Reply #189: ??? Did you spend much time in the trenches of the women's movement?

[Oak2004]

I'm a white woman. And I saw a whole lot of it, and a whole lot of marginalization of women of color, and a whole lot of sillyness trying to "address" it with tokenism, and even some (much less) unscrupulous women of color trying to exploit the guilty tokenism for their own gain (one instance of which was almost certainly a cointelpro operative).

Oh -- and exactly the same crap, but substitute "class" for race. And age, ableism, you name it.

We don't stop being everything else we are, including having our non-gender privileges, just because we're women. And we're not immune from our biases. White middle and upper class women have a very different set of feminist priorities than black women, poor women, etc., yet oftentimes it's their priorities that are seen as the sum total of feminism, because they're in the best position to push their priorities.

This has been discussed in depth for many years in feminist literature. It's one of the reasons I came to the conclusion that identity politics as a vehicle for change is doomed -- you need to work with big human principles, not complex entangled individual identities. Either you haven't read the literature beyond a few popular books, or you're rejecting a whole lot of feminist theory outright.