If the White man’s burden was to bring the “savage” to civilization, then in 2015 the White woman’s burden is to teach the rest of us bumbling half-humans how to be women.
It has become so overt and formulaic that when I opened the most recent “feminist” hot take on Jenner–Elinor Burkett’s maddening “What Makes a Woman?”–it took all of two minutes for me to roll my eyes in exhaustion.
“Their truth is not my truth. Their female identities are not my female identity,“ wrote Burkett–a successful, upper middle class White woman, in an attempt to invalidate trans women. These recent articles and comments critiquing Black and trans women for the very things White women have historically and presently celebrate each other for femininity, self-definition and choosing their own paths, isn’t about defending women- it’s about defending White womanhood as the only version of womanhood (see also: Michelle Goldsberg’s “What Is a Woman” for the New Yorker last year.)
In the past, White women have had to fight to be seen as strong and capable of working outside of the home. All while Black women have had to struggle to be seen as human, to be seen as more than sexual workhorses unable to feel pain of any kind. Entire branches of medicine were built on our superhuman ability to feel nothing, entire nations were built on the idea we can toil in hot fields tirelessly, doing work no White man could be expected to. The interests of White and Black feminists could align, we are all fighting for women to be seen as complete human beings but not if the issues of White women are held as women issues, eclipsing and boxing out ours.
Interesting to note Burkett’s White cis middle class womanhood looks nothing like my Black poor cis womanhood, and that her issues are not my issues. I don’t know what it’s like to be in a meeting and have my breasts discussed because I’m not invited to those meetings. With natural hair and a state college education, I’m not let in to make those $0.75 to a man’s dollar. Most Black women do not. She discusses periods and birth control as defining difficulties of womanhood, but the women I know have found their womanhood rooted in deeper, more communal issues. Becoming a Black woman in America means worrying for yourself and your loved ones when they go out, for fear of police.
While White women fight to reclaim the word “slut,“ I am fighting for the rights of my younger sisters to be recognized as girls and human. This doesn’t make my womanhood less valid. it is simply different…and harder. There is no cult of girlhood, no monolithic womanhood. And if there was, surely it wouldn’t be defined by a successful White American woman, one who’s privilege transcends the majority of the world’s population.
When she wrote how trans women do not have to fear for their safety, struggled with jobs or anything of the like, it was clear she had never considered trans women of color, specifically Black transwomen who have the highest rates of poverty, murder and suicide than any other group. I know these women fear for their safety, I know that they are afraid of walking down the street and not being strong enough to ward off attackers. Worse, they know no one will come to their aid because of thought processes like this that state that their womanhood and that their femininity is artifice, put on, chosen.
It is because our experiences as women diverge so wildly, not just along lines of assigned gender at birth, but along race and class lines, that White women have to let go of the idea that their feminism or womanhood is prescriptive and universal.
Critiquing marginalized women for embracing femininity is tone deaf as it ignores our history of being denied femininity.
2087
snowghoul
stormborns
janainaart
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