It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I am a feminist. When people want to talk feminism, they talk to me. While I love that, the problem is that “feminism” means so many things in everyday conversation.
I recently had someone say to me, “What’s wrong with appreciating your femininity? Isn’t that what feminism is all about?” I responded that's not what feminism means to me; rather, to me, feminism is about advocating for minorities and destroying systematic oppression. I was immediately reprimanded with, “No. Feminism is about equality for women. Maybe specific segments of feminism, like black feminism, are about minorities, but feminism in general is about women.”
Feminism is about women.
Well, of course.
But saying it is about women alone seems to do an injustice to the deep beauty and wisdom of what feminism actually is. First of all, feminism in general must encompass black feminism, because if women are actually ever going to advance, we must all advance together. (White) women were merited the right to vote in 1920, while the majority of black women, for a variety of reasons, couldn't vote until the Civil Rights movement in the '60s. But this isn't what we are accustomed to hearing. Just look at how Facebook celebrated Women's Equality Day.
Generalizing feminism so much tends to lead to a watered down kind of “first-world feminism” concerned with being able to feel confident and beautiful despite being overweight, or wanting to walk down the streets of New York City 100 percent topless. Feminism is so, so much more than cosmetics.
For some women, feminism can mean life over death.Thus I devote myself to writing a series of articles explaining how feminism cannot just be about first-world white women. I intend to examine feminism’s correlation with the environment, the LGBT community, and even with black men.
Yes, black men.
In fact, now that I’ve moved past the intro stage, I can devote the first article in this series to black men and feminism.
It was Ta-Nehisi Coates who inspired me to discover the link between feminism and black men. I have been reading his latest book, "Between the World and Me," which is heartbreaking, thought provoking, and simultaneously amazing and difficult to digest. I’m not done with it yet, but toward the first half of the book, he talks a lot about what life in America is like when you live in a black body.
According to Coates, when you live in a black body, you have to follow different rules. You have to be constantly vigilant about who you are with, where you are, and when you are where you are. You cannot rely on law enforcement to protect you or bring you justice, and because of that, you have to be your own protector, your own bringer of justice. You cannot exist cleanly within The System, because The System does not have your back. But, because The System is what’s in place, you have to learn to adapt and survive, because The System has no voice for you.
What I gathered from Coates’ writings is that in order to survive in America in a black body, you have to take responsibility for your body and your behavior, because those who abuse you will not take responsibility for themselves. You have to take responsibility in order to survive. And yet, that is often not enough.
Now what does this have to do with feminism? I turn your attention to the elusive concept of rape culture. The majority of people in my personal life advocate that rape culture doesn’t exist, but is a mere conjuring of laughable “social justice warriors” from Tumblr who are living on daddy’s money and have nothing better to do than find things to whine about. These same people have actually never been raped and received a lot of privileges from their daddies’ money, so I don’t think they have much authority on the subject.
The point remains, however, that a lot of people don’t think rape culture exists, and those who do don’t know how to articulate what it is.
I read this article around the same time I started reading Coates’ book, and the parallels seemed immediately evident.
Rape culture is women knowing that, being born in the body of a woman, we have to play the rules a little differently. We can’t casually go for a stroll down the street without vigilantly checking our surroundings. We have to plan nights out around who we’re going with, where we will be and how we will get there and back. We go to bathrooms in pairs so we are not alone. When we do go to the bathroom, we either take our drinks with us or we make sure someone we feel we can trust watches them.
We know that the majority of rape kits never get tested, and the majority of rape cases never go to trial. Therefore we feel uncertain that, should we get raped, we would receive justice. When we express that a certain man makes us uncomfortable, we are told to chill out, he’s harmless, we’re just being uptight.
Rape culture exists in having to take responsibility for our bodies because we live in a society that looks for reasons to blame the victim.
In both of these scenarios, in the cases of women and black men, there are evident similarities: knowing that you have to follow different rules and take responsibility for your body. Both of these reflect how an American society which has always prioritized and privileged white men systematically oppresses both women and black men.
Feminism, in its aim to destroy the dominant structures which oppress women, simultaneously destroys the same structures which oppress black men. As feminism tries to guide our society toward forcing white men to take responsibility for their heinous behavior, feminism advocates for black men. As feminism aims to nurture and educate a society based on real, authentic equality and respect, life will become better for both women and black men.
Therefore, it seems bogus to claim that feminism is only about (white) women. Feminism is necessarily bound up in liberating not only women, but also black men. When the same power structures which keep us women paranoid and afraid cease to be, perhaps then black men will also be able to feel freer, safer and happier.
