Dalit feminism and Black feminism
“I have been associated with the Indian feminist movement since the 1970s. Let me tell you something: women in the women’s movement lack a good understanding of feminism. Feminism opposes all kinds of inequalities and injustices. It looks for equality between men and women. In such a circumstance, it is required of feminism to see caste as an inequality, as an institution of inequality. Then why do the feminists not refuse and resist caste? This was a big question for me. Next, if you look at the question of mobilization in the women’s movement you can see that poor working women, women agricultural labourers, Dalit women and Adivasi women are the ones who attend meetings in large numbers. But they aren’t given leadership roles, perhaps because there are not many educated women from these sections. Even if these women have the capacity to run a movement, they are not given the responsibility. They are only seen as followers. Was this not casteist? And these two questions troubled me no end.”
“I was looking at why these Black women were organizing themselves differently. Why were they separate? Then, I understood the racist notions of purity and pollution that operates there. Just like our situation, the Black women don’t have leadership in the mainstream women’s movement. The White women were not going to solve the problems of Black women. Black women had their own struggles; they had their own history of resistance… They not only wrote about the racist inequality, but they spoke about the class struggle, they outlined the economic oppression, the absence of land and resources. There are so many connections between the Dalits and the Blacks.”
The connection between women in different countries and in different movements caught my attention (I am a poc based in the US). I recently dropped a class called “Women and Gender in South Asia” because I didn’t feel like dealing with the spectacularly orientalist comments certain types of people spouted – but one of the things that I noticed early on from the readings was the similarity between the dynamics of upper-caste feminism and US white feminism, with the marginalization of dalit and black women among gender-based and caste/race-based movements, and the way certain feminist politics can be twisted to contribute to the characterization of subaltern men as violent thugs while letting the men with status off the hook.
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