The Sean Bell Case, Take Two
The Apostate ran a post today titled, simply enough, Sean Bell is Not A Feminist Issue. While I can’t find much to fault in the title, the substance of her essay is something else again. In it, she takes to task both Feministe and Feministing for framing the Bell shooting in feminist terms. Commence the disagreement.
One block of the post deserves to be quoted in its entirety:
We don’t, in fact, have any standing to speak about racism that affects black men in America.
There can be no community of people who don’t ALL have a shared reference point, one point on which all members of the community have equal authority to speak. Anything that happens to men cannot be a part of feminism without splintering feminism because there are many women within feminism who have nothing in common at all with black men (or white men). All women, of any color, have a shared reference point. It’s what the community of feminism is — women. We cannot disenfranchise women within a movement that is supposed to be FOR women. Not a single woman deserves to be excluded. If what happens to a black man is a feminist issue, I and millions of other non-black feminists suddenly have no standing within our own movement.
If anything that affects women either 1) equally with men (such as rising gas prices) OR, 2) second-hand through men (such as Middle Eastern men being arrested for minor visa infractions and being imprisoned without charge - they have mothers and other female relatives, I suppose), is a feminist issue… then what, pray tell, is NOT a feminist issue?
At one point or another, we’ve all heard–maybe even said–some variation on the following: “It’s a ________________ thing, you wouldn’t understand.” Regardless of what you put in that blank, you’re invariably putting yourself and your interrogator/perceived adversary into little boxes, and boxing in your thoughts while you’re at it.
I’ll readily admit that there are different levels of apprehension at work here. Nobody who isn’t black isn’t going to get, on the same visceral level, what it is to have the N-word spat at them, the same as some guys don’t get what the big deal is about gender inequality, some straight people don’t understand the whys and wherefores of LGBT rights, et cetera. But even if we don’t all understand things in the same way, or for the same reasons, and even if we’re each bringing to the table diverse sets of experience (and the baggage that goes with them), some sort of effort still needs to be made. We need, in short, to have the imagination and compassion to wrap our hearts and minds around each other’s realities.
We also need to realize that once we start doling out justice in specially labeled, demographic-specific packages, it stops being justice. Social justice–regardless of how you argue it, or on whose behalf–needs to be for all people, equally, lest we run the risk of replacing one injustice with another.
The problem I have with framing this in feminist terms, or shoehorning it into any other -ism, is that the issue becomes about “us” versus “them.” At that point, you start parsing on a case-by-case basis, deciding every time whether or not “we” have anything at stake in “their” fight. There’re two problems here. The first is that the definitions of both “us” and “them” are always shifting, since nobody belongs exclusively to one “us” (priorities shift), nobody belongs to one “them,” and since our “us” is someone else’s “them.” The second, and larger, point is that at the end of the day, there’s no “them,” it’s only us. Like it or not, we’re all in this together, and we need to both learn and act upon our shared responsibility to one another for any kind of future to be possible.
So Apostate is correct in stating that this is not a feminist issue only insofar as it is a human issue. Whether someone’s killed bodily, as was done to Sean Bell, or in spirit–we could take female circumcision as one example, the Elisabeth Fritzl case as another–the end result is the same; an injustice toward one of us needs to be viewed as an injustice toward all, because it diminishes all of us equally.
(The original post I wrote on the Bell shooting may be found here.)
Tags: feminism, justice, non-duality
April 30th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Thanks for the link and the thoughtful post.
I’ll just add a couple of things. As a progressive, I care about all progressive issues, and racism is one of them. As a feminist and as someone who likes clear thinking, I want it to be acknowledged that feminism is a tool and an aid for women’s issues, exclusively.
This is not a box — it’s merely being accurate and it’s also fulfilling a sore need. Definite identifiers impassion people and that’s necessary for activism.
Second, if either Feministing or Feministe had in fact *framed* the Bell case in feminist terms, I would have read with interest. They didn’t. Read both original posts — they didn’t explain how this issue is feminist. Jack’s follow up post is scrambling to produce that missing feminist analysis but I don’t think she did a very good job. See Octogalore’s analysis.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:51 am
Well, thanks for the thought-fodder.
I read both of the other posts in conjunction with yours, actually, to get a better feel for what you were writing about. My argument’s moreso that I feel that framing the issue in terms of an -ism, whether it’s Feminism, Marxism, Post-Colonialism, or whatever, is inherently self-limiting. I understand that those movements, and oodles of others, exist with good reason; not only is there a safety and solidarity in numbers, but the ideological cohesion can be a useful, even necessary, thing.
That said, there can be a point where intellectual rigor crosses the line into ossification. I don’t think, for instance, that something like date rape is a feminist issue, any more so than I think the war in Iraq is a pacifist issue. These things, and a host of others, need to be viewed in broader terms.
On that note, one thing you touched on in your post bears repeating: “There can be no community of people who don’t ALL have a shared reference point, one point on which all members of the community have equal authority to speak.” That community, and common reference point, already exists on the basis of our shared humanity. That’s not to say there’s some great Brotherhood of Man (I’m not that naive, and I’ll bet good money that you’re not either), but rather that we need to engage in each other’s issues because at the end of the day we’ve all got something at stake in them.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:02 am
A slight edit to the above. Where it says, “I don’t think, for instance, that something like date rape is a feminist issue, any more so than I think the war in Iraq is a pacifist issue.” I should instead have said:
I don’t think, for instance, that something like date rape is solely a feminist issue, any more so than I think the war in Iraq is a solely pacifist issue.