White-fem is antiblack

Crenshaw then goes on to examine how black women's lack of fit with this dominant approach to defining discrimination provides less than desir able outcomes. The law reflects the reality of the most "privileged" members of legally recognized classes (151). According to her, the top-down, "but-for" (151) approach fails, because "[i]f Black women cannot conclusively say that 'but for' their race or 'but for' their gender they would be treated differently, they are not invited to climb through the hatch but told to wait in the unprotected margin until they can be absorbed into the broader, protected categories of race and sex" (152). For black women who are assailed by sexism and racism (again, sometimes in ways that resemble their impact on other groups, sometimes in ways that are compounded, or sometimes based on black women as a separate class), the law is inept. In one notable case, DeGraffenreid, for instance, the court decided that antidiscrimination law did not provide for a "super-remedy" that combined consideration of both race and sex discrimination for black women qua black women as advanced by the plaintiffs (141). The law is too narrow to address a bottom-up approach, emanating from the perspective of black women at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Just as it prohibits the application of the law to black women's discrimina tion and thereby reproduces institutional racism and sexism, this top-down approach affirms a dominant feminist praxis that universalizes white female experience as that of all women and abets white women's avoidance of their investments in racism. Echoing criticisms of other black feminists, Crenshaw observes that white feminists often speak for women qua women in ways that deny the specificity of black women's lives. White feminists' discussions of rape, for instance, have often been ill-fitted for black women's circumstances, according to Crenshaw; white feminists who pointed to rape laws as a means of securing female virtue fail to comprehend the implicit centering of the white experience in these positions (157-58). Black women's virtue or "chastity" was something that early rape law never had as a goal (ibid.). Indeed, Crenshaw notes that mainstream feminism's single-axis approach fails to relay how rape constituted "racial terrorism]" against black communities, and that the law aided and abetted white male access to black women's bodies (158). This top-down, single-axis focus Crenshaw derides is problematic because it also centers analyses of racism's impact on black men, leaving in the shadows black women who are doubly disadvantaged by sexism and racism. Within black communities, racism is read as the principal threat to blacks' well-being. In this light, black women who address sexism are often at cross-purposes with stated community interests geared toward fighting racism, and they are left with little support in fighting pernicious patriarchal practices.

White fem is antiblack pt 2.

Alexander-Floyd 12- Nikol Alexander-Floyd is a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post—Black Feminist Era” https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23275087.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A6a20d1d1a0754eca7f223b88005cb6f4&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1

In "Mapping the Margins," Crenshaw (1990-91) further elaborates her theory of intersectionality by examining three forms of intersectionality— structural, political, and representational—in the context of violence against women of color. Structural intersectionality refers to the complex ways in which deeply embedded inequalities not only amplify, but also uniquely define, women of color's confrontations with both sexism and racism. Crenshaw observes that structural intersectionality occurs, for instance, when women of color are targets of domestic violence. According to her, most shelters confront "physical assault," but not the assault of poverty, un- or underemployment, or other underly ing forms of oppression that curtail women of color's ability to escape abuse (1245-46). Similarly, political intersectionality is evident in the persistence of antiracist and feminist social activism that adopts a singular focus on black men and white women, respectively. This single-axis approach generates discursive framings for political agitation that not only fail to address how racism and sexism impact black women, but also distort our understanding of racism and sexism. Finally, representational intersectionality identifies the ways in which cultural representations of black women condone violence against black women and the lack of response thereto. The objectification and hypersexual ization of black women in music, television, and other cultural outlets are commonplace. Even when controversies develop surrounding these cultural images, they can often provide the basis for policing black male behavior in order to protect white women, as opposed to alleviating black women's subjugation through these images. Crenshaw deals with a range of illustrations of each form of intersection ality and their attendant rhetorical strategies, but she identifies two that are particularly relevant to this discussion. I have named these strategies that she identifies as the "universalizing tendency" and the "bait-and-switch" in order to provide a shorthand way of discussing them, further clarify their operation, and build on Crenshaw's insights. Both the universalizing tendency and the bait-and-switch rhetorical strategies work to further marginalize women of color. First, the universalizing tendency occurs when activists or other political actors suggest that a particular issue goes beyond the experience of women of color and is relevant to a broader community of women, the effect of which is to typically highlight the plight of white women and not that of black women. In one poignant example, for instance, Crenshaw (1990-91) takes to task those who argue the case that domestic violence is not "only" a minority issue. When advocates, such as U.S. Senator David Boren, argue that this issue "affects . . . our wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and colleagues," they lay claim to the validity of this suffering as it impacts white female subjects (1260). In such cases, black women are either sidelined and/or included in a "tokenistic" manner (1260-61). They are, in effect (consciously or unconsciously), used as a pretext for talking about white females Conversely, in the second rhetorical strategy, the bait-and-switch, black women are focused on, but only to make visible white female suffering. This occurs, for instance, in the case of the infamous 2 Live Crew controversy, where this rap group was singled out for obscenity charges. When commentators like George Will lament what this group's lyrics portend for black women, they do so only as a means to ultimately highlight its implications for white women (Crenshaw 1990-91, 1290-92). Here, black women stand as a proxy for would be white victims.