Patricia Arquette & Madonna: Reaffirming that #Solidarityisforwhitewomen
Patricia Arquette’s Oscar acceptance speech for her role in Boyhood started positive enough. Arquette chose to do with her platform what very few celebrities ever do - she championed a social justice issue that she felt strongly about. However, while her plea to end gender wage inequality had good intentions, she chose to expand upon her political position backstage in what some are calling a “bad choice of words”. However, this bad choice of words highlight what many women of color have known for decades: when white women talk about women’s rights, they are talking about WHITE women’s rights:
While making her speech, Arquette declared that “it’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”
There are a couple of things that are very problematic with this “bad choice of words”:
1) It suggests that there are no women among gay people or people of color, or that the issues that affect women that fall into these categories only pertain to their identification with these two groups rather than in an intersectional way.
2) Injustices that affect gay people or people of color are a thing of the past because white women helped you overcome them
3) Women (or specifically white women) are the one group that is still oppressed and marginalized
While Patricia Arquette later apologized for her fumble (see following article) it was not before going to twitter and using that default argument that white people like to use when they get defensive after being called on their racism or complicity in continued marginalizations:
http://www.thewrap.com/patricia-arquette-on-oscar-speech-fumble-i-would-have-chosen-my-words-a-little-more-carefully/
So okay, maybe Arquette’s issue was a bad choice of words - but ultimately, I think it still speaks to Peggy McIntosh’s articulations of white privilege - white privilege means never having to think about race and intersectionality, even when you’re giving your well-meaning Oscar speeches.
Because we just couldn’t get enough of white feminist bullshit, just a couple of week’s after this incident, Madonna declares that women are still the most oppressed minority group:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/madonna-says-that-women-have-it-harder-than-black-people-and-gay-community-as-theyre-still-trading-on-their-ass-10101292.html
In this article, Madonna boldly declares that “Gay rights are way more advanced than women’s rights. People are a lot more open-minded to the gay community than they are to women, period. It’s moved along for the gay community, for the African-American community, but women are still just trading on their ass. To me, the last great frontier is women.“
In one of the following posts I mention the alarming statistics for violence against LGBTQ people of color as well as the long history of police shootings of black and brown people in this country. Even Patricia Arquette quotes in her “apology article” that Latinas and African American women make far less than white women do in terms of the wage gap. So tell me again Madge how the last great frontier is women?
Although, I guess the real issue is expecting any critical thought to come from someone who in her early years appropriated the gay, black drag culture in New York. Madonna shot to fame with her video Vogue, which was a full appropriation of the the practice of voguing, an artform that became popular in New York City’s ball culture. Highlighted in the documentary “Paris is Burning” (which is not without its problems since it was done by a straight, middle class, white woman with very little insight into the culture beforehand), ball culture was a space in which drag queens of color would come together and “compete” in shows. Many of these drag queens were homeless or severely impoverished, and used these spaces as a communal space to temporarily escape their lived realities. Voguing was an artform of contest and competition not unlike the B-boy battles that were becoming popular among youth of color in the same time frame. When Madonna used it in her videos, she not only appropriated the style of dance, but never gave credit to the drag queens that created it.
While I’d like to be able to say that her days of appropriation are behind her, a product of her uninformed youth, the above picture is her in 2014, when as an almost 60 year old, wealthy white woman, she decided that a gold grill was the next fashion trend she would appropriate without taking on any of the negative stereotypes and baggage that accompanies this look when sported by people of color.
Peggy McIntosh, 1998 “White Privilege, Color & Crime: A Personal Account”
