Nonwhite women who are fed up with contemporary feminism, dominated as it is by elite white females, recently started tweeting under the #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag. Mikki Kendall, who created the hashtag, brought up the Hugo Schwyzer debacle as proof that white women don’t care about nonwhite women. Kendall is giving too much credit to Schwyzer; he has never provided anything but some lowbrow entertainment with his articles on facials, pegging and such and his penchant for attention seeking. The less said about Schwyzer from here on out the better, but he did at least provide Kendall with a convenient opening from which to launch an attack on the white feminist establishment.
Although a Twitter campaign doesn’t seem all that consequential, and it probably isn’t, the outpouring of rage directed at white feminists was quite a thing to behold. While nothing may come of the Twitter complaints for now, there is no longer any doubt about the hostility toward privileged white feminists from nonwhite women. White men, for their part, sat this one out, with the notable exception of one Tim Wise, who derided the hashtag, thereby bringing a barrage of angry tweets upon himself as well.
There are a couple things at work here, and neither looks good for the white progs who have been dominating the feminist and anti-racist movements to their own benefit for decades. First and most importantly, nonwhites are beginning to feel the growth of their political strength. They are no longer content to sit meekly in the background while white hucksters and smooth talkers putatively speak on their behalf. And I don’t blame them one bit. It’s demeaning to have others speak for you, mainly because their own interests always come first. As far as white progs are concerned, appearing morally superior among their white peers and keeping minorities peaceful rank high on the interests list. This is why they rarely bring up the routine civil rights abuses on the streets of “their” cities or in prisons — best not to speak of the brutal measures that allow them to traipse around the city in relative safety and shove darker people out of desirable real estate.
Nonwhites have begun to realize that they are no longer the subordinate party in the white prog/nonwhite coalition. Why should they continue to kowtow to a faction of whites who are a distinct minority even in their own race? Perhaps no more than a quarter of American whites – if that – are true left progressives, so why does their voice take precedence over the numerically superior nonwhites? While conservative and other non-progressive whites may be at odds with minorities on many issues, there is little conflict between the groups in a concrete, personal sense. On the most basic, personal level, there is considerably less conflict between conservative-leaning whites and nonwhites than between nonwhites and their progressive white overlords. This being the case, a power struggle between minorities and their declining progressive rivals is inevitable.
The next factor here, which is related to the first, is the growth of advocacy for men among nonwhite men. Although they have been standing up for themselves in one form or another for years, only recently have they begun to offer a serious and direct challenge to feminism in their own communities. It’s a challenge that has been hard for their own women to answer, because the effects of feminism have been so utterly toxic to their communities. While white feminists have continued to have a reliable upper class of white men to rely on, black and Hispanic women have been left pretty much on their own while their men are economically and socially emasculated. When it comes down to it, women rely on their men, and when their men are disenfranchised, so are they. It is specifically this disenfranchisement of minority women that has placed white feminists in a position of power over them, and they are starting to become acutely aware of this fact.
This is thanks, in large part, to the efforts of men like Obsidian, who has been working tirelessly to challenge feminism and the denigration of men in the black community. We can’t overemphasize the importance of this work, to nonwhite and white men alike; the master/slave dynamic in the progressive/nonwhite coalition puts the majority of all men at a distinct disadvantage vis a vis the overclass. If it can be broken, and I see some hope for that, we men of all races may come out of the current situation with significantly more self-determination than we had before.
I’ve long predicted the demise of feminism based on demographic and political trends, and it looks like these trends are finally beginning to make themselves felt. For now, we should keep working steadily on our angle, avoid petty bickering to the extent we can, and keep biding our time until the inevitable disintegration of the elite coalition begins.
