I wanted to quickly jot something down regarding Joseph Harker’s excellent piece exposing white hypocrisy when it comes to discussing targeted child abuse, entitled It’s time to face up to the problem of sexual abuse in the white community.

If you haven’t yet read it, you should. Some of the pushback around his piece has argued that its premise is disingenuous from the start because ‘Asian gang‘ stories show a deliberate targeting of white girls. First though, I must clarify that it’s quite clear that Harker was talking about the way the abuse is discussed in the press and by politicians, not the abuse itself.

However, I want to argue that there is a race aspect of these incidents that can’t be ignored, and my acknowledging this doesn’t invalidate my distaste for racist narratives around the issues. Acknowledging the two does not conflict. A lot of the time, being a black feminist situates you between a rock and a hard place, challenging the racism you see targeting at black and brown people whilst also challenging the patriarchy of your own community. You don’t make many friends. And whilst the endless tug of war of political debate demands clear rights and wrongs, this topic desperately requires nuance.

What is undeniable is that western beauty ideals and western objectification of female flesh fusses solely on whiteness and on youth. White female flesh is commoditised in the public eye all the time, it’s posited as the norm in porn and lads magazines. If black and brown flesh is ever included in these forums, it’s often considered a novelty- perhaps described as ‘ebony’, or ‘chocolate’, or ‘caramel’, sometimes approached as taboo. When was the last time you saw a black page 3 girl? I’m convinced that we’re often not considered beautiful enough to reach the point of widespread objectification. There are of course, exceptions to this rule, often in industries with creative control in the hands of black men.

Growing up in inner city London, my understanding of multiculturalism has always been a given, something that was never questioned, something that certainly hadn’t failed. But how does multiculturalism sit inside an understanding of sex and sexual abuse under a white supremacy?  Racist beauty ideals encourage culture of certain types of female flesh being considered publicly available. Jack Straw MP takes on the language of the abuser when he describes white girls as ‘easy meat’. This, plus a public piety narrative around the hijab, the niqab, and covered black female flesh in particular makes for a toxic combination. All the while, the voices of working class white women and girls; and the voices of black and brown women are denied any agency. This is not simply a question of patriarchy; it’s a manifestation of the virgin/whore dichotomy that spans across postcodes and cultures.

Whilst we challenge Islamophobic and Othering narratives regarding sexual abuse, narratives that are so easily propagated by the far right to lambast all black and brown people, we’ve also got to challenge patriarchy where we find it. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive, neither should one be used as an excuse to ignore the other.

Today has kicked off in a spectacular way. This blog post I wrote a few days ago was cross posted on another blog (with my permission) and accompanied by a different headline and a picture (which I didn’t see until it was too late).

As a result, editors of a magazine that’s been linked to in the post threatened legal action to one of the editors on the site that hosted my work (their blog image was used in to illustrate the piece).

This of course, then raised more awareness of the piece. More people read it, and in this context the reaction to was it was pretty negative. Legal stuff aside (I can’t take responsibility for changes I didn’t make), I thought I would take the time to respond to criticisms I’ve received today. I somehow knew that the initially overwhelmingly positive reaction I’d received in response to this post was too good to be true. And I wanted to address these criticisms in a medium other than twitter, which generally isn’t conducive to discussion. I have to write this on my blog as it’s unlikely that I’ll be in the same room as all of the people talking about this any time soon.
The changed title on the cross post has led some critics to believe that I am implying that particular individuals are white supremacists. I hope this video from Jay Smooth clarifies my position on this. I also hope you can see past that and try to engage with the big problems regarding race that I raise in the post. They are everyone’s problem.

Here goes:

1. I agree with what you are saying, but white supremacy evokes visions of Nazis, bovver boots and skinheads. Aren’t the words you use a bit extreme?
I’m not really in to making the words I use more palatable to white people in order to pre-empt their upset, but I’m going to attempt to tackle this question because I think it is genuinely well-meaning and there is some engagement there. Perhaps white supremacy to some might evoke images of Nazi salutes; much like the word misogyny might evoke imagery of domestic violence and gang rape instead of street harassment and ignoring women. Arguably, the histories of the two oppressions are different. I use white supremacy in the very literal sense of favouring whiteness, Othering those who are not white and prioritising white interests. At its most pervasive, this supremacy posits itself as the ‘norm’, whilst all things associated with blackness is the Other. This also means the cultural invisibility of the interests of those who are not white. This is the only terminology I can use to describe structural racism. Again, I need to hammer home the point that racism, much like sexism, is structural. This leads into the institutional; which in turn leads into the interpersonal. Racism doesn’t exist in acts or even inherently in individuals per se, it’s the mood music of a society that is still plagued with endemic structural racism. In which some benefit from this mood music whilst others are crushed under the weight of it. White narratives are dominant. And there are always deliberate efforts to perpetuate this. Black narratives are rendered invisible, are ridiculed, or reviled (much like mine is slowly becoming). Feminists have the word ‘patriarchy’ to describe what they consider male supremacy. There is not yet one for white supremacy so the phrase will have to do for now. Edit: I must also note that if I did create a new word for it, it’s likely I’d be accused of academic elitism, incomprehensible language and so on. I really can’t win. 

2. You are unreasonably making a big deal out of nothing/you are just trying to make a name for yourself
Though I kind of wish I could say this was the case, when I wrote the post in question I’d just experienced an interpersonal incident of racism that was a bit upsetting. Luckily it was quickly diffused, I had gone to bed, but I couldn’t go to sleep because I was thinking about it too much. I wrote that blog post in the dark on my phone, until I didn’t have any words left. What seems like an overreaction is often a straw on the camel’s back style response to a series of microaggressions. As for making a name for myself- I honestly don’t care if people know my name or not, I just hope they take my message seriously.

3. You have upset people/Sometimes they get things wrong/This is a ‘libellous implication of white supremacy.’
I’ve paraphrased the above comment in quotation marks from Vagenda’s twitter, of which they unblocked me today (they had blocked me many, many months ago when I first started to challenge racism in feminism). In my post, I linked to Vagenda’s article in which they constructed a lacklustre defence of a high profile white feminist in an attempt to absolve her from the criticism she was getting about a remark many considered racist. She was getting a lot of criticism at the time, some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn’t,  and I think Vagenda tried to address it all in one article without actually addressing the offensive thing that was actually said. They didn’t engage with the topic of race and racism. This was an article in which they positioned critics such as myself as ‘armed with an MA in Gender Studies and a large vocabulary to match’, and of ‘fracturing feminist dialogue’ with ‘issues of race, class, religion, sexuality, politics and privilege’. I hope I’m not considered a narcissist by coming to the conclusion that I think this attempt to discredit critics were aimed at me in particular. The coincidental nature of this turn of events is almost uncanny- I’m currently studying for a part MA in Gender Studies alongside part time work, and I don’t hide this fact online. What I found distinctly unsettling about that post was its class and elitism implications. I’ve (somewhat precariously) taken out a loan to do this degree, my family isn’t wealthy, and although the BBC’s class calculator might describe me as an emergent service worker, I’m pretty much just bog standard working class. In terms of the implication of white supremacy, I think the bottom half of the original post and the beginning of this post addresses our conceptual clash on this. Edit: People often get things wrong when it comes to discussions about race and power. Sometimes they say ‘I fucked up’, they apologise, and everyone moves on. Sometimes they don’t do this. 

Finally, I’m going to bring this post down to the very kernels of what we do know- society is structurally unequal, and power is often concentrated in the hands of white people much like it is often concentrated in the hands of men. With this is mind, when I write something that forces white people to critically assess how their actions and language contribute to this culture, I find it extremely disingenuous that Vagenda position themselves as the victims in this furore.

A conversation about race, racism, white privilege and white supremacy (all distinctly different things) is so desperately needed in the UK. I am reminded of an incident in 2012 when the conviction of three of Stephen Lawrence’s killers almost sparked that meaningful discussion, with an elevation of black voices, only for it to be derailed and hijacked by accusations of reverse racism against one of the country’s few black female MPs.
The post that I wrote has been shared a lot, has been cross posted on different blogs, and is evoking responses like this one, and this one, which I would never have imagined. I’m so glad my writing has the power to change minds, that it is playing a little part in questioning inherently unequal structures. I’m particularly overwhelmed by the number of people who’ve got in contact to say they resonate with the experiences I documented. I’m very relieved to know I’m not alone. But I have to reject narratives that attempt to divert this conversation into one of white victimhood.

About six months ago, I challenged the racism of a high profile white feminist. The following months I had a crash course of how racism works. The general feminist consensus about my challenge was that I was in the wrong. Though the white feminists who defended her rarely engaged with my actual points about what she had said, they accused me of academic elitism, of being divisive, of pushing a feminism that was not populist. They went to great lengths to explain away the racist remark with context. White feminism continued to stagnate in its white impunity.
I was devastated that a movement that I felt at home in was punishing me for calling for an analysis beyond gender. I learnt that these were women who were only capable of analysing structural inequality insofar as it disadvantaged themselves- no more, no less. I learnt who my allies were. I noted that white feminists started creating a hierarchy between white, cis women’s feminism and ‘identity politics’- the former was good, the latter was bad.

Then I watched as trans women experience the same monstering. Most importantly, I saw the people engaging in this behaviour getting rewarded with success and tea and sympathy, and I saw those who challenged them become sanctioned and demonised. The expulsion of their power was incredible. They used all of their resources to discredit me and my arguments in the national press, and after all this time there’s been no hint of any apology for the racist remark in question. I don’t need to waste my time drawing parallels between these incidents and white male reactions to white feminism; I think you can make the link.

People sometimes ask me why my political involvement is not wider than identity politics. I’m often not allowed to get past the broken record of defending my right to exist in a political movement without experiencing racism or sexism. I don’t think I want to keep doing that for much longer.

Recently I got into a conversation with a friend’s partner about racism. I spoke to her honestly about my most recent experiences. It was going well and she was telling me about the troubles she faced as the youngest and only woman in her workplace- working twice as hard to prove herself as competent to her employers. We were getting along; we found we had common ground. I told her about a recent experience of being passed over for a job I’d interviewed for and finding out through mutual friends that the job had gone to a white woman my age with almost identical experience to me. I had felt the slap in the face of structural racism, the kind of thing you only hear about in statistics of the disparity of black unemployment, whilst never hearing from the people affected.

Then she said ‘You don’t know if that was racism. How do you know it wasn’t something else?”  She told me about her anger and fear after being accused of racism by an Algerian man (she’s French).  She said how angry it made her feel, that black people can use racism accusations to stop white people talking, that maybe the man should have considered that people didn’t like him because he didn’t behave well. She said she had felt intimidated because he was a man, she said she thought he might get aggressive. I was naive, we had resonated beforehand so I had good faith in her humanity, I thought she might be able to accept the structural conditions that allow a situation like this one to happen. So I tried to encourage her to consider the suspicion and anger of a person who has suffered racism their entire lives. I thought I might be able to persuade her to think outside of herself and question the structural, but then every sentence she said sounded like every word I’ve ever heard from people defending white supremacy. It’s like they all learn the lines from the same sheet.

My boyfriend stopped the conversation abruptly. When we’d left the room he said ‘I can’t believe how fucked up that exchange was becoming.’ And I was surprised that he’d picked up her downward steer so quickly, and I was disappointed in myself for not noticing sooner or just not being smart enough to avoiding the conversation all together.
Then I considered the social implications of the logical outcome of that exchange (where the consensus would be that I am wrong, because that’s how white supremacy maintains itself). If I’d argued with her I would put myself at risk of no longer being welcome in my boyfriend’s house share because I would have created an atmosphere and I would be considered a reverse racist, an angry, unreasonable troublemaker, maybe even a violence sympathiser. I don’t get to see my boyfriend as much as I’d like due to clashing working hours, so risking this kind of social exclusion did not seem worth it.

White supremacy manifests itself in everyone and no one. Everyone is complicit, but no one wants to take on responsibility. Challenging it can have real social implications. Because it’s a many headed hydra you can’t be too careful about the white people you trust when it comes to discussing race and racism. You don’t have the privilege of approaching conversations about racism with the assumption that other participants will be on the same plane as you. Raising racism in a conversation is like flicking a switch. It doesn’t matter if it’s a person you’ve just met, or a person you’ve always felt safe and comfortable with. The defensive indignance and the wilful denial of the structural is almost identical in all of the arguments falling from their mouths. ‘Maybe they brought it on themselves’, ‘but this isn’t my fault, so I’m not quite sure why you’re pinpointing me’.    You’re not too sure when a conversation about race and racism will turn into one where you were scared for your physical safety or social position.

White privilege is manipulative, suffocating blanket of power that envelopes everything we know, like a snowy day.  It’s brutal & oppressive, bullying you into not speaking up for fear of losing your loved ones or job or flat. It scares you into silencing yourself; you don’t get the privilege of speaking honestly about your feelings without extensively assessing the consequences.  You spent a lot of time biting your tongue so hard it might fall off.

Challenging it can have drastic implications on your quality of life. You might lose out on job offers when because you’ve spoken openly and honestly about your experiences and perception of racism online. White privilege is deviously, throat stranglingly clever, because it owns the companies that recruits you, owns the industries you want to enter, so you if you need money to live, you’re forced to appease its needs. It eases you into letting your guard down with white people, assured that you’ll be taken seriously, but simultaneously not being surprised when a conversation Others you against your white peers. White privilege is the perverse situation of feeling more comfortable with openly racist, far right extremists, because you know where you stand with them, the boundaries are clear.

But the insidious stuff is harder. You come to expect it, but you never come to accept it. You learn to be careful about your battles, because if you raise every note you come across in the mood music of racism, people would consider you to be angry for no reason at all. A trouble maker, not worth taking seriously, an angry black woman obsessed with race.

Being on the receiving end of white supremacy means feeling shamed and backed into a corner for speaking up, scared because you know speaking up night negatively impact your income, impede your career, or restrict your access to your loved ones. This is why the privilege and power of racist discrimination does not go both ways. There are unique forms of discrimination that are backed up by entitlement, assertion and most importantly, supported by a structural power strong enough to scare you into complying with the demands of the status quo. When I talk about racism, people take my criticisms as all out disgust, and ask me why I hate white people. I don’t hate white people but I do hate racism, I do hate white supremacy, and too often, the two conflate.

Every morning, navigating freezing fingers on a broken smart phone, I check what the argument of the day is on twitter.

It’s become extremely polarised of late. Shit’s gone down, columnists have left twitter in a huff, the New Statesman keeps publishing online articles by confused white people who don’t really get it, swathes of feminist activists online have been chastised for ‘infighting’ and ‘silencing’.

I don’t believe in the silencing conversation that’s currently being had on twitter in response to some of the more heated debates. I understand justifiable and righteous anger and how it can change the world, I think it is patronising to chastise that or dismiss it as infighting. I also think that an online culture that encourages us to consider how language constructs truth, marginalise voices and concentrates power is only a good thing.

That being said, I’m less confident about the discussions around very emotive topics on a social network that only allows expression in 140 characters or less.  It’s too small a space for big ideas. I think it’s insufficient and stifling to say the least, and am always grateful to those twitter users who use blogs to write up their thoughts in more detail.

Indeed, everything I learnt about my feminist identity I sought out through online resources like The F Word, free easy to read and accessible to those with an internet connection. No, I don’t believe in silencing on twitter, much like I do not believe that it is a place to learn about new perspectives of feminism from. Feminist twitter users across the globe are tweeting their real life experiences and opinions- not their dissertations. None of them owe me an education . Google is my friend. An author once said that ‘in the age of information, ignorance is a choice.’

No, I don’t believe in that understanding of silencing. I do however; believe that we’re all connected by virtue of what we have and what we don’t. That is my understanding of how structural inequality, oppression and privilege works. Women’s oppression doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it exists because men rely on its continuation to perpetuate their comfortable status quo. My ease as a London commuter, jumping on and off buses and darting in and out of train stations, comes at a costly social expense- a transport system that is increasingly inaccessible to many disabled people. Liverpool and Bristol aren’t built up, beautiful cities by chance, they were cities that flourished with wealth during the transatlantic slave trade, exchanging tobacco, rice, rum, and black bodies for cash.

Liberalism’s tendency to look at injustice in a vacuum without examining privilege (how those who don’t suffer from it are complicit in its perpetuation) is a bankrupt concept. We waste our time when we fail to connect the tragic death of a transgender woman with the fact that cis people positioned as ‘normal’ contributes directly a culture of trans people constantly positioned as ‘abnormal’.

And for those defiant white, cis feminists out there, let me bring it to your level.  This is the equivalent of a good man’s complicity in misogyny when he chooses not to speak up against sexism.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m very aware of the wilful ignorance surrounding these issues that stems from those who are hell bent on defending the status quo. Be that a privilege denying white woman, or a chap who knows  that objectification of female flesh is wrong but doesn’t want to fall out with his mates.

But I must be clear that the perceived neutrality of the status quo is actively, institutionally brutal- it is structurally racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and ableist. I don’t believe that feminism, or the left as a whole, can continue any sort of principled stance against the status quo whilst perpetuating the status quo’s worst features in its own house.

With this stance, I don’t ask for perfection in your politics, but I do ask for perspective- understanding your place in the power structure that governs us all.

Finally- and I’m embarrassed that I have to even slightly indulge in the phenomenon of tone policing- I believe that we must choose our words of attack carefully. I’ve always been more of a Malcolm X kind of person than a Martin Luther King person. (One was radical in his delivery; the other pandered more to the humanity of his oppressors.) However, it can’t be denied that both delivered their messages with razor sharp language that cut through the white supremacy they sought to dismantle.

In any liberation movement, we will face ad hominem, derailing attacks from people who wilfully choose not to listen to the crux of our argument. We’ve seen that repeatedly over the past few months with derailing tactics that seek to delegitimise intersectional arguments- ‘cis is an insult’, ‘intersectionality is educational elitism’. These are retorts that fail to engage with the argument that we’re making: an argument that makes the case for a feminism for all women- one that examines the invisibility of whiteness, the assumed neutrality of cis people.

I believe in being radical in our message and doing it with dignity. We do that shit by staying on message and not giving them anything to chuck at us. I must admit that of late I’ve felt ashamed to call myself feminist because of some of the acts that have been done in the name of it. But I also refuse to abandon the value of feminists organising online, because I remember first questioning the status quo, tapping the word ‘feminism’ into google and finally finding people who think like me. Despite all the shit that’s gone down, I remind myself that what I believe in isn’t the advancement of some, but social justice for all.

Social justice. That’s the backbone of what brought me to the movement, that’s the backbone of my politics, and in feminism, social justice can be reclaimed.

There’s no denying that Mike Tyson’s public persona capitalises on racist depictions of black masculinity. At his peak, Tyson was a pioneer of a particular kind of black fame that honed in on physical prowess. His was boxing. He punched and punched and punched until he was at the top of his game, quickly rising to undisputed champion status. Tyson was a black man known and celebrated in a sport notorious for aggression. Whilst he’s been off the radar for a number of years, his pervasive public caricature still lingers in the back of the mind.

The public’s temptation of harnessing the sheer power of a right hook have finally been satisfied, long after Tyson’s retirement, in a Polish energy drink endorsed by him, named Black Power.

Before the phrase  was co opted to market a sugary energy drink, Black Power stood (and still stands) for a movement that was the pinpoint of defence against racist oppression.  Perhaps of the most iconic pop culture references the movement is the tight fisted salute at the 200m final in the 1968 Summer Olympics. That Black Power was defiant and proud, typifying an astute threat to a white establishment reluctant to budge on human rights.

But this new sugary, energy laden Black Power signifies a cynical subversion of those values. It’s still threatening, but not in a liberation from oppression way. It’s threatening in a beat the crap out of your opponent and mercilessly rip off an ear way- a metonym for unrestrained violent aggression in a can. Both threats disrupt the status quo- one  for the means emancipation, another destructively so.   This raises some serious questions. In a white supremacist patriarchal society, powerful blackness- a concept that exists in within structures not favoured to black advancement- is either reduced to benign humour or inflated to threatening, dangerous and angry.

Advertisements for the drink draw on tired clichés of what a successful black man’s life looks like- he’s surrounded by attractive white women in both adverts, their objectified flesh gleaming at the viewer whilst they smile and keep eerily silent. In one advert, a woman is handed over to another man as a gift. This objectification of female flesh isn’t new, but thrown into a mix of imagery dominated by the glorification of Tyson, a convicted rapist, the dynamics change somewhat.

Images of powerful, predatory black men and docile, prey like white women effectively hark back to a racist understanding of black masculinity as old as slavery- with blackness equated to danger.  It existed back then, and it’s prevalent today in the heavily biased amplification of Asian sex gang stories, with young white girls described as ‘easy meat’ by those who claim to protect them. Whilst these generalised stereotypes find themselves sticking to black men regardless of flesh incriminated, Tyson has been proved to be a danger to women. A supermarket that stocks an energy drink endorsed by any man convicted of rape unwittingly legitimises violence against women in all its forms. Women shop in Sainsbury’s and Tesco. Rape survivors shop in Sainsbury’s and Tesco. Frankly, stocking these goods is an irresponsible act.

This product’s clearly marketed to straight men, and there’s some unpacking to be done in regards to what energy drinks stand for  in the discourse on heteronormative patriarchy, and what Tyson adds to it as a rapist, glorified and endorsing a product that promises to give you a rush. But, Tyson as an admirable public figure? That’s not how black works.

On white privilege and feminism for The F Word

On why I’m pro choice for New Left Project

Enjoy!

There are some things that are not up for debate.  White journalists cannot use women’s liberation to their own ends and then stick their head in the stand when it comes to questioning their own position in the power structure. In fact, if your critical analysis of power structures in the world we live in begins and ends at gender, you are part of the problem.  In my F Word blog, I questioned who these people are fighting for. But after a few days of this, I’m not convinced they were ever fighting at all.

  The white journalists pulling out every excuse to defend one of their own are doing it embarrassingly so, with arguments better left in the playground. Apparently black women ‘demand tokenism’.  That says a lot about the understanding of representation of black people, if some think our presence is only useful to make white people feel better about themselves (because, that’s what tokenism is). Sigh. These fucking black people, demanding to see a reflection of themselves in the media they consume.  That kind of complacent, self-satisfaction with popular culture should be reserved for white people only! Soon these black people will be insistent they want to see themselves as the central character of a plots consumed by white people, when we know their existence is relegated to the main character’s funny friend or the jolly next door neighbour. How unreasonable.

Those dragging defences of Moran or Dunham’s wider work into this very important discussion on white privilege need to be really careful that they don’t pick up splinters from the fence. I cannot stress how irrelevant this is to their dismissals of black women’s concerns- focusing on their work is a classic derailment, veering the conversation away from the main problem.

Some white women are hand wringing, insisting that this one woman, Caitlin Moran, ‘can’t represent everybody’. This is fundamentally missing the point, and, moreover, is a privilege denying distortion of the complaints against these white voices with power. No one can represent everybody. That’s not what we’re asking. We all have the capacity to check our privilege. I’d never attempt to claim I represent disabled people, because I don’t define as disabled. However, I can see how the world is structured in my favour as a non-disabled person. This is called checking your privilege.  If I denied the structural privilege I benefit from in this respect, and a disabled person called me out on it, I would not flatly deny that it exists. I would not block them on twitter, tell them that their reaction is disproportionate, get my mates to rally round to defend me on my denial. That would make me an arsehole.  

The most ridiculous thing about this whole saga is white people acting grossly hurt as though these challenges are personal attacks- thus, proving the point about the power of white privilege. Having privilege doesn’t make you a bad person. In fact, acknowledging it makes you an ally to those who don’t possess it.  

Ultimately this whole debate boils down to what marginalised voices want. I can tell you what I do not want. I do not want to see benevolently racist articles from paternalistic white women claiming to speak for black women. Most importantly (though I often feel compelled to), I don’t want to spend time and energy explaining this to you, because understanding your position in the power structure of privilege isn’t a difficult concept to grasp. I want journalists to consider talking to people from the marginalised group before you start running your mouth about them in a public forum. Inform yourself about the people you talk about before you put pen to paper, because people are listening to you.  And as long as you monopolise the narrative on feminism in dominant media outlets, I reserve my right to hold you accountable.

When I was a child, American culture always seemed to trump it’s British counterpart, particularly when it came to representations of black identity. As a little black girl, it pervaded my understanding of myself amongst a whitewashed backdrop of what it meant to be British. It was the country that offered me a fully formed and popular black scene when its parallels were being buried in the UK. The US had the Fresh Prince and the Cosby Show- canned laughter sitcoms with main characters that had black faces. They were narratives that presented being black as the norm, not as other. We could be at the centre of the narrative, not that token black family on Eastenders. Where black felt erased in Britain I could always look across the Atlantic for validation. Eight year old me found it pretty subversive.

So it stings when I read a wildly misguided, pseudo optimistic US based comment piece proclaiming that Michelle Obama has redefined black women. Based on the first lady’s appearance at the Democratic National Convention, Sophia A. Nelson herald Michelle as ‘a strong, beautiful, accomplished black woman…elegant, educated, and full of grace’. Apparently she’s now redefined black women- implying that we weren’t any of those things already. But the question that Nelson asserts really has two meanings- does Michelle Obama redefine what it means to be a black woman, or does she redefine perceptions of black women? I’d hazard a guess that the author’s intention is the latter, but both questions are seriously problematic.

I’ve written before about my frustrations with black women’s representation in an appropriated culture- we’re fiery homemakers or oiled up fleshy decoration and there’s no in between. And it’s nice to see that Michelle Obama changes the horizon.

Undoubtedly she is one of the most high profile black women in the world- and she is unique in that, despite repeated attacks ,her notoriety is not bogged down by negative stereotypes.

There’s a lot to dislike about the Obama family’s politics- the fact that, in every public word and gesture, race is continually the elephant in the room- but the worldwide cultural significance of a black family in the white house is undeniably palpable. The very fact that they exist in country as racially segregated as the US is gloriously trangressive. But it’s foolish to consider their occupancy as anything other than the exception to the rule. So it stings when that beaming CNN piece proclaims Michelle Obama’s transformative effect on the representation of black women. Yes- she’s dented racist, sexist stereotypes of black women as welfare queens. But I can’t see anything in her representation that suggests a deviation from her white predecessors, and more importantly, her mere existence is not enough to change what bell hooks called the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.  I want a world where black women can exert ownership over our own identities- not a compromise in which we rely on the ever composed first lady to subvert some stereotypes. And we need an identity that goes far beyond imitating the patriarchal constructed, sweet docile wife like white woman of old. We need more than an exception.

Black women don’t need redefining, instead we need to challenge who owns our definition in the first place- because it certainly isn’t us. Of course, owning it is easier said than done, and bell hooks didn’t speak so deftly about the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy for nothing. Unlike Nelson’s projections, we do not need humanizing, we do not need softening, because we were already these things another thousand more- and if you didn’t recognise that black women are full human beings through your racism and sexism, that’s not our problem.

As long as we uphold Michelle Obama as the perfect black woman, we further reinforce this virgin whore dichotomy and throw other black women under the bus- because, frankly, it’s impossible to reach her standard. The position of the president’s wife is already taken.