Back in 2022, a day or so after the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade I attended a rally downtown. It was a decently large gathering and decently diverse crowd of a few thousand people gathered to protest the loss of a constitutional right to abortion. I heard a lot of speeches that day but one thing I heard from one of the speakers, a woman of color, stood out to me:
“Ladies, your white liberal feminism will not save you.”
I had a lot of questions. What IS White Liberal Feminism? Why won’t it save them? But also:
Is this a good idea?
Everyone with a uterus who attended that rally had lost something with the Hobbs decision. I, attending as a Chicano man, was there to support and these words weren’t directed at me personally. But it made me raise an eyebrow. Everyone there was ostensibly on the same side. I understood that people were upset, and rage is a perfectly valid emotion in that context. But was it a good idea to be throwing rhetorical stones at a time like this?
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Some history
White liberal women have been under suspicion within social justice circles going back at least to when the country was debating the 15th Amendment. The short version:
White women, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, supported the abolitionist movement prior to the Civil War. As the war came to an end, Congress debated passage of several Constitutional Amendments. As public figures and politicians debated the establishment of voting rights for Black people, abolitionist women expected that they too would be granted the right to vote. It didn’t turn out that way. Some of these same white women, feeling let down by racial justice advocates, responded with racist language. Bitterness on both sides ensued.
Beyond historical mistrust, there’s the simple fact that both sides- white women, men of color- benefit from some strands of structural oppression. White women benefit from white supremacy, while men of color benefit from sexism. I say “benefit” here loosely, I believe there are reasons why both systems also cause harm to the very people who allegedly benefit. But I’ll get there. To reiterate: not every man of color has the same incentive to hate sexism, and not every white woman has the same incentive to support anti-racism.
Shifting the Conversation
Views on any subject within any population exist on a spectrum from evangelists>active supporters>passive supporters>indifferent>hostile>actively hostile. As Srdja Popovic argued in Blueprint for Revolution the goal of activists should be to shift everyone one step left. Get your active supports to become evangelists, indifferent people to be sympathetic, and make hostile activists embarrassed about their activism. I bring this up because it’ll matter in a bit.
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A couple of things recently made me think about what I heard at that rally back in 2022. This weekend I attended a showing of American Fiction. It’s a genuinely funny movie about black author who struggles to sell his novels based on Ancient Greek works. The author finally gives up an publishes a stereotypically “black” book, full of tragic stories of violence and poverty, to extraordinary success. It laments that white audiences don’t want to see the full range of Black life, rather they only want to see poverty porn. I really enjoyed it, and the mostly white audience in the theater seemed to enjoy it as well.
This is despite how much white liberals are punching bags in the film. White liberals are portrayed as phony, greedy, stupid, awkward, and generally made the butt of jokes. Which was funny. Liberals usually aren’t afraid to laugh at themselves, and many white liberals are guilty of all these things. These jokes got big laughs. But it seemed to put a special focus on white liberal women.
White liberal women are often portrayed in media as too-earnest, clueless about their own privilege, and often just dorky. American Fiction was no different. I counted four white women who became the butt of jokes by being simultaneously very earnest about racial justice while totally incapable of listening to black people. I think many white women will appreciate the reminder to listen, and it was delivered in a very funny film. To repeat I’m not a white liberal woman, so I’m not sure how white liberal women will take it, but it seemed to get a good reception.
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The other thing that caught my eye was this article at The Root:
The Salty White Woman Tears Shed Over the ‘Barbie’ Oscar Snubs Taste So Good
Want insight into the sheer power of angry white women? Look no further than their response to Academy Award nominations for an extraordinarily mid film.
“Barbie” received eight Oscar nominations on Tuesday, but none are for Best Actress for the film’s star Margot Robbie or Best Director for Greta Gerwig. Given the responses to the snubs, you’d think someone climbed on stage and slapped Taylor Swift in the face mid-concert.
Considering our years of dealing with #OscarsSoWhite and the consistent snubbing of Black films and actors, I’m experiencing a hefty dose of schadenfreude watching the alabaster collective get up in arms.
My first thought- Is this a good idea? And why is this funny? The author’s insight on the movie was pretty bad.
It’s even more amusing (or galling) considering what they’re angry over: “Barbie” is an aggressively aiight film. I realize a lot of white ladies have a strong nostalgic and emotional connection to the Barbie brand, but “Barbie” is nowhere near a prestige film and it should be grateful to get the eight nominations it has.
There’s a lot to unpack here in this paragraph but what annoys me is the claim that white women appreciated the film because they used to play with Barbies. That’s pretty infantilizing. I haven’t heard a single mention by any of the women of playing with a toy by any woman who liked the movie. Multiple women I talked to had never played with a Barbie at all. Most of them just liked the message and the performances.
I thought Barbie was a great, highly successful propaganda film. I mean that literally and figuratively- it made over a billion dollars, and the message was clear and well stated. It may not have ticked every box on the intersectionality bingo card, but it featured people of color in key roles and made nods to trans and queer people.
(The other thing I didn’t like about that paragraph is “Barbie is nowhere near a prestige film”. OK.)
But the most appalling response is that of Los Angeles Times critic Mary McNamara, who wrote a piece criticizing the fact that the director and star of a successful “female empowerment” film didn’t get nominated.
“If only Barbie had done a little time as a sex worker. Or barely survived becoming the next victim in a mass murder plot. Or stood accused of shoving Ken out of the Dream House’s top window.”
I gather the quip about “barely survived becoming the next victim in a mass murder plot” was a reference to Killers of the Flower Moon. The author responds to McNamara:
McNamara threw the other nominees under her Lululemon-branded bus, including Lily Gladstone – the first Native American to ever be nominated for an Oscar for her depiction of a real-life Osage woman who did indeed survive a murder plot in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
To go back a bit- this is exactly what American Fiction was about. Lily Gladstone was only in contention because she was in a movie about a tragedy suffered by people of color. That’s prestige film. It has to involve something sad, like Precious or Crash or 12 Years a Slave. Is this what we want for people of color? Personally, I’d love it if, say, Diego Luna won an Oscar for something as aggressively stupid and smarmy as Forrest Gump. I’d consider that progress.
Part of the irony of this all is that the women of color who were nominated are being diminished under the weight of the controversy: Like Gladstone, America Ferrera made history as the first nominee of Honduran descent in Oscars history 20-plus-years into her career. Of course, she too has had to qualify her nomination by being queried about her poor white lady colleague whom she outacted.
The author doesn’t note it, but the role America Ferrera was nominated for was in Barbie.
Black folks have spent years bringing attention to #OscarsSoWhite because we’re perfectly aware that the awards committees historically consist of stodgy old white folks who don’t have the same emotional response to material made by and for us.
Barbie was made by white people. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t for us men.
And as a man, I personally loved the movie. Remember how I put benefit in scare quotes? Barbie makes a strong case that patriarchy also hurts men. Because patriarchy puts us in a box too. For me this was a message I’d been waiting to see in a major work of art for decades. I’ve always hated that I can’t just enjoy shit I enjoy without looking over my shoulder.
And it points to something I don’t see said often enough- if you want to change minds, it sometimes helps to give people a direct, personal interest in making those changes. Even if I can totally ignore the unfairness of patriarchy for women, it benefits me to get rid of it.
The very nature of film and television awards dictate that someone has to lose and that someone will always believe they didn’t have a fair shake. But with the “Barbie” snubs, we aren’t talking about a superlative film or one that deserves more than it got – we’re talking about the pink pussy hat contingent thinking about no one but themselves, per usual.
And those are salty white tears that taste so sweet
I just don’t get this. The Oscar’s are bad, and made of stodgy old white folks, and Black artists don’t get their fair share. The author’s response is to laugh at white liberal women asking for recognition. Why?
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The reason I bring all this up is because white liberal women and Black men make up large parts of the left coalition. If we want to accomplish anything, we all have to get along to some degree. I think white liberal women have mostly taken these taunts in stride.
The 2020 BLM protests converted a lot of women who were sympathetic to anti-racism into active evangelists for social justice for Black people. That’s the thing about the white liberal women that American Fiction mocks- they’re trying. They’re failing, but they’re trying.
The same goes for the white liberal women mentioned in the Root article. That link about pink pussy hats being controversial for being transphobic and/or ignoring women of color- it claims that when asked, a lot of women agreed not to wear one. This suggests that white women are teachable. That seems like an opportunity to me.
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If you’re still reading you may be thinking — both the movie and the column are by black men… are you lecturing Black men? I don’t think I’m lecturing, but I am asking questions that I think are important. Maybe I’m biased because I liked Barbie. Maybe it’s not my place to comment. Maybe it’s unfair to broadcast a column on a website that’s for and by Black people to a broader audience, because maybe it’s an in-house conversation going on that not everyone here would understand. But in my defense, I’m doing what activists during BLM told me to do. I am seeking out sources of Black thought and trying to listen. I hit on something I’m not sure I can agree with, and I’m not sure what to do about it.
I get that people of color don’t want to always have to engage in the tiresome task of explaining things to white people. And the response when white people don’t get it- annoyance- is understandable. I get it. I don’t like explaining things either.
Sometimes we on the left get caught up in things without thinking them through. For instance— is throwing soup on the Mona Lisa going to lead to action on Climate Change? Will pestering people at Starbucks lead to change in Israeli policy in Gaza? And finally—is mocking people in your coalition on your side going to result in positive change?