“Feminists have created this propaganda to make black women see themselves as women first and second as black.”
This is a recent phone text a straight, cisgender, Black, male family member sent me during an argument about politics in a family group chat. Apart from the fact that he genuinely believes what he wrote, the worst part about this text was its attempt at being a wise, revolutionary, and intellectual statement that would inspire an educational moment, when in reality, it lacked even the slightest hint of originality.
This text is a wordy echo of the age old “why do you have to make everything about gender?” that Black girls and women have been hearing their entire lives. And it doesn’t just come from Black men, white women have been begging us to stop pulling the race-card for years, yet somehow we. Just. Can’t. Do. It. Black women, along with every other woman who belongs to more than one marginalized group, rightly resist separating out their identities.
Take the murder of Tiarah Poyau, a Black female graduate student, who was shot in the face in Brooklyn by a man she told to get off her because she didn’t want a stranger grinding on her while she was trying to enjoy herself at a festival. Despite the man arguing he didn’t know the gun was loaded, he still somehow seemed to find it insignificant that he believed it a reasonable response to stick a gun in a woman’s face because of her decision to say no.
The fact remains, Tiarah Poyau’s last words were “get off me” because of a Black man’s fragile ego. In this case, what do Black men expect Black women to do? To turn a blind eye on a victim that could have been them in order to protect Black men? Or to be rejected from the Black community for acknowledging the fact that a Black woman was killed for being a woman?
The inability to answer these questions is what has led to the continuous exclusion of Black women from anti-racist and women’s liberation movements throughout time, and it has asked us again and again to call into question which community is our top priority. Who are Black women first? Female? Or Black? When you belong to two communities, which one do you prioritize? What is the so-called Hierarchy of Oppression and what does it look like?
When we look at the women’s liberation movements to assess the space for Black women’s voices in the “female community,” the timeline reveals tension between Black and white women consistently. Historically, cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class, white women who have rallied together have not always been willing to fight for the rights of women of color.
In Rory Dicker’s A History of U.S. Feminisms, she notes the attitudes of white women during anti-slavery movements alongside Susan B. Anthony’s quote, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work for or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman,” illustrating how as early as slavery, there was a divisiveness between the groups considered the “female community” and the “black community” that normalized the idea one had to choose one over the other to achieve liberation. Such a mentality made it difficult for Black women to belong in the women’s suffrage movement.
Long after that, during the World War II era, a great number of poor women and women of color were working low paying domestic jobs just to get by, yet the image of working women was “a well-groomed, even glamorous white woman,” Rosie the Riveter, who is still a feminist icon that gives permission to ignore women of color in American history. According to the timeline written to in Dicker’s book, the feminist movement earned its reputation as a white women’s movement because of white women’s habit of drowning out Black, Latino, Asian and Native voices, making it challenging for women of color to feel entirely comfortable in joining the movement and labeling themselves feminists.
Even though the term intersectionality, which was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, has become common parlance within feminist circles, white feminism still pervades. Just three years ago, Sheryl Sandberg came out with her bestseller Lean In, which according to bell hooks in an article titled,”Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In,” was a guide for women on how to “stop holding themselves back,” and without saying it, she exclusively spoke to white, corporate women and served them a “patriarchal male dominated re-framing of feminism, which uses the body and personal success of Sheryl Sandberg,” to uncontroversially and non-threateningly tell women that by putting rich, white women first, and perpetuating oppressive systems already in place, somehow all women would benefit.
With women as dangerous as Sandberg being recognized by the mainstream as representative of all women, Black women cannot feel entirely safe within a group led by people like her, who have no interest in understanding what it is like to be poor, non-white, disabled, trans, etc. As Crenshaw herself said in “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color,” “ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups,” and that tension has made it impossible for women of color to separate race from their identity and put only womanhood first.
However, when we examine the Black community and Black liberation movements in the same way, it is easy to see that Black women’s voices were not protected either. In the film, Free Angela And All Political Prisoners, Black feminist, prison abolitionist and LREI alum Angela Davis briefly spoke to her experiences in the movements of the early 70’s, explaining that,
“I had gotten involved very briefly with the Black Panther Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black student organization on my campus, but I did not like the nationalism, I did not like the male supremacy, I did not like the fact that women were expected to take a back seat and literally sit at the feet of the men,”
forcing her to find a platform for her social justice work elsewhere. Angela Davis knew she could not freely and productively make change by ignoring the oppression taking place in male-dominated movements, and in order to be successful, she could not prioritize her race over her gender.
Even today, there is clear evidence of male domination within anti-racist movements, including Black Lives Matter, despite its black, queer feminist origins. The Black Lives Matter founders have been invisibilized and unacknowledged as queer and female since the birth of the movement, and as people more prone to institutionalized violence than cisgender, straight Black men, that erasure adds on to the endangerment of Black, queer, female lives.
In Alicia Garza’s “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” she defines the action of silencing the founders as racism in itself by explaining that:
“When you design an event / campaign / et cetera based on the work of queer Black women, and don’t invite them to participate in shaping it, but ask them to provide materials and ideas for next steps for said event, that is racism in practice. It’s also hetero-patriarchal. Straight men, unintentionally or intentionally, have taken the work of queer Black women and erased our contributions. Perhaps if we were the charismatic Black men many are rallying around these days, it would have been a different story, but being Black queer women in this society (and apparently within these movements) tends to equal invisibility and non-relevancy.”
As a result, issues that most severely impact women of color, such as sexual assault and rape, are glossed over. Because of this, black women and girls have become so removed from conversations about rape culture that our society cannot seem to believe that it is an issue that also affects us. For example, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Black, queer feminist, incest/rape survivor and creator of NO! The Rape Documentary, wrote that,
“the racist and sexist stereotype that black women and girls are incapable of being raped or otherwise physically or sexually assaulted still prevails…which not only renders black women and girls vulnerable to all forms of violence, but also re-victimizes us if/when we have the courage to come forward about the abuse that we experienced and/or endured,”
Cisgender, straight, Black men who ask Black women to be Black and only Black, are asking Black women to silence themselves so their issues can be talked over, forgotten about and eventually so unheard that we consider them unreal, making Black women once again unsafe and incapable of prioritizing their race over their gender or vice versa.
The urgency for liberation among all intersecting identities make it impossible to choose one over the other, and from this it is clear that the alleged Hierarchy of Oppression, that we ask queer women, women of color, disabled women, transwomen, etc. to refer back to when we want them to “choose one” and stop “making it all about race/gender/etc.,” does not exist.
The most unproductive request in any movement of liberation is to ask members of that movement to compartmentalize and set aside certain aspects of their identity to help those already privileged enough to have only one identity to liberate, because as Audre Lorde wrote in “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action,” “for it is not difference that immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”
In order for these silences to be broken, we must incorporate intersectionality into all movements and come to terms with the fact that the “Hierarchy of Oppression” is nonexistent. In a passage from “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppression,” Lorde writes,
“within the lesbian community I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are black. There is no hierarchy of oppression,”
and because of this, we must discontinue the misconception that women have to choose a specific part of our identities to place at the forefront. As Lorde said in the same essay:
“I know I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only…And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.”
As a black girl, I cannot put blackness before being a girl, or being a girl before blackness. They are parts of my identity that are attacked by more than one system of oppression at the same time. Because these systems, sexism and racism, are interconnected and equally as injurious, acting as if choosing one over the other is an option is irrational. The Hierarchy of Oppression is nothing more than a tool used to perpetuate the exclusion of girls/women of color. It cannot and does not exist.