The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Ich Bin ein Womanist

Bonnie, thanks for your response. These are very complicated and delicate issues, which is why so often we'd all prefer to just sip our lattes and talk about something else. One problem is that we don't even have a common language for discussion. We can't even agree on what race is, let alone what words such as racism, exclusion, feminism, womanism mean and should mean to each of us.

Can we all be womanists? Um, I'm not sure we can. Walker's full definition of the term (laid out in her book In Search of Our Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose) and the reason for its creation (because early feminist movements, led by white, middle-class women, ignored oppression based on race or class to focus solely on sexism, and thus denied the dual reality of a black woman's experience) leaves room for debate. Do you have to actually be a woman of color—or just "get" that women of color experience a substantially different kind of oppression than white women? But Alice Walker doesn't need me to speak for her, so I won't. I'll just say that her statement about Clinton carrying  "all the history of white womanhood in America in her person" reads to me as just that—statement, not accusation. The statement strikes me as a pretty obvious one, but even if one disagrees, the distinction between statement and accusation is critical. I am so uninterested in blame or shame or apologies as to be nearly comatose when these words float up. Distractions, every one of them. Utterly without use. (The last time I made my son apologize to his sister for whacking her in the head with a Frisbee he grudgingly muttered, "Sorry." Then whacked her again.)

Whenever I travel abroad and encounter anti-American anger or, more often, plain old bewilderment, I ask myself: How should I handle this? I did not ask to be born American. I certainly didn't vote for the current administration. It would be easy to disassociate myself from it all, except for one thing—I'm a little too busy racking up the benefits. Benefits from being born in this country, and from actions taken on its behalf long before I was a sparkle in my father's eye. Many years ago, I visited Germany and felt, at one point in a restaurant, that the waitress was condescending toward me. Suddenly, the thought popped into my head: "Hey, we kicked your butts!" And though none of the kicking was my own, I felt much, much better after that. 

That America's influence has waned in the world does not diminish the benefit I've gained and continue to enjoy. For me I need to own that fact, to work to mediate the resulting inequities and to be clear that the past, as Faulkner said, is not dead. It's not even past. Tim Wise, a brilliant writer/lecturer on race, has a great take on it with his gumbo analogy.