Wish I had time to update and resubmit this in light of the recent letter to alumnae quarterly, but I don’t because job. So per a-winding-road's request, here’s an LTE thing i wrote about it all.
Much of the media coverage surrounding the protests at Smith College, and Lagarde’s subsequent withdrawal, has elided one important truth: the protests were visibly led by people of color.
As soon as demonstrations began disgruntled students, faculty and administrators sought to undermine the protests by drawing attention to anger and noise surrounding them, by comparing them to tantrums, and by characterizing them as aggressive and lacking the civility befitting a college environment.
Noisy. Angry. Infantile. The race of the protestors matters because these words, far from being random descriptors, are the historical weapons of white supremacy: a caricature-focused narrative that’s been used again and again to subhumanize, deride, and delegitimize people of color when they resist violence and silencing.
As a white alum, I know that many of my counterparts within the Smith community and at large don’t realize the supremacist impact of “arguments” that draw on this loaded imagery. They feel logical and weighty precisely because they reproduce a meme: we know the story of subjugation justified by savage behavior deep within our collective bones, and it resonates with those of us who benefit from it even when we don’t explicitly or consciously recognize it in our arguments.
But consciously deployed or not, this historically-significant, coded language should be a red flag. Just as it is sexist to delegitimize women who speak up with the language of hysteria, it is racist to delegitimize people of color with the caricature painted by accusations of incivility, noise, and aggression.
At the same time as community-members tried, however unwittingly, to silence protesters with racialized language, they insisted that Lagarde deserved a chance to speak. But as one protester commented, “Christine Lagarde did not lose her audience.” As the head of a globally powerful institution, she is not marginalized and her voice is more than protected—speaking both literally and figuratively, she will be handed a microphone wherever she goes. The same cannot be said for people stripped of their rights and sovereignty by the IMF, a non-democratic organization underwritten by western corporations. Who will amplify their voices?
As members of the Smith community will know, Lagarde’s selection followed the launch of the college’s Women for the World campaign, which purports to empower women from around the globe. Faced with this bitter irony and a racialized backlash, many students and alums found themselves asking: which women, and for whose world? It pains me to say, but it seems like the answer might be “the most powerful women, for a world subjugated to their economic interests.”
There are many feminisms. Though Madame Lagarde certainly represents some of them, she doesn’t represent mine. My feminism is not about breaking down that final barrier which prevents me—white, western, documented—from enjoying the spoils of imperialism, military and corporate, alongside my male counterparts. It isn’t about silencing the disenfranchised so that the ubiquitous narratives of the powerful may go unchallenged. My feminism is about destroying systems of domination, all of them, and it begins with the choice to take a step back from the stage, hand the microphone to the marginalized, and listen.
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