IBARW: feminism, feelings and privilege

[kmd]

Thanks to the work of women of color online, I finally get the dynamic of white women defending our privilege via (supposedly) feminist values around validating feelings.

Comments

[kmd]

"Our women are too strong for that nonsense" is an oft-repeated meme in my family/community of origin, too. But IMO that's just part of the necessary rhetorical framing to make the dynamic we've been discussing and describing here work. It's part of the white noise that covers up what really happens.

One of the things that this discussion is making obvious to me is that the intersections of racism, sexism, and classism all matter to WWT. So white women in the lower and middle classes have less access to white men who have enough power to "protect" them. But delicacy and femininity are class markers for women and power is a class marker for men. And so the middle and lower classes use WWT as a tool to aspire to a higher status in the same way that middle and lower classes always do -- by imitating the upper classes in exaggerated ways.

Thus while upper class white women can with a few sighs and maybe a tear or two get someone deported or put in jail for life, a middle or lower class white woman will cry and her male relatives will go and beat someone up or kill them -- in some cases exposing themselves to legal ramifications, in all cases appearing more brutish, but that's only because they have less power. And the upper classes tsk tsk and make movies and write books that portray racism as a lack of breeding, something only ignorant white trash does.

Which also helps to explain the hyperventilating white people do when accused of racism. In that one label, a person is pushed Out not just by PoC but by white people with class -- you are now one of Those People, inferior to your betters. That one label taints you, your family, your upbringing.

Because, as you say, Denmark and other European countries participated in the slave trade but did not bring enslaved Africans to Denmark, the historical evidence of this dynamic in Denmark is limited. But slavery is not the only institution through which racism is exhibited.

Immigration laws, as you note, show racism quite readily. When Denmark passed its new immigration laws in 2002,

The leader of the Danish People's Party, Pia Kjaersgaard, responded to Swedish criticism by saying: "If they want to turn Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmoe into a Scandinavian Beirut, with clan wars, honour killings and gang rapes, let them do it. We can always put a barrier on the Oeresund Bridge."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4276963.stm

"Honour killings and gang rapes" is precisely the same savage-PoC-threatening-delicate-white-womanhood trope as is common in and widely portrayed about U.S. culture, particularly U.S. Southern culture. And for an added bonus, the Danish version bears the stamp of approval and cooperation of white feminism, in its attack on Islam as threatening to women.