Distinction Without a Difference? The 19th Amendment.

I know it's risky to put it out there in internetland when I'm thinking about whether something is faily, but pretty much everyone I want to talk to about it reads this blog. So click on over to the blog from your reader program so you can comment on it. Go ahead, I'll wait.


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I went to an Atlanta Women's Foundation event last month for work, held at the Atlanta Girls School. It was their annual meeting and grant award ceremony, and my organization was getting a grant. I'm fond of AWF, and it was exciting to be in a room full of women. The audience, staff, and board were racially diverse, though I think most were white-collar, educated, able-bodied, middle- and upper-middle-class folks. Part of the celebration was a choreographed dance routine by five high schoolers from the school. It specifically celebrated the 19th Amendment, which outlawed sex discrimination in voting rights. They wore period clothes and carried suffragette-esque signs, and were all clearly very invested in the performance. There was just one thing. Four of the five women are African-American. I think I twittered it at the time.


I say the Amendment "legally ended sex discrimination" in voting (rather than "gave women the right to vote") because it did not give all women, or even all women citizens, the right to vote. It would be decades before most women of color would be allowed to vote in the U.S. The white women's suffrage movement was largely hostile to women of color. That history seemed to be erased from the dancers' performance, and I found no quizzical looks in the audience other than my own. In college, I told my friend N that I wanted to make college t-shirts that said "est 1836," as so many of ours did, but that also added the years that women and black people were allowed to matriculate. I'm proud of the fact that it was my alma mater that initially sued for the right to integrate, but they didn't do so until the 1950s. Yes, yes, it was a different time, blah blah blah, I don't care. That's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in claiming the fail that gets handed down to us. Is the school actually teaching women of color that they got to vote in the 1920s? Surely they aren't in so many words, but that situation seems to portray a lack of understanding of the bigger picture.


But then my meta side kicks in, and I realize that looking at the 19th amendment as a win for white women only ignores intersectionality. Women of color are full human beings, not half woman, half POC. So why do I expect to see a separation in the celebration of the end of legal sex discrimination? A win for women is a win for women of color, and women of color suffer from gender oppression in ways that are not separate. If it the racial makeup of the women dancing was intentional, then I would see it as a radical reclamation of the work women of color did in the suffrage movement, despite their exclusion in its outcome and the larger movement's failures.


If we were talking in the other direction -- additively, about compounding oppression -- I would say that oppression against people of color (in general) is oppression against women (in general) because it's not acceptable for racially privileged women to ignore the other types of oppression that affect other women. We're all women, and oppression against some of us is oppression against the general category of us. But somehow, when working in the other direction, removing oppression for some of the group doesn't feel like removing an oppression for all. It feels like erasing other oppressions without actually undoing them. Maybe that's because it was only removing oppression for the more privileged part of the group. If it had been a win specifically for black women, maybe I would see it as a win for all women? But then, when have we ever had a movement that focused on the least privileged among us and refused to take incremental rights?


Am I thinking about this in a strange way? Am I missing something big? Is this one of those times where my privilege leads to parsing things in a nonsensical way?


Now that you've clicked on over and can comment, please do. K thx.

(Also please note that I am intentionally not making a regional distinction. Much of the legal oppression of African-Americans happens/ed in the South, but there was and is significant legal and situational oppression in every region of country, against black folks as well as other people of color. I'm thinking especially of Chinese and Japanese folks in California.)