@jmjafrx started off my day sending this article this morning. I read it and gonna share a few thoughts, since Black women’s outrage over it has now started to trickle into my TL and mentions. https://www.thelily.com/i-had-to-choose-being-a-mother-with-no-child-care-or-summer-camps-women-are-being-edged-out-of-the-workforce/

So let’s stipulate how appalling it is that this woman just up and dissolved a company she worked years for and fired 13 people back in March at the beginning of quarantine because her husband didn’t know how to entertain their kid for 12 hours a day.

Every vestige of strong Black woman I got let wonders why she didn’t (metaphorically) slap his ass and tell him to be an adult and get his life together. But y’all: how are you angrier at this white woman than you are at her terrible dude? How?!

How are folks consistently more enraged at white women who give in to white patriarchy than they are at patriarchy itself? This is how patriarchy works: by telling powerful career women that they are being bad mothers if they a.) work or b.) require fathers to be caregivers!

Her dude needed to watch Daddy Day Care and get his life together. And instead as @jmjafrx pointed out he trained their kid to disrupt his mother while she was working by calling her first name. WTF.

Being outraged at Karen is justified. But it’s legit the low hanging fruit here. I am not suggesting we owe her solidarity. I mean her choice to be ride or die for her husband cost people their livelihoods. But women across race risk shit to prop up problematic dudes. #patriarchy

Also: in the story she says that she had been working 70 hour weeks for years. I wonder if the same thing happened to her that happened to much of the professional class at the beginning of quarantine. We realized how our ways of working are unsustainable.

So she did the gendered thing and invoked the nobility of motherhood as a way to unentangle herself from unsustainable demands of capitalism. And it’s unfortunate that she chose a patriarchal rather than feminist framework to free herself.

She saw the job as the problem, when maybe it was only part of the problem. But patriarchy forces women to make these huge sacrifices in the name of motherhood. How do you think Michelle Obama became ‘mom-in-chief’? She didn’t start out that way.

Also: she didn’t assert her choice as feminist. This isn’t about white feminism. It’s about patriarchy. Because even a cursory feminist analysis would have told her to challenge her dude, not give up what she worked for.

My bottom lines: patriarchy as an analytic does great work for us if we let it. It turns out that radical white feminists have had critiques of the shit this woman went through for 50 years.

Also: as a Black feminist, I am tired of our outrage being used to flatten rather than heighten analysis. To be clear: I always have more outrage for how white men do shit under white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism than I do for white women.

And not because I ride for white women. If you’ve read my longer work you know my stance on this. But y’all, where TF is the systemic analysis? Black feminism doesn’t just critique whiteness and Karenism. It critiques patriarchy. Patriarchy be falling away too easily.

And stop doing feminist theory if you haven’t ready any feminist political theory. Everybody loves Judith Butler but what about Wendy Brown, Iris Marion Young (one of my faves), Zillah Eisenstein, Catherine McKinnon, Shatema Threadcraft.

Claudia Jones. Sadie Alexander. Etc. Feminist political theory is where you will find more than 50 - 70 years of labor critiques.

Last: there is a political cost to letting white men off the hook. A cost to projecting the whole of white imperial foolishness onto white women. A cost to overlooking white male mediocrity while staging endless protests against problematic white women. (Biden anyone?)

Go hard AF in the paint at the ways white women keep choosing proximity to whiteness and patriarchy even when we see how piss poor of a choice that is. But don’t stop there. Dammit. Then go after the dudes who keep on building a world where these are the ‘choices.’

And to Black women, just because we are rarely in the class position of that woman, doesn’t mean our dudes don’t routinely force our hands about career vs. love and motherhood. And we would be better if we had a structural critique of how powerful mommy guilt is.

But this is all the shit we don’t do when we act like their is nothing to relate to any of those stories in the article when really there are raggedy men wielding power throughout. Now if white women are smart, they would listen and join us in feminist struggle. That is all.

Oh and let me add Imani Perry’s Vexy Thing as one of my most favorite recent examinations of the operations of patriarchy in Black Feminist Thought. I read part of the thesis of that book to be: ‘Black feminism, where has your analysis of patriarchy gone?’ Read the book.