After a very unfortunate joke about pedophilia and Blue Ivy Carter in the opening show of a new series produced by Amy Poehler, I waited for white feminists to speak up. I waited for my feminist sisters who claim that feminism is indeed for more than just white women, to make the case about why the joke was in terrible taste, and that it would never have been made about a young white child. I waited for Amy Poehler, who I myself have genuinely admired for her politics and hilarious show “Parks & Rec,” to say something. I waited for the think pieces by white feminists calling for a reckoning of the unexamined racism inherent in the joke. I waited. And waited. Instead, I saw a few pieces explaining why the joke was not actually the joke, and that it was intended to be that vile to make a point about what a terrible person the main character is. Of course the conversation on Black Twitter was vibrant and Black feminists wrote some powerful pieces. More than a month later, I have yet to see deeper analysis from white feminists, speaking to each other, about how inexcusable such a ‘joke’ really is and whether it would have happened if it was at the expense of a white toddler. (If you’ve seen such an analysis in response, please share in the comments or via Twitter!) Amy Poehler has not spoken publicly about it, nor has the actress who delivered the lines in the show, nor has anyone affiliated with Hulu, which hosts the series.
This past week brought us the release of a new film about the movement for women’s right to the vote, “Suffragette.” In the film, Meryl Streep stars as British suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst. The film chronicles the lives of Pankhurst and her compatriots as they fight for their right to vote in the early 20th century. Leading up to the premiere of the film, Time Out London interviewed Streep and her co-stars, and they posed for the magazine’s cover wearing T-shirts with the following quote from a speech Pankhurst made in 1913: “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave.”
In the early 1900s, white women in the US were fighting for the right to vote, with many racist values intact. Defending white women’s right to vote, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, foremother of the American suffragette movement, asked, “What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?”