[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img] My husband left the house angry this morning. His firm had instituted a “women’s initiative,” ostensibly as part of a larger “diversity initiative” to address women’s attrition in law.
The goal being laudable, the women’s initiative itself wasn’t so much what bothered him. An e-mail was sent naming the point people in each office who would carry the torch nationwide.
Unsurprisingly, they are all women, but every single one of the women is white. He was upset at the purported conflation of diversity and white women’s issues, only for the firm to conveniently forget about the diversity goal when it came to advancing the objectives of the latter group. If not a single non-white woman could be identified to serve as a point person, it seemed obvious to my husband that the firm ought to be addressing its broader diversity issues before catering to the ostensible needs of the white women more readily identified and already achieving broader success at the firm.
I didn’t find this as shocking as he because I know, first-hand, that legal employers are not known for diversity. It happens all the time. It’s why, if I use labels at all, I call myself a womanist. Let me explain.
Face-to-Face with Sexism
I wouldn’t say I have led an idyllic life, but I rarely experienced sexism when I was a child. With the exception of my boy-favoring grandmother who took my boy cousins fishing and bought them those really cool Hess trucks I dearly coveted, I felt I was treated the same way boys were.
My first real experience with sexism occurred when I attended Hampton University, a historically black college in southeastern Virginia. And yes, Ms. Pfotenhauer, it was the real Virginia – gun-toting peanut farmers and all.
First, there was the freshman curfew policy. Yes, a curfew in the 1990s. I hadn’t ever had a curfew, so this was all new to me. The policy was explained as one that ‘protected’ young women. If we were home at a certain time, the Hampton administration surmised, we could stay out of trouble (read sex). In theory, it could work, but the young men at our school, ironically, had no curfew. Our dorms were promptly locked at 11 (1 o’clock on the weekends), and we had no key.
In an era before cell phones, or even individual room phones, you had to make arrangements for someone to let you in – or you had to find somewhere to sleep. And the freshman boys’ dorms were unlocked 24 hours a day – so it’s no stretch to imagine where curfew-breakers made their bed.
Did They Deserve Special Treatment?
Then there was the fact that the male students were treated like little princes. They could do no wrong. Part of the reason, someone explained to me, was that the ratio of women to men, two to one at my university, made each African American man who’d made it to college a precious part of the community that we had to support. That sounded like a bunch of BS to me.
And there were policies that required pregnant students to be “separated” from the university – where fathers of these soon-to-be babies didn’t suffer the same fate. I remember a woman down the hall falling victim to this rule – crying as she packed up her belongings. No similarly teary scene played out on the other side of campus. And don’t get me started on visitation policies with the “open doors” and “at least one foot on the floor.”
Naively, I had assumed with my classmates and I having the shared experience of growing up black in America, we would be of one mind about the demon we had to fight. But I was wrong. Fighting among the sexes took a front seat to issues I perceived had greater importance, like high proportions of poor and minority soldiers going off to fight the first Bushes’ Gulf War. I felt like I’d fallen into a 1950s novel. But it wasn’t fiction. It was real, and I was outta there.
Change, Yes, but for the Better?
It was with more savvy (or so I thought) that I picked my next college. Enrollment of students who shared gender would eliminate at least one issue of bias. And for the most part, I was right. The administration didn’t seem obsessed with bad girls and sexual peccadilloes. But at Smith, I quickly parted ways with the term feminist because feminism came with a heaping dose of racism.
Students and professors constantly equated the struggle of “women” with the struggle of white women. How many times did I have to hear about the struggles women entering the workforce? I reminded my uninformed classmates (and poorly educated professors) that my mother, grandmother and ancestors before them always worked. Always. Mostly involuntarily. Too often I had to point out that my relatives went to work in their homes (a dawning realization would often begin to appear, like a light bulb above their heads), with my relatives, like so many other black women, often sacrificing their own children so the sorely work-deprived white women could fan themselves or go shopping.
Shared gender like shared race years before, did not quite forge the bond I had imagined. And the endless slights my white women counterparts perceived in their paternalistic world were beyond my vision. I don’t know what world Hillary Clinton or her acolytes inhabit, because after Hampton, my sex has never been my problem. Men, I learned weren’t the enemy.
Finally Figuring Out the Other Side
From those years on, it’s been us and them (black and white). Whether it has been with other students or with administrators, or with women in the workplace, my relationships have been strained. Over the past decade, I’ve learned that a job interview with a white woman is going nowhere – fast. More than any man I’ve ever met, black or white, white women question everything about me. Why don’t I have children? they ask illegally. Am I going to quit if I do? Am I going to take their job or their husband? Despite my education and accomplishments, I get treated like the local “round the way” girl who has no work ethic and will soil their pristine workplace with baby, daddy and childcare issues around the clock.
The only job offers I’ve ever received have been from white men. (Maybe people of color would be more forthcoming in hiring someone like me, but I’ve only met one non-white person in a position to hire during my 13 years of interviewing). A friend suggested to me that this is because they want to sleep with me. If that’s what it takes—the fantasy, that is—then so be it. It has never required any follow-through. I’m certainly not above using a little cleavage to get free car repairs or a discount from the local grocer.
To the detriment of our country, affirmative action has died a quiet death in America. Even employer-led “diversity” seems to be served by addressing the most vocal “minority” actually already in the workplace. White women. This leaves blacks in the lurch, aside from a few tokens, because our issues are not the issues of white women – the primary recipients of affirmative action today.
People like me face oppression and otherness. We’re segregated in schools, in church and where we live. We’re perceived as lazy, criminally inclined, unintelligent folks who would do anything to get over. Even when we have great credentials or accomplishments, it is often assumed that we took them away from better deserving white folks, passed over by unfair affirmative action policies. Overcoming any or all of those prejudices to enter the workplace, thrive and succeed takes a lot of work on our parts, and some acknowledgement from gatekeepers that there remains a problem.
White women, in sharp contrast, have the ultimate inside track for “change from within.” After all, they’re the mothers, sisters, daughters and wives of their oppressors. Indeed, for all the demands for workplace flexibility, I have seen few white women make similar demands on their spouses. Apparently, employers need to change because too many white women choose to marry chauvinists who can’t pick up the kids, cook dinner, or stop by the dry cleaners.
I think white women need to look in the mirror, because the enemy is them.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. She's a reformed lawyer, and full time novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course.This will mark the debut of our newest, and perhaps most charismatic, weekly essayist. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com.
