Gender Wage Inequality Is White Feminist BS
Patricia Arquette’s Oscar acceptance speech imploring for wage equality was met with applause by her peers, including Meryl Streep. However, as The Frisky told you yesterday, her backstage interview — which was reasonably referred to as “tone deaf” where racial politics are concerned — attracted negative attention and response. To recap, this is what she said:
“It’s time for women. Equal means equal. The truth is the older women get, the less money they make. The highest percentage of children living in poverty are in female-headed households. It’s inexcusable that we go around the world and we talk about equal rights for women in other countries and we don’t. One of those superior court justices said two years ago in a law speech at a university that we don’t have equal rights for women in America and we don’t because when they wrote Constitution, they didn’t intend it for women. So the truth is even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America right under the surface there are huge issues at play that really do affect women. It’s time for all the women in America, and all the men that love women and all the gay people and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”
Now firstly, let’s get this straight: Arquette is an actress and she is also imperfect. We must not forget that her words, well-intentioned but problematic though they may be, were merely an entry point to a much-need conversation about wage inequality. It is up to us to expand on and continue the conversation she attempted to begin. So let’s go ahead and do that.
In truth, America does have a wage gap problem that needs to be explored. And that problem can, indeed, be labeled a “gender-based” problem. However, the biggest wage gaps are interracial and not necessarily gender-specific. In order to truly delve into the issue, here are some highlights from the U.S. Bureau Labor of Statistics 2013 December Report:
Asian men out earned all other demographics, with a weekly median earning of $1,059. In comparison, White men earned $884, Black men $664 and Hispanic or Latino men earned $594.
Asian women and White women (with weekly median earnings of $819 and $722 respectively) earned more than Black men and Hispanic men.
Black women and Hispanic women had the lowest median incomes earning $606 and $541, respectively.
While it is true that, as a whole, women still struggle to earn as much as their male counterparts, the largest income gaps are race specific. Only when we compare male-to-female differences in income among individuals of the same race does a gender-specific gap even become worthy of talking about. After all, I would much rather be a White woman and have a weekly earning of $722, than be a Hispanic man who earns $594 in that same time period.
In fact, according to the report, “Earnings growth has been greatest for White women, outpacing that of their Black and Hispanic counterparts. Between 1979 and 2013, inflation-adjusted earnings (also called constant-dollar earnings) rose by 31 percent for White women, compared with an increase of 20 percent for Black women and 15 percent for Hispanic women.”
http://www.thefrisky.com/2015-02-24/the-soapbox-heres-why-closing-the-gender-wage-gap-is-a-white-feminist-issue/
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Response to Sheelanagig (Reply #2)
Not when according to your own stats, women of color make less than men of color. The way statistics work-- add it all up and women make less than men across the board. Period
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Response to ismnotwasm (Reply #7)
Response to draytontiffanie (Original post)
Last edited Mon May 2, 2016, 07:18 AM - Edit history (1)
And unlike the gender gap, race gaps are manifestly uncompensated. That is, ethnic minorities possess nothing like the female's sexual capital, which compels many a man to surrender his bonus pennies, together with the rest of his dollar, as quickly as they're earned. To ignore such moments is analogous to ignoring that the slave serves the master and concluding from the former's greater consumption of food (servitude's fuel) that the slave has the advantage.
Indeed, overall gender inequality, by the only non-arbitrary measure (fecundity, which, as mother of all desires, reigns regardless of whether we list it among our goals), is an obvious impossibility. That's why it is precisely in patriarchies that we find, if we care to look, males at the bottom. And the more extreme the patriarchy, the more miserable is the omega male's state in relation to the female. But instead, we focus on the top: the maned idler the exploiter of lioness industry, ignoring that the typical male lion not only commands no harem, but, betrayed even by his own mother, is denied by the patriarch-female alliance even a decent opportunity to hunt. It is similar with humans, for instance prisons teeming with predominantly male slave labor, an issue we'll get to once every fabricated category of wage labor earns exactly as much per head as its negative.
Then again, there is an elephant in the room. It isn't any of the infinite subclasses of wage labor we may pit in jealous opposition to each other, dividing per chance to conquer. It is rather the class that, besides wage laborers, defines wage labor: the capitalist. He (the masculine pronoun is deliberate, rent's gender gap putting that of work to shame), who, in his capacity as capitalist, does no work, thereby "earns" infinitely more per quantum of work (the general form of the feminist "for equal work"
than the wage laborer or any of the subcategories we may impose upon wage labor. What's the same, the wage laborer earns 0 cents to the capitalist's dollar per quantum of work.
And unlike stances on issues, in which one's stock of stances is as inexhaustible as it is impotent, movements must be economical. Time and effort spent cannibalizing our fellow workers' wages on the basis of random trait inequity is time and effort not spent reclaiming that vast part of our product that hides in profits. In times of chattel slavery, the abolitionist does not bother about the quantity of food received by the female chattel in relation to the male. The abolitionist does not accuse the master of prejudicial notions of female productivity relative to male. The abolitionist does not theorize that the female slave draws too gingerly from the trough as a result of low esteem owing to the subordinate status of women in African societies. The abolitionist is too busy being an abolitionist. Be an abolitionist.
