The Feminist Fatale: Pitting Gender Against Race

Paula Giddings

At today's Harvard Business School's Gender and Work Symposium, Paula Giddings, Sandra Finley, and Jennifer Richeson gave fascinating talks about the traps that feminists have fallen into that pit race against gender to prevent White women and Black women from banding together in a united front for women's progress.  

Giddings, Professor of African-American History at Smith College, discussed how suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott ignored Ida Wells-Barnett's call in 1903 for women to work together across racial lines. Instead the suffragettes followed a policy of expediency to get Southern White women on board by arguing that elite White women should have had the right to vote before Black men, or "Sambo."

After Title VII of the Civil Rights Act passed, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a report authored by Patrick Moynihan titled The Negro Family: A Case to National Action. The report blamed poverty in the African American community on the matriarchal structure of the Black family: Resilient women were seen as more of a problem than structured racism. The recommendation was to make sure every "negro-bodied man" was working, even if it meant threatening Black women's jobs, leading to more poor Black women. This was the moment when Black power combined with masculinity to define the Black Civil Rights Movement.

Giddings also discussed how the fractured coalition among women along racial lines was responsible for the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972. This break-up of alliances enabled the conservative assault on feminism in the 1980s Reagan era and beyond.

In 1991 Kimberly Crenshaw argued that race, gender, class and sexuality are not independent social categories and that Whites have a racial identity, men have a gender identity, and all that all these identities overlap one another, constitute one another, and shape one another. The separate designation of "women" and "minorities" leaves minority women out of the picture: "All women are White, all Blacks are men, and some of us are brave."

The 2008 Democratic Primary pitted race (Barak Obama) against gender (Hillary Clinton). Many women felt the Democratic party betrayed women by choosing Obama over Clinton. Echoing the early suffragette argument that White women should get power before Black men, Gloria Steinem wrote a piece arguing that "Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life," and asked whether a Black woman with Obama's credentials would have been so successful; Steinem could have asked whether a Black woman with Clinton's credentials would have been so successful, but did not.

Now comes Barak Obama's "My Brother's Keeper" initiative, echoing the Moynihan report of 1965. Financial institutions have pledged funding for Black and Latino male youth -- why not girls too? How can this happen? Again, the story is that Black men suffer more than Black women, and that Black women may even be part of the problem (or at least don't need help).

Ida Wells-Barnett saw the political horizon of the growing disparity of wealth, of racial and sexual divisions, but in 1903 Chicago women were engaging with one another on these issues. Women's organizations were the new power that would engage reform in a way the pulpit and politics were unable to do.

Sandra Finley

Sandra Finley of the League of Black Women gave a moving and poetic talk. She began by giving each member of the audience a temporary visa to "Black Woman World" (some were guests there, some were coming home). She reflected on the multitude of psychological sticks used to continually poke her and other Black women, such as having the light color of her skin questioned, akin to being permanently locked in the airport TSA under examination. Black women are very self motivated but lack sponsorship. They're always on the frontline -- even geese change formation and take turns in the headwind, but Black women don't have that kind of back-up.

Finley told us to imagine marching with our White sisters to the halls of power, together as women in unison, and banging on the door to be let in. The Door of Power opens, but Power selects who is let in, and a White woman is chosen to negotiate on behalf of the group. She is told "we can give you what you want, but we just can't handle that race thing at this time; we'll get to that later." Seeing her options, she takes the deal and goes out to explain. She assures Black women that she will make sure "the race thing" is handled. But she doesn't. The trap was sprung at the door, not at the table; it was sprung the moment she went in to represent all women. When power makes that invitation again and again we must say, "not without my sister, I won't go in there alone." Don't let power divide us.

Finley concluded by noting that there's a difference between race and racism. We don't want to build a bridge to a post-racial world; the price tag is too high. Race is beautiful, race is good. Let's have a New Orleans style funeral celebration and bury that nice White woman, bury that angry Black woman -- they never were us anyway, they were invented to confuse us and to pit us against each other.

Finally, Jennifer Richeson presented research showing that White women exposed to a sexist threat -- reading an essay about the continued existence of sexism and gender inequality -- are then more likely to express pro-White and anti-minority bias. In other words, rather than making White women feel more sympathy toward minorities as another disadvantaged group, learning about women's disadvantage made them feel less sympathy for minorities.

Richeson presented additional studies showing that this reaction can be reduced with positive affirmation, a similarity mindset, and thinking of a personal experience of sexism rather than sexism about women as a group in general.