Why I Will Not Disavow the "Feminist" Label

I am simply tired of the hypocrisy of the outside world that wants to make African war crimes like rape as unique only to Africans. This kind of stereotyping needs to be checked and we shouldn't let ignorance prevail. This is obviously not a justification of rape, but for all those in the struggle for justice it is important not to be persuaded that this is a problem that is unique to Africans. This kind of thinking would not help much with your cause since from the onset one may assume that they are dealing with a problem that is race specific yet its not. Who knew that in this day and age we would have Abu Ghraib courtesy of US forces including women as the perpetrators of the abuse? - Grata from The Village.

I see now that feminism is nothing more than erasure. A conversation between white women and men. A commitment to the safety and well being of people who are never women of color.But all the while–even as there is a studied avoidance of the women of color in the room, the women of color are there nonetheless. They are working and agitating and moving and changing the world–and they are doing all this without money, without support, without mainstream media, without jobs, without praise and admiration. And to me, it’s a sin and disgrace to force such an unworthy label on them–they who wouldn’t steal food from a neighbor if they haven’t eaten all day.“The road to hell is paved with feminists” - Brownfemipower's last post in the blogosphere.

The sentiments expressed by both Grata (htp Miriam from Black Fire, White Fire) and Brownfemipower have really given me reason to pause. As one of the bloggers who has been given credit for starting the blogswarm on the Congo rape epidemic, and as someone who has always, always questioned the way Africa has been portrayed as this "netherworld" of our worst nightmares or our most victimized victims (see Africa: This Year's Entertainment and Decolonizing Feminism posts), I take these concerns very seriously. Grata urges us to think globally and not get caught up in a "convenient" stereotype of "African savagery" (which I've already seen occurring in some of the blog comments, especially among African American women). Fortunately, we have so many conscious sisters, the issue of racial stereotypes have already been addressed because no one let those problematic comments go unchecked.

But the other piece to Grata's critique is an immediate distrust of those of us who have not done enough critical self-reflection on our own privileged positions (whether as white feminists or as U.S. citizens) and how this position colors our view of what she calls "Africa's First World War." In short, I have to say: point well taken.

Which is why I thought to link Grata's concerns with the last post entered by Brownfemipower, who, sadly, exited the blogosphere last week over plagiarism and lack of acknowledgment by a white blogger who parroted many of her ideas in a mainstream online site. Apart from the fact of her disappearance is what I can only read as her final "disavowal" of the "Feminist" label. For that, I'm really sad to see, because, unlike BFP, I do not now nor will ever believe that feminism belongs to white women. They did not start it, and even though it looks like they're "running things," that's simply not true. It's because I'm fully aware of the women's rights movement history why I will not disavow feminism, I will not find alternative "names" like womanist to define me, nor will I decide - whenever white feminists or Global North feminists (of which I'm one of them) or any other privileged woman does something heinous to another woman - to leave feminist movements. Instead, I will declare the guilty party to NOT be the feminist one, I will ask those culprits to "please turn in their membership card," and to get in line and treat each other with respect and equality, or get the hell out and don't let the door hit you.

No more of this disavowal. Because, if many of our ideas and theories have been stolen through intellectual theft, then you better believe that our practices and social movements were also stolen and given the label "feminism." Women of color have been made to feel like this is some "bourgeois white women's movement," for which we have to join and assimilate to their concerns, and then have to either pretend we don't do gender analysis or feminist oriented work, lest we become associated with the bad behavior of bourgeois white "feminists" (by bad behavior, I'm talking racism and imperialism, not "bad girl" behavior) or to rely on some segregationist movement to address our cause, which only manages to marginalize us further. Meanwhile, the reason why women the world over are in such a sorry state is because women of color and white women haven't come together to fight sexism. There is no other way to defeat intersectional oppression.

When I say our social practices and movements, as women of color, have been appropriated, here's what I'm talking about (see also my Black Feminist Legacies post):

1. Did you know, according to Paula Gunn Allen in her 1984 essay, "Who is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism," that the impetus for theorizing on "natural rights" and "liberties" had a great deal to do with Europeans' encounter with indigenous American societies, which were often egalitarian and in which women held important leadership positions? Sure, Eurocentrists would rather trace their liberation theory back to King John of England's 1297 Magna Carta, but such "democratic rights" were decreed by a monarch. How much did the encounter with Native Americans (and women's roles within the culture) generate the philosophies of Enlightenment, the point that many Western feminists often trace as the origin of feminist theory with Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman?

2. How many of you ever heard of the name Maria Stewart (1803-1879)? Well, she was a black woman who happened to be the first woman ever in U.S. history to speak in public about women's rights. Influenced by David Walker's militant 1829 appeal, she drew on the discourse of black liberation to address feminism. She started in 1831 and would be followed more than five years later with white women abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who were loudly criticized by their male counterparts for daring to speak in public as women, as was Maria Stewart. It was this gender discrimination in the anti-slavery community that prompted the formation of a women's movement to begin with, until woman suffrage became the point (and became the point precisely because so many white women were pissed that black men got the right to vote before them - sound familiar?). Makes me wonder why anti-racist white women allow their white supremacist counterparts to take over (as Susan B. Anthony had allowed in the suffrage movement). Worse, such actions lull them into thinking that white privilege will protect them as women, in which the vast majority of women (who happen not to be white) can be sacrificed for a few gains that they gain, not as women, but as whites!

3. In the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it was another black woman, Florynce Kennedy, who founded the Feminist Party in 1971 and nominated Shirley Chisholm for president of the United States. So, even here, it was black women who politicized the term Feminism to begin with!

And yet, I'm offering this history because I keep hearing women of color, time and again, echoing words like what Brownfemipower expressed. I'm just reminding everyone that the "Feminist" label belongs to us, as women of color. We laid the foundations for feminist theory and practice. We are the bodies on which feminist theories are created. We are the "comparative" variable and the case study for why "life sucks for women." It's because of the combined effects of sexism, racism, imperialism, heterosexism, etc. why we've got it bad. And it's because we "bleed at the intersections" why we, more than any other group of women, need feminist movement.

When I was asked to speak at a Latina sorority last month, invited by a student who is in my class, to talk about the Juarez situation, I said yes, because I believe in supporting my students but I wondered why this student, who majored in Latin American Studies, didn't ask one of her LAS faculty to speak and to speak with more knowledge than I would.

Imagine my surprise that, in a room full of 120 students, many of who were LAS majors, this was the first time they had heard of the mass killings and rapes of women in that U.S./Mexico border city, and the killings have begun since 1993! (At some point, I will offer a connect-the-dots post to show how the coltane stolen from the Congo is then processed in various factories and later assembled by such women in Juarez to give us our lovely computers and TV sets, which are then used to recycle the most demeaning images of women - tell me this cyclical pattern isn't affecting all women everywhere.)

I offer this anecdote to say that Women's Studies and feminism are important because, sadly, our Ethnic Studies programs still don't center women and gender. And there is no excuse for feminism or Women's Studies to not place women of color at its center when we have laid the foundations.

We are the feminist movement, and it exists in the blogosphere, in the streets, in households, in community shelters, in classrooms, and everywhere there is a woman fighting for her right to just be.

I will not disavow the "feminist" label because I didn't get it coming through the back door.