White Lady Power

To women the resolution is to have more women in power, as it is believed that for many women have. been marginalized and demonized too long, just ask Hilary Clinton about that one. And to some extent that is true but to think that women are superior to men and can find better ways to resolve a problem, handle a crisis and to be more egalitarian clearly haven’t hung out with a lot of women. Most of my professional life has been one surrounded by women in the education field and of course retail. Store Managers, Administrators and often other Executives in both the private and public sector have been men, largely white but in education that is a field that has been largely one of color and usually singularly Black. Government positions, be that municipal or federal have a better grasp on what Affirmative Action means and in turn follow that guidance to employ and promote. I won’t say it is perfect but it has enabled many faces of color to be employed in secure jobs with a career track (sort of) and secure pay and benefits that enable a middle class lifestyle. That has eroded and the Supreme Court has like Voting Rights slowly whittled that away and again all we really need to look at is the pay equity with regards to women and those of color to see how the gaps remain.

As I have said repeatedly when it comes to poverty, the rung on the mythical unicorn ladder of meritocracy is a low one to get when it is at the bottom but each successive rung is one hard climbed and regardless of who is below you will claw, kick and do whatever it takes to keep hold, regardless of color, gender or any other factor, be in extrinsic (as in enabled by laws and policies) or intrinsic (that up by your boot strap nonsense) that has led people to believe they earned it and are worth it. Sometimes you are pushed or pulled up and that seems to be forgotten once landed.

I have also said that as a woman I have been scolded, reprimanded, disciplined and cautioned that what I said, didn’t say, should of said, what I looked like, how I acted, did not act, failed to do or did wrong which I all took as a failure of personal character, until I didn’t. I am not sure when but I think it was during Teaching, being married and having fuck you money or just getting older which enabled me to stop beating up myself. Then I sat down and realized that no one is perfect, the perfect person is dead, as my Mother used to say, and that to some I am great to others not and how I handled the latter mattered more. So I started to abandon ship. I quit jobs, I moved, I dumped and ran like the runaway Bride anytime conflict entered the picture. I finally had to stop running thanks to a pandemic and in reality I already knew it was time, I am sick of fucking running. So when I read this article in the Guardian today about a Pakistani woman who has found White Feminism repressing and oppressing in the same, but different, ways Muslim life was, I was RELIEVED; What I had been saying as a white woman for years about the way women, largely white treat each other, excusing women of color as well they were deeply also in debt psychologically to the power of the purse, I found myself having a good laugh. This is why we don’t get along, we don’t know each other at all. I call it Cultural Dysmorphia, like Body Dysmorphia: A mental health disorder in which you can’t stop thinking about one or more perceived defects or flaws in your appearance — a flaw that appears minor or can’t be seen by others. But you may feel so embarrassed, ashamed and anxious that you may avoid many social situations

So now take that and apply that to someone else, a person of color, a person of another gender, culture, religion, sexuality or even class and see what happens. I remember when Ethan the religious Zealot said, “I have never met anyone from the North before.” Dear God you would have thought I just arrived from Croatia with that comment. Really, no one? He said the same about Gay folks so there you go, he just needed to look in the mirror on that one. But that is the point, that you treat someone as an oddity, as a thing that needs to be fixed, placated, handled. it is both patronizing and utterly insane. And with this one I mean really even the bullshit assorted with White Privilege and that idea that we have to confess our micro/macro agressions to a room of people, many strangers but also colleagues, and find those folks of color and go out of our way to apologize and ensure that we will never do it again, is both patronizing and childish. The old adage about teaching a man to fish fits, learning about another culture/race/faith opens the mind and hopefully the heart a workshop filled with sad worried white liberals is the last place to do it. I would truly hate to be the outlier there and be a face of color, the sad grimace faces would be enough to have me go off the rails. I went to one and turned my micro aggression into a vulgar stereotype and admitted to having the dick pics to prove it, and no one took me up on and immediately moved away from me. I then went to the bathroom never to return, grateful that I had not been asked to show said non-existent pics as that would have been well, to say “interesting.” But one woman did show her pics, of her family, a nice interracial one and that too led to very pregnant pauses.

Again I want to remind many that to have a Teaching degree you need at least five years of college and most Teachers have Masters and Doctorates and yet we are subject to endless seminars and workshops in which we must take in order to retain our licenses. I doubt Accountants, Architects, Attorneys and others with similar licensing requirements need to subject themselves to this bulllshit to prove worth but then this is largely a pink collar profession so that makes sense.

Dr. Zakaria which like Jill Biden is the appropriate title, has entered a largely privileged class or workplaces, higher Ed and to say assholes would be well a sweeping generalization but then again I remember the crazy woman Professor a few years ago and her “safe space” agenda. We have the crazy Tiger Mother at Yale and her husband the serial harasser so no, higher ed is hardly the respite one thinks when it comes to intellectual parity so her issues she faces there are not shocking in the least. But then again she has never been a bus driver or a fast food worker so she too has an elitist touch when it comes to her perspective here with regards to her experiences. What I do agree with is that almost all women’s success is dependent upon male mentors and patriarchs. The reality is that almost all women have some comma, hyphen or tangential relationship to a powerful white male. The example of Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and Google has clear links to the blowhard, Lawrence Summers of Havard, etc, who was a strong factor in her hiring in said gigs, so no those bootstraps were tied to Manolo’s when she leaned in. And currently her relationship to Zuckerberg is to say the least, tense, given the current climate post election and their role in the debacle that is all things Trump.

I rarely hear women mention other women as their mentors and that is not surprising as few know how and they fear and worry that the same woman they are supporting is the same women who will walk over her back on the same Manolo’s that Andrew Cuomo seemed to prefer on his staff, who seemed to have no problem enabling his toxic work culture.

Again much like any maligned class or group few have the training, the talent and the skills needed to navigate what is a largely a man’s world. And we as Liberals take offense as a highly skilled defense when someone does not agree with the concepts and decisions made that are talked about over and over again and then decided upon after reaching a consensus of all. And with that anyone who does not agree is immediately ostracized and alienated, marked and labeled as an outlier/outsider not to be trusted. Sheep mentality is not exclusive to the right or left but it is both expected and tolerated. Be different just like everyone else, my Mother said and on that too she was right. I choose be different just like myself and I have paid a heavy price for it. So choose wisely.

Rafia Zakaria: ‘A lot of white female professors told me to quit’

Nesrine Malik The Guardian

The activist and author discusses why there is no one-size-fits-all feminism and her aim to create work that comforts women of colour who have been ‘gaslit’Sat 28 Aug 2021 06.00 EDT

Rafia Zakaria’s new book Against White Feminism starts with a sort of Sex and the City scene entitled “At a wine bar, a group of feminists …” In it, some well-heeled white women are gathered for a drink in New York. The only brown woman in attendance, Zakaria winces and wilts under the glare of their innocent questions, as she tries to avoid the responses she tends to receive when she tells her true story – ones of pity, discomfort and avoidance.

Zakaria was born in Pakistan and at the age of 17 agreed to an arranged marriage to a Pakistani man living in the US. “I had never experienced freedom, so I gladly signed it away,” she writes. The marriage was unhappy, and she left her abusive husband at the age of 25, seeking refuge in a shelter with her toddler. What followed were years of precarity in the US.

She tells me, from her home in Indiana, that she wrote the book because “I am a Muslim brown person from Pakistan, and the assumption when I meet people in the west is that all the oppression I’ve ever faced, all the hardship that I’ve ever faced, were back in Pakistan, and were the consequence of cultural mores and beliefs.” With Against White Feminism, she wanted to challenge that “liberation trajectory” of the Muslim woman’s story, so that women who live in the west stop thinking “Oh it’s so bad over there – ” it must be “so great here”.

Graduate school, with its subsidised childcare, was a refuge, a place where she could be ‘poor and smart’

By writing the book, Zakaria hopes to decentre white feminism or, at least, call attention to the fact that it is a template that does not work for everyone because it is limited in its utility by white supremacy. “A white feminist,” Zakaria writes, “is someone who refuses to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played in universalising white feminist concerns, agendas and beliefs as being those of all of feminism and of all of feminists.”Advertisement

In the book, Zakaria outlines how a one-size-fits-all white feminism has been complicit in interventionist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in destroying native aid and empowerment structures in low income countries, and in denying the cultural backwardness of western societies vis-a-vis women’s rights.

Her “trauma” is central to her motivations for writing the book. In 2002, when she ran away from her husband with “a baby on her hip”, she had no money, bank account or credit card. She managed to leave sheltered accommodation only when a black woman “took her on” and offered her an apartment. It was the first time she could “exhale”, she says. “I had been running for so long.” After a few difficult years, she managed to finish law school and complete a postgraduate degree in political philosophy. At one point, a stranger paid for her groceries at the supermarket when her daughter brought an unbudgeted bag of popsicles to the till. “That moment of not having enough money to pay for your food is really seared into my memory. I felt so much shame, so much absolute disappointment in myself because I had to take charity to feed myself and my kid.” Graduate school, with its subsidised childcare and flexible hours, was a refuge, a place where Zakaria could be “poor and smart”.

The white women she met on the way, all of ostensibly impeccable liberal and feminist credentials, did little tohelp her. In law school “a lot of white female professors told me to quit”. When she felt she had finally found her place in the NGO world, white women “obstructed” and sabotaged her “in every possible way” from doing her job. “Every time I would write a report there would be 10 people who would shred it, telling me how I was wrong and I was failing and I didn’t know this and I didn’t know that. I would put forward a resolution or an idea and there would be discussion and none of the white woman would support me. Basically it was a trap, I was set up to fail. So then you can tell the story that we gave so and so the job and we’re so inclusive, but she decided she didn’t want to do it.” Zakaria is softly spoken and quasi-academic in her speech, but her tone sharpens when she lists these slights and humiliations, as it does when she recounts other incidents that made her feel like a sort of shop window display of a brown woman for the benefit of a white audience.“I was either never allowed to speak or entrapped.”

One of the problems with white feminism according to Zakaria is that it is still connected to the patriarchy through the power pool of white men. “That shared culture can be drawn on and augmented by ideas such as ‘lean in’ [Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 bestselling book advocated a can-do brand of feminist self-empowerment] that undergird the white feminists you might encounter at Google.” This model of feminism has “gotten far and shattered ceilings, I won’t lie”, she says. But once white feminists succeed, they hoard the spoils. “If white men have welcomed you to the executive suite, the way you protect your position there is you continue to please white men.”

What about the women of colour who get to the top, remain silent and so are also complicit? “There are a lot of benefits in being the token woman of colour. There are doors that open for you, things available to you that are not available to a trouble-making brown feminist like me, because I am going to ask questions and I’m not going to take it.” But she sees these women as co-opted by necessity, rather than by conscious agreement and shared interest. “I have sympathy for them; for literally hundreds of years that has been the only way to get anywhere close to power.”

The sharpest of Zakaria’s criticism of white feminism is reserved for white female journalists. “There’s a certain arc that the editors want,” she says, that these journalists deliver. “In the case of Afghanistan, there was very much an idea that this was America taking feminism to Afghan women,” and “liberating them from the Taliban. There are colonial precedents to sending female reporters out there. These white women are sent in as emblems – our women are brave and they are out taking pictures and writing stories and getting your story out to the world. But the assumption is that there isn’t anyone in Afghanistan who can write in English and tell the stories of Afghanistan to the world.”

When it comes to her native Pakistan, a country from which white feminists believe she was saved, Zakaria has little time for their concerns. When Imran Khan, the prime minister, was challenged by Judy Woodruff of PBS earlier this year about comments he made that appeared to blame women for incidents of rape in Pakistan, Zakaria saw the episode as a manifestation of “a legacy of cultural ranking that no one has really bothered to take apart. That cultural ranking says that cultural crimes occur in these places and those sorts of cultural crimes don’t exist in other places in the west. There isn’t some particular British form of violence against women, it’s just violence against women.”

With her book, Zakaria hopes to console the scolded and scold the consolers. “I don’t think white women are truly aware of how uncomfortable other women feel, how much they have to edit themselves, how fed up they are.” While she harbours some hope that white feminists will listen to her advice on how to cede space and examine their prejudices, she says the real goal of her work is to comfort women of colour who have been “gaslit”.

“I struggled very much. I had come from trauma, I went into trauma. I feel a very strong sense of responsibility towards other women like me, who’ve been through traumatic marriages, migration, being a single mother. Women like me never really make it. The odds are so stacked against someone with my experience, my racial background, my economic background, to be in the conversation at all. And so since I’ve somehow slipped into the conversation I feel a responsibility towards other women who are just as smart as me, just as articulate. Now I’m here, I’m going to say all those things. I believe that you can tear things down when they’re not working, and build them up again. That is one of my core beliefs, because I’ve done it.”