In Front of My Women’s History Month?! How long will it take before a white feminist/social theorist or two steals Kimberle Crenshaw’s work as their own
In 2018, I was asked to participate in a Northeastern University Boston symposium held by both the Northeastern Global Research Institute and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) Department entitled, “Feminist Resilience: Structures & Strategies for Troubled Times.” The panel on which I sat was entitled, “Imagining (Real) Feminist Resilience.”
The flyer for the event featured prominently the famous photo of Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes.
I presented the flyer for the event as the litmus test to why “intersectional feminism” isn’t just a hot topic in social theory, but a term white feminists frequently overstate but hardly ever utilize.
As such, the majority of the class could identify the white woman in the photo as Gloria Steinem, but only the director of the WGSS program could identify the Black woman as Dorothy Pitman-Hughes.
Pitman-Hughes on her own is a powerhouse author and activist, co-founding what is now the NYC Administration for Children’s Services. However, what many people — white feminists, in particular — do not know is that Pitman-Hughes co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance AND Ms. Magazine right alongside Gloria Steinem.
It is a serious lack of intersectionality that Mary Wollstonecraft has been revered as the “Mother of Feminism.” It reeks of empirical tropes of patriarchal and puritanical white motherhood as the Madonna against Black women figures — such as Kimberle Crenshaw, Sesali Bowen, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Dr. Feminista Jones, Maya Angelou, Anna Julia Cooper, Dr. Moya Bailey, Angela Davis, and Maria Stewart.
Did you know that the Women’s Media Center has a “Lost Women of History Series’’ that cites “Maria Stewart as the first recorded American-born woman to give a public speech in the United States in 1832.” The problem is that the word “lost” within the title of the series is a polite misnomer for the word “discarded.”
In my opinion, this is where Black Feminist Standpoint theory begins and empiricism should be strangled.
The same racism that served to exclude Black women from the feminist and abolitionist narrative in 1832 is the same racism that allows white feminists to evade accountability for not including Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Trans, Queer, Muslim and Disabled lives in “The Women’s March” of 2017.
The aforementioned women’s intersections were not lost or misplaced like some elusive artifact; they were discarded by white women feminists who dream of their own personal liberation from the oppression of white men.
This is why white women have historically failed to admit that discarding the most marginalized — women experiencing multiple intersections of oppression — will serve only to empower white women, and no one else.
History
Intersectionality as defined by the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women is:
…the structural and dynamic consequences of the interaction between two or more forms of discrimination or systems of subordination. (Intersectionality) specifically addresses the manner in which racism, patriarchy, economic disadvantages and other discriminatory systems contribute to create layers of inequality that structure the relative positions of women and men, races and other groups. (2000)
In G. G. v. Gloucester County Public Schools, the school’s reaction to the combination of G.G.’s sex assigned at birth, gender identity and gender expression prevented Gavin from experiencing the same rights as other students that utilized the “boys’ bathroom.” After an exhaustive emotional rollercoaster including the Trump Administration, the U.S. The District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted Gavin’s motion for summary judgment, ruling that the school violated Gavin’s rights under Title IX and the 14th Amendment (ACLU 2023).
Intersectional Feminism — Intersectionality being coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989, — asserts that both feminist ideology and gender supportive policies exclude Black women because they face a compounded multitude of discriminations at the intersection of both their gender and race and certainly not separately, but together: “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”
Crenshaw’s assessment amplifies for Black non-men a particular challenge in law: that antidiscrimination laws look solely at gender and race separately. Consequently, African-American women and other women of color experience overlapping forms of discrimination and the law, unaware of how to combine the two, leaves these women with no justice (Crenshaw 3).
The title of my paper for the Imagining (Real) Feminist Resilience event was “The Violence of Resilience: Black Non-Men and the Expectation of Suffering.” This talk discussed how tropes and the expectation of resilience are often disempowering, and even deadly, to Black women and non-men compared to our non-Black counterparts; how expressions and perceptions of femininity are denied to Black feminists; and why emotional and physical reparations to Black women and non-men are essential to true feminist resilience and equity.
Crenshaw would quite possibly balk at me for being so frankly reductive, but if I had to summarize Crenshaw’s theory into my own brief conclusion, I would say that to be clear, the term intersectionality is not about inclusion or diversity, it’s about centering. It’s not enough for feminist initiative narratives to include marginalized people, they must be centered.
Critique exists for Crenshaw’s work to be merely listed as ‘a super important theory’ or guide, but any ambiguity, either real or contrived, can be consigned to white feminists’ collective refusal to admit their inability to identify with Black women and other women of color exists simply because they could never be Black or a woman of color and the refusal of white men like Ben Shapiro to stop oppressing all women, especially Black women. The intersections of discrimination and gender-based violence can be met by white women when it comes to “sex, ability, creed, religion, sexual orientation, marital status, military obligation” (AAUW 2021); but become murky and non-existent on understanding the same violence and discrimination based on race, color, and ethnicity. Further, what feminism secures any justice for people denied femininity (Black, fat, trans, etc)? Constantly being depicted as strong and resilient causes harm to Black women. That’s why we’ve become the punching bag of the world.
This point brings to mind two women, alive at the same time: Susan B. Anthony and Anna J. Cooper. Throughout all of March, social media timelines will be filled with how often Anthony is heralded as a feminist icon while her highly esteemed colleague, Cooper, is someone I’d have to Google or wait until I could add an Africana studies class to my course load.
In 1894, Cooper opened The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation with:
“It is enough for me to know that while in the eyes of the highest tribunal in America she was deemed no more than a chattel, an irresponsible thing, a dull block, to be drawn hither nor thither at the volition of an owner, the Afro-American woman maintained ideals of womanhood unshamed by any ever conceived. Resting or fermenting in untutored minds, such ideals could not claim a hearing at the bar of the nation. The white woman could at least plead for her own emancipation; the black woman, doubly enslaved, could but suffer and struggle and be silent.”
Not much has changed between the state of Black women, women of color, and white women in 130 years. In the heightened awareness of the #MeToo movement, paparazzi centered around faux creator, Alyssa Milano, when 10 years prior, Tarana Burke documented her #MeToo story of the same branded content on social media with the same hashtag. In 2018, Christine Blasey Ford was the preferred narrative of what a perfect sexual assault victim that we can and should protect would look like although Anita Hill went through a similar public victim blaming and was less likely to be believed.
Detractors often offer patriarchal tropes associated with grape, including victim-blaming, but, according to a NPR poll, more people identified with Blasey Ford than those that may have been in the minority for supporting Anita Hill’s accusation of assault against Clarence Thomas. In “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” Barbara Smith states, “But of course Anita Hill’s description of sexual harassment was responded to with anything but a Black feminist consciousness, which explains in part why this drama ended as it did.”
White feminist academics will spend years in libraries, head in tomes, learning new vernacular and familiarizing themselves with terms and theories, but can’t bother to learn the way the most marginalized women express themselves.
They don’t feel comfortable going into our neighborhoods and talking to us. They’re not willing to educate themselves on how we communicate and convey ourselves, even though they’re willing to co-opt language from Black women when it suits them — from “fleek” to “intersectionality.” This is how a self-proclaimed feminist can often support initiatives that harm women, like the bills referred to as SESTA and FOSTA that seem to be protections against sex trafficking when viewed on the government website for Congress, but in reality adversely impact marginalized women.
Luckily, Black women’s resilience has been going strong since Harriet Tubman was named “most resilient,” and shows up today when The Black Sex Worker Collective is one of the advocacy groups ran by the actual marginalized group affected to shut down these measures (Velez).
Another example of how two people of the same gender should experience the same consequences, but their race leads to different outcomes is in the curious contrasting cases of how justice of public opinion and in courts of law is administered to two parents would do anything to ensure their child’s growth through education are sentenced to jail time; the white parent received a 14 day jail sentence and the Black parent received a five year jail sentence. Both parents “defrauded” the school their child went to; however the differences are stark depending on whether the offending parent is a white woman (who is married, with both social and financial capital) directly involved in a college admission lie to get their child into the best school (Lori Laughlin & Felicity Hoffman) versus Black women (single and homeless or living in public housing) lying about where she lived to get her child into a better school (Tanya McDowell & Kelley Williams-Bolar).
It’s important that when we discuss resilience, we think of the COLLECTIVE of women and non-men. Because when collectives are resilient, it means we alternate and take turns bearing the burden. A collective is only as strong as its most exhausted members. Black women and other marginalized genders of color don’t need to be more resilient, we need a f**king break. The only way we can take a break is if more privileged members of our collective shoulder more of that burden. That means relinquishing privilege, that means paying reparations. That means allowing Black women to exist as soft and feminine and vulnerable people, and not the mules we have been treated as since we were first dragged to these shores.
To quote esteemed philosopher, Christopher Wallace, “You’re nobody ’til somebody’s kills you.” It is a stark reminder to this author that 1) Black women and other marginalized genders will continue to experience violence in the form of being tried in the court of law and/or public opinion unless it happens to a white person of a marginalized gender. 2) Black feminists will be discarded by mainstream white feminists as social theorists, unless a white feminist somewhere says she miraculously thought of how marginalized genders are mistreated especially when it comes to the intersection of their race and gender. I gag, but also somebody please queue Natalie Portman and Gwyneth Paltrow to enter the chat.
Donations & reparations to the author welcome, but only if you got it like that.
Works Cited
Smith, Barbara. “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” The Black Scholar, vol. 22, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 90–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41067758. Accessed 22 Jan. 2020.
Crenshaw, Kimberle, et al. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New Press, The, 1996.
“Gender and Racial Discrimination Report of the Expert Group Meeting.” United Nations, United Nations, 24 Nov. 2000, www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/genrac/report.htm. Accessed 16 Jan. 2020.
“Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board.” American Civil Liberties Union, 18 May 2023, www.aclu.org/cases/grimm-v-gloucester-county-school-board. Accessed 18 Jan. 2020.
Hull, Gloria T., et al. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1982.
Montanaro, Domenico. “Poll: More Believe Ford than Kavanaugh, a Cultural Shift from 1991.” NPR, NPR, 3 Oct. 2018, www.npr.org/2018/10/03/654054108/poll-more-believe-ford-than-kavanaugh-a-cultural-shift-from-1991. Accessed 21 Jan. 2020.
“Professor Blasey Ford Testifies on Sexual Assault Allegations, Part 1.” Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh Sexual Assault Hearing, Professor Blasey Ford Testimony, 27 Sept. 2018, www.c-span.org/video/?451895-1%2Fsupreme-court-nominee-brett-kavanaugh-sexual-assault-hearing-professor-blasey-ford-testimony&event=451895&playEvent. Accessed 17 Jan. 2020.
S.1693–115th Congress (2017–2018): Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act …, www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1693. Accessed 22 Jan. 2020.
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. How We Get Free Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books, 2017.
Text — H.R.1865–115th Congress (2017–2018): Allow States and Victims …, www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865/text. Accessed 22 Jan. 2020.
Velez, Ashley, and Zoe Stahl. Are Sex Workers Being Targeted by New Legislation? YouTube, The Root, 4 Apr. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e7aF1VWF04#action=share. Accessed 21 Jan. 2020.
“Workplace Sexual Harassment.” AAUW, 27 Oct. 2021, www.aauw.org/issues/equity/workplace-harassment/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2020.
