What Happens When Every Movement is a Social Justice Movement?
Since I’m not an active participant in the feminist movement, or any of the other movements Jessica Hoffman mentions in her polemic “letter to white feminists,” maybe it’s not really my place to comment on her piece, but much of it seems off base in a pretty fundamental fashion. Her basic point is that many “feminists” – by which she means those (typically but not always) white women we associate with NOW or Feminist Majority or any other feminist organization – are oftentimes ignorant of the struggles faced by many women, not to mention men, who are abused by the criminalization of borders and the criminal-justice/prison system more broadly. It’s the basic message that many feminist and social justice advocates of color have been pushing since at least the late 1970s, that many white feminists are mostly concerned with the issues facing, well, white women. Hoffman’s critique is by no means new, and she appears to be doing a paint-by-numbers critique of mainstream feminism.
Her critique seems especially misguided in a world where, to me at least, those white feminists who she seems to be critiquing (rarely by name) are more cognizant than ever of challenges – especially those faced by people of color, immigrants, transmen and women – that have not traditionally been the purview of mainstream feminism. If you look at the three largest feminist blogs (Pandagon, feministing, feministe), all headed by liberal white women, you see plenty of discussion of racism or of borders or of prison reform. And even more importantly, Jill Filipovic, Amanda Marcotte and Jessica Valenti are in many ways similar to Hoffman insomuch as they are not only aware of this type of criticism, but are also very much part of the reaction to same type of 70s era, white liberal feminism that Hoffman criticizes.
Hoffman’s idea, that everyone who is part of any social movement – whether it be anti-racism, feminism, immigrants rights, gay rights, prison abolition – should be aware and always talking about the issues that are important to those of every other movement seems misguided. In Hoffman’s view, there are really two issues that matter. The prison-industrial complex and borders.
She castigates white feminists for not paying off attention to the Jena 6, Newark 4, the abuses of the immigration system and whole host of other issues, that she, Jessica Hoffman, considers very important. And while I tend to agree with Hoffman that the two biggest “social justice” issues are how we lock up so many (especially young black men) and how we don’t let enough immigrants live where they chose to in dignity, not everyone shares that view. Ultimately, it’s pointless to tell people that the work they’re doing, which they’re passionate about, which they see as important and for a good cause is not “intersectional” enough and that they should instead just be paying attention to your issues.
Many of Hoffman’s examples of how white feminism marginalizes and actually hurts other social justice movements are really not indicative of anything. She doesn’t like that one email list didn’t talk about the horrific story of a transwoman who died in a male immigration detention center after being denied AIDS treatment and instead was discussing the demise of Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem’s GreenStone Media.
And Hoffman may be “objectively” right, the abuse of gender nonconformists in both our immigration and criminal justice systems is absolutely horrific, but not every feminist activist is particularly focused on that issue, and they don’t all have to be. Would it be better if everyone was talking about prisons and borders, even if it wasn’t an issue that especially excited them (for whatever reason) or that they didn’t have much expertise in? I don’t think so. People who specialize in immigration issues should be the ones talking about immigration issues. After all, someone needs to talk about those supposedly antiquated “white feminist” issues like the pay gap, lack of family medical or paternal leave, depictions of women in the media and culture, the prevalence of rape etc etc etc. And if Hoffman doesn’t want to be that person, that’s fine for her, but the cause of feminism or of social justice more broadly isn’t advanced much by this type of self-righteous sniping. It isn’t particularly productive.
