Willow Smith's Hair: Gender, Race, and White Feminism

Over the holiday weekend, this quote from Will Smith on his daughter Willow's choice of hairstyle flew about the intertubes, making the rounds of the feminisphere on tumblr, twitter, and showing up on a few of the bigger blogs as well:

“We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives.”

I reblogged it when I saw it, with a comment about "Parenting, ur doin it right," as did most of the other people I saw reblogging it.

But this morning, as I was reading through my daily un-newspaper (the collection of blogs from which I get my news on a daily basis), I found the above-linked post by Renee of Womanist Musings, which addressed the quote in a context that focuses on the racial dynamic at play when you're talking about a young black girl's hair like that.

And I realized, as I read her commentary on the way white feminists picked up and passed around this quote, treating it as a statement on gender equality and encouraging a young girl's sense of bodily sovereignty while ignoring the girl's race and how that intersects to give the statement a totally different meaning and context...that I had done exactly that.  I read that quote and got excited about what it meant in terms of gender only, without taking into account the additional politics of black women's hair and how that was really the bigger issue being addressed here.

So I wanted to A: apologize for my personal intersectionality fail in how I viewed/addressed the issue when I saw it this weekend (though I didn't do it *here*; I will however be cross-posting some version of this to tumblr), and B: signal-boost a great post about the racial+gender politics of it, for those who similarly heard about this but forgot to look beyond our own immediate gendered oppression.

Black Children an "Endangered Species"

So this is all kinds of full of facepalm. Or facepaw, as the case may be. (Yes, I'm totally going to abuse this graphic. Get used to it.)

An antiabortion group has begun putting up billboards in and around Atlanta that declare "Black children are an endangered species". Via Renee at Womanist Musings, it seems the organization is basing this on the fact that while black women make up 30% of the demographic, they account for 56% of the abortions performed.

The first epic FAIL of this billboard campaign is in their phrasing. Black children are an "endangered species"? Really? Because gods know, it's not like there's a history, stretching back centuries, of African-Americans being framed as animalistic and therefore subhuman to justify white peoples' abuses of them. And it's not like that shit is the distant past, either. When even as recently as 2008 conservatives felt free to make monkey-caricatures of Obama, referring to black children the same way you would refer to some Amazonian tree frog is incredibly problematic. Black children are not some other species. They are not animals. Please do not refer to them as such.

The second epic FAIL is their statistics. Or rather, the fact that they're using those statistics without ever considering some of the potential reasons behind them. Ok, so black women are aborting at a higher rate than their white sistren. Ever wonder why that is? These people think it's a eugenics conspiracy. But consider that the poverty rate for blacks is three times higher than it is for whites (in 2008, 24.7% vs 8.6%, according to the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan). Combine that with the fact that, according to the Guttmacher Institute, approximately 3/4 of women obtaining abortions cite inability to afford a child as one of their reasons for aborting, and it might occur to you that black women abort more often because they're much likelier to be unable to afford a kid, hmm? I'll also point out that a third of black children live in poverty, and 60% of women who have abortions are already mothers of at least one child, and again, you might think that these factors point toward socioeconomic reasons for the higher rate of abortions among black women, rather than some evil eugenics conspiracy.

Black women deserve the right to choose when and how they will bear children. Attempting to bully them into having children they can't afford or don't want is a shitty way to deal with the real problem here. The real problem is that our society makes it damn difficult for black women to be successful mothers. There are a whole lot of well-off white people who sniff about "welfare queens" when a black woman chooses to reproduce. Bristol Palin was commended for "doing the right thing", but think about the shaming and censure a 17-year-old black girl would face in the same situation. That's a social disincentive to parenting. Of course there's the economic aspect, with poverty rates being as disproportionately high as they are among black communities in general and for black children in particular. On the day when black women face no greater difficulties in having and raising and supporting children than do white women, yet are still aborting at much higher rates, THEN you can look for evidence of a eugenics conspiracy. Until then, consider working on the REAL issues here by actually supporting black women and their children, and keep the fearmongering and bullying tactics to yourselves.

Activist, Educate THYSELF: The Importance of the STFU&L Phase

Hey. You. Shut the fuck up...and listen.

I know it doesn't sound very nice. And it's not. But it was exactly the slap upside the head that I needed not too long ago, and I am forever indebted to Renee of Womanist Musings for saying it. I came to the blogosphere naively full of completely-unexamined privilege, discovered WM, and when one of her characteristically blunt and no-nonsense posts on whiteness prodded me right in the privilege, I flipped and argued with her, telling her it "wasn't really racism" and that she was taking things way too personally. She turned right around and told me in no uncertain terms that, as a privileged young white woman, if I wanted to be at all taken seriously, I needed to shut the fuck up and listen, for a good long time, to those who had lived the experiences she was talking about.

I felt like a puppy who had just been scolded for getting into the garbage! My pride was stung, my privilege smarting from that solid whack on the nose. I nursed my privilege for a couple of weeks, not reading her blog at all. I don't remember what it was that prompted me to return to her space. Maybe it was just the nagging guilt of "She's probably right, you know..." that I felt more vividly the more I thought about it.

But I returned. And it was probably three or four months of reading, processing, shutting the fuck up and listening, before I began to comment again. I sought out Peggy McIntosh's Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack list, read Womanist Musings and TransGriot and The Angry Black Woman, began to note examples of what these bloggers talked about in my daily life, and, in short...educated myself. I learned how to behave as a privileged person in the space occupied and owned by the oppressed class. I learned how not to appropriate, and how to defer to the lived experiences of those with less privilege than I when talking about what is and isn't oppression. I learned, basically, how not to be a privileged asshole.*

And right now, after another dustup on Feministing Community, wherein a man came in and put up his first post basically saying "Hi feminists! Please prove to me that harmful sexism still exists in Western cultures by telling me how you experience it." and many of us took affront at this wielding of male privilege in a feminist space, I feel the need to pass on Renee's wisdom. Shut the fuck up, dude. Shut the fuck up and LISTEN, before you start spouting off. Educate yourself by shutting up and listening to us, by seeking out reading material on your own, by LISTENING to what has already been said. Not by demanding, no matter how politely, to have your hand held and information spoon-fed to you.

I know it's less fun this way. The STFU&L phase is not over in a day. It takes time, and effort, to educate yourself on the experiences of a life you've never lived. But this is how it's done. The first step is to learn...by shutting the fuck up and listening while other people talk.

*Not that I'm any less privileged now than I was before, but I am not generally an asshole about it these days, or if I slip and am called on it, I check my privilege and listen. So still privileged, but not a privileged asshole.

Quick Hit: 15-yr-old WoC pilots cross-country flight

You may have noticed that aviation is a subject near to my roots and dear to my heart, though I no longer fly myself. So this story...is definitely sniffle-worthy.

Kimberly Anyadike, age 15, has just become the youngest known WoC to fly across the country, in a single-engine Cessna from Compton, CA to Newport News, VA. She learned to fly through an after-school program with Tomorrow's Aeronautical Museum in Compton that offers lessons to at-risk and economically disadvantaged youth. Among her reasons for doing this, she says, was to honor the Tuskegee Airmen, the segregated unit of black airmen during WWII. Levi Thornhill, an 87-yr-old veteran of the Tuskegee Airmen, made the flight with her, and along the way they stopped and met 50 other veterans, who autographed the plane.

"That way, they can fly with us forever."

Sniffle. Kimberly, I salute you, and your determination to stand forth as an example of what can be done, while honoring those who came before. You are awesome. Thank you.