E-race-r
Posted on May 13, 2008
Filed Under Opinion |
College is so wonderful with all of its lovely diversity-teaching.
The semester, for me, is over, completing my third year of my undergraduate degree. For one particularly feministy class, I had to do a final project with a focus on “feminism and magazines.” My partner and I, unlike the rest of my class of 60-something people, chose to analyze the effect of feminism on women’s magazines that target specific races.
The results? Predictable. No question arises that the Women’s Lib movement of the ’60s and ’70s left a substantial amount of human beings out of its “inclusive” cause. As bell hooks said in response to Caucasian women fighting to enter the workplace, “African American women have always worked.”
Essence magazine was founded in 1969 by three men who were affected by the Black Nationalist movement, which carried feminist ideals because it advocated education and advancement for all African American people.
One more fact: back then, advertising took up 20% of magazines. Today it’s around 60%.
What does all of that mean?
It means that because patriarchy intersects with capitalistic ideals, Caucasian women, who are the pedestal-ed vaginas to the all-powerful Caucasian man, are targeted most by the ideals of femininity. However, because African American women are subject to, or most frequently engage in submitting to an African American man, and the African American man is subject to being subordinate to the Caucasian man, African American women are derailed by two indirect paths of power, where their gender is not reflected, but merely their race.
African American women have learned to associate themselves more with being African American than being a woman–Being a woman in this country, according to its women’s history, has not included them (damn epistemology).
The whole idea for the project came from talking with my roommate, who is an African American woman, and who is also a feminist. She is not very political, yet she knows she wants Obama for president (not saying that Clinton is necessarily the better candidate, but I did want to dig deeper).
Now I’m sure we could tie this all of this into the presidential election, but fuck, I’m sick of talking about that.
The point is, “feminism” to some is not feminism to all; White woman politics is not “woman” politics. It’s just blue, red, and white.
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