The Absent Racial #MeToo and Rekindling Intersectional Identity

It is times like this, as the United States Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh unfold, that I am reminded that I dwell at the margins of this club called feminism. Moments like this remind me that mainstream feminism frequently requires tamping down my intersectional identity. This is neither surprising nor necessarily a bad thing.  Strategic essentialism is a well-known mechanism for fighting oppression. But when the flames of intersectional identities are tamped down too often or too forcefully, they are in danger of being extinguished all together.  So here I speak, hoping to stir the embers.


Like many people, feminists included, I think that, generally speaking, false sexual assault accusations are relatively rare. But as a black woman whose family has lived in the United States since before the United States Revolutionary War, I am also painfully aware of the fact that false sexual assault and sexual harassment claims lodged by white women against black men are an age-old tool of oppression. For generations men in my family were advised to avoid contact with white women because even a look, never mind touching, unwanted or not, could mean a death sentence. This is not hyperbole; it was reality for all too many of us, my own relatives included. Even now, though interracial black male-white female interactions and relationships are not forbidden by law, they still raise some eyebrows. There are still sufficient amounts of anti-black prejudice for me to bear in mind that my black sons and husband may be falsely accused of some sexualized crime against white women.

But while I recognize that cross-racial false allegations of sexualized crime are potential perils for my sons and husband, a far greater peril for the black men, women and children in my family is that they will be gunned down, beaten, or otherwise abused by police or by white citizens who perceive them as a threat. This is my reality Every. Single. Day. No amount of advanced education, middle-class living, or professional dressing will make these perils go away. We can run, but we cannot hide, not even in our own homes, as the police killing of Botham Jean in his own home shows.

In recent days I have kept quiet as I watched women, mostly white women, talk about how painful and triggering it is to see a person who alleges sexual harassment or assault come forward and be disbelieved or mistreated by authorities or by members of the public. I understand this; I have also experienced the pain of being disbelieved about sexual harassment (see my blog article "Me, One"). But I wonder if many of these women have thought about how endlessly dismaying it is for black people to see black men, women and children killed, assaulted, or otherwise abused because they are perceived as threats, or as undesirable, only to have authorities or the public try to somehow justify our mistreatment. Some days, many days, I am at the edge of tears, at the edge of an abyss, hoping that the abuse will stop, and knowing that without massive public and private acknowledgement and action, it will not.

Just as many women in general have experienced varying degrees of sexual harassment and/or sexualized violence, so, too, have many black people suffered varying degrees of racist abuses. Just as women in general have been coached to attribute it to our own shortcomings, forget about it, keep silent, act as if it didn’t happen, so also have black people been coached to ignore racist treatment. The coaching is sometimes explicit; other times it is implied from the ways in which complaints about racism are treated in our society. To complain too much, or at all, is to invite being labeled as a black person with an Unfounded Grievance. We are supposed to smile, keep moving forward, and act as if nothing at all is wrong.  
 
There is no racial #MeToo. Or at least, not one that most people care to hear about.

Black and Pink and Re(a)d All Over: Michelle Obama, Shotgun Feminism and the Media

A recent article in Politico magazine called First Lady Michelle Obama a “feminist nightmare” and lambasted her for her failure to be “edgier” and more vocal about more controversial issues. One commenter quoted in the article asserted that Michelle Obama has become “an almost music-hall-level imitation of a warm-and-fuzzy, unthreatening, bucolic female from some imaginary era from the past.” The author ends on a note of somber resignation: “Someday somebody will shatter the conventional First Lady mold. It just won’t be Michelle Obama.” Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. Michelle Obama is the most unconventional First Lady in the history of First Ladies. No amount of reading to children and gardening will undo this.  

Discourses of the good wife and mother, along with discourses about empowered womanhood, have historically been forged within the frameworks of racial and class based ideologies. This is especially true today. There remains, for instance, an intimate link between motherhood, race, class and civic membership. Black motherhood is a particularly difficult role to occupy in contemporary United States society, and that difficulty is heightened for educated black women who sometimes find themselves conflicted by the possibility of desireable work outside of the home and meaningful work within it. While an iconic goal of the mainstream (white) feminist movement has often been to get out of the house, for too many black women the goal has long been to get into the house—that is, into their own houses and out of the houses of others where for centuries they worked for no wages or low wages.  

Black First Ladyhood is a whole other dimension of black motherhood and womanhood. It is a role whose demands are at once so complex, novel, and difficult to maneuver that its performance certainly defies and disrupts most labels that we might try to append to it.  This is in large part because being a black First Lady involves a much-too-short historic journey from the kitchen of the plantation Big House to the Executive Residence of the White House. And we live even now in a world where Ivy League-credentialed, business suit wearing, briefcase carrying black women may easily be confused with the cleaning staff, courtesy of a pervasive, deep-seated social and cognitive dissonance that admits of few other possibilities. It is perhaps little wonder that Michelle Obama might like to pause to relish her role as Mom-in-Chief. Indeed what a wonder it is for Michelle Obama to be cast as Everybody’s Mother rather than as somebody’s mammy.

Media portrayals of Michelle Obama’s allegedly deficient feminism are often assumed to be neutral and ideologically pure, fueled by the wisdom of decades of well-honed feminist activism and deep thought.  However, too often neither writers nor readers of such portrayals are conscious of the strong ideological biases that are inevitably encoded, and they sometimes adopt such stances without much critical inquiry. It is certainly true that every act by every woman is not feminist. Even so, feminism is a broad, multifaceted, and highly contextual concept. Media pieces like the one in Politico do feminism a grave injustice by framing Michelle Obama as one of the enemies of feminism, taking scattershot aim with a claim that is at once overwrought and undertheorized.

Of Husband Hunting and Diamond Mines

There has been a tremendous dust-up in response to Susan Patton's (a member of the Princeton class of 1977) letter to the Daily Princetonian.  In her letter, Patton exhorts Princeton women to begin the task of husband hunting in their freshman year, warning them that “[f]or most of you, the cornerstone of your future and happiness will be inextricably linked to the man you marry, and you will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you.”

Below is my response, a version of which was also published in the Daily Princetonian:

I have to say that while I disagree with most of Patton’s assertions, I don’t find them especially offensive. After all, women can take Patton’s advice or leave it. While Patton’s tone does seem overwrought and off key in several respects, I don’t find her message much different from any other piece of alumni advice. In fact, I find myself uneasier with the assumption by some women that Patton’s point of view is one that should be suppressed. I don’t agree with much of what Patton says. But neither do I think that Patton’s view should be silenced. Haven’t men told women to shut up long enough without women telling each other (for it is mostly women doing the silencing) to shut up? I for one think Patton ought to speak louder and longer to her points. If she did, we might engender fuller and more constructive engagement on the issue of women’s family lives.

I am especially uneasy with the class and race privilege evidenced in the outraged responses to Patton’s letter. There seems to be at work here an implicit understanding that elite college women who look for early marriage with classmates (or perhaps for any marriage at all) are turning their backs on stellar opportunities or are being untrue to bedrock feminist principles such as autonomy or equality. This is problematic because although women come in all stripes, too often norms of feminism are shaped by the elite few. Feminism has been and continues to be the province of the wealthy, the white and the well-connected. Many of these women want to have it all or want a larger piece of the pie. Other women might be content to get any of it at all or might be content with some of the crumbs from the pie much less a piece of it. It is difficult to frame a broad-based emancipatory feminist program in the face of such starkly contrasting metaphors for female success.

The contrast may be especially bleak when comparing wealthy, white women to black women from poor and working class backgrounds. In the context of marriage, some wealthy white women, for instance, may be far more likely to have access to well-paying jobs or other resources that obviate the need for a spouse’s financial support. Moreover, given a higher rate of placement in elite firms and more frequent residence in upscale neighborhoods, wealthy white women who do choose to marry may have far more opportunity to find a like-minded mate at places outside of the elite colleges or universities that they may have attended.

For poor or working class black women and for some other women of color, there is often less available in the way of career or spousal choice. Even equipped with an elite college degree, highly educated black women from poor or working class backgrounds often earn less than their white, wealthy counterparts, making it harder for them to support themselves alone. Highly educated black women from poor or working class backgrounds are also less likely than their wealthy white peers to live and work in settings where there are large numbers of people who share their interests or values. Yes, it may be possible to find a suitable mate in other settings. I’ll call such mates diamonds in the rough. Then again, it may not be possible. There are far more rocks in the world than diamonds in the rough. While solid and dependable, a rock is, well, just a rock.

This is not to say that elite colleges and universities are brimming over with cut and polished diamonds in the form of highly suitable mates. But I think some of us protest entirely too much when we eschew the seeming elitism of remarks such as Patton’s “you will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you.” Certainly I’d adjust that statement to read men or women; heteronormativity is its own form of tyranny. And maybe Patton’s statement it is a bit too emphatic; never is a long time, after all. But the fact is, even if adopting the most anti-elitist stance possible, a lot of us do think this way. We just don’t like to say it and if anyone else says it we cry foul.

Does this mean that I would give my daughter the advice that Patton is proposing? Absolutely not. If my daughter is lucky enough to attend Princeton or a school like it, I want her to view her college years as a momentous first step in a life full of grand possibilities of all sorts. Marriage may or may not be one of them. But, I would also make sure that my daughter understands that for some women, well educated or not, choices and opportunities, if they exist at all, may be narrower and more constrained. Only with this sort of honest acknowledgement of the conditions facing some women can we achieve significant change for all women.