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?

This was her interview on Woman's Hour with Emma Barnett. Emma Barnett brought up Priti Patel as an example of a successful woman, and the response was that Priti was a "brown white feminist".

I don't think it's the path to go down as part of winning people's interest in buying your book, to be honest. It probably played well with listeners who were already planning to buy it, but if she was content with that number of sales, why bother going on Women's Hour to promote the book?

It is a bit odd, Purgatory, why she would bother with a UK campaign. The US book market is absolutely vast compared to the UK. Sometimes books are launched UK first, to gauge interest levels. But this has apparently already done well in the US? So - not sure the point of going on UK radio to insult UK women to appeal to a tiny and not very relevant section of your market.

I don't believe that Patel is known for any commitment to feminist thought, so no-one would have had much of an issue with that.

Indeed, what is implied by her lumping Priti into her artificial "white feminist" group of female people she doesn't agree with is that genuinely white feminist women who Zakaria doesn't approve of and Priti Patel are equally bad for women's rights.

It is a bit odd, Purgatory, why she would bother with a UK campaign.

I think they thought dunking on feminist women, especially white ones and white women more generally is all the rage and that it was bound to sell like hot cakes.

She doesn't seem particularly self aware.

I've just relistened to the interview. There is certainly stuff in there that I am interested in, and I wonder if we are seeing the same issue, but through different lenses. I myself have a chip on the shoulder the size of Blackpool about women who never lived in one and think they never will, telling us all there is no problem with mixed-sex homeless hostels and prisons. But I call them libfems. Not white feminists.

I do think it's unfortunate that at an earlier point in the interview she distinguished racial discrimination from classism by observing that race is immutable and class isn't.

Well, apparently race is mutable when you want to distance yourself from Priti Patel!

Quite.

Yea Purgatory that's getting into No True Scotsman Fallacy territory. And is race immutable in the same way that sex is? We often hear there are no English - or whoever - because DNA blah blah. It's all just culture and language. Fair enough but this argument is seemingly optional too...

Emma Barnett is the perfect example of white feminism.

Race is definitely mutable. What counts as 'white' in Jamaica would be called 'black' in the UK or US.

And so many British female icons with mixed heritage, from Shirley Bassey to Poly Styrene, are not generally regarded as any particular race.

You say that about poly, but in an interview I heard once, many people did view her as not white and let that affect their treatment of her

( always sssuming I haven't mixed people up )

She experienced plenty of racism in real life, but her fans never saw her as anything but Poly.

Annabella Lwin of Bow Wow Wow was treated badly by the rock press, who called her "The Burmese Boiler" amongst other things.

As I said before, although I do want to be a better ally to women of different backgrounds, I don't think this book will help me much, unless I am in fact a British expat in America. And I'm not planning on moving continents. (I can barely deal with house moves in the same county!)

The immutability of race came up when Emma discussed the perspective of Julie Bindel (not present) that a major issue was class. Rafia was insistent on rejecting that point of view. I think she saw it as pretending that racism didn't exist and we only had classism in this country. Some people do do that, but imo, Julie Bindel is not one of them. I cannot blame Rafia for being eager to shut it down though.

I feel like she had never really considered how to explain a problem like Maria Priti Patel to an audience unfamiliar with her school of thought, and she'd backed herself into a corner when she denied the role of class so emphatically. And yet, what she said about women simply trying to adapt themselves to the current structures of power, instead of trying to modify them to be more open to women in general wasn't anything we'd see as an unpalatable point of view on here. But "brown white feminist" was very unpalatable, even as an off-the-cuff joke.

I think I'd like a book by a British woman that analyses race and class, using terms like radical feminism, liberal feminism, socialist feminism etc to describe different approaches, rather than this categorisation of women as "white feminists", "brown white feminists". The latter just doesn't work for my literal turn of mind. I can't gel with describing people as metaphorically black, white or brown, according to their political alignment.

But I will read the book. She probably communicates her ideas better in writing than she did during that interview.

I could come back here, yelling and cursing Joan Smith for her hostile review, you never know!

But I will read the book. She probably communicates her ideas better in writing than she did during that interview.

That would be interesting because I suspect Amia Srinivasan is wellserved by how gently she is handled by interviewers (I've not seen anyone challenge her) and wonder if text is easier to critique: The Right to Sex

Shirley Bassey had a primetime Saturday night show on the BBC for years, and nobody ever made a fuss over her or her guests.

Quite different in the US, where a network went into meltdown when viewers and advertisers complained about a duet between Harry Belafonte and Petula Clark holding hands.

Oh, excellent, I see an excuse for this!

Any excuse, Arrabella.

We were the people our parents warned us about.

And this.

And this.

I think I'd like a book by a British woman that analyses race and class, using terms like radical feminism, liberal feminism, socialist feminism etc to describe different approaches, rather than this categorisation of women as "white feminists", "brown white feminists"

Agreed.

I do think it's unfortunate that at an earlier point in the interview she distinguished racial discrimination from classism by observing that race is immutable and class isn't.

I guess that's only if you have a very simplistic view of how class impacts people's lives. Yes, I have a degree and what would be classed as a middle class profession but I will never recover emotionally and mentally from the inter-generational trauma of poverty and its effects, and that is the factor that has most shaped my life and my health. What's more I actually like lots of things about my working class culture and I don't want to pretend to be something different so I don't fit in to many middle class circles. My family is still working class, and so are most of my friends, and interestingly also my daughters' friends, so even though she has in effect been brought up "middle class" in terms of my education my and her dad's working class backgrounds are still prominent in her experience.

Yes, race is more immutable (although I think some people do things to "westernise" which gives a certain degree of acceptance) but you can't just walk away from your class background. Like PP I feel that although white privilege exists, it's very unevenly distributed at the level of the individual and I resent being told by people coming from professional families and with a much better university education than I have that I should shut up and go away.

"Privelige" is the wrong word. A privelige is a special right granted to a few. The concept owes a lot to the US concept of rights being granted by their Constitution.

The position in English common law is that all liberty rests with people and the law can only take it away.

'Advantage' would be a better choice of term.

@Ereshkigalangcleg

We can talk about a class or group being subject to a prejudice, or having a disparity, but it will not apply to all individuals in the group and the causes in many cases are indirect.

Yes that's what I meant when I said it's only useful at the class level, with limitations.

Yes.

I get the impression that most people get this at a certain level, but get a little muddled about how to apply it in practice. I think in a lot of cases people get mixed up between two different ways of thinking about class A sort of statistical sense where you can't apply it to individuals at all being one - you would never say, because men are statistically more likely to be over 5"10, all men have height privilege.

You can talk about relational class analysis, but there are real limits on what can count as a class in that sense an also the kind of things that fall out of it. You can talk about workers and capitalists in that way because they exist in relation to the other. You can talk about men and women because their reproductive roles are fixed, and related to each other and necessarily different - as long as you are talking about elements that fall out of those roles, or become attached to them, although the latter may cease to be true at some point.

As far as race being immutable and class not, maybe she only meant in terms of, you can't change how society perceives your race so that affects you externally in your particular time and place. Whereas people do manage to change their social class, even if it's still evident that they were not born to it. No one would say Jamie Oliver lives a working class life, nor do his kids.

OTOH, from a larger perspective race is quite changable, I've seen some changes in the way people define it even within my lifetime, and some groups that used to be considered different "races," now, aren't. You don't tend to hear people talk about the Gallic race, for example, or Caucasians.

Emma discussed the perspective of Julie Bindel (not present) that a major issue was class. Rafia was insistent on rejecting that point of view.

Just wondering… does Rafia happen to possess immense class privilege? The kind where it would suit her very well to pretend class privilege isn’t a thing, in exactly the way it suits some white people to pretend white privilege isn’t a thing?

I don’t know anything about her but based on the quotes and insights we’ve seen here, she didn’t get a book deal on the merits of her razor sharp analytical mind.

WRT class vs race:

I think that sometimes people are talking past each other on this. As I understand a lot of people who are seen as saying that class trumps race, what they are really saying is that race is a particular manifestation of class. That's particularly the case when you are talking about systemic racism rather than prejudice.

Because the id politics people don't see that this is the argument, they never really address it.

Rafia is on from about 27 minutes, 20 seconds.

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

Jaysmith71
'Quite different in the US, where a network went into meltdown when viewers and advertisers complained about a duet between Harry Belafonte and Petula Clark holding hands'.

Even in more enlightened times Americans are prone to digging themselves into a hole over this. When Craig David went over to America the networks etc weren't happy that his guitarist was white. Their brand of diversity seemed to be that different races would be represented but apparently not intermingle. It's amazing the paths that seemingly good intentions can lead you down.