Feminism and Racial Justice
Can feminism help white Americans recognize racial discrimination?
The answer really depends.
In January 2017, protests erupted in response to the election of former President Donald J. Trump. Referred to as the Women’s March, nearly half a million people crowded the U.S Capitol with signs that read “we will not be ignored” and “End rape culture. Stop victim blaming. Support survivors.” Those marching on the Capitol were not alone. In cities across the country, over three million people marched in protest.
Protestors’ concerns stemmed from several revelations during the 2016 presidential campaign including the release of a 2005 Access Hollywood recording. In the audio clip, Trump can be heard crudely speaking about how women allow him to act out sexually because he is a celebrity. These comments, together with other events during the campaign, ignited fears about the civil rights dangers that the Trump administration might pose.
While these concerns united protesters, the broader social movement was fractured by conflict. First, divides rooted in the lack of racial diversity of the movement’s organizers. Second, Teresa Shook, the woman who is credited with the idea for the protests, initially called the event the Million Woman March. The decision stoked criticism because she failed to acknowledge that the same name was used by organizers protesting for Black women’s unity and rights in 1997. This oversight poked at old wounds related to white feminists’ marginalization of Black women organizers and their experiences during the women’s movement.
In response, the event’s name was eventually changed to the Women’s March on Washington to more intentionally pay homage to Black organizers’ long fight for social justice. The leadership team also expanded and became more inclusive of the range of racial, gender, and other identities of women. This expansion included the penning of an inclusivity statement on Facebook that called on white women to “understand their privilege and acknowledge the struggle that women of color face.”
There were mixed responses to this call. Some women wrote that they were marching “so all women do not go backwards in the last 50 years of our accomplishments” while others wrote “every paragraph is racism. Since when do I have to apologize for being born white?”
Events surrounding the Women’s March sparked the idea for my new research article (co-authored with Michele Margolis) titled, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free: how feminist identification influences white Americans’ willingness to recognize and respond to racial discrimination.” In the article, we examine the relationship between white Americans’ strength of feminist identification and their ability to recognize racial discrimination and react accordingly.
In 2018, we designed a survey experiment to observe how contextual factors, particularly the clarity of cue regarding the role of race in decision making, influence feminists’ willingness to acknowledge discrimination. Our experiment randomized who saw different versions of a news article describing a group who was recently denied a permit to protest police-involved shootings of unarmed Black Americans. The articles varied in how they discussed race. Both versions described a scandal among “officials who are responsible for granting permits.” In the racially ambiguous version, the scandal involves “Several emails between officials in the police department [which] suggest that some groups paid to expedite their permit application [that] became public last month.” In this version, the role of race in the permit decision is ambiguous, or unclear to an outside observer.
In the racially explicit version, the scandal involves “Several racially charged emails between officials in the police department [that] became public last month.” Thus, different from the other version, this news article draws attention to racial bias among those granting permits. Below is an image of the racially explicit version of the news article.
We asked respondents to react to what they read. Specifically, we measured their agreement with several statements — two involved the role of race in the decision-making process. The first statement declared, “City officials did not racially discriminate against the demonstration organizers.” The second statement asserted, “Race likely played a role in the city officials’ decision to deny the protestors a permit.” We coded and averaged responses to these statements into a single variable measuring perceived discrimination. This variable ranged from 0 to 3 with higher values indicating stronger agreement with the view that race was a factor.
We found differences in respondents’ perception of racial discrimination based on the version of the article they read and their level of feminist identification. For non-feminists who read the racially ambiguous version of the news article, the mean perception of racial discrimination was 1.23. For those who read the racially explicit version, this figure was 1.24. In other words, non-feminists’ interpretation of the role of race in decision making does not vary based on the clarity of cue regarding race.
A different pattern emerged among strong feminists.
The mean perception of racial discrimination was 1.88 for those who read the racially ambiguous version of the news article. This figure was 2.02 for those who read the racially explicit version. That is to say, white respondents who strongly identify as feminists were more likely to report race was a factor in the decision to deny the permit after having read the racially-explicit version of the news article.
The figure below illustrates this finding. It plots treatment effects among respondents in each feminist quartile. The Y-axis tracks the difference in perceived discrimination in decision making between those who read the racially ambiguous versus explicit news article.
Taken together, we conclude that strong feminists are not only more likely to perceive discrimination in both scenarios, the strength of the relationship increases with explicit discussions of racial bias. This occurs because non-feminists were no more likely to perceive racial bias after reading the racially explicit news article. These results suggest that it is not simply the case that non-feminists think about racial discrimination differently. Rather, it appears that they interpret events differently.
Therefore, the answer to the question posed in the title for this post is: it depends. Our findings suggest that it is likely only among the most strongly identified white feminists that fertile ground for coalitions responding to racial injustice exists.
