“I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white. Now—and this is a form of recognition that Hegel had not envisaged—who but a white woman can do this for me?
—Frantz Fanon, “The Man of Color and the White Woman,” in Black Skin, White Masks

 

Social theorist and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’ to describe the experiences of individuals who are oppressed on the basis of multiple axes of their identity. For example, whereas white women and Black men in the United States have historically been oppressed on the basis of gender and race, respectively, Black women often face marginalization, discrimination, and violence on the basis of both their race and their gender. This unique experience of oppression rooted in the ‘intersection’ of gender and race constitute a new kind of experience that cannot be understood through the single lenses of race and gender, nor a simple combination of the two. The effects instead compound in ways that are uniquely pernicious (though nonetheless related to the racialized experiences of Black men and gendered experiences of white women). Of course, Crenshaw’s framework for understanding the multiple axes of oppression that can shape an individual’s life extend beyond race and gender; class, citizenship status, gender (in regards to cisnormativity), and religion are other examples.

 

The framework of intersectionality enables us to make general statements, on a relative scale, about which identity groups are most vulnerable (not that these statements about relative oppressed-ness are always useful, but I think we often do think about intersectionality in this way). In the above example, Black women are the most vulnerable. It also enables us to say which groups are the most privileged (take a guess). But for the rest of this blog post, I want to discuss the relation between two groups that are ‘in-between’: white women and men of color. In truth, I am thinking about this only partly through the topic of intersectionality. Rather, with the election around the corner, I see lots of white feminism (see Elizabeth Warren’s fanbase) and hegemonic masculinity (see Bernie Sanders’ fanbase) that has led me to think about my own relationship with whiteness and feminism as a man of color. In particular, I will reflect upon my own experiences as a South Asian man. In my experiences in academic and political spaces, I find that the presence of both (1) privileges that come with whiteness or being a man, and (2) the burdens that come with being a woman or being a person of color, suggest some similarities and some differences that have taught me about masculinity and whiteness.

 

I’m a philosophy major, and philosophy is a discipline that is overwhelmingly white and male (our department has eleven professors, three of whom are women, one of whom is a person of color). In my philosophy classes, I am made acutely aware of my ethnicity and cultural background – sometimes I feel that I am in a space that is not open to people like me, nor the kinds of reasons I might give for my beliefs/feelings. Coming from a high school that had no white people made my experiences at Rice all the more alienating. Many of the women I know who are philosophy majors have had analogous experiences but across a wider range of spaces, feeling as though they aren’t taken seriously in the classroom or in leadership positions.

 

In some of the SWGS and English classes I have taken, the same racial dynamic persists. Although the classes are almost completely made up of women, I find that white women dominate the conversation. The gender dynamics, of course, are necessarily different. Because I am a man in a gender studies course about masculinity, for example, I am made acutely aware, in an instructive way, about how men dominate social space. But at the same time, I am often left wondering: do I feel that I shouldn’t speak because I know I should do more listening as a man, or do I feel that I should do more listening because I am in a white space that covertly functions to silence people of color? It’s probably a mix of both, and in the midst of any given experience, it’s hard to parse the two. In political spaces, similar tensions exist. I have noticed that white people care much more about climate change than any other issue – income inequality, police brutality, imperialism, etc., since those issues generally have little bearing on the lives of white people (at Rice). Climate catastrophe, on the other hand, is a possibility for everyone alive (and a reality for many already). At the same time, there is a necessity for men like myself to think more deeply about the issues they foreground in leftist politics; my impulsively negative response to white women’s (and men’s) tendency towards the climate movement obscures the fundamental role that women have played in that movement.

 

In light of some of these personal experiences and feelings, I will conclude by reflecting on the Fanon passage that I quoted at the top. Admittedly, Frantz Fanon had both an implicitly gendered conception of political resistance and used explicitly objectifying language about women in his work. But in his discussion about the affective and even seuxal relations between white women and men of color, there is a recognition that neither men of color nor white women are afforded the same privileges as white men. But in discussing the direct, material relationship between men of color and white women, Fanon makes clear another task ahead of us: when working to dismantle the white gaze and the male gaze, people of color and women must think more often about how internalized racism and sexism structure our own political imaginations.

 

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43 (6), 1991.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Pluto Press. 1952.