There was an Internet storm about the interview immediately after we came off air. Some people were as shocked at this assertion as I was. Others were convinced that I was a liar and a bully who had been waging a war against Caroline online – not true – and that by balking at her intervention, I was playing the victim. I hadn’t wanted to at first, but after some encouragement from friends, a few hours later I wrote a short blog post clarifying what went on.
Think about the last time you heard a comprehensive description of the nature of structural racism in the mainstream media, I wrote. These issues just don’t get the kind of airtime that feminism does in the UK press. Think hard about the last time you heard a person of colour challenge the virulently racist rhetoric around immigration in this country, or just state the plain fact that structural racism prevails because white people are treated more favourably in the society we live in. I was afforded the opportunity to do this live, on national radio. I didn’t take it lightly.
After a concerted effort from many a white woman to portray black feminist thought as destructive and divisive, I’m aware that accepting these media requests is a double-edged sword. It was Audre Lorde who said: ‘If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.’ Though it sometimes feels like I am entering into a trap, I’m hyper-aware that if I don’t accept these opportunities, black feminism will be mischaracterised and misrepresented by the priorities of the white feminists taking part in the conversation . . . I’m tired of this tribal deadlock. I meant what I said on the programme: the only way to foster any shared solidarity is to learn from each other’s struggles, and recognise the various privileges and disadvantages that we all enter the movement with.
Caroline apologised in the early evening, writing on Twitter: ‘I just wanted to apologise if this am it came across at all like I was suggesting the abuse is something you have been party to. I didn’t mean to imply that at all, but I can see that given I responded to your comment, it might have seemed like that. I didn’t want to suggest I have ever felt abused by you – I haven’t, because of course you haven’t abused me. I just wanted to take the opportunity to talk about abuse I have experienced and how damaging I think it is, because I think it needs to stop. But perhaps could have picked a better moment/way of saying it. So am sorry for that.’
Despite her apology, the day got worse.
The former Conservative MP and self-fashioned right-wing feminist Louise Mensch saw fit to swoop in and support Caroline. She began to tweet at me. ‘Reni was wrong and Caroline was wrong to give in to her bullying. I wouldn’t have.’ I told her she was stirring. She responded: ‘I would hope that I am stirring against your frankly disgraceful attitude and I am not lying. You are bullying, trying to silence.’2
For the crime of daring to suggest that racism is still a problem in Britain, I had been smeared by a former Member of Parliament. Simply using my voice was tantamount to being a bullying disgrace. Old racist stereotypes were being resurrected, and I found myself on the receiving end of them. I was a social problem, a disruptive force, a tragic example of a problem community.
Years later, while writing this book, I contacted Caroline Criado-Perez in the hope of getting her perspective on the Woman’s Hour debacle. She didn’t want to speak to me about it.
Even though I write about my experiences with so much contempt, feminism was my first love. It was what gave me a framework to begin understanding the world. My feminist thinking gave rise to my anti-racist thinking, serving as a tool that helped me forge a sense of self-worth. Finding it aged nineteen was perfect timing, equipping me with the skills to navigate adulthood, stand up for myself and work out my own values.
I found feminism a few years before the Twitter and Tumblr generation really took off. It happened in a rather old-fashioned way. As an English literature student, I’d been assigned a stack of books to read for a module on critical theory, which led me to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. As unlikely a situation as it was, the book spoke to me, and I found myself furiously agreeing with the long-dead French existentialist. When she wrote, ‘To be feminine is to show oneself as weak, futile, passive, and docile . . . any self-assertion will take away from her femininity and her seductiveness,’ it sounded like she was describing my entire existence.
I couldn’t find any people in my immediate vicinity who agreed, though. Criticising the misogyny in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew in a university seminar drew disapproval from my peers, with the majority of my female classmates concluding that ‘that’s just how it was at the time’. So I sought out feminism elsewhere, spending my student loan money on travel to feminist conferences and events happening around the country. During those years, I met tons of inspiring and passionate women, some who are still my good friends today. Being at feminist events was a relief; to be in a space where people just got it – the shared anger, frustration, the burning will to do something, anything, to change the messed-up world we live in. This passion took me to tiny, draughty church halls in little villages in the north-west of England, huddled in a circle surrounded by women my mum’s age, and on trains to London, to huge gatherings packed to the brim with hundreds of women – young and old, some new to the movement and some who’d been engaged in activism longer than I’d been alive.
But something wasn’t quite right. Feminism was helping me to become a more critical, confident woman, and in turn, it was helping me come to terms with my blackness – a part of myself that I’d always known was shrouded in stigma. I’d grown up with white friends who had assured me that they ‘didn’t see me as black’, and that I ‘wasn’t like other black people’. Up until then, I’d understood myself as someone who was ‘pretty for a black girl’, as someone who ‘spoke well for where she came from’. I couldn’t quite understand why these distinctions were made, but I had a feeling it was to do with class, education – and latent racism. The feminist circles I’d thrown myself into were almost all white. This whiteness wasn’t a problem if you didn’t talk about race, but if you did, it would reveal itself as an exclusionary force.
A lot of white women in feminist spaces couldn’t understand why women of colour needed or wanted a different place to meet, so they would find ways of subtly undermining the self-determination of those who chose to organise separately. At one feminist gathering, there were paper sign-up sheets for every break-out session, designed to keep tabs on the numbers of people attending each one. On the sheet for black feminists, someone had taken the time to vandalise it with their ignorance, simply writing: ‘Why?’ At another event, a friend held a break-out session called ‘the colour of beauty’. With a big stack of fashion and beauty magazines piled in front of her, it was a pretty simple premise, aimed at deconstructing Eurocentric beauty standards. It was primary-school level, really – ‘what are the similarities and differences in these pictures?’ As others in my group pointed out the models’ slimness, I, the only black person in my group, said, ‘They’re all white.’ ‘And they’ve all got long hair,’ added a white women eagerly. Laboriously, I explained, ‘Yes, but you can grow out your short hair if you want to. I can’t change the colour of my skin to fit this beauty standard.’ I’m still not sure if she understood what I was saying.
On and on it went like this, tiptoeing around whiteness in feminist spaces. This wasn’t a place to be discussing racism, they insisted. There are other places you can go to for that. But that wasn’t a choice I could make. My blackness was as much a part of me as my womanhood, and I couldn’t separate them.