My point is that I don't see fighting racism as foregoing my gender concerns. I also don't see how feminism has ever looked out for women of color like me. You are the one who sees the fight against racism as separate. I don't.
That's wonderful that you don't see that. But many other women do, and have experienced marginalization and dissatisfaction having to choose. Which is why this is even an issue in the first place. You are obviously able to see racism and sexism at two distinct issues when looking through the lens of feminism, I find it odd you are unable to see them as such when looking through the lens of racial justice.
I will say, women like Sojourner Truth, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Ida B. Wells, Audre Lord, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and many other black feminists who have spent their lives fighting for black women to have rights and a voice would probably have something to say about them "never looking out for women of colour".
In regard to reproductive issues. .. see my issue is that White feminist have reduced women's issues down to abortion rights and birth control.
I find it really funny how you didn't even both to comment on Planned Parenthood eugenics. .. you spout all this intersectionality but never touch on how racism and sexism intersected in that instance.
Again, I've found that most feminists (white included), are just as concerned with economic justice (equal pay) as reproductive justice. If you take issue with the focus on reproductive justice, you may find yourself in the minority of the black community on this issue, as 81% support expanding access to contraception and 91% support expanding birth control to women who can't afford it.
I am familiar with the "PP as agent of black genocide" conspiracy theory. I'm gonna be honest, it doesn't seem plausible or substantiated to me. The
vast, vast majority of work PP does is related to non-abortion women's health services. Things like cervical and breast cancer screening, STD testing and treatment, pap smears, contraception, sex education, etc. Surely you don't believe it is harmful to the black community for women to have access to those services? In 2014 they saw 2.5 million patients and performing 9.5 million discrete services, 324,000 of those being abortions. That's about 3.5%. So even if Cecile Richards and Jill Lafer have pledged devotion to the racist ghost of racist Margaret Sanger, they're not doing a very good job of it. And even if we take for granted that black abortions are a negative thing, surely the women's health work they do which makes up 96.5% of their services makes it, on balance, a positive institution for black women.
OPINION: Dr. Ben Carson’s tall tales about abortion and black women
It’s particularly frustrating that Carson, a man of science, would repeat myths that aren’t based in history or research. He erroneously
believes that abortion is the number one cause of death of black people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say it’s
heart disease. His claim that abortion clinics are more likely to be in black communities also couldn’t be further from the truth. A 2014
study by the sexual and reproductive health research organization, Guttmacher Institute, found that 60 percent of abortion clinics were located in neighborhoods in which a majority of the residents were white. Fewer than 1 in 10 abortion clinics are located in communities in which more than half of the residents are black. In an interview with ABC, Carson was
fact-checked on air, yet he continues to ignore the data.
Because black women tend to experience
higher rates of unintended pregnancy — due to lack of consistent access to birth control — it would be beneficial for reproductive health care providers such as Planned Parenthood to be located in low-income neighborhoods. But they aren’t. More than
80 percent (PDF) of black Americans believe abortion should remain legal, and more than 70 percent believe that some healthcare professionals in our communities should provide them. We also know that
two-thirds of those who have an abortion are already parents, meaning the decision to have an abortion isn’t a flippant one to avoid parenthood; it’s often a decision to ensure families can afford the children they’re already caring for.
This isn't about intersectionality it's about getting numbers up. Diversity for the sake of having more people who can push forward an agenda, the agenda being fighting against white men while empowering mostly white women. I'm just not one who thinks that empowering white women is to my benefit as a black woman.
Intersectionality was created specifically so that black women are no longer fighting white women's battles. What you did by pointing out that black women's and white women's interests are necessarily the same is an act of intersectionality. You didn't/don't have to turn in your feminist card to do so. Feminism is about promoting women as equal to men.
Women. Not just white women, not just black women, not just latino women, not just asian women. Women.
There's a really good book, "Killing the Black Body" by Dorothy Roberts pretty much sums up my view point regarding black women, reproductive rights, etc.
Ms. Magazine Online
White women's reproductive choices may have been curtailed throughout U.S. history, says Roberts, but black women's choices have been, more often than not, eliminated. While white women have had to demand freedom from compulsory motherhood, black women have had to fight for their right to procreate at all, let alone on their own terms. The sheer scope of restrictions on black women's maternity both tangible (punitive public policies) and intangible (a lack of positive images of black motherhood)has "shaped the meaning of reproductive freedom in this country," says Roberts. In some instances, the agenda has been stark and obvious: children born to slaves were automatically the property of the slaveowner, and the women who gave birth to them had no control over their destiny. But as Roberts painstakingly delineates in her 1997 book Killing the Black Body (Pantheon) more recent theories and practices have at their essence the same pairing of deep racism and reproductive rights regulation. The connection is clear in the eugenics movement (which had alliances with the early birth control movement), forced sterilization, the distribution of Norplant and Depo-Provera (rather than safer methods) to poor women and teenagers, and with family caps for welfare recipients. . .. In contemporary America there is a prevalent belief that poor black women shouldn't have children. And that their having children is the cause of black people's problems, well, indeed, of America's problems. I think for a long time the denigration of black women's reproduction was just ignored by mainstream feminists because they had the image of the white mother in mind. Even though there are restrictions on white mothers, it's a fundamentally different kind of regulation. And then there are other feminists who are so wedded to abortion rights as the most important issue and to abortion as the be all and end all of reproductive freedom that there s a resistance to seeing coercive birth control policies as also being oppressive. They don't get that distributing Norplant and Depo-Provera in poor communities and telling women, "This is what you should use," could be oppressive.
This is a great passage, and a prime example of intersectionality. The author correctly notes that not all women are in the same boat. Black women have unique issues that would not be met if the dominant subgroup of women, being white women, were allowed to continue to dominate the discourse and paint all women with one brush in their color. The two groups have faced a different history, and are considered by society similarly in some ways, but differently in others. The solution is not to dismantle the fight for women's equality, it's to include the concerns and perspectives of those who have been historically been marginalized (by their race, in this specific instance). To take it back to this thread, most of the issues present in this passage are not issues that Black men overtly deal with. So again, black women have unique issues that would not be met if the dominant subgroup of race, being black
men, were allowed to continue to dominate the discourse surrounding racial justice and paint all black people with one brush. The solution isn't to dismantle the fight for racial equality, it's to include the concerns of those who have been historically been marginalized (by their gender, in this specific instance).
