Feminism is just not about hating males. It by no means was.
The phrase itself — rooted within the Latin femina, that means girl — has carried, since its earliest recorded use within the Nineties, one foundational thought: That ladies deserve equal social, financial, and political standing with males.
That’s it. That’s the entire argument.
So how did we get right here? How did a phrase constructed on the scaffolding of primary human dignity turn out to be one thing individuals apologize for, distance themselves from, or hurl as an insult? The reply is just not sophisticated, even whether it is infuriating. The time period was systematically dismantled. And nowhere is the price of that dismantling felt extra acutely, or extra tragically, than within the Black neighborhood.
The outline of a feminist has been twisted over time. After I ask some males right this moment what they consider the phrase, they describe it as brainwashed, offended, bitter ladies who hate males. These photos are unfold all through podcasts, social media influencers, and unqualified web personalities who haven’t any primary understanding of this phrase.
When the late Kevin Samuels constructed a complete media empire on the premise that Black ladies who dared to have requirements have been damaged and unworthy, he was not providing relationship recommendation. He was conducting a really public anti-feminist campaign, and hundreds of thousands tuned in. His viewers was not made up of fringe extremists. They have been our brothers, our uncles, our sons.
The latest rise of the so-called Passport Bros motion is one other instructive instance. Males who journey overseas in deliberate rejection of American ladies, citing their “feminism” because the disqualifying sin, are usually not reacting to feminism because it truly exists. They’re reacting to a distortion of it. They’ve consumed a lot misinformation about what the motion signifies that they’ve confused a girl’s assertion of her personal value with aggression in opposition to theirs.
This isn’t to say Black males maintain a monopoly on this specific failure. There’s a painful irony in ladies who actively work in opposition to their very own liberation, who carry out submission for social validation, who police different ladies’s ambitions, who dismiss gender inequality as exaggeration whereas benefiting each day from the rights that feminists bled to safe. The habits is actual, and it’s a product of the identical misinformation marketing campaign that has made “feminist” a slur.
The inform is all the time the identical phrasing: “I’m not a feminist, however,” adopted by one thing Sojourner Reality, Ida B. Wells, or Shirley Chisholm would have stated with out hesitation. We’ve divorced the assumption from the phrase so completely that individuals are dwelling feminist lives whereas treating the label like a communicable illness.
Black ladies have all the time been on the forefront of this nation’s most consequential justice actions, continuously with out recognition, continuously with out safety, and continuously whereas being advised to attend their flip. The phrase “who protects Black ladies?” didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It emerged as a result of, too usually, the reply has been not sufficient of us.
Feminism doesn’t ask males to give up their dignity. It asks them to increase the identical presumption of humanity to the ladies of their lives that they demand for themselves. Each issues may be true concurrently. Black males may be oppressed by race and advantaged by gender. Acknowledging that complexity is mental honesty.
The phrase “feminist” doesn’t must be softened, renamed, or changed. It must be reclaimed. Feminist is just not a nasty phrase. It’s only handled that means by those that have been satisfied that equality is a menace. It’s not. The confusion about that’s precisely the place the true hazard lives.
