Intersectionality: Feminism Wasn't Made for Black Women | Ephrata Tesfaye | TEDxYouth@MaristSchool

Transcriber: Sofía Farías Reviewer: Selin Tüfekçi (Applause) Okay, so, if you were to ask hyper-liberal 13-year-old Ephrata if she was a feminist she probably would not answer that question. And that’s because her ‘screw the patriarchy’ T-shirt would answer that for you. But, while I would still rock that shirt any day of the week, if you were to ask me that question now, I probably wouldn’t have the same enthusiasm as I did then.

And that’s because back then, I didn’t understand the complexities of the feminist movement and what it was built on. This is a statistic from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2020 that showed that with only acquiring a high school diploma, while white men’s median weekly earnings were $888, women’s were only $653. And when I first heard that, I knew that I had to be a feminist.

It was my obligation. But, what if I showed you that there was more to that story? To understand my point, I need to explain, or introduce, the topic of intersectionality.

Intersectionality is a term coined by scholar and civil rights advocate Kimberly Crenshaw and it's defined as the interconnected nature of social categorization, such as race, class, and gender, as it applies to a given individual or group regarded as creating overlapping or interdependent systems of discrimination and disadvantage. So let’s say, for example, you’re a woman, you’re gonna experience examples of misogyny like the wage gap and less educational fairness. But, if you’re a woman of color, or a woman with a disability, or a woman from a lower financial status you’d have to experience additional oppression on top of that because of the fact that another facet of your identity is marginalized by society.

Take the previous statistic I gave of the median weekly earnings. See, all women aren’t actually making $653, white women are. With acquiring a high school diploma, while white women made $653, Asian women made $607, Hispanic and Latina women made $593, and Black and African American women made $586.

So why is that important? Well, it’s because the modern day Western feminist movement isn’t really feminism. It’s what author, attorney, and feminist Rafia Zakaria says is “white feminism”: a movement that lacks the ability to acknowledge the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played in universalizing white feminist concerns, agendas, and beliefs as being those of all feminists.

And that’s a consistent issue in the modern day Western feminist movement. White women become the face of activism, but they’re not actually advocating for all women. And while I spoke of different women in my explanation of feminism, I want to talk about Black women’s role in all this.

Not just ’cause I’m a Black woman, but, I think Black women are possibly the front of what it means to give so much to a movement and receive little to nothing in the end. To understand the implications of intersectionality we have to understand the fact that the founding of the feminist movement in America is rooted in racist ideologies from colonialism. Black women, or black people in general, didn’t have any inherent differences than other races.

They could not prove that we were less than. Ideas like social Darwinism appeared out of thin air to justify superiority, and, more drastically, racism and imperialism. But in the context of feminism, early feminist ideologies had to justify the reasoning behind depicting Black women as less feminine.

Their thought process was “if we prove Black women are not feminine, we no longer have to advocate for them in the feminist movement”. So they were able to ostracize Black women by, you guessed it, de-feminizing them. So how did they do that?

Well, colonialism tried justifying a caste system with pseudoscience. When they classified animals and plants, they did the same with humans. And while whites were considered the most elite, where were Black Africans in the mix?

Yeah, we were equated to animals. We were seen as animalistic, hypersexual, uncivilized. And the hyper sexualization of Black women led to a high tolerance of rape and sexual assault crimes against them.

To make matters worse, there weren’t any laws protecting Black women from this. The only laws that prevented this kind of thing was to protect white men, or to maintain this idea of eugenics, to keep the population pure or, as they considered it, not black. But the thing is, this kind of stuff doesn’t spread only by word of mouth.

The media has to create big propaganda to sway people to one side and when it comes to de-feminizing Black women, the media was one of the key players in doing so. There were different tropes to stereotype Black women, Like the mammy, who was prominent during slavery, which showed and depicted Black women in slavery as being okay with being owned by another human. Or the Jezebel, which represented the typical promiscuous black woman.

And medias created this trope to normalize the rape of Black women because, as they considered it, “we asked for it”. But I think the biggest trope of the Post Antebellum Period is one that you all, and even some Black women, have kept in the back of our heads: the angry Black woman. You see her in school, at work, in public.

She's feisty. She has an attitude. She pops her gums, she shakes her neck.

But the biggest trait of the angry Black woman is that she has no dignity. And this is a trait that the media commonly depicts Black women having. Carolyn West, an associate professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, Tacoma, explains the reasoning behind depicting Black women without dignity.

She says that by depicting Black women as not knowing their own worth, media can actively mitigate their concerns and consider them unnecessarily voiced. And as much as I hate to admit it, it worked. Because a lot of Black women, or people of color in general, have often undermined their own abilities.

And this is what Pauline Clanton and Suzanne Ames call “Imposter phenomenon” It's when a member of a marginalized community undermines their own success because their community is not associated with that success. And I think a lot of students of color can understand that. Because often we’re told that we can’t or we don’t typically measure up to the success of our white peers.

We find it hard to stand up to offensive comments that would be considered taboo if anyone, but us, the recipient. Or we’re scared to talk with propriety because talking right is equated to talking white. But it sticks with us.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Supreme Court ruling on Affirmative action but, let’s not forget, Affirmative action was created to help women and people of color. So if justice for women continues, but not people of color, then it’s just a repetition of the feminist movement. And it's even in the media.

I’ve seen so many posts saying that major and famous Black women like Megan Thee Stallion, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama, are men. And, as I thought of that, I remember that in the late 1800s, activist Sojourner Truth once flashed her breasts to someone in the audience when they questioned her gender. And it’s insane to think that 165 years later, Black women are still out here having to try and prove their femininity to society.

So, while I mainly spoke of Black women today, my main message to you all is that if feminism wants to be feminist, it can’t just be Western feminism. It can’t just be white feminism. It can’t just be neurodivergent exclusioning feminism.

It can’t just be heterosexual feminism. It can’t just be cisgender feminism. Like it or not, the magnitude of trans women being killed in this country right now is not going anywhere, let alone shrinking.

Adding intersectionality to feminism doesn't make it complicated. All we have to do is listen, because, trust me, if you can listen to a couple more voices, I promise you can change a couple million more lives. Thank you.