Michelle Obama and white feminists

Some of this has been said before. I would link to all the women who have said it but I wouldn’t even know where to begin because it has been said so many times before. The most goose-bump-inducing one I’ve read was by Latoya at Racialicious, and I’ll be happy to add any similar links that anyone wants to supply.

But I never felt it until tonight, while watching the end of Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention tonight. (Sadly, I didn’t see the whole thing.)

It was a tiny blip in my radar, so tiny that I’m not even sure if it truly existed.

When she mentioned the two great anniversaries of this week, the anniversaries of women’s suffrage and Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech, it felt like the latter meant more to Michelle than the former. Something in the timbre of her voice seemed to say that, while she valued her own ability to vote, she valued King’s legacy far more.

For a woman like myself, who has always identified herself as female first and white rarely at all, this made an impact.

Perhaps, the thought went, she identifies herself as black first and a woman somewhere further along the line. The next thought was why?

And here my attempts to understand sex, gender, and race collided. Race did come first in the hierarchy of American packaging, as so many black women and black feminists have been saying all along. Black women will be seen as black first and a woman somewhere further along the line. The blackness will color the femaleness until the femaleness is not the same as mine. My femaleness is generally unbound by the stereotypes of race; I am generally free to be my white self without judgment from others. In the gauzy drapes of stereotypes that separate us from each other, that obscure and distort each other, black women’s lives are obscured by a screen that is altogether foreign to my existence, and that can render them in completely different shades. Our femaleness may be a commonality but the expressions and interpretations of that femaleness are not automatically in common. This is where feminism has historically failed black women, and in many ways continues to.

I am, as I said, hardly the first one to say this.

But upon the heels of this grok sat another little creature, an equal and opposite understanding:

This election is no longer about feminism first and foremost. It is now about race, and fighting against the bonds of race. But if we continue with this dichotomy of oppressions, if we continue to see it as feminism or anti-racism, we exclude a core group: black women. White feminists must let go of the implicit rule that feminism always equals white women.

We must stare down our own pride for a moment and humbly stand aside. We, who so hope and struggle to see men recognize the privileges they hold, must be the example of privilege recognized-and-given-up so that those without it might benefit. If there was ever a time to do it, it is now.

I don’t mean that we shouldn’t mourn the loss of hopes for Hillary Clinton and Kathleen Sebellius. I wouldn’t dream of telling someone how they could feel, especially someones who are so often told that their feelings are not what they should be. And I do not blame those who still wish that the clocks could be turned back, the sexism confronted openly and effectively, so that the nation would begin to see that Hillary was more than a suit with a woman’s body in it. I wish for that too. My heart is still knotted with the disappointment of another male/male presidential ticket.

But I also cannot deny the joy of the first black/white presidential ticket. I will not pretend as though women are always white, or always identify as women first. I refuse to see my view of the world as the only plausible one.

From the beginning of this race, we knew that one historically underrepresented category would have their hopes crushed this way.

And yet either way, the overlapped category of “black woman” would win.

It may not be all of the women in the world who benefit from this election. It may not be white women like me and my family. It isn’t, in truth, probably going to have as large of an impact on most black women as people who love justice might hope. But I can’t in good conscience continue to call myself a feminist if I can’t also find it within myself to avoid the pigpen of selfishness, if I can’t help black women like Michelle Obama in their work to sweep the shrouds aside and pull them into a space just a little less warped than the one in which they have resided for so long. If I can’t hold out my hand to a woman in need, if I can’t look past her color to the real woman there while also recognizing that that color makes her a different woman than me, how can I still claim to seek justice for all women?

So while the lifts in Michelle Obama’s voice may not have occurred where I would have had them, I can’t hold it against her. And I can’t see her husband’s success as the end of the political hopes of women.

It was also a great speech.