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Feminist Author Claims Exposing Minority Sexism is Racist
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On October 30, 2014 @ 11:03 am In The Point | 24 Comments
This viral video of a woman walking around New York City and being harassed by men has been making the rounds of all the usual sites.
“Not a day goes by when I don’t experience this,” Roberts told NBC. Her experience isn’t unusual. Many women experience street harassment in the form of catcalls, winks or even simple greetings like “hello” that take on a different meaning when they come from a stranger staring at your breasts.
There’s a problem with the video though. Most of the men doing the harassing are minorities. That’s all the more striking because the video seems to be mostly set in Manhattan where only 13 percent of the population is black and less than 20 percent is Latino. (Not coincidentally, Manhattan is also the most expensive place to live in the city.)
So Hannah Rosin, a radical feminist and author of The End of Men decided to jump in and remind us that today’s feminism has nothing to do with helping women and a lot to do with pushing the assorted radical agendas of the left.
On Tuesday, Slate and everyone else posted a video of a woman who is harassed more than 100 times by men as she walks around New York City for ten hours. More specifically, it’s a video of a young white woman who is harassed by mostly black and Latino men as she walks around New York City for ten hours. The one dude who turns around and says, “Nice,” is white, but the guys who do the most egregious things—like the one who harangues her, “Somebody’s acknowledging you for being beautiful! You should say thank you more,” or the one who follows her down the street too closely for five whole minutes—are not.
…the video also unintentionally makes another point, that harassers are mostly black and Latino, and hanging out on the streets in midday in clothes that suggest they are not on their lunch break. As Roxane Gay tweeted, “The racial politics of the video are f___d up. Like, she didn’t walk through any white neighborhoods?”
Actually she seems to be walking through mostly a lot of neighborhoods. She walks around Soho which has a lot of white gay men and hipsters. But the real problem is that the video exposed a reality that the promoters didn’t want discussed.
He wrote, “we got a fair amount of white guys, but for whatever reason, a lot of what they said was in passing, or off camera” or was ruined by a siren or other noise. The final product, he writes, “is not a perfect representation of everything that happened.” That may be true but if you find yourself editing out all the catcalling white guys, maybe you should try another take.
What Bliss obviously isn’t saying is that the white guys were edited out because their material was underwhelming. Sexual harassment and assorted misbehaviors are not distributed evenly across races.
But he can’t say that which leaves him open to accusations of being a racist. That’s the usual pattern. If you can’t tell the truth, you have no defense against a smear.
But the whole thing is a reminder that while feminism was important, the thing called “feminism” today is leftist politics featuring bizarre outbursts of hate which have nothing to do with supporting women. In the debate over groups such as Women Against Feminism, feminists trot out a dictionary definition of feminism as equality that has nothing to do with feminism in reality. That’s what Rosin reminds us of.
The activists of the left operate around a Victim Value Index that determines which groups get priority. Black people have always come ahead of women in the Victim Value Index. That was true during the debate about voting rights. It’s still true today.
Black men got the vote before white women did, and that very issue led to a heated debate over universal suffrage in the Fourteenth Amendment, which was written to include black men, but exclude women. Suffragists were told in Fredrick Douglass’ words, “This is the Negro’s hour.” To explain why that was the hour on the clock, Douglass brought out what would become the Victim Value Index.
“When women because they are women are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts… then they will have the urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own,” Douglass sneered. Women had been dragged out of their homes and subjected to horrors because they were women for far longer than the brief few centuries of African slavery in America, but Douglass’ real point was, “My suffering beats your suffering, so my rights beat your rights.” In contemporary progressivism this is expressed in the sneering “White Women’s Tears” meme.
So you can make a video about the harassment of women, just don’t talk about black men. You can condemn rape culture, as long as you limit it to white Ivy League men and don’t talk about hip hop or rape rates in minority communities. There are subjects that feminists place off limits because they aren’t there for women’s causes, their true allegiance is to the larger agenda of the left.
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