitalism is always going to muscle in and appropriate a movement in the way that benefits itself the most. Turning everyone's life into a profit-and-loss sheet, calculating how to maximise profit above all else. Hyper individualism by its nature excludes family structures, all the delicate networks of friendship and community. Pick-and-mix your identity because it has no actual connection to what used to be a place in an interwoven and intermingled society, this is what idpol is all about, isn't it? Take the signifiers & symbols and use them in place of the things they used to have meaningful connection with. 'Woman' becomes a commodity consisting of lips, tits, hips, instead of a human being with the embodied experience of living as a female in relation to other people.

And our identities get divorced from context. So we squabble about a term like 'white feminist' that has apparently become removed from meaning (if 'white' can be used to mean 'black' then it is meaningless) or the structure of a community/society, and we squabble about the words, and get into stupid, juvenile academic Twitter spats, instead of actually doing the work of supporting each other, helping out, wiping arses, making dinner, cracking jokes, making up, teaching, etc.

Commodification is surely a big part of this movement. Pay to fix your body in a simulcra of what you feel/imagine/want/dream/desire. Sex work is work. Buy your fantasy, sell your fantasy. If the 'fixing' makes you infertile, pay a poorer woman to be a surrogate.

Buy a body. Buy sex. Buy babies. Buy care for those babies. Buy a gender, etc, and the cycle continues.

Everything becomes commodified, chargeable and monetised. Every aspect of human life. Bought and sold.

Great Post Arabella.

God knows on MN a lot of posters (including me) get thrown when people post certain opinions or ways of thinking. Because they're unusual. Mn certainly has a mainstream of thought, which is not the same as saying all MN posters think the same. Priti Patel is unusual in achieving what she has, as a woman and as an Asian woman, and I think of her as exaggerating her punitive policies in order to counteract expectations placed on her by other people. But maybe that's not the case, maybe if she were a white male she would be equally harsh and corrupt? Who knows.

I agree that labelling a school of thought with a colour, so that if you think those things you must be that colour, is surely going to end up with stupidities like 'brown white feminist'.

People like Kemi Badenoch & Priti Patel can be a source of cognitive dissonance for many. I do think it's offensive to suggest that a woman, especially a woman of colour, should subscribe to a certain group think just by virtue of her ethnicity. That said it's such a fast and lucrative career path for many in the minority commentariat. And the Tories do treat their ethnic minorities so much better than Labour.

labelling a school of thought with a colour, so that if you think those things you must be that colour, is surely going to end up with stupidities like 'brown white feminist'.

The trouble is that the label has become totally divorced from the thing it used to refer to. Lots of this movement seems to be language-based, doesn't it? And the words have been taken out of their original context, twisted or changed, and then people presume the context/thing referred to has also changed.

I guess, though I don't know enough about it, that some of this comes from post modernist thought that 'language creates reality'. Which was maybe an interesting idea to begin with, taken to extreme and absurd conclusions.

Hence the idea that if a male refers to their self as 'she' the male becomes female. Linguistically it is possible, of course. In reality, it changes nothing.