Reply #15: actually ... [View All]

[iverglas]

My understanding of women's and black suffrage in the US, from way back in my early feminist days, is that some woman suffragists used the fact of black suffrage as a talking point in arguing for woman suffrage: that the votes of white women were needed to outweigh the votes of black men. That racism is in fact documented.

Certainly in Canada, early feminists -- the Famous Five, the women who took their legal challenge all the way and won the right to sit in the Senate, as "persons" -- were overwhelmingly racist. Again, the rough parallel is Chinese immigration: the Chinese men who came to work on the railways and so on, and had to pay a special tax for the privilege, and had a hell of a time bringing their families here, were their targets. Some of the things the local feminists of the day had to say about them would make your hair stand on end. (And the damned thing is that those who think about it today know that a community composed largely of men without partners or extended families, for supportive relationships and to fill emotional needs and provide social controls, is likely to have markedly higher rates of criminality, as the early Chinese immigrant community, with its opium and gambling, undoubtedly did. The racist immigration policies caused the problem, just as inherently sexist immigration policies have in more recent times.)

This is a bit of an age-old problem. Everybody wants to be equal to the ones at the top -- straight white men -- and not to be associated with / equal to the "others", the denigrated ones.

Individuals do it within their own denigrated groups, try to distinguish themselves from the group and by disclaiming its denigrated characteristics. Women who want to be not like other women (that was one of the most perturbing things I was told so often by suitors back in that 1970ish time -- I didn't want to be like the bimbos on campus with their green eyeshadow and witlessness, but I also did not want "womanness" to be denigrated). Oreos, bananas, all them.

For one oppressed group to identify with another, it's not an easy thing, any more than it is for an individual within the group to identify with it when s/he is trying to distinguish him/herself in order to escape the oppression.

It doesn't work for all but a few individuals. You can act as male or white or straight as you like, and everybody knows you're really female or black (or you yourself live with the conflict of knowing you're gay/lesbian), and you live with the consequences of those facts no matter how hard you try to distinguish yourself.

It calls for a fairly high degree of sophistication and internal confidence to embrace the identity as a member of an oppressed group, as an individual, or a member of the community of oppressed groups, as a group. It involves giving up the privileges that one might gain by rejecting the group, or the community of groups -- to be recognized by the oppressor as different and deserving of better (never actually equal) treatment. Women can make it to the boardroom and still be excluded from the golfing parties. Black people, ditto. Gay men and lesbians can do it only by denying who they are. Oppressed racial and ethnic minorities can (even if only very implicitly) claim superiority to sexual minorities (GLBT people, as actual minorities; women, as having minority status ascribed) ... and vice versa ... and seek recognition as equals that way.

It's damned easy to say "give us women the vote and we'll help you outvote the dangerous black people", as a group, or "appoint me to the board and don't bother about that corporate child care centre", as an individual. It's a lot harder, as an individual, to say that you'll only join that board if the company starts doing something about the working conditions of the lowest-paid women, in terms of both the material benefits you give up and the self-image you have to embrace, as one of "them" -- the oppressed who didn't manage to haul themselves up by their bootstraps and demonstrate their worthiness -- and their imposed identity of a group composed of individuals who are less intelligent, less ambitious, less dependable, etc. And, as a group, to say that you are going to use that vote to improve the living conditions of racial and ethnic minorities, thus embracing, as a group, the imposed identity of less intelligent, deserving, etc., group.

That's even without the plain old racism among woman suffragists, and feminists and GLBT activists. And plain old homophobic bigotry among racial and ethnic minorities.