Dare To Be A Feminist

The mission of The Feminist Wire is to provide socio-political and cultural critique of anti-feminist, racist, and imperialist politics pervasive in all forms and spaces of private and public lives of individuals globally.

Language is an extremely finicky thing. Much like a snowball, a language picks up habits from the culture that uses it as time goes on, especially our really bad habits like racism, sexism, and homophobia. If a single word is enough to dismiss and disregard an entire population’s feelings, ideas, and humanity, you can imagine why those people would want it erased from society’s vocabulary.

If there was any doubt that the politics of the right are based in fear and resentment, the right-wing reaction to the death of Nelson Mandela laid it to rest, a moment that also laid bare the relationship between racism and opposition to the free agency of women.

Personally, I haven’t encountered that argument in the feminist blogosphere, and I would never make it myself. It’s the first lady’s life that sounds like the nightmare to me. You only need to spend one election season writing about Michelle Obama’s clothes to be caught in a fusillade of drive-by commenters’ hate speech. Yes, they’re only Internet trolls, but they’re digital traces of the simmering racism that makes being a high-achieving and high-profile black woman in America singularly frustrating. Cottle pays lip service to the racial limitations of Michelle Obama’s public persona, noting that some say Michelle “must tread lightly to avoid being stereotyped as an Angry Black Woman.” As if that were an abstract theory used to rationalize Obama’s frivolity and not a racist episode we collectively watched unfold over the past five years.

If only 12 Years a Slave (or Roots, or any other wrenching American slave narrative) could move audiences beyond those already eager for a dose of feel-good shame.

...Which leads to the more important question: Could this film possibly preach to the unconverted? Could it reach Americans who at this late date, in the 21st century, still haven’t gotten Stowe’s message? Will it even be seen by any of the millions who swear by Glenn Beck? This question might be asked of all the recent movies that touch upon America’s unfinished racial business: Lee Daniels’ The Butler, the Jackie Robinson biopic 42, and Fruitvale Station, as well as Django and Lincoln.

Liberals are fond of chastising the right (accurately) for living in a media echo chamber of Rush and Drudge by day and Fox News by night, with no other reality penetrating the bubble. The left has never been able to replicate that mass-media ecosystem; an exclusive diet of, say, the Times and NPR would be far more porous to contrary views than 24/7 of Fox and friends. But whenever mainstream media start gushing en masse about a cultural work with an uplifting historical or political message, a smaller liberal echo chamber does spring up that I’ve at times been part of: We tend to assume that a wide audience will be converted by the power of the new masterpiece at hand, especially under the tutelage of critics, editorial pages, magazine cover stories, and awards ceremonies. Much as the right can convince itself that all of America must regard Obama­care as the worst piece of legislative blight in the country’s history, or that easy access to guns is a God-given right tantamount to freedom of speech, so liberals can become prisoners of our own bubble.

CAP examines both the progress made and the challenges remaining for women of color across the country.

Throughout the 20th century, women fought for and achieved countless victories for women’s rights and became a political and economic force in our society after winning the right to vote, equal pay, and reproductive rights. While women have continued to organize for collective gains into the 21st century, the benefits of those achievements have not been equally shared. Over time, those gaps have expanded into wide and deep inequalities for some women—namely, women of color.

And then in Zami, when Audre Lorde shares with us another memory, a memory of people spitting at her in the streets, I understood something. An experience of racism can involve the loss of the words to explain what is going on. It was a memory of her mother explaining to her that people were spitting into the wind because they were ill-mannered and rude, because the mother wants to protect her black child from the knowledge that those people are spitting at her, because she is a black child. I understood something. I understood that racism can be what happens right in front of us – in the direction of violence towards some of us – but also that we learn not to see it. We might learn not to see racism as a way of being protecting from racism: but of course we are not protected. We might not learn the word ‘racism’ or learn not to say that word ‘racism’ as if by not saying it, it might go away. Not naming racism as if racism is not going-on keeps racism on-going. This is why, in naming racism, we are always doing something. We need to find the words. Black feminism can be a way of finding the words.

From Black feminism as a Life-Line by Sara Ahmed. (via tamghrabit)

I've read through your blog pretty extensively, and theres something I'd like to ask from a place of honesty and genuine desire to understand. A white man can never begin to understand the struggle of a person of color or the struggle of a woman against oppression, because he can never walk in that person's shoes. He can also never renounce the privilege that he has (simply because he exists) no matter the amount of self-educating he does. What, then, should he do to be an ally?

This is a story about intersectionality. It's going to displease a few people who don't know what intersectionality is, annoy a few people who do, and enrage a load of people who don't use Twitter. But I checked with my privilege, and my privilege said it was OK. (Don't know what "check your privilege" means? This might turn out to be a problem for you, too).

Last week, an argument on Twitter started in the manner characteristic of, possibly unique to, that medium. Someone called historian Mary Beard a racist. Helen Lewis, the deputy editor of the New Statesman, asked what made Beard a racist. A small but persistent Twitter intersectionality-core rounded on Lewis, accusing her of mindlessly defending the establishment against outsiders, effectively using her platform in the mainstream to defend racists within feminism from the critical voices whom feminism ought properly to champion and defend.