February 27, 2017
I came across an article on a friend’s Facebook page that caught my eye a few days ago. “Why I don’t like white women,” read the article’s subtitle. “Huh. I am a white woman,” I thought curiously. I decided I needed to know more.
The official title of the article is “Befriending Becky: The Imperative of Intersectional Solidarity” and it was written by a poet and activist by the name of DiDi Delgado. I read Delgado’s article nothing short of ten times. I outlined it. Because I am not a huge fan of being disliked, I wanted to understand her major arguments and where she was coming from.
Admittedly, the article stung at first. I am a white woman and, well, she said out of the gate that she does not like white women. But, as a complete aside and for the record only, I only partly identify as a white woman. I am white, yes. But, a lot of the time, I lose track of the socially constructed gender that has been assigned to me – the being a woman part. I prefer to think of myself as a creature – part 13 year-old boy, part girl, and part cat. Nevertheless, despite not wholeheartedly identifying as a woman, I do identify as white. Delgado’s subtitle made an impact and I felt compelled to hear her out.
While I cannot pretend to know exactly what Delgado was saying in her article, I tried to get the best idea I could by studying it extensively. Her main point seemed to be that to achieve universal liberation and racial equality, it is imperative that we stop hiding behind imagined shared experiences (for instance rallying around the fact that we are all women, arguably a social construct itself) and start acknowledging the different intersections of oppression that exist within the broader categories around which we try to relate.
Delgado is certainly correct. Attempting to unite around our shared womanhood does obscure the ways we white women participate in the oppression of minorities, immigrants, trans women, etc. The life experiences of females who are members of racial minorities and trans women are not comparable to the experiences of white women who do not have to endure systematic and institutionalized racism in America. And this fact is not made any less salient as a result of the fact that we all have vaginas.
Like Delgado, I think that using broad (and socially constructed) identifiers like gender to achieve equality is an exercise in futility. But while I agree with Delgado’s observations, I don’t agree her ultimate conclusion that “it’s not our shared experiences (real or imagined) that will unite us. It’s acknowledging our differences.”
I am a staunch believer in the idea that we will not achieve racial equality until we first acknowledge our shared experiences. But I think our problem is that we have been looking at the wrong experiences – we have not been appreciating the things we share that are more powerful than the racial divides that perpetuate both the illusion that we are separate from one another and the very real life consequences that we have created as a result of this illusion.
Where we have gone wrong is in trying to rally and find binding common ground around social constructs, such as feminism. Feminism will not bind us together because feminism is a creation of the human mind, a perceptually limited and inherently flawed piece of machinery. Because the human mind is limited in terms of capacity and the ability to appreciate experiences that it does not directly feel in the first-person, there will always be oppressions that fly under the radar when we attempt to unify around such broadly drawn socially constructed identifiers.
To match something so endemic, so sadistic, and so entrenched into our collective minds and our society as racism, we must understand and pay attention to how our minds came to create racism in the first place and we must find common ground so powerful and so fundamental to the human experience that it cannot be undermined by the fears that accompany our differences.
And, while I understand that the social and cultural origins of racism are an important focal point, what is of equal importance are the evolutionary limitations of the human mind that have gotten us to where we are now. While we like to think of ourselves as the most intelligent species, in reality, the human mind is a powerful, but tragically limited, tool. The human brain’s handicaps and limitations as they relate to any kind of discrimination are in large part traceable to the evolutionary time lag. The evolutionary time lag is a fancy word for the fact that because we adapt so slowly to our external environments, the adaptations we are working with today (i.e. how we interact with our fellows and live now) correlate to the conditions that existed roughly 50,000 years ago.
Back then, humans lived in bands of 20-200 people and they rarely saw a human that did not belong to their clan. When they did, they fought them fiercely for resources and life was in general one big zero sum game. And we survived under these conditions by developing a fierce loyalty for those we perceived as being similar to us while simultaneously viewing those who are different from us as threatening to our own survival.
These instincts served us thousands and thousands of years ago. They ensured our survival and the survival of those we love the most, our kin. Today, however, when we live in cities of millions of people made of people of all different colors, sexualities, gender identities, religions, countries of origin, size, appearances, these instincts are part of what enable us to justify oppressing those who we perceive as being fundamentally different from us. When there is no longer a need to band together in hierarchical and oppositional clans and yet the evolution of our cognitive machinery has not kept pace with our external circumstances, we scramble to create divisions any way we can. One such way is race. Another is religion. Another sexuality. Another gender identity, and so on. Our desire to draw lines between each other and dominate those who fall on opposite sides of those lines are cognitive impulses that we all share. In some ways, then, so long as we perceive our differences first and foremost, we are destined to tear each other apart.
Given our limited emotional and cognitive capacities, we cannot achieve equality by focusing solely on our different experiences. While it is critical to honor and respect what makes each of us distinct, we also must seek out what glues us together as human beings.
In other words, we need to find ways that we can all be in each other’s in-group. This is not to say that we need to homogenize the entire human population. But, I do believe that we need to work to take the sting out of what makes us non-homogenized. And this will only be achieved if we can view each other as possessing fundamentally similar cores.
While culture has created differences among us, we humans share more than we realize. As an initial matter, there is nothing in our DNA that varies according to race. There is no Black gene, Asian gene, or White gene. We suffer from the same diseases, we experience similar instincts, and, for all of us, life boils down to a battle between love and fear. We all favor kin and would die for those we love. We are subjected to the same fucked up rules of life: live fearlessly or live meaninglessly, oh, but also know that everyone you love could be stripped from you at any minute and you are ultimately going to die.
There is enormous potential for us to relate to one another and draw strength and love from the things we all go through that are painful and joyous beyond words that are solely a result of being human. I believe that if we can see each other as human, we will extend greater kindness and love to each other and then, then we can truly dedicate ourselves to dismantling those societal mechanisms that brutally oppress our fellows. It will take recognition of our fundamental similarities to get us to a point where we can feel safe with, and not threatened by, our differences.
So, on the whole, I appreciated Delgado’s article. It made me think and this is something for which I am always grateful. However, I am curious as to how she would receive my criticisms. I also cannot help but wonder whether, if we were to ever meet, she would still dislike me. Truth be told, if it were up to me, we would be friends – and not because I am a giant people pleaser. I want to be friends because I want to live in a unified society where equality is a reality – regardless of our differences. And I see being friends as a critical starting point to getting there.
