Wonder Woman is a fantastic movie. My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed it and I want to take my oldest kid to go see it soon. It was nice to see a female superhero get a great movie for a change, something I’ve actually craved for a while. That may be surprising considering my anti-SJW bonafides here on the pages of PJ Media, but it’s true.
It’s been unsurprising that many feminists have embraced her as their own. After all, she’s a woman fighting a war at a time when the patriarchy was actually a very real thing…and kicking more butt than any man in the movie in the process.
What is unfortunate is that for some people, even that isn’t enough. Arielle Iniko Newton begins this piece about the movie at Essense with:
Author’s Note: If you ain’t a Black woman or femme, this conversation ain’t for you.
Yes, that’s actually how this dreck starts out. Frankly, with an invitation like that, how can a white cis male such as myself refuse?
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why race relations will never get any better. If white women aren’t able to discuss how something like Wonder Woman is a positive step forward for women as a whole (and they’ll need to, just wait) then you’ve given those same white women license to ignore whatever you think. After all, turnabout is fair play.
Wonder Woman shattered box office records this weekend, due in part to the promotion carried by mainstream feminism, but also Black women who championed the DC superhero film to their large audiences. Black women like Ava DuVernay, Kerry Washington, and Lupita Nyong’o made public their delight in seeing the film starring Gal Gadot and Patty Jenkins (both of whom are White women) surpass expectations and reel in over $100 million in a matter of days.
When I first saw these iconic Black women express their laudations of Gal Gadot, who is pro-Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and a former combat trainer with direct ties to the oppression of Palestinian people, I thought of the longstanding and tacit requisite of upward mobility that requires Black people to distance themselves or abandon those of us without social influence, political clout, or financial security. I think about how we are left to scurry for scraps as we survive in a White supremacist world that sees us as disposable while our faves engage in behaviors that are antithetical to our Liberation.
Well, of course, Gadot is pro-IDF. She’s an IDF veteran and an Israeli citizen. Of course she opposes the people who launch rockets into Israel and have a history of setting off car bombs designed to kill Israeli citizens.
Again, she’s Israeli. She’s from a nation that is literally surrounded by enemies, many of whom have said they want to see her entire people exterminated.
I can’t say that I blame her for those positions. She continues:
I care little about Wonder Woman and if this film should qualify in its potential to empower Black women and femmes. Black women and femmes can do and feel whatever the fuck we want without scrutiny. Instead, I am unnerved by Gal Gadot and how she is poised to become the next White superstar whose problematic herstory is overlooked because any “progress” White women make in amassing wealth is sacrosanct.
And there’s the money quote.
In other words, unless black women make huge sums of money, there has been no progress for women as a whole. None.
Which is laughable.
I hate to break it to people like this, but blacks equate to 12.6 percent of the population. If you add in mixed race individuals with at least partial black heritage, you get a whopping 13.5 percent. If you assume that half of those are women, then you can see that black women represent less than seven percent of the American population.
That means that progress for women will obviously manifest more prominently in white women. After all, whites still account for 72.4 percent of the American public. That means white women alone make up 36.2 percent of the population, making theirs twice as large as the black population. That means it makes sense that white women would make up the lion’s share of the trailblazers for women.
By resenting that fact, the writer betrays her poor understanding of reality. Luckily, it gives us something to mock until the next showing of Wonder Woman.
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