I’m struggling with wanting to express something, and not knowing the best way to do it. I was going to do a live video, but then I’m trying not to post my own stuff this week in order to #amplifymelanatedvoices but I think I can help others by sharing this conversation I had yesterday and how I responded.
“So you are doing a social media blackout on Friday then?”
“Yes I think so, why?”
“I just think it’s all a bit out of proportion, I mean most people aren’t racist.”
“Ok. Trump is the President of the United States, and people voted for him, probably because they agree with what he says- so probably quite a lot are overtly racist, and sexist.”
So at this point, I launched into a monologue that became background noise that fell on deaf ears, and that’s the bit I want to share with people who can and will listen.
As a birth worker and mother, my perspectives have changed rapidly over the past couple of years. I used to think, naively, that feminism was a thing of the past, that there was no need for it since we got the vote, aren’t we equal now?
And then slowly but surely, my reading, combined with my previous education and my own life experiences, finally led me to wake up to the reality that the patriarchal system upholds sexism in our social structures and institutions so insidiously that many of us can go a lifetime without realising that we are part of it. Just because we are not hurling sexist abuse at one another, does not mean that we are not sexist.
Being sexist is not a personality trait, and it is not a personal judgement either. We are culturally conditioned to favour male role models.
We are culturally conditioned to accept our lot as women.
When we dress our children, we play out our cultural conditioning in how they look. When girls can wear dresses and make-up and look pretty and boys can’t, it is because we see girls and women differently to how we see boys and men. When we buy our daughters dolls and toy kitchens without thinking twice, but struggle with the backlash of doing the same for our sons- that is culturally conditioned sexism.
Whenever you hear someone say “Man up” or “stop being a girl” we could notice that much of our language contains male bias, even ‘man’ going to the moon sets a precedent that woman can be excluded from the human race.
Institutional sexism is a bigger problem than the abuse hurling kind. As author Milli Hill says in Give Birth Like a Feminist, “the fish can’t see the water”, so the maternity system as we know it, set up by men who described women as ‘hysterical’ because they owned a womb, based on the patriarchal study of female anatomy and reproduction that blamed and shamed women for their bodies, using the tools created to extract babies during a time when women had no right to say no or walk away- this is the maternity system that we continue to work with and in, meaning those within it often cannot see the harm being done by this setup. By the underlying conditioned belief that women’s bodies cannot possibly function without help, that babies have to be ‘delivered’ and not born, and that ‘good girls’ stay quiet and do as they are told even if it hurts, even if it breaks them.
So if educated and compassionate birth workers do not see the problem with a third of women and birthing people describing their birth as traumatic, if they cannot see that they are contributing towards that physical and mental trauma, then what hope is there?
First, they have to see it, and then they have to act. Hence the reason why so many birth workers choose to work outside the system as independent midwives, and doulas, and I do not doubt that there are many wide awake within the system too.
There is still much work to do and Feminism very much still has a place, it is not a dirty word, and men and boys can be feminists too, I’m raising two of my own.
So imagine then, being of female body and also being black.
What would happen if institutional sexism and institutional racism combined?
Institutional, conditioned racism, not hurling racist abuse, or telling racist jokes but quite literally a whole world colonised by white people, capitalising on black slaves, laws and social structures built by the white male to protect the white male, unseeing of the black and indigenous cultures. If it is so recent in our shared cultural memory to step on black bodies to reach our goals, then this whole reality that we see before us is built on that premise. That white matters more.
I can tell you what happens when institutional sexism and institutional racism combine; it results in black women and black birthing people being FIVE TIMES more likely to die in the perinatal period compared to white women and white birthing people.
Asian women and Asian birthing people being THREE TIMES more likely to die in the perinatal period compared to white women and white birthing people.
So during a pandemic, when already in the US black people are dying at THREE TIMES the rate of white people, and in the UK your ethnicity can double your chances of dying from Covid-19, it is time to stop saying or thinking, “I’m not racist”, and allow your eyes to be opened, it’s not a personal judgement of you, it is a representation of our inherited societal backdrop, and it is killing people.
