Vron Ware - Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History

This edition published by Verso 2015
First published by Verso 1992
Vron Ware 1992, 2015
Foreword Mikki Kendall 2015

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-012-8 (PB)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-014-2 (US)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-013-5 (UK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

v3.1

For Paul (your turn now)
and
Katie Impey, who deserved more and better

When Beyond the Pale was first published, I was a senior in a predominantly white high school, struggling to work out my relationship with the feminism espoused by some of my classmates that didnt seem to include women like me. Women who grew up in the inner city without two parents, or even a picket fence in sight. Women for whom the right to work was never going to be in question. Instead ours was a fight to be paid a living wage and not to have our bodies and hair marked out as unprofessional simply for existing. Perhaps if I had read it then, I would have been better equipped to manage conversations about the intersection of race and gender.

Instead, I floundered when white friends took offence at a plan to perform for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange the Obie and Tony Awardwinning theater piece about the experiences of seven women of colour in a racist and sexist society with a cast comprised solely of girls of colour. There was an air of white women are oppressed too! that I didnt know how to dissect in order to show them that their response was oppressive. When the idea of the play was first floated, their immediate reaction was Its not fair to us! and Why put on a show we cant be in? despite the fact that most shows at the school had casts that were all white or nearly so. Selections like Pirates of Penzance or Brigadoon were more likely to be produced than Porgy and Bess or A Raisin in the Sun, much less anything as modern as for colored girls who have considered suicide and no one said a word about those plays, even when it came up (as it did periodically) that hardly any plays written by or about communities of colour were even considered for the drama programme. In retrospect, I am certain that the Girl Power rhetoric that was our intro to feminism covered everything but race and class.

That pop-music inspired feminism focused more on women being able to work outside the home than on the type of work they might be doing there. It was about having it all, but in a way that had white women in boardrooms with women of colour as their secretaries. It was never overtly stated that way, but in retrospect a lot of imagery from that time either had no women of colour or only one amid a group of white women. Sure my friends wanted the girls of colour to have parts in the school plays, an activity that is typically prime material for enhancing college applications, but not at their own perceived expense. Even one show a year (out of the four to six that were usually performed) was too much space in the limelight for them to give up.

Its easy to dismiss such an occurrence as the behaviour of children who didnt know any better, but that same phenomenon can be found in modern mainstream feminist circles among adults. Whether the problem is feminist events that ignore topics like food access, police brutality, or schools in favour of a focus on how to become a CEO, or an insistence that women of colour be patient about their issues for the greater good (i.e., Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other notable suffragettes prioritizing womens rights over the abolition of lynching), the end result is the same. In order for solidarity between white women and women of colour to develop on a broader basis, the history behind the formers failure to support women of colour confronting problems like racial inequality and immigration must be examined and addressed so that these issuess can cease to be replicated in each successive generation.

When Kimberl Crenshaw, a scholar and law professor specializing in race and gender, coined the term intersectionality in 1989, it was intended to apply to legal issues and the way that different forms of oppression, domination, or discrimination can intersect to create structural injustices in the court system. Yet it linked to a broader history, as well as to ongoing problems among progressives due to largely unexamined biases that meant the same social inequalities they wanted to fight were being replicated within activist circles. In 2013, I highlighted some of the same issues on Twitter with the hash tag #solidarityisforwhitewomen, pointing out that, for many women of colour, participating in online and offline feminist work is fraught with tensions that were going unaddressed in mainstream feminist spaces. The tag became a rallying cry, going viral across several countries, largely because, for once, the focus of the conversation was the problems within feminism, and not just a look outward at the rest of society. It was a venue to really delve into why so many were uncomfortable identifying with a movement that feels comfortable enough to use them as foot soldiers in the reproductive justice war, but not comfortable enough to include them in the strategy sessions.

Vron Wares Beyond the Pale is an ambitious attempt to examine both the history of these divisions as well as possible solutions. Whereas much of my work is US-centric, Ware approaches the same questions from a British perspective, highlighting some of the blind spots of feminist history and politics by focusing on the ways that white women have power to oppress women of colour, as well as the ways in which archetypes of white femininity have been used as a weapon of the patriarchy. Both my work and Vron Wares suggest directions that future work could take to incorporate a more global, intersectional perspective. After all, in a world where Western media imagery is exported to every country, the women who are seeing it erase, demean, or deny their existence on a regular basis are going to be critical of the ways it centers white people in the West to the detriment of their own communities. White women may not have had to consider the impact of that imagery on others, or on their own ideas of what it means to be a woman.

Much of the organizing being done in intersectional feminism is from the perspective of the marginalized, and while it certainly challenges the status quo that singularly addresses the success and safety of white middle-class women, it is not necessarily the kind of work that enables white mainstream feminist leaders to interrogate their own complicity. White women who are fighting oppression may struggle to understand that they too can be oppressive because of their privileged position.