this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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askchapo
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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.
ok, this explains it
...and i'm back to being utterly baffled because i'm not understanding the rationale behind people labeling blackness as "masculine" and whiteness as "feminine". makes zero sense to me to genderize(?) a whole race/group of people like they're a completely different alien species.
now this gets me wondering, did white people back then try to control the reproductive rights of black people (or even kill black children or force black couples into aborting their children) to achieve this goal?
...yeah, i'm calling cap on their belief. i don't think white guys could care less if you included black women or not. i don't think they'd still be willing to give you rights or treat you as every other human being.
I don't know about doing it on purpose, but the Tuskegee syphilis experiment comes to mind as one of the ways the result was that. You can also argue that condemning black people to poverty and misery through policing the black body (by segregation, white terrorism, objectification, etc.) is a way to make sure they weren't able to exercise their reproductive rights freely. Really hard to have a fulfilled family life when everything you've ever known regarding your own body is brutalization.
while modern Planned Parenthood has more-or-less moved beyond its racist roots, the organization's founder, Margaret Sanger, was a eugenicist and aligned herself with racist arguments to further the cause of birth control.
so, yes, white people did try to control, or at least influence, the reproductive decisions of black women.
Leave it to crackkkers to achieve groundbreaking new heights when it comes to racism
My best guess is that the origin of the idea is slavery itself. Work was seen as inherently masculine (women at home don't do real work of course), so the bodies of slaves that were seen as tools for work were therefore also perceived as inherently more masculine
Basically it was playing on white supremacist ideas like "You gave black men the right to vote before white women??".
¿¿¿???
this... isn't a competition re: who could get rights first...???
if anything, the white women in question should've been able to show solidarity with the black women because both of them are in a similar situation (neither could vote)
but white supremacist sounds about right
gross... did not expect this
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
It's fucking wild, isn't it? But racism goes so, so deep. Some people believe in it like they believe in the sun.
sadly yes, but i just didn't expect feminists of all people to harbor these kinds of sentiments
All the movements have their contradictions
Yeah. That's why the Statement of the Combahee River Colective was of such world-shaking importance. The concept of intersectionality had always been bouncing around in some sense but the Combahee River Colective made it a concrete part of theory and started us exploring and codifying the concept.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/
Thanks for the link. Right now I have a splitting headache so I'll have to read it in full later, but the opening statement is fascinating.
It's good stuff. Even fifty years later it's still so important.
shoutout to the combahee river collective statement, absolutely critical text. if people like that one, i also recommend cathy cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens”
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.