cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/my_mouldy_memes/t/310874
THE FUTURE OF FEMINISM
IS ONLY AS POWERFUL
AS THE FUTURE OF ANTI-RACISM
CLEO WADE
Why?
Honestly, I’m surprised that OP is being so obtuse about this. It’s clear once you’re familiar with intersectionality, but I think it could do well to be explained at least a little bit for those who aren’t.
Essentially, the argument is that feminism, while a good force, needs anti-racism to maximize it’s potential, just as it needs support for LGBTQ+ rights, since a lot of people are impacted by racism, homophobia, transphobia etc. Focusing largely on cis-het white middle-class women does help them, but we need those other elements too to be able to truly liberate people
Because it widely breaks down to the same sort of discrimination. Feminism without anti-racism means that the discrimination we see towards women won’t disappear, it’ll just be shifted towards people of color. How successful is your movement if all you did was export the bad shit to other people so it’s not your problem anymore?
If the response to “Women shouldn’t have to do housework” is “Yes! Juanita should do the housework!” Then something failed.
This seems to assume that there’s a certain fixed amount of “bad shit” that must be placed on one minority or another. If I eliminated all police brutality (which in the US disproportionately is aimed at black people), does that somehow make things any worse for women?
This isn’t exactly a helpful response. The two movements are different in myriad ways, and I see no reason to believe that the failure or success, however that may be defined, of one would cause the other to have the same fate.
Mostly because the roots of every discrimination are basically the same, and if you focus on only one aspect of it, you will not succeed no matter how much progress you think you’re making. For example, both racism and misogyny is based on the old entitlement, on the old white men’s unearned sense of superiority, and if you don’t target that, you will never have an egalitarian society, even if you make them pretend that they aren’t overtly misogynistic anymore. It’s like TERFs teaming up with white supremacists to harass trans people, only to be incredibly surprised that white supremacists hate women too.
