Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(38)

Then bell hooks stepped forward in 1981, writing in Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism: ‘The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that . . . women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labelling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization. It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to reappropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.’

And in a law lecture delivered to London’s Birkbeck University in late 2013, Angela Davis expanded on the history of how black women have articulated their experiences over the years. In 1969, she explained, American civil rights activist Frances Beale wrote a pamphlet called Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female. Later, the Third World Women’s Alliance created a newspaper called Triple Jeopardy. For them, the struggle was not just against racism and sexism, but imperialism too. Elizabeth Spelman’s 1988 book Inessential Woman challenged the methods of adding on oppressions a year before Dr Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’.

America, with its grid-like road system, neatly packed full of perfect rectangles and squares, was the right place for the birth of this metaphor. Every person knows of a place where all the roads meet. A place where there’s no longer one distinct road, but instead a very particular spot, a space that merges all of the roads leading up to it. Black women, in these theories, were proof that the roads didn’t run parallel, but instead crossed over each other frequently. And the aforementioned women writers’ work thoroughly illustrates how much richness and depth there is to be found when examining those intersections, instead of denying they exist, or forgetting them altogether. For too long, black women have been the forgotten, and have had to come up with strategies of being remembered. In the analysis of who fell through the cracks in competing struggles for rights for women and rights for black people, it always seemed to be black women who took the hit.

When black feminists started to push for an intersectional analysis in British feminism, the widespread response from feminists who were white was not one of support. Instead, they began to make the case that the word ‘intersectional’ was utter jargon – too difficult for anyone without a degree to understand – and therefore useless.

‘If you haven’t got the same background in or affinity with academia, though, intersectionality is a word that says this is not for you,’ wrote Sarah Ditum on her personal blog in 2012.4

In the New Statesman, Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett wrote: ‘This means that issues of race, class, religion, sexuality, politics and privilege often end up fracturing feminist dialogue, most regularly causing disagreements between those armed with an MA in Gender Studies and a large vocabulary to match, and those without [. . .] Going into certain state comps and discussing the nuances of intersectionality isn’t going to have much dice if some of the teenage girls in the audience are pregnant, or hungry, or at risk of abuse (what are they going to do? Protect or feed themselves with theory? Women cannot dine on Greer alone). [. . .] It almost seems as though some educated women want to keep feminism for themselves, cloak it in esoteric theory and hide it under their mattresses, safe and warm beneath the duck-down duvet.’5

As the debate intensified on social media, feminists who didn’t comply with this line were routinely monstered in the press. The jabs were kept just about evasive enough so that no particular woman was named, and so there was very little response published from those being criticised. Sadie Smith wrote in the New Statesman: ‘The Online Wimmin Mob takes offence everywhere, but particularly at other women who are not in their little Mean Girls club, which has their own over-stylised and impenetrable language, rules and disciplinary proceedings.’6

The white feminist distaste for intersectionality quickly evolved into a hatred of the idea of white privilege – perhaps because to recognise structural racism would have to mean recognising their own whiteness. They were backed up by their men. Tom Midlane wrote in the New Statesman: ‘While the idea is obviously born out of honourable intentions, I believe the whole discourse around privilege is inherently destructive – at best, a colossal distraction, and at worst a means of turning us all into self-appointed moral guardians out to aggressively police even fellow travellers’ speech and behaviour. Why does this matter, you ask? The answer is simple: it matters because privilege-checking has thoroughly infected progressive thought.’7

You’ll notice a trend here. Between 2012 and 2014, the most spirited takedowns of black women talking about race, racism and intersectionality were always published via the New Statesman, Britain’s foremost centre-left political magazine. Because of the sheer frequency of these takedowns, I began to wonder if there was an editorial line. There were weak efforts by the New Statesman to publish rebuttals by defenders of intersectionality, but it was the harsh criticisms that seemed to set the magazine’s agenda on the topic.

A few years later, the arguments first put forward by white feminists and left-wing bloggers in 2012 and 2013 were being echoed by publishing platforms that were decidedly not left wing. The extreme, hard-right, website Breitbart London defined intersectionality as ‘A debate strategy: when you’re losing an argument about feminism, call your opponent racist or, even more damningly, capitalist’, and defined privilege as ‘What white middle-class feminists have and their victims don’t’.8 In another dictionary-style takedown of progressives, the Spectator wrote: ‘I is for identity politics. Always define yourself by your natural characteristics rather than your character, achievements or beliefs. You are first and foremost male, female, other, straight, gay, black or white and should refer to yourself as such. Martin Luther King should have checked his privilege when he had that nonsense dream of a world where people “will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”. That’s easy for a middle-class straight man to say, Marty. I is also for intersectionality, the tearaway offspring of identity politics, where you must constantly wonder how your various personal identities intersect with each other (or something).’9 On the same topic, another writer in the same magazine wrote, ‘As theories go, this one isn’t wholly mad. The trouble is, it has become faddish among people who don’t read books or essays but merely tweets and Internet comments, and thus don’t know what they are talking about. So what you end up with is a kind of minority Top Trumps, and a sort of spreading, infectious belief that the more box-tickingly disadvantaged a person is, the wiser, kinder and more all-seeing they must be. And it’s stupid.’10