Confronting Race and Second Wave Feminism

This year the Omega Institute held another Women and Power Conference, with the theme of "Communicating Across the Generations." Thanks to a notice at Feministing, I got word that Omega was giving out scholarships to attend and I was one of the lucky recipients. I went in being pretty sure that it was going to be three days of hugging, possible hand-holding and trying to re-energize the second wave feminist movement for every generation of woman. And guess what, readers? I was right.

I don't want to get critical before pointing out that there was a lot to be taken away from the range of influential women that spoke at the conference. Gloria Steinem, Isabel Allende, Liza Donnelly, Sarah Jones, Helen Thomas and the Feministing staff were just a few of the names there.

And they all provided something valuable in a larger conversation about the importance of empowering women, continuing to fight for feminist justice in the U.S. and around the world, and finding ways to support one another through that kind of struggle without attempting to "save one another."

I think Steinem was why so many of the women were there, and I can understand that. But I couldn't help but cringe when she started talking about how race didn't exist and that's been proven by biology. While she isn't wrong, she's ignoring that race has been created through social construction and centuries of oppression.

Steinem also pointed out what I, as a 23-year-old woman of color, had forgotten: to call the second wave feminist movement a white, middle-class movement is unfair because there were women of color and lesbian women involved in that work as well. To call it a "white, middle-class" movement is to ignore and silence the work of those women.

Then I remembered why I thought of the second wave the way I did. I looked around the room. I looked at the majority of speakers. Though Steinem called out the work of women of color and queer women, that was about all that was done. No discussion of the intersections of race and gender. No real mention of LGBT activism and its overlap with feminism.

All the work of women of color and queer women didn't matter enough to actually delve into the work of those communities. Real mentions of racial justice and its intersections with feminism were few and far between. A mere mention was apparently enough. I wonder how many other people felt similarly to me -- a woman in her 50s sat with me at lunch to tell me how upset she was that gay marriage wasn't mentioned once.

A young queer activist compared the conference discussions to a tour of a zoo: "There's the work of woman of color over there and gay activism there. But there's no interaction." They both planned to write a letter to Omega. I'm not sure if it will help.

Nina Jacinto is a freelance blogger living in the Bay Area whose writing focuses on issues of race, gender, and media representation. She's a graduate of Pomona College and loves South Asian diaspora narratives, bargain shopping and the internet.