033 Intersectional Feminism & Money: Creators & Educators to Follow

Money Through Ease is proud to share with you some excellent creators and educators who are teaching about race and gender and how having one or more marginalized identities compounds the prejudice someone experiences in our world.

All Ease Accounting’s founder Regan Bashara is focused on supporting and uplifting the voices and work of Black women. Please check out these individuals, support them financially, and quietly take a seat to absorb the learning.

In no specific order:

Dr. Kimberle Crenshaw

Danita Platt

Dr. Nicole Truesdell

Imani Barbarin

Portia Burch (Portia.Noir)

Rebecca a.k.a White Woman Whisperer

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Hey, everybody, it's Regan. I am the host of money through ease and I'm coming to you today with a little bit of a different episode. That's kind of all I've been doing for the past couple of weeks. Some of you know if you listened to the last episode that I was temporarily displaced from my home, which is also my virtual office and podcast recording studio, because of a significant power outage in my area. We finally got power back and that we were able to return to our home. It took me several hours to kind of reset everything and get back into my routine. I had to clean out the fridge because we had, you know, all of the food was spoiled in there. We were without power for five days and it was really inconvenient, but I'm back now and I'm back working and the cicadas are singing in the trees outside and if you hear that, I do apologize. Once again, I'm in Louisiana and there's a lot of nature and bugs and things out here. So today's episode is going to be about intersectional feminism and money. So this topic has been on my mind for a while. I'm constantly thinking about how my work and experience is influenced by systems of oppression. I'm not the one to be teaching anybody about this, so what I'm doing here is sharing with you some resources that I want you to go explore and learn from these educators. They are qualified to teach these topics. This is a very watered-down summary of what I've learned from these advocates over several years. I still have blind spots and ways that I can't see the forest for the trees, but I'm willing to share this imperfect message with you in the hopes that you will go read and watch and think about these issues for yourself. Let's start off by defining intersectional feminism. Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw. From her bio on the Columbia University website, “Kimberle W Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory and race racism, and the law.” Intersectionality describes the simultaneous racial and gender prejudice experienced by Black women. These forms of discrimination overlap and compound on one another. Let's look at money, finance and these financial systems through this intersectional lens. The first subject that I want to talk about is women's labor. There is a creator on TikTok, her name is Danita Platt. And all of this information will be in the show notes. And the conversation about household labor, what value stay at home moms bring to the household, women being socially expected to do all the housework, child rearing, and family planning, even when they are working full time jobs, and the emotional and mental burden of division of household labor is often missing the nuance that this intersectional lens can provide. That's why I enjoy watching the content that Danita Platt shares on her TikTok account. She's having the discussion about how historically Black women were the household laborers who were underpaid and undervalued even after slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment. They were still hired to perform child rearing, cooking, cleaning, and other household management. The conversation about division of labor today is centered around white women's resentment towards the culture that expects them to contribute financially and have a full time job, while also performing all of the care tasks for her family, or at the very least managing the division of these tasks. But the intersectionality allows us to see how centering the white women's perspective erases the contributions and labor that Black women performed for a long period of history, sometimes under duress and coercion. An even broader scope of this argument is that in the United States, if you're a woman, you are more likely to be paid less than a man for the same type of work. Even after adjusting for other factors like level of education or experience. And when we use a critical race lens to evaluate wages, we find that Black, Latina and other women of color make even less than their white counterparts under the same standards. This is born from white supremacy and patriarchy, which insists on the hierarchy of bodies and identities, subjugating groups of people who do not meet the standard of cishet, able-bodied, wealthy, white male. This perpetuates the idea that your labor is somehow less valuable when you exist in a marginalized body. Our capitalist economy is exploitative and extracts our labor. And when your labor and your body is seen as less valuable by the oppressive system, it justifies that exploitation. One of the creators that I follow that teaches about this topic is Dr. Nicole Truesdell. The next topic we're going to cover is on women's pleasure and desires. So, if you have a hobby, you have probably thought about turning that hobby into a side hustle that you need to monetize in order to survive. We are all very aware of the industry of multi-level marketing or direct sales or network marketing. This industry is primarily made-up of women. And features products mostly for women, such as makeup, jewelry, sex toys and athleisure wear. There is also a huge stigma against these companies, which are seen to be preying on women and mothers specific. As if women don't have autonomy and critical thinking skills and are always just going to be the victims. The marketing for a lot of these products and companies tells you that you can turn what you love, like makeup, jewelry, yoga pants, all the things that women are “supposed” to be interested in, into a career. And that you can “girl boss” your way to success. Nothing can exist just for pleasure or fun, and women can't have desires without money being involved in some way. This is because we live in a capitalist global economy where our safety care and livelihoods are based on producing more and requires most of us to work for food, shelter, and healthcare. If you want to be interested in something and have a hobby and you're going to spend all sorts of time on that hobby anyways, you might as well monetize it, right? Because if you don't, then that hobby is just taking away from the time that you could spend managing your household, accelerating your career, raising your children. So, you better make that hobby worth something. Otherwise doing something just for the sake of pleasure would mean that you're selfish. When we look at women's labor versus their pleasures and desires through a critical race lens, we see the stereotypes and caricatures that were part of anti-Black propaganda before and after slavery was abolished in the United States. You have the stereotype of the mammy, who was an enslaved Black woman dutifully serving and committed to her white enslavers. This stereotype was created to suggest that Black women were content to be enslaved and in service of her oppressors. Once again, with the focus on white women's resentment towards their own families’ expectations of them, we are missing the context and history of these racist stereotypes and their impact on Black women. Today, the 3rd and final topic that I want to cover on this episode is disability and money, and the Creator that I want to highlight here is Crutches and Spice. That is her handle. This is a TikTok creator named Imani Barbarin. She is a disability justice advocate who I've learned so much from. She is a Black, disabled, queer woman who teaches us about the intersection of ability and how every form of marginalization disables you. What I've learned from her content is that disabled people can receive benefits just as long as they don't make too much. But disabled people at the same time must spend more money to have access and just to live. They may require mobility aids or other expensive equipment, modifications to their home, and pay more in healthcare costs than somebody who is not chronically disabled. Disabled people in our country and society have had their autonomy taken away and part of that comes from the financial systems and laws that prevent them from exercising their personal agency. There is a barbaric history of institutions that we are not that far removed from. Disabled people, especially women, are at a higher risk for assault and sexual assault, sometimes from their own caregivers and family members. And with our society being largely inaccessible, there are barriers to disability advocacy for the very people who would benefit from systemic accessibility efforts. So to wrap up, I wanted to share the things that I've learned over several years with you because I am always thinking about how these systems of oppression impact what I do. And of course when we live in a capitalist global economy, this always comes down to money and how that gives us access to power. One thing I will not proclaim is that I'm the one to be teaching about these systems and intersections and impact on our society. This is me sharing what I've learned and have been thinking about, but I encourage you to seek out these sources yourself and sit with what is being shared. Often we want to be a part of the conversation immediately when it's more important to absorb the information, thank the person who did the labor of sharing that with us, provide monetary gratitude for their time and effort, and then privately contemplate or journal about what we're learning and what comes up for us. I know that I have blind spots and instead of reacting to what I learn, I take the time to sit with it and observe what comes up for me as I process. So your call to action today will be to do the same. Seek out these creators that I've shared and follow, listen, support them, and then wait before speaking. Here's those folks to go follow in no particular order, except how this is just how I presented them on this podcast episode, that would be Doctor Kimberly Crenshaw, Danita Platt, Doctor Nicole Truesdell, Imani Barbarin. There are two other creators that I also followed that I didn't mention here. But I want to include them and that would be Portia.noir on TikTok and White Woman whisperer on TikTok as well. I hope you found this episode useful, and I wish you all the best in your learning. I'll talk to you next week.