Intersectionality Between Black and White Women’s Struggles Does Not Exist
By: L.A. Justice
Tags: Women, Womens Rights, Racism, BlackLivesMatter, Black Women

About a month ago I was involved in a book discussion on race and racism that included activists, university professors, college students, and others. During this discussion a history professor, who was a white woman, made a comment where she described white women’s and black women’s lived experiences of oppression as an intersectional matter.

An attendee asked her to clarify what she meant by this statement and the professor went on to equate white women’s struggles for equality to black women’s struggles for equality, stating that the only people who benefit from anything in this country are white men.

I completely disagreed with her analysis, not only because of the lack of historical facts in her argument but also because of the way in which she interpreted the meaning of intersectionality. First off, intersectionality exists between people’s social locations or social identities. Because people have multiple social locations (such as race, class, sex, sexuality, ability, gender, age, etc.) that have an overlapping effect on how they are either oppressed or privileged in this country, the inseparable amalgamation of these effects is the intersectionality of those social locations which comprise their lived experiences.

Secondly, historically speaking, discrimination against white women in this country has primarily been based on their sex. The women’s suffrage movement and the ratification of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. The feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s fought mainly for women to be able to participate more in the political & economic spheres of this country, for equal pay, and reproductive rights. These women’s rights movements focused more on the concerns of middle-class white women and did not concern themselves with the unique needs of black women and other women of color.

This is why author and activist Alice Walker created womanism, because black women’s needs were being excluded from the fight for equality for women. Black women exist in the intersectional space that has continually oppressed us based on race, sex, class, sexuality, and now more frequently also in terms of gender. Also, let us not forget that white women are affirmative action’s greatest beneficiaries, yet they have become one of its fiercest opponents in more recent years since the greatest gains for white women have already been achieved.

The social construct of race, the brutal history of systemic racism, the false notion of white superiority, and the existence of racial terrorism, are the reasons intersectionality between the lived experiences of white women and black women does not exist. Black women have been victimized by systemic racism that is not only responsible for the murder of millions of Africans during the Middle Passage, the forced enslavement of millions more, the rape and forced breeding of black women during slavery, and the hanging of black people from trees, but is also responsible for multiple injustices that we are still fighting against.

While it is true that white women have been, and to some degree still are, discriminated against, in a country that normalizes and exalts whiteness above all else, their white skin has protected them and continues to protect them, from the various forms of institutional oppression experienced by black women.

In addition, white women have always weaponized both their whiteness and their femaleness against black men, with a long history of false accusations of lewd behavior or rape that have landed innocent black men in jail, or worse yet, in a grave. Recently, they have taken it to a whole new level as demonstrated in the numerous news stories and video posts in what has come to be known as the “Karen” meme on various social media sites and in American culture, where white women have perfected the ability to play the victim.

This has done nothing more than pit white women against the very people they claim to identify with, proving that their white skin privileges them much more than their sex oppresses them. This means their privilege elevates them to a status second only to white men, while black women’s oppression diminishes our status to last, or perhaps second to last, only slightly ahead of indigenous women.

While sociologists, psychologists, and scholars, shun the idea of a hierarchy of oppression, it is often necessary to use as a tool to make white women understand how they are causing additional harm by trying to equate their experience with sexism and misogyny to the type of oppression that black women continue to experience on a daily basis due to the intersectionality of race, class, sexuality, and gender, in addition to sexism and misogyny. These false claims do nothing more than attempt to silence the voices of, and discredit the experiences of, black women who continually struggle to be seen and heard in a country that has long ignored our plight.