Lots of people seem to think Patricia Arquette basically said gay people and people of color should stop fighting for their rights and instead fight for the rights of rich white women.
I don’t think she said that.
Soraya Nadia McDonald at the Washington Post tells the story:
…while the language in Arquette’s acceptance speech may have set off some silent alarms, her follow-up comments backstage proved more incendiary to some.
Said Arquette:
“The truth is, right under the surface, there are huge issues that are at play that do affect women, and it’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women and all the gay people and all the people of color that we all fought for to fight for us now.”
Here’s where things really got dicey, and this is what made a lot of people unhappy with Arquette. Over at RH Reality Check, Andrea Grimes called Arquette’s statement an “intersectionality fail.”
I disagree.
To be fair, I do agree that it can be read that way. There’s ambiguity in the wording. But then, she was talking live, in conversation, and it’s pretty damn hard to remove all the possible ambiguity in what you’re saying in live conversation.
But why, when it’s ambiguous, assume that she meant the worst thing possible? Why not just say well she could have worded that better but right on, or she could have worded that better but meh?
I think she was simply calling for solidarity across all the lines, in other words for more intersectionality.
I don’t think she is the enemy.
Because, for all the MRAs out there, the best way to hold onto your privilege is to magnify all possible divisions among the enemy.
Divide and conquer, baby.
But that’s a strawman, no one thinks she’s the enemy. It wasn’t ambiguous, she grouped gays and people of color as separate from women. I get that it was spur of the moment but she doubled down and we wouldn’t accept that as an excuse from Dawkins. Throughout the atheist movement, women have been told that they need to stop criticizing the supposed “leaders” because we’re all on the same side and all want the same thing. It’s not fair to tell women of color to stop creating Deep Rifts in feminism when we complain about atheist men saying the same to us.
“Divide and conquer, baby.”
Why can’t we white women change ourselves instead of expecting women of color to agree with our goals and rhetoric as they stand? If we’re worried about division, why aren’t we working to unite? Condemning anyone who complains fixes nothing and reinforces the problems people have with white feminism.
You think it’s MRAs who are complaining about Patricia Arquette not being intersectional enough?
Some people definitely think she’s the enemy; she’s being mobbed.
And yes it was ambiguous, she invoked “all women” first and then “all the gay people and all the people of color” – overlapping, not separate. It’s ambiguous in the sense that you can read it as separate, but overlapping is a good deal more natural – I mean come on, “all the people of color” necessarily includes women.
Fergawdsake, people. A woman calls for solidarity for women, not for some other grouping, and all of a sudden everything, everything!, is wrong with what she said.
Grimes is full of it.
I am so angry about this crap, I’m inarticulate.
Women fight against racism, against homophobia, against every bigotry there is. But when it’s time to stand up for women, people who aren’t women (and plenty who are like Grimes), either say nothing or say that everything else is always more important. And note that it’s half the human race that’s so useless. The half that does over 70% of the work.
I don’t remember the 1950s, but it sure seems like we’ve regressed further back than that. Back to the point where the concept of women’s rights didn’t even exist. 1620, maybe.
Ambiguity? What ambiguity? She’s calling for people to unite against what she, at least, sees as a common set of problems. For someone making a spontaneous political statement at a non-political event, this is pretty clear stuff.
I agree completely.
(It’s for exactly this reason that I was baffled by the furore over Benedict Cumberbatch a couple of weeks ago. Yes, he might have used a term that isn’t currently in favour. But – really – look at the context!)
I can only assume that the Aquette outrage is at least substantially attributable to the fact that people who aren’t that fussed don’t go to write about it – or, at least, don’t get read. The media reward outrage, and so outrage we get – warranted or not. And if someone does put their foot in it, or is felt to have, “Here’s how you could have said the same thing better” is always going to be eclipsed by “YOU ARE TEH ENEMIEZ! RAAAAAAAARRRRR!”
I missed the furore over Cumberbatch. Probably just as well.
Absolutely agree. There is no reason to attribute the worse possible meaning to her words. Beyond that, I imagine she was nervous making these political comments as she probably doesn’t talk politics to the general public.
I would think its obvious she’s saying that those who believe in not discriminating (on the basis of color or sexual orientation) need to also show solidarity when it comes to women’s issues. It really hard to read this any other way. Its an also not an instead of – but I guess my SJW tinted glasses make me read it this way.
I’m glad you said this, and that so many of your commenters agree: It’s what I’ve been thinking, but wasn’t sure I had standing to say out loud. In a Venn diagram, each circle exists in its own right: Talking about any one of them does not intrinsically deny the others, nor their intersection(s), nor their union.
What I’m seeing all over the place is the complaint that her mistake there is a common one. It just happens over and over and over, and feels like obliviousness and erasure to a lot of people.
But, more importantly than that, stoking the flames, is how many people rush(ed) to defend Arquette, to accuse the people upset about erasing language of being divisive and ‘attacking allies’, rather than just agreeing it was bad wording and maybe apologizing and replacing with some more inclusive phrasing.
So, basically, like Anne Marie was saying, maybe the best way to work on unity is to try to fix insulting and erasing language rather than howl in outrage about criticism. (And, yes, I see plenty of examples on Twitter, at the very least, of people howling in outrage that how dare someone criticize a rich, White, liberal woman’s phrasing.)
It really does seem a lot like the gender stuff in atheism/skepticism and why are those darn feminists being so outraged and divisive over some sloppy wording.
But the wording wasn’t all that bad. Many people – SJWs in good standing – don’t see it as bad at all. And how is it possible to “replace” the wording of a conversation? What she said wasn’t a written article or statement, it was something she said, with her mouth, unrehearsed.
Really. You see people saying how dare someone criticize a rich, White, liberal woman’s phrasing. In those words.
I don’t believe you.
No, it doesn’t. This isn’t like Dear Muslima, or it’s more of a guy thing. The wording was nowhere near as “sloppy” as that. And differences make a difference. Degrees of badness make a difference.
@ 14 Ophelia Benson
Yes, but was it “zero bad”? 😉
(Forgive me, I’m just being flippant.)
First, I think Patricia Arquette’s comments were offered with good intentions but there were some problems with the post-Oscars press conference comments.
Second, there are some commenters on the freethoughtblogs.com network who raised some issues with Patricia Arquette’s comments:
Source — http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/02/23/who-watched-the-academy-awards-who-cared/
Source — http://freethoughtblogs.com/heinous/2015/02/23/patricia-arquette-white-feminism/
In addition to the RH Reality Check article by Andrea Grimes (“Patricia Arquette’s Spectacular Intersectionality Fail”), there was another article from Imani Gandy on the RH Reality Check site that documented past difficulties that 1st, 2nd, and 3rd wave feminism had with racial justice issues. The article is called “The Road to Structural Erasure Is Paved With Well-Intentioned White Ladies” and it closes with the following paragraph:
Source — http://rhrealitycheck.org/ablc/2015/02/23/patricia-arquette/
So … when someone raises a concern like Imani Gandy’s concern, should we pull a “Dawkins” and get defensive? Or should we stop, say “please tell me more,” and listen?
Ophelia @ 14
Plenty of people thought that things like “it’s more of a guy thing” weren’t that bad either, or the space agency guy with the pinup shirt, or various other examples. I’m not claiming to be one of them – it seems clear enough to me why that would get a reaction. And it seemed very understandable to me that it was the defensiveness and pushback on the criticism that was a major issue.
And no, of course it wasn’t that phrasing. Thus, no quotes. That’s the way it comes across often enough, though.
One example is partly here: http://radioornot.com/blog/2-24-15-nicole-sandler-show-they-sure-told-me/
An email conversation between Elon James White (@elonjames) and Nicole Sandler (@nicolesandler – possibly deleted now). He tweeted some bits of the conversation separately, without saying where it was from, so she posted the whole email exchange. Then, in Twitter, she accused him of trying to start a race war. (And that led to a few hours of chatter and mocking the hyperbole, rather like ‘witchhunt’ claims are prone to do.)
From what I can see, he caught a lot of flack for the following commentary:
“Not sure why folks are defending Arquette. Her framing around PoC and LGBTQ shows a thought process that’s prevalent and problematic. Fact.”
“This is a problem w/ race in USA. We can call it out as long as it doesn’t bump against what Allies deem important. Then we’re problematic.”
“I mean the quote screams problematic. I don’ care what you “meant” it’s what you SAID. This should be critiqued.”
From there several people tweeted at him since I think yesterday morning. He was accused of twisting Arquette’s words, of attacking, of being ‘in it for the RTs and favs’, and so on. So his timeline is a good place for some examples.
So @elonjames is one example, but I’ve seen similar stories with a handful of women of color I follow too. And I didn’t see much harsher than Marcotte’s article on Slate. It was a lot more frustration about the defensiveness and pushback and the accusations of attacks and divisiveness and such.
I know I’m the cis het White guy, so I’m pretty much just a bystander. It’s just that to me it does look very similar to some of those other examples. Someone says something that irks a fair few less privileged people, that complain, and then there’s a big kerfuffle over how it wasn’t *actually* that bad.
[meta]
John-Henry Beck:
Me, I think that your framing around
PoC and LGBTQcis het Whiteness shows a thought process that’s also prevalent, but still problematic.(Lived experience adds to relevance, but is not the sum of it)
Says the professed bystander.
(Hey, I’m a bystander too, and I too am having a say. Audacious, we!)
Trying to act like the Liberal Community Organizer, completely miscast being a rich white woman dressed to the nines. Leave that job to Elizabeth Warren. What she said was mostly good, some of it definitely slightly bad, not too bad for someone shooting from the hip.
Why are we parsing the specific choice of wording? Her overall statement is, clearly enough, “Women fought for right for gay people, people of color, and they need to fight for women now.”
The reason this hits a sour note with many gay people, and people of color, is that it’s a misrepresentation of history that only a privileged white woman is liable to make: although women were among those fighting for civil rights, the feminist movement has quite prominently focused on the concerns of middle-class white women not just to the exclusion of, but to the detriment of, other civil rights. See Heina’s post on the subject, where she quotes suffragettes demeaning people of color so as to say, “They don’t deserve the vote, clearly, but we do.”
None of this was in Patricia Arquette’s mind, I’m sure. That’s what privilege is. The thing she failed to check.
But that cuts both ways. Parts of feminism have been bad at including people who are marginalized in other ways, but parts of other movements have been bad at including women. I think that second problem is playing a role here.
“Parts of feminism have been bad at including people who are marginalized in other ways”
Yeah… primarily the part that Patricia Arquette represents. Which is why people are upset. She is calling for equal pay, for example, without even a moment’s recognition of the fact that the inequality is borne primarily by the gays and PoC that she is “enlisting” in a fight they’ve been involved in for a lot longer than middle-class white women have. Middle-class white women HAVEN’T been fighting for PoC and gays. They vote Republican. And to say “it’s time for you to start fighting for us” is disgustingly, blatantly ignorant of the issue she is trying to champion.
It would be like me getting behind a podium and saying that it was time for women to throw off the shackles of religion and start participating and fighting for atheists. It’s that level of clueless. And to write a piece as though people are upset at Arquette for no reason aside from “assuming she meant the worst thing possible” is… I don’t even know. From YOU it’s quite surprising – you’ve repeatedly been (inaccurately) accused of doing the exact same thing. How do you not see that?
It would be an entirely different statement, by the way, if she had said “it’s time for gay and PoC groups to recognize we have a common struggle and look for ways to help each other”. That would have been a perfectly defensible statement, and I think it’s what you (and probably she) WISH she had said. Instead, it comes across far more like what quixote says: “Women fight against racism, against homophobia, against every bigotry there is” which is bafflingly inaccurate and ahistorical.
I do see that. Of course I see it. But the fact that I’ve been accused of doing the exact same thing doesn’t automatically mean that all parallel accusations without exception are inaccurate. For that matter it is of course possible that some or all of the accusations of me are accurate. I don’t think they are, but then I wouldn’t, would I.
Hi. I’m middle class and white and a woman and I’ve never voted Republican in my life. That generalization has some exceptions that I can think of.
I was going to ignore the whole subject, but then I saw some very furious posts and comments by feminist women of color on Facebook, so I decided not to ignore it. These women were furious about the attacks on Arquette and feminism. I’ve solicited a guest post on this, and I’m hoping it will come in soon.
I was replying to @22 there. @23 – sure – that would have been a much better way to say it. But it was a live conversation.
“Hi. I’m middle class and white and a woman and I’ve never voted Republican in my life.”
#NotAllMiddleClassWhiteWomen
Yeah I’ve never understood that one. Does an inaccurate generalization become accurate because of a sarcastic hashtag? I’m not convinced that it’s quite that easy.
“But the fact that I’ve been accused of doing the exact same thing doesn’t automatically mean that all parallel accusations without exception are inaccurate.”
No, but what it DOES mean is that there ought to be something besides your individual say-so that separates those situations from this one. I don’t wish to impugn your right to blog, as you see fit, any position for any reason. I am simply saying that I am surprised to see you make this “pick your enemies” and “don’t jump to the worst interpretation” from someone who has had to deal with this mendacious pair of arguments, without any discussion at all of the merits of the criticism. I don’t know if you’ve considered and rejected those criticisms, I don’t know if you think there is some additional factor that you think saves Arquette’s statement from this kind of scrutiny (that in other circumstances I would imagine you’d deem totally fair). I don’t know any of these things. They’re just not discussed.
I also don’t really understand how “it was a live conversation” makes any difference to the issue. Has Ms. Arquette come out with a clarification of the statement? She’s certainly had time. Should it be a rule that inaccurate statements are granted exemptions when said in a live conversation? Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments were said in a “live conversation” – did you think the criticism of that statement was unfair?
“Does an inaccurate generalization become accurate because of a sarcastic hashtag?”
Does a trend become not a trend when there are individual exceptions?
I think statements in a live conversation should be given a certain amount of slack. Not an infinite amount, but some. I think it depends. Shermer’s dismissal of women as thinkers and talkers was in live conversation, but I do think it was dismissive enough that he should have caught it before it fell out of his mouth. But then “it’s a guy thing” is part of the language in a way that “it’s a white thing” is not, so…
Well what do you mean trend? Is it true that a majority of white middle-class women vote Republican?
“But then “it’s a guy thing” is part of the language in a way that “it’s a white thing” is not, so…”
This is true. And I want to be clear that I am not saying that women haven’t been on the forefront of most (if not all) civil rights fights. I do not disagree with what Ms. Arquette thinks she was saying. But I think she (probably unknowingly or unthinkingly) said a bunch of other things with that statement. Things she might disagree with if put to her directly. Or it’s possible that she, like Shermer, refuses to accept that the statement she made exposes some ugly things that dismiss the important contributions that people have made to her own cause, and that maybe the things she says in a live conversation can be revelatory of the kinds of things you don’t even recognize that you believe.
Anyway, I disagree with your assessment that this fight is due to intentional misunderstanding any more than other, similar fights are.
“Is it true that a majority of white middle-class women vote Republican?”
They did in 2012: https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/the-white-vote-in-2012-the-obama-coalition/
And in 2014: http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/11/democrats_have_a_white_women_problem.html
Unfortunately, pollsters do a pretty consistently bad job of looking at the electorate from a multi-demographic perspective. They divide by gender, they divide by race, but they seldom do both.
Definitely. And that that can be educational, in an unpleasant but useful way.
But my assessment isn’t that this is intentional misunderstanding.
“But my assessment isn’t that this is intentional misunderstanding.”
Then I am misunderstanding your article, and I apologize for that.
Well except that that 2012 one doesn’t say white middle-class women did, but that more white women voted for Romney – no class breakdown.
On the other hand if by middle-class we mean rich, then I don’t dispute it. Rich people vote Republican even if they hate the social policies.
No problem.
I think there’s some bandwagoning, and thus some eagerness to find fault, but that’s pretty much the opposite of intentional. We all do it, I think.
If you are wealthy, married, and white, you are more likely to vote Republican – this is true for women. I can’t point to a poll that specifically breaks the electorate into gender and class and race all at the same time, but given what we know about the demographics of people who are married, I am comfortable with the way I phrased my statement.
None of which is relevant to my initial point, which was that “women” as a monolithic group may be more progressive when it comes to working for human rights, but that this effect is largely driven by the work of WoC and queer women, rather than equally distributed among the entire monolith. In fact, the stratum of “women” that Ms. Arquette occupies (in admittedly broad strokes) is, statistically, the least likely to do the thing she claims “women” have done. Which is, from what I’ve seen, the substance of the complaint against what she said.
“is largely driven by the work of WoC and queer women”
And, of course, queer WoC primarily. Here I am falling into the exact same hole.
@Crommunist – I don’t think that Ophelia was supposing these uncharitable interpretations were “intentional”.
Because married=middle class? I’m not following.
I don’t disagree that the more comfortable and/or mainstream you are by various measures, the more likely you are to vote Republican. But “middle class white women” isn’t finely-sliced enough to say that.
But what I really don’t get is why the stratum Arquette belongs to means she can’t claim things about what feminists have done. I think that’s a rather horrible way of looking at it.
“But what I really don’t get is why the stratum Arquette belongs to means she can’t claim things about what feminists have done.”
Well… she can claim whatever she wants. When it’s WRONG, it’s a problem. Feminist organizations DON’T have a good track record, either contemporaneously or historically, of fighting for PoC or queer issues. And when she makes these claims in a way that reinforces the negative aspects of that track record, I’d say that’s a problem worth pointing out.
Again, if I started going around saying that women need to do more to support atheism because atheists fight for women’s rights, I’d deserve the ass-kicking that I would undoubtedly get. And I wouldn’t expect (nor should anyone accept) an article saying “that’s probably not what he meant, pick your enemies better”. Do SOME atheists fight for women’s rights? Yes. Is it accurate to say that atheists in general are good and reliable advocates for women’s issues? Absolutely not. Is that saying that I “can’t claim things about what atheists have done”? I certainly don’t see it that way.
Yes but what’s also true is that anti-racism movements and gay rights movements DON’T have a good track record of fighting for feminist issues. It cuts both ways, but there’s a myth that feminism is uniquely bad at being intersectional. It’s not just atheists who are bad at feminism.
“Yes but what’s also true is that anti-racism movements and gay rights movements DON’T have a good track record of fighting for feminist issues”
And if that’s the way she had phrased it, then I doubt there would be an issue. And if she had come out since those comments became public and said “That’s what I was trying to say”, I’d imagine that there’d be a lot less of an issue. But the comment, as it currently stands, reads very much like “we fought for you, now fight for us” which is wrong, insulting, and erases the forebears of her own cause all at the same time. I am not sure why I am supposed to assume that she meant one thing and not the other – especially when the other is not an unusual thing to hear from white feminism.
When black women say that a white feminist said something racist, I don’t see any reason for white feminists to explain to them why they’re wrong. I can think of several reasons not to.
How about when black women say that a white feminist did not say something racist? What should a white feminist do then?
While accepting his Oscar for the song Glory, John Legend said:
Where are the articles on John Legend’s intersectionality fail?