When I logged onto Twitter this morning I saw a new viral #solidarityisforwhitewomen. Since then @niche has gone to the effort to Storify the tweets to make it easier to read them. You can see the storify here. I’m pretty sure that anyone can see it, you don’t have to be a social media user. Please let me know in comments if this is incorrect.
Owning this shit is hard. But I’m guessing living with this is even harder. I am going to shut up and read. If needs be I will call the whaaaambulance in private so I can go to Getovermyfuckingself Hospital until I am ready to listen again.
Of course there could also be a #solidarity is for cis, able bodied, middle class etc women too. Maybe there will be. But I think now is the time to listen to what is there.
Categories: gender & feminism, Life, social justice
96th Down Under Feminists Carnival 
Please don’t liken yourselves to Rosa Parks 
Today in ‘You can’t make this sh*t up’ because no one would believe you’ 
Cloaking device 
Hoyden About Town 
#solidarityisforwhitewomen.
White. Women.
Then plenty of people jump in, saying that feminism should show solidarity with *all* women.
How about all *people* ? A little more solidatiry with male victims of sexual abuse would not hurt. A little more concern for the pligths of dads wouldn’t hurt either.
Yeah maybe it should. But the time now is to examine how white feminism is throwing women of colour under the bus.
Also, what about men thinking about all these things and being supportive too?
I’m certainly in favor of that. Though the feminist topic that’s concerned me personally the most over the last decade, has been the situation for women in the middle-east.
My point was just that the hashtag says solidarity is limited to those who have 2 properties: they’re white, and they’re women.
Somehow the other property: that they’re female, got ignored. I suggest that a subset of feminism is not only blind to the problems of non-white women — they’re also blind to the problems of non-women.
It’s not #solidarityisforwhitepeople
But this is a minor nitpick. I’m all for expanding the problem-area that feminists choose to tackle, and including folks who aren’t white, is definitely a step in the right direction.
Are we really having a “What About The Menz?” discussion on a thread that should be about acknowledging the racist discourse that dominates mainstream feminism?
Listen, Gunnar Tveiten, there is a time and a place to discuss men’s issues (despite your use of “non-women” in your second comment, your first comment makes it clear that you are talking about men). This thread? IS NOT THE PLACE. It is the epitome of privilege to think that it is somehow okay to hijack a thread about WOC and make it about how the poor downtrodden men aren’t being sufficiently taken into account.
I know it is a hard thing for a person of a privileged group to grasp that not all conversations can, or should, revolve around you and your concerns. The whole POINT of #solidarityisforwhitewomen is to show how white women engage in exactly that kind of white supremacist thinking, so much so that WOC’s experiences are erased in favor of a white-centric “universal womanhood” narrative.
If you are going to participate in intersectional anti-oppression spaces like Hoyden About Town, you are going to need to realize that you can’t try to make every conversation about what you, personally, think is important. And you most certainly can’t barge into a discussion about marginalized groups and expect a privileged group, or groups, to be included in the discussion, much less given priority.
That wasn’t my point at all, and I explicitly said it’s a “minor nitpick”, and that I welcome the attempt at widening the perspective. My comment was solely on the hash-tag itself as contrasted with the discussion.
Because it really is a thing — and a thing we should fix, that a too large fraction of feminist discourse deals with the problems of white women, and only those. You could even narrow it down even more, because really, we’re mostly talking about the problems of white, female, heterosexual, first-world people.
I also think it’s quite rude of you to claim that I want it all to be about me. I said already that the issue nearest to my heart is the plight of women in the middle-east, and I’m neither middle-eastern, nor a woman.
Even if you where to have a discussion about issues facing male survivors of sexual abuse, or single dads, you’d still not be talking about me, nor of any issue particularly important to me.
Or do you assume that since I’m male, any issue that affect men austomatically is “my” issue ?
Quite a few in the middle-east, especially in Iran, self-identify as white, thus in principle they are white women. Nevertheless they’re also among the people whose problems are seldom discussed among feminists.
In short: I welcome the inclusion of women of color — could we please consider including even more groups in addition to this ?
Gunnar Tveiten:
Before you dig yourself any deeper, please read:
http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/phmt-argument/
If, after reading it, you don’t understand why you’re getting jumped on, read it again.
If you still don’t understand, I suggest you discuss it there, not here. (IIRC, both sites have the same Supreme Overlord[-ess], so you won’t have to start from the very beginning.)
I ain’t surprised. Neither at the hostility, not at your reaction of recommending I read introductory texts, i.e. I clearly don’t “get it”, and thus need to be educated to be worthy of participating in the discussion. Both are pretty standard fare.
To quote your introductory link: “The thing is, a feminist space — unless the topic is specifically men’s issues — is not the place to have that discussion”
So, unless we’re already discussing it, don’t bring it up. That don’t work so well if the problem is that we’re not discussing it often enough, does it ?
So I respectfully disagree. The topic at hand is issues ignored (or underprioritized) by feminism. This includes problems faced by non-white women, problems faced by middle-eastern women, and yes, problems faced by non-women.
It’s also interesting that the hostility is only ever directed at bringing up men when offtopic (and it’s mostly offtopic!), the same thing does not happen at all if someone says: “women of color have problems that we need to talk about” and then someone else says: “Agree ! And there’s stupid shit going on down in the Middle East that we should totally look into !”
Doing that is fine.
But saying “Agree ! And we should look at issues facing non-women too!” raises a near-automatic “what about teh menz” knee-jerk response.
#solidarityisforwhitewomen indeed !
Both are pretty standard fare.
Everything you’ve said is standard fare. The idea that feminism should talk about men more isn’t some new perspective, it comes up in every conversation like this, as predictably as night following day.
And you know what? I see an order of magnitude more concern for – to take your first example – concern for male victims of sexual assault on feminist sites than I do anywhere else. And to take your second example, the plight of dads is a direct result of the idea that women axiomatically have the primary responsibility for caregiving – and it’s feminism that does most of the work opposing that too.
But a given conversation can’t be about everything at once. Solidarity is for white women is a conversation about how WoC have been hurt and harmed by a movement that is explicitly supposed to champion them. It’s not about men, you, me, or any other kind. And nor should it be.
There’s nothing to stop you starting another conversation about whatever you want. But taking over an existing one, saying that it should be shifted to centre the more privileged… well, that’s pretty standard fare. And if your biggest concern really is women in the Middle East, then maybe you should have led with that as a perspective – since, you know, it’s about the sidelining of nonwhite women. But instead they were an afterthought to a derailment centred on men.
I agree with that, leading with what’s important, I mean. I should have.
When I didn’t, it was solely because of the hash-tag itself. which is #solidarityisfor-white-women-
Those specific two properties of a person where the ones mentioned in the hash-tag, yet only one of them where being discussed.
We absolutely need #solidarityisforfirstworlders and a large collection of too-often-ignored topics.
Gunnar, you have done enough talking about what you want this thread to be now. Please desist from commenting here for the next 24 hours, and confine yourself to 3 comments maximum in any 24-hr period after that.
Now that I’ve got the server at Feministe behaving itself again, Jill has posted about Karnythia’s hashtag in two posts – one for including Voldeschwyz discussion, and one for those who prefer that the discussion is Voldeshwyz-free.
#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen: Reckonings and Thoughts (Content notes: Hugo, suicide, self-harm, racism.)
#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen secondary thread:
Those specific two properties of a person where the ones mentioned in the hash-tag, yet only one of them where being discussed.
They’re both being discussed, just in different terms. White women are being called on their treatment of nonwhite women – the “white” is the point on where the privilege differential turns, ie vs nonwhite – while the “women” is the point they have in common, but which the privilege differential is allowing white feminist women to coopt and treat as if it refers to them alone.
This is also the core of why it’s a really bad conversation to bring men into the way you suggested: this is about the more privileged having to expand their horizons so they perceive the less privileged; including discussion of men in it is the reverse of that.
Ahhh…suddenly now I get who Voldeschwyz is….
My condolences.
I was discussing this thread with a friend, and she pointed out that the CEO of Storify not only does not take stalking seriously, he has encouraged the stalking of several people via outing them to @elevatorgate, a known stalker.
tekanji, that’s appalling.
Mikki Kendall talks about what started the #solidarityisforwhitewomen
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/14/solidarityisforwhitewomen-hashtag-feminism
It’s heartrending to see Ana Mardoll post about this on Shakesville, with an actual “You may be stalked if you reply to this post, or have anything to do with me” warning.
And how do you even start to justify not kicking a known stalker so proud of his stalking that he names himself after a hate campaign that’s still not over? The callousness is breathtaking even before the linking tweet.
I’ve got a new post up about the Storify fail.