Seeing all the TERFs/SWERFs made me wonder, has there been [B]lack [E]xclusionary [R]adical [F]eminists in the past?
/genq. I don't live in the west, but I am curious about this.
There were a lot of racist suffragettes.
see, i don't understand this.
maybe it's because i'm from the 21st century or just that i don't know much on the matter, but i'm literally clueless on how the fuck could the suffragettes - despite being feminists - not sympathize with black women or be inspired to be anti-slavery after seeing the shit black women go through (granted idk how the lives of black women were when they weren't doing slave labor like their brothers, but still).
like, it's just not registering with me. someone please explain this to me.
It's intersectional. It's partially white ignorance, most whites didn't see the shit Black women go through; the voices of white women were elevated because of their whiteness so their own concerns came first in the public discourse; Black women were rationally reluctant to raise their own voices in the face of white terrorism; Blackness has been coded as masculine and male by white society to better superexploit their physical labor; increasing the population of Black labor was no longer seen as desirable by white society after the end of slavery, Black women were doubly undesirable for both being Black and giving birth to Black babies; white women believed they could easier acheive their own liberation by focusing only on themselves and excluding Black women.
Angela Davis keeps mentioning "All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave" so I probably should read that at some point.
Among other things, it's respectability politics. Many worried that adding an additional radical notion -- Black Suffrage -- On top of their already radical position would push it too far past the window of achievable politics.
It's the same justofication sometimes given for why the LGB movement excludes T
White supremacy ideology puts great value on white femininity, and often portrays white women as being under threat from men of color, and people of color in general. Lack of an intersectional perspective leads white feminists to parrot the tropes of white supremacy, with the language of feminism.
There still are. White feminist is often used derogatorily to refer to 2nd/3rd wave feminists who have no intersectionality.
there is black exclusionary everything
It's been a minute since I've read it, but I think this subject is touched on in Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis.
Very much one of the foundational texts for intersectional feminism, yeah it deals with white feminism without calling it such.
Yes, and there are still plenty of them around today.
still plenty of them around today
how??? how are they still able to operate in this era???
how do they reinforce their beliefs???
do they seriously think white guys will happily give them rights just because they're throwing their black sisters under the bus?
i'm so baffled by this, their existence. how can you exclude black women from your space or think they don't deserve rights...
especially in an era where you'd think people would know better. :\
I mean the vice president of the United States, in Kamala Harris, literally went on the presidental debate stage and told lies about how Palestinian men/Hamas members sexually assaulted Israelis. "Feminists" fear mongering about non-white men is a tale as old as time itself, and sadly is still popular today, hell it's still part of the mainstream political consensus in the USA, from the "progressive" Democratic party.
That was basically the vast majority of white feminists until very recently. It was/is bad enough that womanism is a thing. And calling womanists Black feminists is 100% going to get you in trouble with certain people because for many Black radicals, feminism itself is completely tainted with white supremacy to the point where they need a completely different movement without the white supremacist baggage.
This brings to mind Sojourner Truth's Ain't I A Woman speech. She was a slave who escaped her master and became an activist. She gave that speech at a convention to a crowd of white women who didn't want her speak because they wanted to keep the feminist movement separate from abolition.
Yes.
this is the most common version
Yes and holy shit it's bad when you start digging into it. I'll look up some specific examples after work.
Honestly I think it's safe to assume that any social movement or group that isn't explicitly intersectional has huge problems with racism, transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny.
"The history of all hitherto existing societies is a history of class struggles"
As there are class struggles of women against the oppression by men there are class struggles of nations of peoples against their imperialist/colonial oppressors. If one understands that material conditions can often inform one's worldview and if those material conditions lend to the privilege of white supremacism then one can easily see why some suffragettes could, for example, support the British Union of Fascists.
Always think about dialectics (for example the interaction between the evolving ideas of a person and their surrounding environment, how they influence each other back and forth) and one will see, unfortunately, why solidarity is not universal and why some people's empathetic intelligence is stunted.
TLDR: they wanted a more equitable share of the white bourgoisie's loot.
