Don't Wait for Pain to Make You Engage

Women have accepted pain as necessary to existence because that is what the dominant narrative in society is. There is a weight that hangs over every woman’s head,  as we walk through life, and particularly now with the national debate on Kavanaugh. It’s the weight of the unnamed feeling of deviating from the norm, the weight that is often unnamed (or perhaps not unnamed, but not listened to and taken to be important), the weight of being an exception. It’s the weight of not being born a white cis, straight man. And this can be demonstrated in our health care system, where white, cis, straight, able-bodied man is the norm and everything else a deviation The says something. It says that pain is expected if you are not within that group.  

This pain, which is beginning to be named, has to not just be experienced by one person, but by many people and by people that we (and yes I mean all of us) as a society decide to care about. And too often this deciding to care is limited. It is limited in  in the way that sexual harassment has entered, yes, only slightly and with a lot of backlash, into our discourse with the #metoo movement. And how there has been some traction gained in acknowledging that this pain exists for women. Women being mostly defined as white women that are middle class.

Race is absent from this discourse and it can’t remain that way.It is absent from the dominant narrative because the representatives in the US government have hardly begun to wrap their head around maybe not letting a man who is maybe sexist because he might have sexually assaulted a woman,  be nominated to the Supreme Court. This played out once before in the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, with one key element thrown in: race. Anita Hill had to publicly document and defend her pain of sexual assault and she had to do this while being a black woman, facing a black man, in front of a majority white government. Now we have a white man and a white woman and once again , the woman, Ford, is expected to document and demonstrate her pain. But this time, race isn't explicitly there, it's subsumed . Race isn’t entering directly into the conversation because it doesn’t have to. White is the default.
This pain, the racism ingrained into our systems and the demand that this pain be shared and public and supported have devastating effects on women of color, particularly when looking at health, where it has been proven that race is a factor. This can be seen in the maternal mortality rate which says that black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy related causes than white women. And this statistic shouldn’t even have to exist to prove this, but because white men can’t believe a woman, and white men and women can’t believe a woman of color, we have to have this study. Because it puts it into language that is acceptable and plays into the dominant narrative. And then to rule out that this isn’t just because of poverty we need a rich, successful, athletically fit, black women, like Serena Williams, to also experience problems in childbirth before we can even begin to start to name the fact that maybe, racism exists and maybe it's affecting health.

White women, particularly white feminists need to start taking a responsibility for race. This doesn’t mean the oppression of being a woman is any lessened, but too often white feminists do not own up to their own complicity.  It is something that is easy to ignore and this doesn’t excuse us. I use us, because I am a white woman, and I am right there with you. We can see how easy it is to ignore throughout history. We can see how race hasn’t been at the forefront of white women’s minds and can become a form in our neo-liberal, patriarchal white supremacist, racist, nation.  And because the US often exports many of our ideas, particularly about health, through the means of colonialism to the rest of the world, we can extend this to the world. Kathy Davis in The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves shows how this happened with the book, Our Bodies, Ourselves. She says of the original group  “The “whiteness” of the group is constructed as an unmarked norm, conflating the ordinariness of the group with being white. As Ruth Frankenberg (2001) has noted, the “invisibility of whiteness” allows whiteness to “assume its own normativity,” allowing us to think that “everyone is the same as me” (81)."

This needs to end. Women’s lives need to start meaning women of color’s lives, not just white, particularly middle-class women’s lives. White women need to take responsibility for it and call it out at every opportunity. We need to do this because of the way that our society works, we will most likely be in a position where the media takes notice, or the government takes notice. Because a white woman can be a victim, because that’s how patriarchy works.

We need to talk about race. We can not fall into the safety of white supremacy. And if we are unsure of how to talk about race, let’s look it up, don’t ask a women of color to explain it. Because that is playing in to the demand of pain to make people feel heard. Educate, start with a google search, listen to this podcast, particularly the first one, and then all the rest. Show up and actively engage. When you see a protest happening about race on our college campus, read the signs, listen to what people are saying, and join. Don’t let it disappear.

We, women, each in our everyday experience and in ALL the work that we do, need to actively confront and challenge racism, because as white women start to be believed (barely), women of color are still silenced and dying at faster rates because of this silence.  As white women start to be believed, we need to make sure that women of color, women who are differently abled, women of different socioeconomic statuses, women whose first language is not English, women whose religion is not a dominant one, women who are immigrants, women who are queer, women who are at multiple intersections of identity, are believed and heard.  

Readings from class:
PBS News Hour, "Why Are Black Mothers and Infants Far More Likely to Die in US from Pregnancy-Related Causes?" 

Davis, The Making of Our Bodies Ourselves. Duke U Pr ISBN-13: 978-0822340669