What’s Wrong with White Feminism?
In This Issue: Editor’s Letter, “My Reflections on Racism: An Irish Approach,” “Black Women’s Integral Role in the Women’s Suffrage Movement,” and a quote by Meghan Markle.
Editor’s Letter
I grew weary of whiteness many years ago, but I didn’t expect to grow tired of feminism as I have. How many ways can we — should we — shed our skin?
The fight for gender equality in America — currently called feminism by most, or often white feminism by People of Color — has undergone several iterations over the centuries, and it has waxed and waned in popularity. Yet some aspects haven’t changed much, and they need to evolve if we ever hope to achieve success. More than that, though — we need to re-think what we call success if our goal is truly equality. We need to answer equality for whom and why.
After several decades during which feminism was roundly vilified by the Right and deemed no longer necessary by many women on the Left, the movement roared back to the forefront recently with the 2016 election of Trump, a misogynist and alleged rapist who campaigned on promises to restrict women’s rights. Feminists quickly organized the first annual Women’s March for the day after the presidential inauguration, to a great turnout around the world. Yet almost as quickly, evidence of racism arose within the movement that has continued with each round of protest.
feminism:
1. the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes 2. organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests
— Merriam-Websterwhite feminism:
white feminism is an epithet used to describe feminist theories that focus on the struggles of white women without addressing distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and women lacking other privileges.
–Wikipedia
This is problematic on numerous levels. For Black women and other Women of Color dealing with racism on a daily basis, certainly. For those of us white women who grew up during the Civil Rights Movement and protested along multiple fronts, this has also been distressing. By 2017, I’d somehow assumed we were further along. I’d gotten complacent and therefore complicit, like too many of us.
Still more white women, however, raised on patriarchal approaches to power — as well as a thick, long-simmering vein of racism — expected Women of Color to simply fall in line behind them. At the very least, many white women, often including those who’d self-identify as allies, failed to understand the depth and breadth of the issue and their role in it.
Meanwhile, the wealth of complaints by Black and Brown women have largely gone unanswered. And the few answers that have come have been fraught with the usual whitesplaining, talking over, and failure to listen. In my local Facebook Women’s March group, I witnessed a shrill and ugly argument between two white women who were each sure that they knew best what Black women would want — without actually consulting one. Nor did it end immediately when a Women’s March leader, a local Black woman, commented. Too many of us cannot figure out when to shut up or learn from our mistakes.
Read the full article at Our Human Family.
NEW THIS WEEK
My Reflections on Racism: An Irish Approach
At the end of 2022, I retired from teaching and a few months later left Ireland, where I’d lived for six years, and moved back to Germany, where I’d previously lived for over forty years. My mother was Irish and my father was from Nigeria, where I was born. In the late 1960s, my parents sent me to school in Cork, Ireland. Cork — the real capital of Ireland, by the way, according to the locals — is my mother’s birthplace.
As a retiree in Germany, I expected I’d settle down and concentrate on my writing, and my family and friends. But as it happened, I was asked by the Nano Nagle Place’s Cork Migrant Centre (CMC), the organisation I volunteered with when I lived in Cork, to work with them on a nine-month government-funded anti-racism project.
Currently, the Irish Government plans to support actions to help make Ireland a place in which the impacts of racism are fully acknowledged and actively addressed, and sets out actions and objectives to create a fair, equal, and inclusive society, free of racial discrimination.
Its National Action Plan Against Racism (NAPAR) was launched in 2023. It recognises the importance of meaningful efforts to address racism and its impacts in Ireland. Further, it has recognised that a whole-of-government approach is required to achieve this as racism is a cross-cutting issue that requires action by the Government, public bodies, private bodies, communities, and individuals.
This is a huge endeavour, I know, but in the face of increasing racism steered notably by far-right nationalistic and internationally organised populistic groups set on disruption, and exploiting a disgruntled faction of society, every action to counter their mission is crucial.
Since this is a government-funded project, I had to write a personal statement explaining why I was interested in the job. So, after some reflection on my understanding of racism and the chances of living in a society where skin colour isn’t a defining feature, I submitted the following reflections.
Read the full article at Our Human Family.
ALSO BY OUR WRITERS
Black Women’s Integral Role in the Women’s Suffrage Movement
I remember learning about the Women’s Suffrage Movement in junior and senior high school. Instructors taught us how pioneers like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other white women fought tirelessly to gain the same voting rights for women as white men.
The assumption has always been that since African Americans were enslaved during that period, they couldn’t possibly have either played any part in the movement or offered any meaningful contributions if they did. But this notion could not be further from the truth.
Throughout the struggle for women’s rights, Black women were always in the trenches with white women and worked just as tirelessly despite facing greater opposition. Yet rarely have their efforts shared the same spotlight as those of their white counterparts.
What follows are the names of a few prominent Black women who were involved in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and their contributions in not only securing the right to vote for all women but Black men, too.
The Beginnings of a Movement
Many Black women found themselves drawn to the women’s rights movement through their work advocating for the abolition of slavery and the Temperance Movement. It was within these groups that many women met, shared ideas, and strategized.
Related: A comprehensive list of African-American women who contributed to the movement.
Read the full article at Our Human Family.
Calling all Poets
As a reminder, Tapestry is a new section of Our Human Family devoted to poetry that celebrates both our similarities and our differences, but most of all our shared humanity — and our first few poems will be available this week! It’s poetry that seeks to recognize the contributions from . . . foster racial equity and allyship for . . . and support inclusion of marginalized people into the beautifully varied fabric that is America. We look forward to reading and sharing your poems, as well!
Final Thought
