I deleted the post I put up last night, in anger over ONCE AGAIN reading a whole slew of comments here and at Pandagon which equate indifference toward children with hatred of children.
However, what Ilyka said.
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Hmm–that sounded good…
What sounded good?
Yeeeah, it’s probably better to let it go unsaid.
I almost posted about seeing a comment in the special moderation cue that has to be the most misogynistic (and racist! and homophobic!) set of remarks I’ve seen in a long time.
But then I thought, “Why bother? Isn’t the special moderation cue set up so that we don’t have to look at these little turds?”
I guess the guys who wrote those posts managed to achieve their goal now.
I missed this dispute and wish you hadn’t deleted your post.
What I think is that people without kids believe they are supposed to have some sort of attitude toward kids. Why that should be I don’t know. I have kids and a grandkid, and I have no attitude toward kids at all.
I wish you’d left your post. It wasn’t nasty.
Seriously, what Ledasmom said. Or at least left the title and amended the text to, “Please see comments.”
It was a bit too personal, and I decided against airing the family dirty laundry.
I’ve been reading the debate on this blog and on Pandagon because I’ve been become more interesting in learning about feminism in a more formal sense, because I think I am living it, in some part on a daily basis.
However, I really have to say that as a black woman, I can truly see why many WOC check out of this feminist thing because really and for true, this is an upper middle class white woman’s discussion or as my mama would say ‘some silly white folks shit’. And I truly don’t mean to offend when I say that because I am not trying to mock a very serious and heartfelt discussion. But amongst my friends, child-less or mothers, these type of discussions simply don’t come up.
Now granted I recognize the majority of the readership of this blog and some of the other ‘big’ feminist blogs is going to be the majority group of folks anyway but I guess I just had to post about how fascinating observing these dialogues have been because I never realized how SERIOUS this topic is. I guess amongst many women of color these types of battles just don’t seem to crop up.
I’m not trying to ‘other’ anyone either BTW. White women are not aliens or anything for having these types of discussions, just different.
Tiffany – That is really enlightening. As a man (white as well) I never ran into these conversations with other men until I started attending Bible studies and we were picking books to challenge ourselves on being more sensitive to walking in the shoes of others. Was great for both the childrened and the childless to hear the perspectives of the other group and try to get a handle on where offense arises.
May I ask what you and your friends do talk about in the realm of looking outwardly? To understand what you value as a discussion topic would be very helpful to me to try and learn sensitivity outside my circles.
WOC don’t write about mommy drive-bys? Or about discussions within feminism that denigrate mothers and motherhood? Or about the potentially misogynist–never mind racist and classist–implications of “breeder” and similar terms?
I’m sure some do, however I was REFERRING TO ME AND MY EXPERIENCES. And to be quite frank I’m not a blogger so I don’t write about them, but guess what I don’t talk about it either because we don’t talk about feminism in the more formal sense.
I’m trying real hard not to get offended by your inferences so let me stop right there.
If you are trying to say something, piny, how about you spit it out and we can go from there.
Mr from MN: (I lived in St Louis Park for 2.5 years BTW)
I think that me and friends talk about issues that many women face and would more than likely fall under the big tent of ‘feminist’ issues: women in the workplace, motherhood, gender inequalities. Unfortunately, much of the discussions are tinged with the nuance of race of course and the subtleties of dealing with such. There is a fine balance that must be walked between being hypersensitive because of some else’s ignorance and calling out just flat out bias. I find that many of us struggle with that quite a bit.
A big issue in the black community as a whole is the issue of fatherlessness and how that is so destructive to well being of black children in general. I think that is an issue that falls both under the tent of ‘feminism’ to some degree but probably is not as an important an issue to the majority population that it would be to me.
I’m a little confused by your post, too, piny, because Tiffany isn’t the first WOC to point out that this fight doesn’t go on in her circles. I’ve generally seen it attributed to two things. First of all, the mainstream society stigmitizes WOC’s reproduction. It’s great when middle-class, adult white women have babies, but it’s a problem when WOC (or poor white women or young white women) do. So WOC, whether they have kids or not, see fighting for their right to reproduce as part of a struggle against gendered racism. They’re not going to stigmitize women with children as “breeders”: the mainstream, racist discourse does that already. And the second is that people of color often don’t see the nuclear family as the sole site of childraising. Taking care of children is seen as the responsibility of the extended family and to some extent the community. Therefore, you don’t have to have biological or adopted kids to see yourself as and to be seen by the community as a person with a stake in raising children. “People with children” and “people without children” isn’t a stark bianary in the same way it is in most upper-middle-class white communities.
So yeah. It makes sense to me that this is a fight that is contingent on the class, race, and cultural positioning of the people who are fighting.
[Standard disclaimer: I'm white, and I'm generalizing wildly about people of color. Feel free to slap me if I'm way out of line.]
Sorry to have misread you; this sounded pretty general:
What inferences?
Okay: I don’t think this is true. In fact, most of the mommy-blogging and explicitly feminist discussions of motherhood that I’ve encountered have been focused on the ways in which some strains of feminism–like this one–have forgotten or delegitimized motherhood in ways that tend to dovetail real neatly with racist hatred of WOC and their kids. I know that my experience is not necessarily representative, either, and I know that there must be many discussions of the phenomenon Lauren posted about that are chock-ful of entitlement. I don’t think they’re the rule.
But which fight? There were at least three or four that I could see. I just wasn’t sure which ones she was referring to.
I think she was referring to the people with kids vs. people without kids fight. Which is a highly simplified way of looking at that battle, but I think it does sort of play out that way. When it comes down to it, a lot of the hurt feelings in mommy discussions on feminist blogs come down to mothers feeling like their commitment to their kids is being diminished and mocked or non-mothers feeling like we’re being told, yet again, that we’re stunted, incomplete people because we’ve failed to have kids. And I do, absolutely, feel that I’m constantly told in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that I’m stunted and incomplete because I haven’t had kids and probably won’t have kids. But I’m aware that I’d be getting different messages and looking at this differently if I were coming from somewhere else.
I was getting different conflicts from like eight out of ten of the comments, but I realize that this was the start of the conversation. I’ve encountered both positions as filtered through any number of side issues–natural childbirth, cuts in public resources for children and parents, queer sexuality and parenting, adoption/surrogacy, single motherhood, and so on.
My comment on all of this got too long, so I posted it at home.
Sally:
You’re on point in my assessment. I would so totally agree. Another thing I might add is that I don’t see a lot of black women/couples that choose to opt out of having kids. There are of course, some black folks that don’t want kids but in my experience it seems to be much more common in the majority population.
Piny: I thought you were trying to be sarcastic. My apologies for misreading. I would agree with you to some extent. I went and read the post you referenced and the related comments and quite frankly old girl is bat shit crazy. I don’t have time for mess like that.
I’m just going to be frank here. It seems like white women spending a whole lot of time worrying abouut what every other white women is thinking about THEM. Historically, WOC haven’t had time for that nonsense because we’ve been too busy trying to make it in this life. It’s about getting busy living as opposed to get busy dying.
No problem.
…Yeah, she trolls a lot of blogs. I get the sense that her feminism is a bizarre blend of bastardized radfem and Peggy-Noonan-ish social conservatism. It mostly boils down to saying nasty things about other people.
Anyway, we banned her ass.
I see what you mean. Most of the discussions I’ve read about mommy drive-bys (“Don’t you know that apple juice has forty grams of sugar per serving, you neglectful bitch?” etc.) in WOC circles have focused on racism and shaming of mothers by non-feminists. It’s true that the breeder/childfree conflict is a different issue.
Tiffany -
It’s interesting to note that the lack of your community’s luxury (best word I could think of here) to engage in these types of debates can once again be traced back to men. The fatherlessness that plagues your community robs WOC from the stable, generational asset growing and combined economic power that affords one the free time it takes to get beyond the daily living battles you so eloquently remind us about and on to more indulgent pursuits. Men keep WOC from being as feministly able (again sorry for poor words) as white women. How ironic. It’s a great reminder when the dialogue gets so passionate about subjects like this that others who read these comments struggle every day to just live. Perhaps aq good deal of passion is being wasted.
I’d like to add that I think the fatherlessness is caused by economic factors, and also that black men don’t make as much as white, even though women in general don’t make as much as men(it’s mixed up but you know what I am saying?) I am not a poor woc, but I would also like to add that even I have some responsibility for younger children(even though I would like people to not assume that all women are good at childcare, it drives me nuts) and pretty much the whole family cares for the younger kids, although this is helped by the fact that most of my extended family live in the same area.
The lesser isolation helps the family structure adapt, I think.
And I forgot to add that sometimes people who aren’t technically related to us provide childcare as well. So even if you have no biological children, you still may be helping raise a child.
my mama would say ’some silly white folks shit’.
I agree with your mother. It’s a white people thing. I’ve never gotten any flak from being in public with my daughter from anyone of color. But it’s also a social class thing. Nobody in my union hall even noticed when I breastfed my daughter (either at meetings or at picnics—I just hung back a little bit away from the crowd, no biggie). Neighborhood taverns don’t care if my girl has a hamburger or slice of pizza.
But, it’s not so much “white people”, or even “classism” that’s the culprit—I think it’s cultural. And the mainstream opinion is that normative culture is supposed to be white (or rather, WASP) and middle class. And that those of us who aren’t, are supposed to know and adapt to those values; something I actively reject. And I accept that I will get flak for that. That’s not the problem. The problem for me is the out-and-out hypocrisy of folks who claim to reject certain white, middle-class assumptions because those assumptions are anti-feminist—but only when it benefits their lives. In other words, rejecting the notion that all women are supposed to be stay-at-home mothers, because they don’t want to be mothers, yet still expecting a “Mother” to look,act,and be a certain way. How is expecting me to restrict my intellectual, social, and political activities because I am not supposed to bring my child anywhere non-child-oriented supposed to benefit feminism? How is that not anti-feminist?
Tiffany & La Lubu: spot on. And I’d like to add that it’s–as far as my experience goes–a specifically AMERICAN white person thing.
Just today, I was thinking about the thread on Pandagon and it occurred to me that I couldn’t imagine those sorts of comments being uttered by anyone in the European countries I’ve lived in. Maybe I’m just not integrated enough into UK society, but apart from a continuing media insistence on demonising working mothers (which, btw, I’ve not heard echoed much in real-life conversations), none of this stuff seems to crop up.
I have to make a bit of a correction there: whatever makes big news in the US does get at least mentioned in the UK media, but I honestly have never had any sorts of real-life conversations about “whether it’s ok to be child neutral/negative/whatever”. I’ve not tried it, but I imagine that if you tried to bring it up, people where I live would look at you like you were from Mars.