Intersectional Feminist Catfights Turn Me On
by Jim Goad
If it was only white women who had voted in the past presidential election, Donald Trump still would have won. The only difference would be that he would also have won the popular vote, and by a 12-point margin. Trump garnered 53% of the white female vote, whereas a white woman named Hillary Clinton was only able to rally 41% of her white sistren to pull the lever for her.
Ashamed, traumatized, horrified, and grievously triggered by these stats, a pair of phenotypically white women from New York City—where else?—have designed and are marketing a “
NOT THIS WHITE WOMAN” T-shirt that enables white feminists who didn’t vote for Trump to publicly virtue-signal this fact.
Hilariously, this doesn’t sit well with black feminists.
“
White Women, Please Come Get Your Friends,” reads a savagely dismissive screed by brown-skinned Kara Brown at Jezebel:
Are you a white woman who did not vote for Donald Trump? Have you been searching for a way to assuage the guilt you may feel after learning white women were largely responsible for sending us all to Boy-Are-We-Fuckedville? Do you have zero self-awareness? Then get those credit cards out bitches!!!!....That aside, it’s hard to see how this really helps anyone or anything other than the conscience of the white women buying this ****….All it says is you want people to know you’re not a complete *******. The irony is, this shirt kinda makes you look like an *******.
Thus rears the ugly—yet inimitably enjoyable—head of intersectional feminism.
“Intersectionality,” which I’ve previously referred to as “
Cannibalism Among The Oppressed,” refers to the highly amusing tendency of leftist identity politics to devolve into petty pissing matches about whose group has had a shittier, more miserable history. In case you didn’t realize, the more of a historical loser you are, the more advanced and noble you are as a human being. When it comes to shuffling the Progressive Stack, straight white Christian males go to the bottom of the deck by default. But if you just happen to be a one-armed HIV+ obese transgender black lesbian with multiple personality disorder, you might as well be the second coming of Gandhi.
To their befuddlement, white feminists are waking up to the fact that they are being herded to the back of the progressive bus due to their shamefully inescapable whiteness.
When a small group of white women announced
a Women’s March on Washingtonfor this Saturday, Feminists of Color immediately scolded them for culturally appropriating the name of 1997’s
Million Woman March, which was exclusively a black thang. They were also lectured for lifting their stupid little event’s name from MLK’s 1963
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
After being told to
check their privilege, the march’s white female organizers hastily hired a token black woman, a token Muslim woman, and a token Latina.
In the fading Whitopia that is
Portland, OR, the president of the local NAACP dropped her endorsement of an anti-Trump march scheduled for Saturday because “I didn’t want to be part of the march if it was going to be a white-woman kumbaya march.”
It should come as no surprise that white feminists’ clumsy attempts to be black women’s “allies” is greeted with sneeringly imperious disdain by black women, but white feminists tend to live in a little white bubble, don’t they?
No matter how hard they stretch and strain to reach out to their highly fetishized Women of Color, white feminists invariably find their hands being slapped away.
They are harshly reminded that America’s original white suffragists were, by modern standards, unforgivably racist. Nonwhite feminists will tell you cool information—which I previously didn’t know—about how Elizabeth Cady Stanton lamented that “degraded black men” had been granted the vote before white women. They will alert you to the fact that white suffragist Frances Willard justified the lynching of black men in the South because she considered black dudes to be drunken perverts who couldn’t keep their dicks in their pants.
Showing zero sense of irony nor the slightest wisp of self-awareness, they will chide white females that “
Black Women Are Far More Likely To Be Fatally Shot By a Man Than White Women,” but they act as if this is somehow the fault of a white supremacist society rather than the possibility that black men, you know, tend to kill their domestic partners more than white men do.
Each humble white feminist attempt to reach common ground, no matter how naively well intentioned, is met with open disdain. “
Dear White Feminists: Your Good Intentions Aren’t Enough,” reads the title of a Huffington Post hit piece:
The question is not IF you are a part of the problem, I am here to tell you that YOU ARE.
Well, then, Aunt Jemima, excuse white women for livin’!
In “
An Open Letter to White Liberal Feminists,” a woman with the unmistakably black name of LeRhonda S. Manigualt-Bryant snorts:
If this most recent presidential election has revealed nothing else, it has shown that this specific ilk of white feminism must die. Rather than [women of color] holding up your weeping, weak selves, You must now do the intensive work to heal your troubled soul. And after you have come to terms with your own guilt, embarrassment, and pain, I encourage you to run with your newfound perspective.
Any human on this planet—whether white, black, male, or female—who doesn’t respond to such sick condescension with a hearty “go fist yourself in the ass, Moms Mabley” is a masochist who deserves whatever misfortune befalls them.
If one truly wishes to understand the driving cultural forces behind feminism, it may be more instructive to sort prominent feminists by
religionrather than race. Writing in
The Forward, a Jewish woman argues that Jewish feminists may be able to heal the yawning chasm between white and nonwhite feminists. I wish her luck with that plan and will closely monitor how it unfolds.
But the open disdain nonwhite feminists express for their white would-be allies seems to be causing an understandable whitelash. Regarding the intersectional squawking about whether the Women’s March on Washington was “too white,” a white woman from
New Jerseywrote, “I’m starting to feel not very welcome in this endeavor.” A white woman who wound up canceling her trip to DC commented, “This is a women’s march. We’re supposed to be allies in equal pay, marriage, adoption. Why is it now about, ‘White women don’t understand black women’?”
Quite possibly it’s because many black women care far more about being black than they do about being women. And if that’s the case, white feminists may have to realign their entire political worldview.
It’s also quite possible that a majority of white women voted for Trump because they woke up to the fact that for at least a generation, American society hasn’t “bashed” women at all, but it can’t seem to restrain itself from aggressively bashing
everythingwhite. In the end, these white women may not have been “voting against their interests” at all.
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