My husband may not always understand how misogyny impacts me, but he can absolutely grasp what it means when a boss’s or a coworker’s racism is an impediment. We sit together at that table, even if we don’t face the exact same battles in every aspect of life. Women in communities of color must balance fighting external problematic voices with educating those inside our communities who are bad actors, and we expect feminism to do the same work on itself.
Intersectionality isn’t a convenient buzzword that can be co-opted into erasing Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who coined the term to describe the way race and gender impact Black women in the justice system. An intersectional approach to feminism requires understanding that too often mainstream feminism ignores that Black women and other women of color are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine of hate.
It’s not always easy to confront a problem when it occurs, but ignoring it is dangerous. Take Hugo Schwyzer, the man whose predatory and abusive behavior sparked the conversation about what solidarity in feminism means. When Schwyzer admitted on Twitter that he had spent years alternating between abusing students and spouses and targeting women of color, the response from feminist outlets that had published him was to distance themselves. Many white, mainstream feminists claimed not to have known what he was doing; one of the reasons that argument didn’t hold up was the years of blog posts, emails, and articles written by him for their publications where he gleefully detailed his history. It was a redemption narrative that required no actual change or even accountability for prior behavior. Not only was the emperor naked, so was everyone else in his court. What happens to us first will eventually happen to white women, so enabling abusers like Schwyzer can only lead in one direction, yet unchecked racism often renders women who should be allies as complicit in the abuse until they are targets too.
Fast-forward slightly to Gamergate, a loosely connected campaign of misogyny, racism, and harassment. Zoë Quinn was the first target, but the men who went after her, who churned up the rage and stoked the hate, practiced their craft on Black women first. Because Black women are seen as having no selves to defend, it was us standing with each other while mainstream, white feminism looked the other way. By the time the threats were aimed at big-name white feminists like Sady Doyle, Jessica Valenti, and Amanda Marcotte, the question shouldn’t have been “How did this happen?” It should have been “Why didn’t we do more to stop it sooner?”
Many white feminist pundits were shocked in 2016 when Trump was elected, and it became clear that despite his abominable record on women’s issues, race, class, gender, and education, the majority of white women voters (some 53 percent) voted for a man who promised to mistreat them. One who made jokes about grabbing their pussies because he was certain his fame would sway them into accepting his atrocious behavior. Trump wasn’t offering a bright, shiny future with equality for all. In fact, most of his campaign promises centered on the idea that the real problem was immigration. He promised a future with lower competition levels, where white women who live in fear of a mythical Black or Muslim man could feel that their fears were justified, that their racism was justified. Instead of appealing to women on the basis of equality, he appealed on the basis of fear, and for many white feminists, they were shocked to discover that the solidarity they had never offered wasn’t available to them either.
The shock that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump was sadly hilarious. It turned out that even among white women, solidarity was only for some of them. For women of color, especially Black women, it wasn’t a surprise. It was the same racism we had always seen masked as feminism playing out in real time. Feminism that could ignore police brutality killing women of color, that could ignore the steady disenfranchisement and abuse in local and national politics of some women based on race and religion, wasn’t about equality or equity for all women; it was about benefiting white women at the expense of all others. There was a sense that when the targets of oppression weren’t white, it was fine to vote based on “economic distress” and not solidarity with other women. Only it turned out that the policies that followed have so far served to increase that distress, disadvantaging everyone who isn’t a rich white male.
When I first met the writer Gail Simone, I made her gluten-free triple-chocolate cupcakes as a gift. While we were talking that day, she asked if I was interested in writing comics. The comics industry is a white, male-dominated space, and Gail could have treated the niche she has carved out for herself as something to defend from other women. Instead when I said yes, she went out of her way to help me get into the industry. I’ve since learned that she does this pretty often. She knows she has power and privilege and she uses it to help others whenever she can. Sometimes being a good ally is about opening the door for someone instead of insisting that your voice is the only one that matters.
Gail’s a great writer and editor. She pushed back against a misogynistic trope of killing women in comics to further the stories of male heroes. She started out as a hairdresser and probably fails to meet someone’s definition of respectable every day. She’s doing the work, though, and changing the way an industry functions for women and with women, one book at a time. Sometimes solidarity is just that simple. Step up, reach back, and keep pushing forward.
GUN VIOLENCE
My grandfather saved my life when I was six. He grabbed my hair and yanked me out of the middle of a gunfight between two strangers as I was walking out of a beauty shop. I remember that my bangs got a sizzling little trim from a round, and I was more focused on that (I really wanted short bangs for reasons that now escape me) than on the fact that a few more inches and my hairstyle wouldn’t have mattered. I am not afraid of guns. Actually, I love guns. More accurately, I love shooting them. I go to the range to shoot weapons I would never want on the street; I talk online occasionally about my time in the military—a time when I had access to many types of weapons, from guns to grenades. Periodically, I even mention my grandfather and his guns. To me, guns are tools; the people wielding them are the deciding factor in whether that tool is used safely or unsafely. That doesn’t mean I think you should take guns to brunch, or to the grocery store, or to a movie theater.
What does feminism have to do with guns? After all, guns aren’t a feminist issue, right? Except they are. They just might not be a feminist issue for your life. Not right now, anyway. But many women, especially those from lower-income communities, face gun violence every day. The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed. Women get killed by these guns because they are available, because their partners are violent, because an accident with a gun is more likely to be fatal, because of a dozen mundane reasons made worse by the availability of weapons. Although we tend to focus on the impact on young men who are exposed to gun violence, girls are likewise gravely affected. Girls drop out of school at nearly the same rate as boys in an effort to avoid having to pass through places where shootings are common—that is, in an effort to survive. Mothers bury their children because of gun violence. Families are irrevocably changed by guns. Mainstream feminism has to engage with gun violence as an everyday occurrence in the lives of some women. It can’t be treated as a distant problem when in some neighborhoods, bullets are as common as rain. In order to adequately address the needs of the girls and women who deal with the consequences of what amounts to a full-scale public health crisis every day, mainstream feminism has to be listening, advocating, and providing resources. A twelve-year-old girl was shot on her porch a few blocks from my house while I was writing this chapter. The gun used to injure her didn’t belong on the street. She’s one of hundreds of girls who will be impacted by gun violence this year, one of almost two hundred thousand children impacted by gun violence since the Columbine shootings in 1999. You may think that gun violence is a distant problem, nothing to do with you, but if you pause, if you look around, if you look outside the bubble that privilege has created where you don’t have to worry about gun violence on a regular basis, you’ll see it’s a public epidemic that we ignore. Every state, every city, and every income level has been impacted by gun violence.