As the year winds down it is often customary for people to look back on the previous 11-odd months to reflect on what has gone down, and where they go from here moving forward into the new year ahead. For African Americans in particular, now having lived to see a Black first family in the White House, it is a time of reckoning indeed.

Among those doing a Remembrance of Things Past, is a sector of the femosphere that I like to call “The Sistarati” – a gaggle of Black women writers and bloggers of varying stripe. While much of what they type is tripe, on occasion they manage to put something out that grabs my attention. One of those things is the seeming consensus on the part of the Sistahood that White feminists have done them wrong.

That’s right, you heard me I did not stutter – the sistas are hopping mad because they sick and tired of being dissed by their White sisters ala Audre Lourde, and they ain’t gonna take it no more (insert “cobrahead” gesticulations). They’re tired of having their concerns pushed to the back burner if addressed at all, sick of not being recognized as Sistas-in-Arms by their fellow White feministas, and they’re tired of the latter’s constant whining over stuff that doesn’t mean anything at the end of the day, while it’s Black women that REALLY have problems.

So says one Ms. Christelyn Karazin, one of the more colorful “swirl” bloggers who got her fifteen minutes of fame earlier this year, when she grabbed up her bullhorn and went on her “No Wedding, No Womb!” crusade. Because I’m a strong believer in the notion that nothing beats experience, I decided to spend a bit of time at her place over the Thanksgiving/Black Friday holiday weekend. Trust me, not only do we have nothing to fear from the likes of Ms. Karazin, but in so many ways, she, and by extension Black women as a whole, are the living embodiment of that which they claim to despise – the Ideology of (White) Feminism.

Her views regarding NWNW and “swirling” are no doubt intentionally provocative, and I do indeed plan to revisit both topics as they require a more thorough treatment that I care to give either here. But in this essay, I wish to address the arguments she puts forth in her blogpost “BWIP Continued! Fish Don’t Need Bicycles, but (hetero) Black Women (tend to) Need/Want Men. Take that, Feminazis!”

Ms. Karazin basically makes the argument that, while White women were living in the lap of luxury, bored to tears by their middle to upper middle class existence and agitated like mad to get out of the gilded cage they were trapped in, Black women were busy doing the real labor of the workaday world, and weren’t being recognized for that. And indeed, she would have a legitimate point here — Black women have always worked and didn’t have the option of being a June Cleaver, historically and in aggregate.

But what Ms. Karazin leaves out is the fact that Black women have not only gained as a direct result of (White) feminism, but they’ve also gained from the Civil Rights movement as well; in fact, and I point this out to Ms. Karazin and her readers as you’ll see below, academics have found that if there was one big “winner” in the women’s and civil rights movements, it was and still is, Black women.

I make the point (among a great many others) in the following comment I left on Ms. Karazin’s blog, the other day:

Very interesting discussion.

I’m having trouble understanding what the bone of contention is here: Black women have benefitted tremendously from (White) feminism. Let’s count the ways, shall we?

Reproductive Rights: Black women currently get more abortions than any other female group in the USA, far exceeding Asian, Hispanic and White women, and have for a long time now. If anyone benefited from the passage of Roe v. Wade, it’s been the Sistahood. And that’s not even including all the advances in birth control such as the pill…

Education: Black womens’ access to and benefiting from this is unassailable. Black women are among the biggest group in the country holding advanced degrees, and when one looks at comparitive analyses to their male counterparts along these lines, Black women far and away outpace Black men in terms of formal educational attainment, and have now for decades. Although this is starting to change wrt White women/White men, it still is nowhere near the levels it is for BW/BM.

Affirmative Action: Black women benefit far and away more from AA than any other group, and that includes Black men and White women. It is a well known fact that compaines and agencies can and will hire Black women as they see it as satisfying two quota criteria at once – hiring a minority and hiring a Woman – in one fell swoop.

Even academia has agreed that on the balance, the single biggest beneficiary of the civil rights and women’s movements of the 60s and 70s have been American Black women, far and away more than Black men in aggregate, and often ahead of White women in aggregate. If we consider the key concerns of feminists since the 60s – reproductive rights, education and career advancement – this is unassailable. (UPenn study, Uni of Chicago studies, Google em)

NOW…

Having said all that, yes, I personally believe that Black women are in some ways, the cannon fodder for White elite feminists; they bear the brunt of the gruntwork and the lab rat type experiments. Moreover, I have always been of the view that the seeming camraderie between Black and White women was something of a facade, but hardly surprising, since it is in womens’ natures to fake the funk moreso than do men. Just notice how men of different races rarely hangout with each other, on the job or off.

It occurs to me that while Black women have indeed benefited mightily from the above, it all has come at serious and heavy costs to Black women as well. Among the more notable “costs” have been the explosion of out of wedlock births, some 70%-plus at present in Black America, and this cuts accross all income/sociometric groups within the Black community. Another area is the fact that at present, some 70% of all professional Black women are single – and not by their own choice. What Black women don’t seem to understand and/or accept, is that the very things that have made their successes possible, have also hobbled them in many other ways as well, along the aforementioned lines. Because of the precarious social position of Black America to begin with in relation to White America, these “advances” would have grave unintended consequences that they had little ability to “offset” in the ways that Ms. Ann could. The results speak for themselves.

Simply put and in closing, White women could afford to burn up their bras and go back home to their hubbies and communities where they were reasonably confident they could secure same; Black women didn’t then, and don’t now, have such luxuries. And while the owner of this forum and other “swirl bloggers” are pushing a line of “Something New” to their readers, the simple facts on the ground and the math on the spreadsheet says this too is a fool’s errand, a solution workable only for a few Black women, but by no means a viable solution for them all in aggregate. The fact that White feminists tend to regard and treat their Black sisters as little more than flowers in the attic, only adds tremendous insult to a longstanding injury. In so many ways, what Black women have received what has amounted to a Faustian Bargain in extremis.

Enjoy your victory, my Sistas – if you can call it that…

Holla back

The Obsidian

As I note above, not only have Black women benefited arguably the most of any other group of women overall in terms of the goals White feminists have achieved, they’ve also received a good dose of the unintended consequences of said goals and aims, too – in spades. But hey, they should have thought about all that way back when. As it currently stands, and as is often the case with the Sistarati, Ms. Karazin & Co. are a day late and dollar short – the horse is outta the barn, the genie’s out of the bottle, and there’s no going back. Although one particular pedantic commenter at Ms. Karazin’s site noted that White women benefitted more from AA than Black women, neither she, nor anyone else, could debunk my central point: on the big ticket items that feminists regard as most dear – reproductive rights (read: abortion), education and career/work – Black women do pretty damn well for themselves. In a sane world, one would think that’s something to be proud of.

But, as we all know, that is not the world in which we live; women, and this includes the Sistahood, want fried ice. The idea of unintended consequences, cause and effect, opportunity costs and the like, are alien to them – and don’t even get me started on their somewhat lax understanding of what it means to actually live in a free republic (as Ms. Karazin herself so aptly demonstrates – more on this soon, stay tuned). True, the Sistahood was never, and probably will never be, feted by the White feministas; but even they cannot deny that they haven’t benefited tremendously from, let’s be honest, the hard grunt work their White sisters put in. In fact, a strong case can be made for the Sistahood looking a gift horse in the mouth — of being not only ungrateful, or biting the hands that fed them, but also of being downright crass and rude: the very traits they are increasingly becoming known for at home and abroad, and with noteworthy consequences.

After all, there IS some truth in the fact that Black men with options, can and often do, marry or at the very least, date out (Chad Ochocinco, anyone? Wesley Snipes? Tiger Woods? Just to name a few). And despite the efforts of Ms. Karazin and others, last time I checked, there was no stampede of non-Black men beating a paths to the Sistas’ doors. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here; more to come on the “swirl” front soon. Stay tuned.

Look sistas, since it’s clear that you didn’t get the memo it falls to me to clue you in: yes, its true, White feminism was about, in truth, the elites – that you and other women of color and for that matter, even poor White women gained from feminism, wasn’t by design but actually a flaw in it. The so-called “third wave” of feminists – like Jezebel, Feministing, Feministe and the like – aren’t built for or by you, nor are they terribly interested in your concerns, beyond that which makes them feel and look good. You, my Sistas, were and continue to be, Useful Idiots of the feminist lobby, but don’t be mad… Like I said, you’ve made out like a bandit, riding the coattails of those who never really wanted you as a member of the club in the first place.

Remember what happened to Audre Lourde.

I’m just sayin.

The Obsidian