Hillary Clinton and the fault lines in feminism
If Barack Obama’s presidency ended up showing us that racism is truly alive and well in the United States, Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House has exposed the deepening fault lines within western feminism.
Much has been made of data showing young women ditching Clinton for her Democratic Party rival, Bernie Sanders.
Thirty-four-year-old Anoa Chonga, recently quoted in the Guardian voicing her opposition to Clinton, possibly spoke for awhole slew of so-called third-wave feminists when she said, “There are a lot of issues that affect low-income women, immigrant women and women of colour that her brand of doing things is not going to address.”
For many women in the U.S. and in this country, “mainstream” feminism is still a subject of white-on-white discrimination.
It’s a rallying cry by middle-class white women for the rights of women like themselves that happens to benefit other women who attain that level of privilege.
The Toronto Filipina nannies’ struggles to be unified with their families is not just an immigration issue. The plight of our missing and murdered indigenous women is not a cultural issue. The duality of Muslim women’s struggle for recognition within their cultures and outside is not a religious issue. And certainly, black women’s historical and unimaginably arduous struggle for equality is not just a racial or civil rights issue.
If you’re looking for more instances, #solidarityisforwhitewomen on Twitter is a good starting point.
White feminism does not mean that all feminists who are white are racist or homophobic. It refers to feminists who are (usually) white and stop learning, believing their journey to empowerment has taught them all they need to know about feminism. Women whose experiences show they have to work harder to be considered equal to men, but who are oblivious that other women have had to work even harder to be considered equal to them.
The problem is also not about ill intentions. It’s about lack of empathy.
In February, when Meryl Streep said the all-white Berlin International Film Festival jury “was ahead of the game” because it included women, intentionally or not she showed she had shut the door to equality behind herself and other white women.
This was the same press conference where she dismissed questions about diversity, saying, “We’re all African really.”
The question is how would Streep and her ilk react if film producers justified male dominance in Hollywood saying, “We’re all humans, really”?
For all that, I don’t call white feminism a failure to other women. It is still a beacon to the rest of the world, especially when it comes to setting the bar for equality at the workplace or in marriage and divorce.
Take the fact that Canadian women who work full time earn 73.5 cents for every dollar men make. This applies only to white women; new immigrants and women of colour are paid even less. That’s a problem that women here have to deal with. For the rest of the world, the existence of such accounting itself is important; it serves as an example of how to measure equality.
Policy leadership, however, does not au- tomatically empower individual women. Growing up in India, I fought hard against gender expectations and blind conventions without the language of western feminism to help me along the way.
Many urban women like me reinvented the wheel and fashioned it to our own experiences, inspired by the success in the West and leaning on our own role models, including ferocious goddesses from mythology, warrior queens from history and eloquent modern leaders.
So imagine my surprise when I came to Toronto in 1999 and a single woman in her 20s, a journalist living by herself in the city — ostensibly independent and empowered — asked me if it would be acceptable for her to ask a man out on a date. Meanwhile, a few years earlier, I had come straight out of school and thought nothing of proposing to a man (which he wisely rejected).
For second-wave American feminists, the symbolism of a Clinton victory is the equivalent of an Obama victory for black people. But from a world perspective, there would be nothing groundbreaking about a Hillary Clinton presidency, coming as it does when nations ranging from Brazil to Bangladesh have already been led by females.
Clinton may yet win the presidency. To be a true trailblazer, she will have to shun the language of elitist white feminism and adopt policies that benefit all women.