As I was perusing twitter the other day, I stumbled across a link to a blog Rebecca Walker wrote recently. In it, she lambasted Katie Roiphe and the rest of mainstream feminism for their obsession with Rophie’s latest piece on motherhood.
What makes me sick about this “excitement” on Salon and all the other white dominated blogs, is the way editors and many readers ignore the work of women of color. My book Baby Love is all about the subject of feminism and motherhood and making a surprising and seemingly “anti-feminist” choice, and yet, it got none of the nuanced treatment. In fact, Salon used my piece on this exact subject to excoriate me personally.
Walker makes a great point. White feminists do unashamedly ignore women of color. We can look back as far as the Women’s Suffragist Movement. Susan B. Anthony and her cadre were more than willing to throw her colleague Frederick Douglass under the bus, along with other black activists in order to get the [white] woman’s right to vote. On numerous occasions, the suffragist movement supported efforts to suppress the black vote in order to ensure their own.
In the 1970′s white feminists infamously failed to include issues affecting black women in their policy agenda catering to white middle class women instead. This was noted by the Combahee River Collective, as the black feminist movement emerged.
A Black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American women’s movement beginning in the late 1960s. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation.
In 2008, white feminists shamelessly ignored the rabid racism and sexism that was hurled at Michelle Obama during the campaign season.
All of this to say, that it should come as no surprise to Walker, or to anybody else, that in 2009 white feminists still remain largely unaware of the existence of women of color.
The problem that Walker continues to come across, is that her entire body of work is seen as reactionary to her mother. Whether this is true or not, until Walker addresses this issue head on, her work will not be taken seriously by the white feminists she desires to be recognized by.
Nevertheless, at the end of the day, as an academic who studies race, gender and politics, I find myself silently agreeing with Walker’s final point.
The entire episode reminds me of one of the more insightful things my mother told me (and regardless of where our relationship may or may not be, there were MANY insightful things my mother told me): “We read them, but really, they do not read us.”
Meaning, of course, that many white women think what they write is new because they don’t really bother to read the work of women of color. And yet we think nothing of reading theirs and weighing their contributions as part of our process of informing ourselves as we begin to do our own work.
If our work is still not even read (let alone being taken seriously) by white intellectuals, how far have we really come as writers, intellectuals and scholars?
peace.
look for my thoughts on Rophie’s piece later on this week…
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