Dare To Be A Feminist

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.

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.