My closest friend at that job, the only African American man at the company, also got laid off when the firm’s payroll sluffed off about 330 employees over six months in 2001. That bubble eventually burst, and I got laid off. I left my job in academia to work in the dotcom industry in 2000 and had a great time while the ride lasted. In the mid-1990s, I was working as a sociology professor when the rise of the popular internet changed the world as I knew it. THE BUILT-IN ADVANTAGE OF BEING A WHITE WOMAN No amount of positivity, light, and love will help us defeat the patriarchy if white feminists can’t tolerate being criticized. This is what researcher Robin DiAngelo has called “white fragility,” a kind of hypersensitivity to any critical discussion of whiteness, and it stands in the way of actual solidarity. It may be that white feminists feel particularly sensitive to any criticism, especially when it comes to matters of race. ![]() ![]() ![]() Perhaps Goldberg’s use of the word savaged twice in the same article was a coincidence, or merely bad copyediting, but given that most of the critique of the #femfuture report, coauthored by two white feminists, came from women of color, it is worth considering that the word choice here has deeper meaning. Goldberg said that the report was “savaged as a cabal by white opportunists” and, later, that there is a “nascent genre of essays by people who feel emotionally savaged” by criticism from other feminists. When the meeting and the report were criticized for being exclusionary, the organizers were hurt and some saw the criticism as disproportionate. In 2011, writer and critic Emily Nussbaum celebrated the feminist blogosphere in New York magazine: “Freed from the boundaries of print, writers could blur the lines between formal and casual writing between a call to arms, a confession, and a stand-up routine-and this new looseness of form in turn emboldened readers to join in, to take risks in the safety of the shared spotlight.” But by 2014, Michelle Goldberg, then a contributing editor at The Nation, wondered if the online version of feminism was over because of “toxic Twitter wars.” To make her case, Goldberg pointed to the blowback received by producers of the #femfuture report following a convening at Barnard College in New York City. It seems that when someone tries to bring up the issue of race and racism within feminism, they are accused of being “toxic” and of making people feel “awkward.” Some of the most ardent proponents of the idea that talking about race is divisive that I’ve encountered are white feminists. So, not talking about the social fact of race and racism amounts to a kind of gaslighting, a denial of what is plainly evident in the social world around us. And researchers have also demonstrated that being able to talk about race and racism actually fosters a decrease in prejudice among children. ![]() We know from child development researchers that even children as young as two years old recognize and respond to racial differences. But there’s evidence that this isn’t the best approach. This ignore-it-and-maybe-it-will-go-away approach to race doesn’t work and, in fact, plays into another kind of racism known as “colorblindness.” White people who were raised in households that valued colorblindness might have been taught that even mentioning race was rude, socially unacceptable, and to be avoided at all costs. “Talking about white women just divides us” is something that white people, and especially nice white ladies, say to me often.
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