There were a lot of racist suffragettes.
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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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.
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;
ok, this explains it
Blackness has been coded as masculine and male by white society to better superexploit their physical labor
...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.
increasing the population of Black labor was no longer seen as desirable by white society after the end of slavery
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?
white women believed they could easier acheive their own liberation by focusing only on themselves and excluding Black women.
...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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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”
All the movements have their contradictions
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.
hold on. there are... 3rd wave feminists... with no sense of intersectionality??? the hell???
I've seen trans women online who have some wild takes about fellow trans women of color. It's crazy, but it happens.
i'm now curious about what these wild takes they have about non-white trans women like me.
but i pray that i don't have to meet the kind of trans women you mentioned... and that they can eventually see the light and the error of their ways.
unbelievable that some people - despite being oppressed by the system - could be like this.
coincidentally, do these people also happen to be truscum/transmed? or even some "tucutes" are a part of this? because i feel like it'd make sense for truscum/transmed trans people to hold such reactionary views.
I think there is a lot of overlap with truscum and transmed views and racism. Hell there's plenty of transphobic trans women sadly. None of us are immune from internalizing society's worst features.
this makes sense, in a disgusting sort of way. cis-passing culture tends towards racism (among other problems), so I could definitely see that playing into some really weird takes.
I'm now very interested in seeing these wild takes, though, from a place of morbid curiosity...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.