Mind the Gap

You might be familiar with the video that Sudy (of A Womyn’s Ecdysis) made a while back, showcasing a collection of comments by self-identified feminists in people’s comments threads, some of which are pretty horrifying.

I have a bit of a problem with the Vlog format – basically, it has the problems of a blog, times one hundred. Still, I think Sudy did some good work here, and raised some fundamental questions. As feminists, we engage with race, class, gender, and sexuality issues all the time, and we all have internalised prejudice in all of those areas, and we’re going to come out with some pretty gnarly statements sometimes, which isn’t a crime. The only possible crime is failing to question your attitudes, and rationalising your prejudices as important parts of your feminism. In fact, I think it’s deeply feminist to face your prejudices and work through the reasons why you might hold those views, realising that it’s not a crime not to be a perfect feminist, especially as women are supposed to be perfect and eager to please at all times. And the trouble with prejudice is that often we use it to try and justify our privilege, and absolutely want to keep it, because calling it into question would be very uncomfortable indeed.

Two comments stood out for me, this one:

Stupid people all over the world tend to have too many kids. It’s going to prove to be one of the issues of our day if nothing is done to prevent the wanton, reckless procreation of the world’s have-nots, who only succeed in passing on their poverty to subsequent generations, and thus drag us all down with them. Not pretty, but it’s obviously what is happening. Soft-headed, well-meaning but cosmically misguided “welfare” practises only exacerbate the problem.

and this one:

I’m saying this as a women of color, which is a stupid term anyway. My color is only skin deep and I don’t define myself by it. White women are no more privileged than any others. Feminism is the great equalizer, and frankly, these women of color need to get a fucking grip.

They stand out for me for two reasons. First, they’re pretty terrible – the first one is a contender for worst thing to say ever. Secondly, they’re both views I’ve held, and indeed shared loudly in public places before, quite a few years ago (I was a teenager), but still, I can’t deny it, my current socialism and feminism started there.

What changed? Well, I had some pretty convincing first-hand evidence that the second statement, at least, was 150% pure horseshit, which led to questioning the first one pretty strongly. It wasn’t just having a lot of African acquaintances in university – it’s perfectly possible to have lots of Black friends and remain racist as fuck, you simply see your friends as the exceptions. And it’s perfectly possible to be racist while rationally thinking of yourself as anti-racist as well. That’s why it’s called phobic behaviour: it’s not rational.

Anyway, inspired by a recent post on male privilege here, I think it might be a good idea to make a few similar points on white privilege, based on the personal experience of some of my friends and acquaintances. Some of these points might not occur to us that easily. After all, one of the things about privilege is that, the more privileged you are, the more confident you feel that you don’t have to question your privilege. So, here are a few points, which I hope will be as much of a wake-up call to you as they were for me.

1. When I speak to people in a foreign language, with a heavy accent, I can be fairly sure they’ll think I’m an exchange student or a tourist or something. Because I have a thick French accent (except when I speak English), and white skin, rather than an African accent and black skin, they won’t assume I’m stupid, or make me repeat things several times.

2. Generally, people won’t assume I’m illiterate with eight kids, lots of dirty habits, and have probably tried to do my laundry in the toilet at some point.

3. When I go to see the doctor, he might recommend that I go on the Pill. But he won’t try to force me to agree to it, and when I refuse, say ‘Don’t come crying to me when you get pregnant’.

4. Similarly, the doctor won’t refer me to gynaecologist without consulting me first, and the gynaecologist won’t spend fifteen minutes trying to force stuff through my hymen before chastising me for not letting her know I was a virgin.

5. When I go to the ophthalmologist, he won’t try to fob me off with the wrong prescription, and in fact chastise me for wasting his time at all, and then try to convince me that I only think I can’t see out of the glasses because I’ve never worn glasses before.

6. If I take a job as a cleaner, I won’t have to quit because I moved a penny from the table to the mantelpiece, and had to explain to my employers where I’d put it, because their immediate assumption was that I’d stolen it, and I’m worried that if they lose something bigger, well, the cops are going to listen to them rather than me.

7. If I choose to join a local Church (highly unlikely, but you never know), I won’t have parishioners offering to help me by driving me various places, only to have their children ask ‘what’s that weird smell?’ when I get into the car.

8.Generally, people don’t talk to me as though I’m a three-year-old child. And especially, they will never lecture me, in that tone of voice, on gratefulness towards God and other people for putting up with me.

9. In my place of study, I won’t be confused with someone in the same room who is a completely different height and build to me, a different skin colour, and wears a nun’s habit, or chastised when I don’t answer to her name.

10. My lecturers won’t deliberately speak a language I don’t understand (Alsatian, in my friend’s case) just because they don’t think Black people should be in universities, then chastise me for not doing the work properly at the end of the class.

11. In my place of work, I will never get hit over the head with a walking stick by patients as I try to help them because ‘every time I ring this bell they send me another lazy nigger’.

12. I will never have to share a room with someone who infers lack of hygiene from my skin colour, and constantly reminds me of this. In fact, people never have and will never associate my skin colour with dirt. It’s pretty basic, but you’d be surprised.

13. If I’m ever in a position to need welfare or help from a social worker, they won’t assume that my predicament is due to my failure to abandon the weirdy, foreign, ‘not like us’ ways that come with my background, culture and entire history.

14. People will not randomly walk up to me in the street and insult me for being ‘no good’ on the basis of my skin colour.

15. When thumbing through a clothes catalogue with friends, I will never have to listen to one of them express surprise that Black women can look attractive without make-up, because usually they need tons of it before they look half-decent.

16. Finally, I will never be asked by anyone whether in my country we eat lions or live in huts. Well, I did get asked if the water in France was safe to drink once. But I was able to safely give a short, sharp reply to that question, which I would probably have thought twice about doing, had I not been White.

It’s not all good, though, because

17. I will never be able to jump the queue in the supermarket by telling the old ladies ahead of me that, where I come from, we eat people. Although technically, that one was a case of male privilege.

These are all various people’s real experiences - and the list is by no means exhaustive - and as you can see, they’re all things we pretty much take for granted – our rights to health care, education, and even assumptions about our personal hygiene. It might not occur to us that any of those privileges are anything special. In fact, they shouldn’t be privileges at all. But for millions of people, going through the day without experiencing any of this kind of discrimination is a relief.

I haven’t seen feminists make many of these assumptions, but I have seen a couple of them made on a depressingly regular basis. For instance, point 14 might sound familiar to a lot of people, since a lot of feminists do assume that ethnic minority women shouldn’t join their groups if they don’t abandon

the weirdy, foreign, ‘not like us’ ways that come with their background, culture and entire history

even if it’s phrased a bit differently.

Generally, if I’m honest, I’m very worried because these kinds of statements from feminists seem to be accepted without question from other feminists, on the basis that feminism is supposed to be an egalitarian movement, so we’re all fabulously egalitarian, right? Well, no, we’re not. It takes constant work, constant questioning, and it’s a constant learning experience. At no point do we get to stop learning and start teaching everyone else.

Another thing I’m worried about, if I’m completely honest, is the number of very ambitious young women in feminism. I don’t think ambition is a bad thing, necessarily. But personal ambition within a political movement can be. After all, to advance your career, you need two things: to maintain the status quo that has given you the chance to start your career in the first place, and to impress the right people, that is to say, the ones who are more privileged than you, who have even more of an interest in maintaining the status quo. To be blunt, I feel that these people are being given a very loud voice indeed, often to the detriment of the majority of women. As for ethnic minority women, I have observed a tendency to allow enough of them a voice so as not to be called racist, but no more than that, and the symbolic gestures often mean that racist undercurrents within feminism go unquestioned. Or maybe I’m being too cynical, but the fact remains, a lot of women are being left out of feminism, despite their huge involvement at local community level.

On a more general level, it seems that a minority of middle-class women with ambitions to be great names in feminism are denying the majority of women a part in feminism, on the basis that they can’t be trusted not to be too oppressed or to represent the interests of ‘their men’ (read: their community, which might have different interests to ours). For instance, in today’s Guardian, it is actually suggested that it might be appropriate for feminists to ‘boo’ a female scriptwriter because she used to be a stripper:

Hurray, surely, for Diablo Cody, the (female) Bafta-winning scriptwriter. But boo to the fact that she used to be a stripper? Sisters, it’s complicated.

Yeah, Sisters, if we can’t work that one out, maybe we’d best stay in the sewing room. Actually, that kind of thing has been going down since the Suffragist movement tried to attract more sophisticated women, and interestingly, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst get statues (not to denigrate most of their achievements) while Sylvia is considered to be an extremist.

But that’s the thing: if we still haven’t worked that one out, how can we be sure that there isn’t something at the core of feminism that’s very rotten indeed? In that case, surely it’s our job to carry on the work of previous generations of feminists, and try to work out what it is.