Because crying is for attention whores

[la_vie_noire]

Women of color = Intersection of two oppressions. They experience racism from white women and white men. They experience sexism from white men and men of color. (They experience racism from men and other women of color, and sexism from white women and other WOC too, but let's just stick to the basics.)

If you are going to say that sexism is WOC being "demeaning" towards white women, then, white women being demeaning towards WOC is sexism and racism.

Sexism is not something that only white women experience. Nor it is savages WOC persecuting fragile white women with "sexist" words when calling them on their racism. I wonder why white women never say that it is "sexist" for a white woman to tell a WOC to shut up (it is racist, they all say). Women weren't after all always told to shut up by men?

Sexism is not white women feeling insulted. Feminism is not about white women feeling good with themselves. (Yes, I know feminism was constructed over the backs of women of color, and that white feminists have been using the movement that way for decades by now, but since I have met a lot of wonderful people here, I'm sticking to the "not a monolith" thing.)

kialio said that "hysteria" is rarely used on non-white women. That it depends on the western 1800 concept of WHITE women being fragile and precious beings. Women of color weren't fragile and precious beings. They were slaved and put to work.

kialio: PoC women were/are... well... pack mules. No time for "hysteria" when you're being relocated to a reservation or having your children sold in slavery.

Also remember this:

"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place, and ain't I a woman? ... I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me -- and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear the lash as well -- and ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen most all sold off to slavery and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me -- and ain't I woman?"

Sojourner Truth - 1854 Ohio Woman's Rights Convention

It's funny because here in Latin America (or in my country) hysteria is also used for women, but yes, for women enjoying white/class privilege. (But have in mind that "histeria" as is used around here - at least in my country - is kinda different from the English term.)

kialio gave this link too

"Because diagnoses of hysteria represented, in part, a professional articulation of womanhood, it was a gendered - and gendering - discourse. Medical studies by Mitchell and George M. Beard suggested, further, that nervous diseases (on the continuum from dyspepsia to insanity) were also race- and class-specific: Women of color, they concluded, lacked the extreme feminine sensibility and degree of cultural refinement marking the developed neurasthenic.(7) The racial coding of hysteria (and related disturbances of the nerves) as a middle-class white woman's disease meant that it was not simply a condition of "modern" women, but also functioned as a condition for womanhood and modernity in Victorian America."

Interesting. Now I get it.