Against White Feminism Read online

  “What languages do they speak in Kenya?” one yelled out. “When did you get here from your native country?” another probed. It was, all of it, a circus; the white women were the roused and rowdy audience and the Brown and Black women the erstwhile performers.

  I stood next to my “table” but not against it as I had been instructed. I could see myself from the vantage point of the white attendee: here was a Brown woman and helping her and her kind was as easy as buying a trinket. If one was feeling particularly generous and humane, one could even chat with her to prove her commitment to diversity. I felt sick.

  This was a “global bazaar,” where the “natives” from various countries could raise money for some noteworthy cause, orphanages, malnutrition, girls’ schooling, or even microloans. Like extensions of the merchandise, the women who had been invited to “speak” would stand obediently by the tchotchkes that commodified their culture.

  In the shame-laden minutes that followed, nobody ventured near my table or asked me any questions. This was good. I felt suspended, paralyzed by the anticipatory terror that exists when someone raises their hand to strike you, before the actual sting and burn of the slap itself. I was angry, I was ashamed, I was aghast. I saw the Brown and Black women doing the bidding of my handler and others of her kind.

  One of them walked by my table. “Is there a problem?” she asked.

  “Yes, there is a problem,” I replied curtly. “This is not what I was invited to do. I was told that I was to give a small talk about Pakistan.” She stared at me, the look of an elementary school teacher dealing with a problem child. “Well, it actually is; you’re supposed to engage people and give a little talk,” she cooed. “We wanted it to be a bit informal, you know.”

  I felt stupid to have said anything at all. Where to begin and how to explain? I became quiet and she walked off. When she was gone, I gathered my purse and my folder of “notes” and walked out into the night to my car. I sat there in the dark for a good half hour and cried.

  I can still feel the burning shame I felt that day. The event was degrading because its very arrangement situated Black and Brown women as the beseeching, hungry “others” trying to grab the attentions of white women. Instead of a conversation, it was an enactment of power difference. The Brown and Black women, their stories, their histories, had to be abridged to fit the tiny attention span of white women walking by. Fetishized and in “native dress,” they could jockey to be the most colorful, the most alluring, along with the trinkets they were selling. It was, in sum, a spectacle, one in which all stereotypes about Brown or Black women or the cultures they represented were reaffirmed, and conversation was only occasioned by the possibility of a transaction.

  The idea that Brown, Black, and Asian others are really just flavors for consumption in a wide buffet of countries and cultures laid out for white consumers is rooted in and pervaded by white feminism’s earliest exchanges with women of color. Even when white women suffragists were agitating for the recognition of their own personhood, their obliviousness to all “other” women was on display. Unlike their British sisters, the American suffragists did not have an entire empire (yet) in which to perform and celebrate their feminist awakenings or export their suffrage movement. They were, however, quite eager to show off their own “new women,” modern and forward-looking, as a beacon to all womanhood everywhere. They got the chance to do just that at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, which showcased not just how white American women saw themselves but also how they saw the rest of the world in relation to themselves.

  The geography of how the World’s Fair was laid out was also important, a picture of sorts of the American worldview at the time. On one side was the gleaming, blazing “White City” of the future; in the middle was the Women’s Building, crammed with exhibits gathered from white American women all over the United States; and on the opposite side of the fairgrounds from the Women’s Building was an avenue called the Midwest Plaisance, which was flanked by “villages” that represented all the countries of the world.

  Having such a white fair that excluded American Black people was controversial and deliberate. In 1893 racial tensions were high over the Fifteenth Amendment and the integration of Blacks. In the initial planning months, President Benjamin Harrison appointed a commission of 100 representatives from all over the country, all “almond pure and lily-white,” to make decisions about the fair, and they were the ones who decided to call the centerpiece of the Exposition “The White City.”1 The centerpiece of “The White City” was electricity and all the wonders that it could produce. There was an electric tram to carry people around from one part of the large exposition to the other. The first “movie” ever made was on display, a seconds-long instance of a man sneezing, astounding the public with moving pictures. There was even a small moving sidewalk.

  The White City was also, quite literally, white. Black people were permitted to visit, but of the thousands of exhibits, none were devoted to the achievements that Black Americans had made in the thirty years since slavery had been abolished. The only Black employees of the exposition other than those hired to play African savages or serve as porters were a single army chaplain, a couple of nurses and clerks, and some messengers. In the words of Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass, who produced a pamphlet decrying the exclusion of African Americans, “the whole history of the Fair was a record of discrimination against colored peoples.”2

  White women from all around the United States, on the other hand, were celebrated in style. For the first time in U.S. history, there was an expressly designed “Women’s Building” highlighting their achievements, so that fairgoers could see that (white) American women were, like the rest of the innovative and dazzling entrepreneurs and engineers of the White City, thoroughly modern.

  Assigned to oversee the Women’s Building, located at the very edge of the White City, an all-white board of lady managers squabbled over which sort of white women—rich society women or activist suffragists—would run the show. Philanthropist Bertha Palmer, not a suffragist but the wife of a very important and very rich white man, faced off against Phoebe Couzins, a longtime suffragist from poor roots, for leadership of the board.

  Bertha Palmer wanted the fair to “shed light on [white women’s] economic situation in the world” and believed that while women “should be able to do anything they want, they should not want to do everything” but should remain “gentle and womanly.”3 Couzins felt that the Women’s Building should highlight the suffragist struggle and be more overtly political. But neither was at all interested in including Black women in the conversation, or in having Black American women’s achievements reflected in the exhibits they intended to represent the progress American women had made.

  The World’s Fair represented a microcosm of the American world and within it the Women’s’ Building was its own microcosm. The many hundreds of exhibits from crafts to paintings to household devices revealed the universe of white American women as they saw themselves. That none of these women, from the politically active Couzins to the philanthropically inclined gentlewoman Palmer, felt that the contributions of Black women were part of the American story reveals just how normalized the invisibility of Black women was. Just like British suffragettes who discussed what was best for colonized Indian or Egyptian or African women without consulting them, white American women remained self-absorbed, oblivious to the erasure of Black women.

  Actually not oblivious, but active participants in the project of erasure. Black activists, Ida B. Wells among them, petitioned for representation, or at the very least the inclusion of one token member “whose duty it would be to collect exhibits from the colored women of America,” but nothing came of it and the contributions of Black women were not included in the Women’s Building or elsewhere.

  White women, on the other hand, were celebrated in style. On the roof of the Women’s Building was a tea room where white women, tired after traipsing through the exhibition
, could get a bite to eat and enjoy the cool breeze with an unobstructed view of the Midway Plaisance. Running out away from the main body of the Fair like a spare limb, the Midway Plaisance was a narrow, crowded strip intended for entertainment and education. Among its fairground rides and snack sellers were model “villages” representing different countries of the world, with people from those countries shipped in to populate them. At the beginning of each day, all the performers participated in a parade. Dressed in their “native” costumes, they marched up and down the mile-long Midway to entice visitors to their various villages. In the case of the Dahomey village, this meant Black American people hired to act the parts of African “savages,” allowed only to beat drums and make unintelligible sounds. Frederick Douglass and other Black activists emphatically criticized the Dahomean exhibit, writing that the Dahomeans were there to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage.4

  The Midway Pleasance also included the “Tower of Beauties,” which exhibited “live” women from all around the world doing a provocative “Hoochie-Coochie Dance.” In some souvenir books, fair-goers were invited to rank the women of the Plaisance from least to most beautiful. If the Women’s Building was about the personal achievements of the respectable white woman, outside its confines the “other” woman was exoticized, objectified, and generalized to a crude type.

  Here was the world as white Americans saw it at the turn of the twentieth century, white men at its blazing, electrically lit center, white women protectively ensconced in their own building, celebrating their own limited achievements, and everyone else relegated to the periphery of their manufactured modern world, a flat caricature mostly included for entertainment value. Racism was not surprising in the nineteenth century, but it was unjust and the subject of protest even then. What’s shocking was how closely it parallels events today. The “Global Bazaar” event that I had found myself storming out of on a rainy midweek evening was all too reminiscent of the World’s Fair a century before.

  The women of color, including me, were not terribly unlike the foreign women doing the Hoochie-Coochie, or situated along the Midwest Plaisance. For us “foreign women” tasked with standing next to tables of tourist wares, as for the Black women and foreign women at the fair, the white feminist Women’s Building remains impenetrable, a realm of power and discourse and political action where we are not welcome and our absence has never been missed.

  The fair’s geography and the centrality of white women as the only women whose achievements were worthy of being noted and commended was a precursor to what was to come. On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was finally passed, granting suffrage to all American women. Its text declared: “The right of citizens to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”5 The celebrations that took place then, and for many years to come, failed to note that this was not a victory for Black women.6 While the amendment barred reserving the ballot for men only, poll taxes and a maze of other restrictions based on residency, mental competence, age, and so on were still on the books in several states, specifically aimed at suppressing the Black vote.

  In 1920, Mary McLeod Bethune, an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil-rights activist traveled through her home state of Florida to encourage women to vote, facing tremendous obstacles at every step along the route. The night before Election Day in November 1920, white-robed Klansmen marched into Bethune’s girls’ school to intimidate the women who had gathered there to get ready to vote, aiming to prevent them from voting even though they had managed to get their names on the voter rolls. Newspapers in Wilmington, Delaware, reported that the numbers of Black women who wanted to register to vote were “unusually large,” but they were turned away for their alleged failure to “comply with Constitutional tests” without any specification of what these tests were. The Birmingham Black newspaper Voice of the People noted that only half a dozen Black women had been registered to vote because the state had applied the same restrictive rules for voting to colored women that they applied to colored men. Some Black women did vote in 1920, but their numbers were small relative to their white counterparts.7 Though they had been active campaigners for suffrage from the beginning of the movement, Black women in America did not meaningfully win the right to vote until after the civil-rights movement spearheaded by Martin Luther King Jr. led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The inroads made by that law were undercut in 2013 when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the act, opening up new avenues for voter suppression, such as the purge of voter rolls, closing polling places, and voter ID laws—all of which were an issue in the 2020 election. It is worth remembering that when the victory of the suffragists is lauded every August, it is mostly white feminists who are being celebrated, with continued centralization of those white feminist icons who had histories of racist views.

  Even white American feminists who passionately championed civil rights for Black Americans were not generally clearsighted in supporting the political aspirations of their “sisters” around the world (or, for that matter, in understanding the intersectional struggles of Black women at home, but more on that later). In this, they followed Simone de Beauvoir, philosopher and author of the groundbreaking feminist text published in 1949, The Second Sex. It is fashionable now to celebrate de Beauvoir as a philosopher in her own right who was responsible for key insights of the existential philosophy for which her longtime partner, Jean-Paul Sartre, took credit, including but not limited to the idea of the “other.” Yet her work is also foundational in establishing the white woman as “the” woman, the universal subject of feminism.

  De Beauvoir’s goal in The Second Sex is simply this: to carve out for women the position of the universalizable and generalizable subject so that women could begin to exist in the realm of philosophy. Until then, only white men had occupied the position of the generalizable and universalizable subject for European philosophers.

  This in itself is a worthy goal, but in comparing “women” to “others,” who include Blacks and Jews, de Beauvoir reveals herself to be thinking of “women” as only white women. From the very introductory pages of The Second Sex, de Beauvoir identifies “otherness” as the fundamental category and woman as the ultimate “other” in a way similar to how “the natives of a country see inhabitants of other countries as ‘foreigners’, Jews are the ‘others’ for anti-Semites, blacks for racist Americans, indigenous peoples for colonists, proletarians for the propertied classes.”8 In de Beauvoir’s view, then, the justifications for inferior conditions of race, class, and caste are not just comparable but rather the same. Stereotypes about the “Jewish character” and the “Black soul” are, in her view, equivalent to stereotypes about the “eternal feminine.” In this way, she sees each of these as discrete systems of oppression that could be compared, but did not overlap.

  Comparisons of women and Blacks continue throughout the book, but they never meet in, say, the category of “black woman.” In one section, de Beauvoir compares anti-Black racism to anti-feminism, saying that antifeminists offer “separate but equal” status to women in the same way that Jim Crow subjects Blacks to extreme forms of discrimination. There are, she says, “deep analogies” between women and Blacks; both must be liberated from the same paternalism and master class that wants to keep them in their place.

  In every comparison that de Beauvoir makes between women and Blacks, however, the Blacks are assumed to be American and male and the women are assumed to be white. In The Second Sex, she uses the character Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son to evoke the parallel—but not intersecting—situation of women: “he watches planes pass and knows that because he is black the sky is out of bounds for him. Because she is woman, the girl knows that the sea and the poles, a thousand adventures, a thousand joys are forbidden to her: she is born on the wrong side.”9 It does not seem to occur to her that one could be oppressed by both of these systems, race and gender.


  In later portions of the book, de Beauvoir shifts her attention to the uniqueness of women’s oppression. Unlike Blacks or Jews, she argues, women cannot trace their oppression back to some historical event. Thus she obscures the sufferings and subjugation of Black and Brown and Jewish women, and again, positions the class of “women” as white and Christian. Categories such as these determine the epistemic foundations, and the focus on women as white excludes women of color from both the philosophical category essentialized here and frames of historical reference. Even as she purports to take on the study of women in history, de Beauvoir elects to focus only on women in the West, and more specifically France, dispensing with the rest of history in a footnote.10

  Neither is that West-centric footnote the only one in The Second Sex that is problematic. In another, she comments that “the history of woman in the East in India and China has been in effect that of a long and unchanging slavery.”11 Was she not aware that two years prior to her book’s publication Indian women had managed to overthrow the British Empire and win the franchise? Elsewhere, she explains the particular and special character of gender relations in the modern West. “The more a male becomes individualized and lays claim to individuality,” she writes, “the more certainly he will recognize also in his companion a free and individual being. The Oriental, careless of his own fate, is content with a female who is, for him, (an object of pleasure) but the dream of the Occidental once he rises to consciousness of his own uniqueness is to be taken cognizance of by another human being, at once strange and docile.”12