This past Friday, on April 15, a panel of seven professors, alumnae, and current students, brought together by Professor Joyce Jacobson, discussed “Feminism as Wesleyan since 1970.” The panel was all-white. I am sure that Joyce Jacobson had excellent reasons for not including even a single woman of color on her panel. Students may remember Jacobson from her heartfelt statement that she did not understand how she, as a half-white, half-Asian woman who had lived in communities of color, could become any “more diverse.”
Perhaps Jacobson’s qualifications as one of the most “diverse” women at Wesleyan compensate for the extreme whiteness of the panel. Perhaps she merely forgot that women of color exist at Wesleyan; we blend right in with all the white people. Perhaps women of color are just so invisible that Jacobson couldn’t find any.
Perhaps she felt that on a seven-person panel, she just didn’t have space for even one non-white face. Perhaps she genuinely felt that women of color haven’t made any significant contributions to the history of feminism at Wesleyan in the last 35 years. Second-wave feminism, to which Friday’s panel paid homage, was for the most part a straight, white, upper-middle class women’s movement. However, women of color do NOT have the same experiences as white women, and although there are commonalities, women of color face multiple layers of oppression in white spaces and in our own cultural/racial/ethnic spaces. Additionally, women of color need to be able to claim feminism as something that we have a right to, a theory that we can relate to, and an ideology that we can support. This is not possible when histories of feminist struggles and movements of women of color are erased by white feminists who think that they need to save us from ourselves and from brown men—how is this any better than white men trying to save us from our skin? To their credit, current students Arianna Thompson and Zach Strassburger were not silent on the whiteness of the panel, but the remaining panelists did not even pay lip service to women of color. It saddens me to see that after 30 years, feminism still seems to marked “white-only,” even to “diverse” women like Jacobson.
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