By Nydia Swaby

I’m a black woman, and sometimes even I need to check my privilege. Imagine that.

I’ll never forget the day when my mother (yes my mother!) had to check my privilege. It was the most eye-opening moment of my life.

Prior to that moment, I put many people – and I mean many people – in check. A white man in a business suit who reprimanded a teenage black girl because she was standing on the walking side of the escalator; a black man who suggested to a classroom of mostly women that feminism has done us a great disservice; a white woman who was my peer in high school who seemed surprised about all I’ve accomplished knowing where I’ve been, just to name a few. But this was the first time that I, an ardent black feminist, actually had MY privilege checked. And it totally changed the way I look at the world and understand my place in it.

So I’m on the phone with my mother walking down Fulton Ave in Brooklyn (where I lived prior to moving to London where I have the privilege of studying at SOAS), and I say something like, “Ugh, I can’t stand it when I see these young girls feeding their baby potato chips and a quarter water at 10:00 am. The baby barely has any teeth. Damn.” And my mother, my single mother, says to me, “Girl, you actually know nothing about her situation. You have no idea what she feeds her baby on the daily. She could have woken up with only $3.00 to her name, just enough to spend a $.75 on breakfast for her baby and $2.25 to take a train into the city to pick up her paycheck. Don’t judge until you been there. You were privileged to have the childhood you had. And you’re privileged to have all you do now.”

I had to stop in my tracks because I felt so dizzy. Seriously, my mind was reeling.

When I tell you I’m not a novice to the struggle, I’m telling you we struggled. Mom raised my brother and I on less money than I make as a funded PhD student. I grew up knowing the value of a dollar and the reality of how much it does and yet doesn’t stretch. There were times when I had to give up something I loved, like piano or gymnastics, because the money wasn’t there. We came home a few times with the electricity shut off because the bills weren’t paid, and we spent a few days without it here and there. I can recall a few times when we ate the same square meal for an entire week. Mom is a wicked cook though, so other than the expected teenage complaints, I didn’t mind this at all.

Despite the limited financial resources, my childhood was amazing. My mother made the best of what she had and I look back on that time in my life with a smile on my face and love in my heart. Like Louise Mensch, I went to a private school my family couldn’t afford, and I also busted my ass to make sure I stayed there. I didn’t feel that way at the time, but I’m so grateful for the opportunity and I can see how my life was enriched as a result. One of MANY skills I gained at private school was how to effectively and efficiently use a computer (it was the mid-to late 1990s, before babies with ipads and that). That’s a skill many of us take for granted as though everyone knows how to start a blog let alone use Word to draft a CV! We also had

access to the one resource my mother believed would help make us a success – a community library from which we borrowed an insane amount of books to pass the summers, as we didn’t have (read: couldn’t afford) cable TV. I, a lover of literature and history, would go on to get a BA in Anthropology, an MA in Women’s History, and now I’m studying for a PhD in Gender Studies. My brother, who was all about tinkering reveled any book in the sciences, now has a BA in Aeronautical Engineering and is making plans to get a master’s degree in the near future.

Thanks to my mother’s encouragement, I always knew my brother and I would ‘make it’ somehow, someway. And we both have. At least, we’re well on our way.

So yes, Mensch, you should be proud of yourself (I know I am). You’ve earned it. No one is saying you shouldn’t or you haven’t. But just because you’ve struggled / worked hard and made it doesn’t mean the time won’t come when you could and should check your privilege. What I took away from my mother that day is that ‘checking my privilege’ requires that I see the world through an intersectional lens. Clearly, my other understood that there might be some class dynamics at work that I, only slightly removed from my days of struggle, didn’t recognize. I’m glad my mother called me on it. I like to think that she gave me the tools to be a better feminist ally. The kind of feminist who understands that though I’ve ‘busted my ass’ to get where I am today, I’ve had the privilege to be put in situations where I can continue to thrive and grow.

Acknowledging privilege doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate yourself. It means you consider that your intersectional life experience has given you opportunities that others might not have.

It means you recognize that someone else’s intersectional life experience might do the same. Or it might limit them in meaningful ways. It means that before you spout off dismissing other voices or telling said voices how they should feel, you take on that maybe you don’t understand how they feel. Furthermore, you have no right to tell them how to feel or how to respond to things that hurt / upset / offend them. It doesn’t mean you can’t comment. Rather it means you should be open to the possibility, that maybe, just maybe, your comments aren’t spot on.

Further Reading:
Stephanie Phillips’ post Intersectionality for dummies
Lola Okolosie’s post Intersectionality – Round 5
Reni Eddo-Lodge’s post Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

This post originally appeared on The Fourth Woman.

There’s nothing more likely to rattle a black feminist’s nerves than supposed allies throwing out the intersectionality question. It seems to be flavour of the month right now as time and time again white, middle class, straight women (hmm there seems to be a link there should we think about why that is or should we just continue to moan and cry. Moan and cry it is then) bring out articles with half formed ideas about why intersectionality is such an evil, evil thing. God forbid we offend white women.

The latest culprit, although not the most shocking, was Louise Mensch who coined the term reality based feminism because obviously the rest of us are dreamers who don’t know what we’re talking about.

I don’t know how many times this need to be said but intersectionality is no far fetched concept only used to belittle the privileged few. It means that different people experience different social structural oppressions. The life of a queer black woman is different to that of a middle class man and similarly the life of a middle class man is different to a disabled white man.

It’s really not that hard or complex. In terms of the supposed trolling well if you suffered a lifetime of oppression and had people constantly offending you but apparently not always on purpose then you might snap once or twice. Maybe you’ll snap every time because the one thing I know about replying to these kinda people is that no matter how nicely you tell them they have offended you they will always patronise you and completely miss the point so you might as well tell them to fuck off in the most glorious way.

Also, and most importantly, we don’t gain from calling anyone out or win intersectionality points. It’s not like if you’re a black, queer, disabled woman you win the intersectionality board game and get to win crappy plastic hat. You get nothing. Honestly nothing, just a lot of crap and blank faces. The reason we keep telling people when they’ve offended us is that we shouldn’t have to bottle it up. That leads to random, angry outbursts and self hatred. I’m not going to pretend what you just said wasn’t racist to appease you, a person who cared so little about me that they couldn’t even be bothered to be racist behind my back.

I wish all these white feminists would come out and say what they actually mean. They’re scared. Scared of being wrong. Scared of losing their power. Scared of losing control. It’s not a coincidence that the white feminists who have power, status and platforms are the ones causing a fuss.

Further Reading:
Lola Okolosie’s post Intersectionality – Round 5
Reni Eddo-Lodge’s post Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

By Reni Eddo Lodge

This post originally appeared on No Comment

In 1851, black abolitionist and women’s right’s activist Sojourner Truth addressed the OHIO Women’s Right’s convention.

“I think that ‘twixt de niggers of de South and the women of de North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about? That man over there say that women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have de best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? Then they talks ’bout this ting in de head; what this they call it?” (“Intellect,” whispered someone near.) “That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or nigger’s rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?”

Over one hundred years later, black feminist Audre Lourde stood before the New York University Institute for the Humanities Conference.

‘Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Colour to educate white women — in the face of tremendous resistance — as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.”

In 1979, Michele Wallace wrote:

“We exist as women who are Black who are feminist, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle-because being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one has done: we would have to fight the world.”

Then bell hooks stepped forward in 1981, writing:

‘The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that… women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labelling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.

It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.”

Decades later, Angela Davis spoke at a US university, telling students: “The assumption that feminism is only about gender is the result of a yearning for simplicity that has racialised feminism as white. The kind of feminism I talk about can embrace more and more complexity.”

These are the black women who came before me. In 2013 I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. The truth is, thousands of black women made the case for intersectionality before I was even born, and thousands more will make the case for intersectionality long after I’m cold and dead in the ground. In 2013 we have developed terms to describe the issues Audre, bell, Michele, Angela and Sojourner speak of. We use intersectionality to describe the bridging of those gaps between liberation movements. You see, liberation movements have a nasty habit of recreating the ugly hierarchies they try to oppose. It is our duty to resist them. Miriam Dobson’s illustration describes this better than I could write it. We use the term privilege to describe the unearned structural advantages that are created as a result of vast, entrenched structural inequality.

Yet here we are in 2013. There’s no point referencing any of the recent debates. Women before me fought this fight, women after me will, and it’s a burden all of us invested in ending a viciously unequal status quo will have to bear.  Do you think we’ve made any progress?

Further Reading: Lola Okolosie’s post Intersectionality – Round 5

Over the last 9 months, white feminists have regurgitated the same arguments about intersectionality (I won’t provide links because, really, who needs to direct traffic their way?)  For them, it is variously divisive, overly academic and, you can hear them sigh, not the point of their brand of feminism.  Each time this happens, I feel the anger and frustration viscerally.   I do not exaggerate.

The latest privilege denying white feminist to jump into the fray is Tory Lousie Mensch.  Before I go any further into why Mensch is… deep breath in and out… an insensitive and narrow-minded feminist, let me provide you with some much-needed context.

The writer Laurie Penny felt it necessary to tell comedienne Ava Vidal that she shouldn’t be too upset over the racism inherent in Rod Liddle’s piece for The Spectator on the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby.  Mensch took particular issue with the fact that Vidal, rightly, pointed out to Penny that she needed to check her privilege and that as a white woman she is in no position to tell black people how we should feel or react when we experience racism.  Despite the fact that Penny had herself recognised Ava’s criticism and had apologised, Mensch felt duty bound to point out that this was an example of intersectionality (read political correctness) gone mad.

Today, the Guardian have given her a platform to spout utter crap about how intersectionality ‘does nothing. It accomplishes nothing. It changes nothing.’  It is funny how a well connected, white, upper middle class, married woman with a degree from Oxbridge can so comfortably declare as worthless a concept that seeks to empower, from bottom up, the most marginalised groups in society.  But then, that is how privilege operates isn’t it?  Intersectionality can only be said to achieve nothing if you are unconcerned with creating a dynamic movement that has all types of women as stakeholders.

Over two decades ago, Black American feminist, Kimberle Crenshaw formulated the concept to speak of and to the ways in which the social categories of gender, race and class crisscross each other to produce particular forms of oppression. Later, Patricia Hill Collins, another Black American feminist, would broaden the concept to encompass considerations of ‘nation, ability, sexuality, age, and ethnicity.’ So when Mensch suggests that American feminists waste no time in considering intersectionality because they are too busy getting ‘organized’, she clearly only has a particular kind of ‘American’ in mind.  Very much like how Lena Dunham and Caitlin Moran have a particular kind of ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ in mind.

Mensch in her astonishing arrogance can’t begin to comprehend that statements such as ‘actual empowerment for women means getting more money, since money and liberty often equate, and being able to legislate or influence’ only serve to speak to how narrow her set of concerns are.  Attaining wealth and influence in a society where money begets money is something a tiny minority not born into that privilege are able to do.  To bring up the old lie that we live in a purely meritocratic society in which, if we were all to focus ourselves on wealth creation, we could all become Hilary Clinton is laughable at best.  Mensch is able to glibly dismiss how structural inequalities operate to further disempower those at the very bottom of society’s food chain. But then she would, wouldn’t she? She was a member of this Tory government.

Black, disabled, transgendered, working class, LGBQ feminists who continue to ‘bang on’ about the importance of intersectional thinking within our movement become people merely obsessed with ‘words’, derailing feminism from its true concerns – the advancement of well connected, well educated, middle class white feminists to positions of power once occupied by their fathers, husbands and brothers – to paraphrase Alice Walker.  To declare that the concept is merely about semantics is…deep breath… anger inducing. Thinking intersectionally has made concrete changes to the feminist movement, it means considering what barriers impede women from accessing particular services and events and doing something about them! It not only means asking that a panel discussion initially tabled as having four white men and one white woman, all of whom are heterosexual, be more representative of humanity.  It also means asking if there is step free access to where you will be holding the discussion.  It means considering whether you will need a BSL interpreter or a speech to text reporter. Thinking intersectionally means doing all we possibly can to include the wonderful variety of women invested in the feminist movement.

Time and time again the validity and worth of intersectionality is brought into question. It is a concept that has had huge impact in the fields of education, health and social work. Not only is it an insult to the wonderful scholarship of black feminist thinkers and academics such as Crenshaw and Collins, it is a slap in the face to the lived experiences of black, disabled, transgendered, working class, LGBQ women. It is a wilful desire to not accept that before intersectionality women at the bottom of society’s heap were ignored by the dominant white voices within feminism.  Take for example the fact that once upon a time refuges could, unbelievably, turn away some black women. Why? Because those women couldn’t speak English and so would be ”disempowered’ by their inability and therefore unable to fully ‘access’ the services they so desperately needed. This is the kind of real oversight that can occur within the feminist movement when we do not think intersectionally.  Intersectionality is not an airy fairy esoteric tinkering with language, it is about the concrete ways in which oppression become manifest.

Clearly positioned on the right of the political spectrum, it is no surprise to us that Mensch believes, and spouts, rubbish about intersectionality.  What I want to know is, what’s the excuse of those liberal left wing writers who have argued the same?

Lola Okolosie

Last week, the Tate gallery announced this year’s Turner Prize shortlist. Acclaimed for being ‘international’ in its make-up, the biggest surprise was perhaps the inclusion of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye – the first black woman to be shortlisted for the prize. I will not be surprised if much of the discourse that follows (especially if Yiadom Boakye is to win) will be about what this ‘means’ for black women artists, and whether or not the ‘establishment’ is becoming more inclusive. However, I can’t help but recall the words of Sonia Boyce, who at a recent panel discussion commented (and I paraphrase here), ‘once again, we have not talked about the work itself.’ It seems that black women’s work, in art as in other spheres, is always politicised. Do black women have the freedom to create art without having to specifically state their position?

In some ways Yiadom-Boakye’s work is unusual for a Turner Prize nominee; recent winners have been conceptual multi-media pieces. Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits, on the other hand, figurative in form, with subjects in a variety of ‘ordinary’ positions, seem more traditional in comparison. In fact what makes her oil paintings unconventional is that all the subjects are black. She herself has stated that this is in itself a political act, ‘We’re used to looking at portraits of white people in painting’. Of course, just because one artist chooses to make an explicitly political statement, does not mean that we should expect it from all black women.

I recently spoke about DIY Culture and how black women artists should continue to organise their own shows, rather than wait for mainstream approval which is often restrictive and can pigeonhole minority groups. However, that does not mean this approval should be outright rejected when it does appear. The fact remains, that institutions such as Tate have the power to dictate who is accepted into the ‘canon’ and to effectively create history. Thus, being accepted into the fold is an achievement. Black women artists are producing work just like everyone else, so why should we not be included in the museums and galleries, the holders of knowledge for future generations? Furthermore, the greater the presence of black women artists, as well as other excluded groups, the more chance there is for ‘normalisation’ and thus the freedom to represent oneself in any way, political or otherwise.

Image from the Saatchi Gallery of Politics, 2005, oil on canvas, 183 x 168 cm.

This is a post about porn.

Pornography!

Sex!

Hot in-and-out action, and the roles of Black people involved in this!

(Have our Google hits increased yet?)

Ok, enough exclamation marks. Sex is one of the few things that we all have an opinion on. When concepts like pornography and prostitution enter the conversation, it can become hopelessly entrenched. As Chitra put it in her excellent post a few weeks ago, the conversation seems to go around and around the same old worn grooves. Sex-positivity versus sex-negativity, and the emotional force that many of us feel when identifying with aspects of those terms, can lead to us becoming more involved in the ideal than is healthy.

For example, I have seen many women call for criminalising pornography and/or prostitution out of a desire to protect the workers and punish those who abuse them. However, many sex workers are among the most marginalised members of society; on the poverty line, queer/trans*, asylum seekers, mentally ill and so on. Criminalisation would put power into the hands of the police, and the police do not have a good track record with marginalised bodies. Look at the actions of Detective Ryan Coleman-Farrow from the London Metropolitan Police sexual crimes task force last year, disposing of evidence. Or the United States’ ‘War On Drugs’, which has led to a hugely disproportionate number of Black bodies imprisoned.

On the other end of the argument, I have also seen women speak in praise of the companies that make porn as a part of their pro-sex worker ideology. This is done without noting any difference between the sort of mainstream company that earns thousands or millions of dollars by selling class/race based stereotypes as part of their sex scenes, with scenarios like ‘Latina maids’ or ‘white girl attempts to take on huge black dick’ reappearing again and again, and the more specialised companies that offer feminist/queer/radical porn which can be more careful about using such stereotypes.

One of the results of this divide down partisan lines is that the lived experience of those who are or were sex workers themselves are often either ignored or used to prove an ideological point, which is ultimately unhelpful. As Black Feminists, we know ourselves how it feels to have our own experiences dismissed when they don’t agree with the expectation held by others.

What Black voices are speaking about their own negative or positive experiences in various forms of sex work?* One of the few I know about is Jiz Lee (@ http://jizlee.com/, NSFW link), who is a genderqueer Asian-American performer in queer feminist porn. Who else should I be reading or following?

*Necessary disclaimer: I am not and have never been part of any paid sex work myself.

Image courtesy of adamr/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Born in 1915, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is seen as the Godmother of Rock n Roll. Her electric guitar playing and singing in the 1940s have been cited as key influences by music icons, including Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Little Richard and Johnny Cash. Songs like Strange Things Happening Every Day and Up Above My Head are great examples of her style, straddling her gospel roots with jazz and blues. During the 1940s she was also said to be in a relationship with singer Marie Knight, which was an ‘open secret’ in the music industry. She was an original flamboyant performer who has influenced generations. – Tara

Growing up female, black and poor, the daughter of immigrants, in the economically deprived northern city of Bradford, you can imagine that representations of people like me did not abound back then in 1990s England.  (I’m not sure that they do now but that is another blog post…) So imagine my sense of wonderful recognition when, at the age of 14, I first read Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl Brown Stone.

Here was a story about the vicissitudes of poor Barbadian immigrants in a racist New York, trapped between wanting to make a home in such harsh conditions and longing for the warmth of ‘back home’.  It was a sweet revelation and affirmation of who I was. – Lola