[For this year’s annual non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight moments when important and in many ways impressive Americans gave in to white supremacist prejudices, modeling the worst of our national community in the process. Got grievances of your own to air, about anything and everything? Share ‘em for a therapeutic crowd-sourced post, please!]
On a
collective and an individual frustration with an inspiring figure’s worst
quote.
In a long-ago
column for my gig at Talking Points Memo on white feminism’s frequently and
frustratingly racist histories, I highlighted a particularly crappy
line from legendary suffrage activist Susan B. Anthony: “I will cut off
this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the
Negro and not the woman.” Check out both that hyperlinked column of mine and
that excellent hyperlinked story on race and the suffrage movement if you
would, and then come on back for a couple further thoughts on this quote and
moment.
Welcome
back! As I traced in that column, far too often both particular activist
organizations and the suffrage movement as a whole echoed Anthony’s perspective
and excluded
African Americans. And that’s a significant layer to what makes that
perspectives so profoundly frustrating and counter-productive—as with so many
issues in American history (indeed, as with all of them, like all
of our history overall), there was no actual way to separate out African
Americans from the community as a whole, as African American women were just as
much part of the push for women’s suffrage as any other group. The only
possible arguments for treating race and gender as separate came
down to blatant racism and white supremacy, and for a movement dedicated to
equality and justice to endorse those ideologies so consistently and fully was
nothing short of tragic.
It’s also
tragic, on a smaller but not insignificant scale, that a figure as impressive
as Susan B. Anthony took part in those practices and perspectives. I know that
she knew better, especially when it comes to her long-term relationship with
Frederick Douglass, to whom she was connected through their
shared community of Rochester among many other ways. As I highlighted in
this post, right at the end of Douglass’ life (literally on his last day),
he and Anthony met to try to bury the hatchet and strategize about the women’s
rights movement of which he was such a lifelong ally. But as far as I’ve seen,
Anthony never publicly took back her quote about race and suffrage, and she
certainly never became a public advocate for African American voting rights (in
the way, again, that Douglass was such an impassioned advocate of women’s
voting rights). That makes this one telling quote an even more frustrating non-favorite
moment for sure.
Next
non-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other non-favorites (of any and all types) you’d share?
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