As a Black Feminist, I See How the Wider Movement Fails Women Like My Mother
Or organisations such as Manchester’s Lesbian Immigration Support Group, which offers practical help to members with asylum applications based on sexuality. Or the London-based black feminist organisation Imkaan, which is working in partnership with Women’s Aid to support and maintain specialist services dealing with violence against women for black and refugee women. In these times of austerity, the ability to save refuges from closure is no small feat and should be celebrated. Yet such groups do not make the headlines or gain enough support despite the profound change in lives that they enable.
The majority of women both in the UK and across the globe do not live lives that are negatively impacted by sexism alone. Because of this reality, the black feminist concept of intersectionality, the idea that oppressions criss-cross and compound each other, has been seismic. Through it black feminists have been able to point out the failures of the wider feminist movement - which lie in its continual failure to capture and reflect the extreme differences in how women live their lives. That we sometimes point this out with a lack of patience has garnered more column inches than the critiques we are making. This is saddening but predictable. It is a type of quibbling that enables procrastination in the matter of the difficult work of turning feminism into feminisms - something more representative of our wonderful variety.
It is ironic that even some within the feminist movement, when engaging with criticism from black feminist quarters, use the stereotype of the angry and humourless black woman. At the black feminist meetings I attend we are angry with a lot of things, because - shock horror - we live in a world where racism, sexism and economic inequality abound. Our meetings are, however, also filled with laughter and a deep love for having a space in which much that is said is empathised with, not minimised, questioned and treated defensively.
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