The Atlantic Article, Trickle-Down Feminism, And My Twitter Mentions. God Help Us All.

By Guest Contributor Tressie McMillan Cottom, cross-posted from TressieMC

Courtesy: kveller.com

This is one of those posts that can go nowhere but down.

There are things you simply cannot do in this life and slaying unicorns is one of them.

What do I mean by “slaying unicorns”? It’s an old Livejournal term. It means providing evidence that one’s sacred emotional belief or object is either not a) universal b) all that great or c) grounded in reality or supported by empirical evidence.

I am really, really bad about this. I tend to slay unicorns even when I only mean to make an observation or intend to honor my own truth or even when I just mean to get through the day. I end up slaying unicorns way more than I’d like. My hands are filthy with their rainbow blood.

So, I wanted to leave alone The Atlantic article about women having it all.

An initial tentative reaction about not seeing my experience as a black woman in the article provoked such passionate responses that my mentions on Twitter took two days to recover. And, I don’t mean the responses that disagreed with me. I mean I got tweets that charged me with not being a feminist or not understanding because I don’t have children and one lovely message that seemed to intimate that I was just too stupid to “get it”.

I decided to leave that unicorn alone.

But that did not mean that I did not want to make sense of it myself. After a great deal of thinking I think I can finally articulate my reaction and I owe much of that process to this tweet:

I’m a Reagan baby. You can’t say “trickle-down” to me and not evoke a response.

I went back and re-read The Atlantic article. I’ll try to take my thought process step-by-step in an effort to do minimal damage to the unicorn.

First, I do not have an emotional connection to the piece. That cannot be overstated because a great deal of its value to some of the readers, as far as I can discern, is grounded in the fact that it evoked an emotional response. Much of that appears to be rooted in relief that someone is validating their experiences. I get that. It is valuable. However, if it is important to the article’s value to its many, many supporters then it is important to note that I did not have that experience.

It could be race, class, or experience (I’ll get to that later) but I don’t have fond memories of attending the Seven Sisters or an experience of being told that I should want or have “it all.” It truly never occurred to me that so many others did. Again, as someone pointed out, I may have been too poor to get it. I will own that.

In exchange, I ask others to consider that as much as it is about class status or race or background that one’s visceral reaction to the article is about his or her individual relationship with power. That’s not exactly about race or class; that’s about ideological orientation.

I do not aspire to power. I do aspire to do well and to do good, but I am somewhat ambivalent about power. That is a result of my upbringing, but it is also a result of the many small decisions I have made during my emotional and intellectual development about who I am in relation to power. I will also admit that is greatly shaped by social processes that limit the potential of my access to power. Whether I am accepting those or asserting my own agency is unclear but, either way, I know that fat, black, southern bodies that went to low-status schools and come from rural, formerly enslaved people have limited avenues into power.

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