I almost put my white liberal foot up my right liberal ass when responding to this post. I found myself awfully uncomfortable while reading. Was I reacting to the strident tone of the article? Was it that the message sounded oddly familiar?
I think it was a bit of both, actually. On one hand I found the tone of the post to be hostile, inflammatory (more about this later). On the other hand, I kept thinking “I’ve heard this before”. Coupled with this thought was also, “fuck, you think white women don’t suffer, too?”(Ouch. As I look at that last sentence,I can’t believe I thought it.)I kept reading bits of the article and stopping to digest before going to the next bit, and I had the above running through my mind.
I know about feminism. I know something about racism. Both of which insist you thinking about what you are thinking. Knee jerk reactions mean that something is happening emotionally. I don’t like to leave emotions unexamined.Following is not so much a response to your post as a response to my reactions to it. I think if we truly want to be who we say we are, we have to examine ourselves. I like to think of myself as a feminist and an anti-racist (?? Is there a positive way to express this?)I hope it informs you:
I remember reading strident articles and seeing movies with tough messages (Anybody seen “Not a Love Story”. That was hard to sit through)years ago,created by white women.The tone never bothered me then. In fact, I take it with young, upstart, pups and their mysongist, older brothers.
We all know white women suffer AND WE ALL KNOW that women of colour suffer MORE OFTEN. Any of us who think otherwise, or think it is none of our concern, are in denial. We, white women know that individually we may be called a bitch, but we are still considered “better” than women of colour on the whole. I also know that in my culture, being a called a bitch means you don’t submit to anybody (a label I wear proudly). You may react nastily when called one, but it means you’ve pissed somebody off. I don’t know what being called a bitch means to other people in other cultures. I know some of the conditions that some women of colour live in and I doubt names have no power over them.
Just because white women have gained alot of power, doesn’t mean we all have. The fight is not over until every last woman in the world can live where she wants, how she wants, and not have to suffer for it.
Thanks for making me think.
Oh yeah. Blame it on the parents? Give me a break.

Hah! So it is. The Ice-T rap, for comparison, is here [YouTube] and uncensored (NSFW).

As for Jay-Z narrowly missing being sniffed out for drugs by a K-9 police companion, you can actually tell how he morphs that word from referencing women to referencing a real bitch (a female dog) at one point in the song.

No one is saying white women don’t experience internalized misogyny. The article’s focus was on the intersectionality of racism and sexism vis-a-vis the epidemic of sexualized violence against black women. See my response to Commenter #3 on the racial politics and historical and cultural differences of internalized sexism and misogyny vis-a-vis black women. Also see the Crunk Feminist Collective’s breakdown of why the Slutwalk re-appropriation was problematic from a black feminist perspective.
http://crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/i-saw-the-sign-but-did-we-really-need-a-sign-slutwalk-and-racism

There’s the SlutWalk movement and Bitch Magazine. So yes, there are white women who use equivalent terms either jokingly with each other, or as way to reclaim stereotypes. And no, internalized misogyny is by no means limited to black girls.

The origin of that “99 Problems” line is actually a 1993 Ice-T song of the same name. Jay-Z used the chorus, partly as an homage to Ice-T and partly a double entendre with “bitch” referring to a police K9 unit dog. So … it’s Ice-T’s fault 🙂

A really depressing trend I’ve noticed is that as the pervasiveness of a problem increases, the victim blaming increases.

If you get mugged in the middle of the night, you should of known better. Don’t you know criminals come out at night? And it kind of is your fault you got raped. I mean, everyone knows that women get raped sometimes, so you shouldn’t have been attracting attention to yourself with that slutty dress. And if it’s a black women that’s been raped, the dial goes to 11, because she really must have been asking for it.
/sarcasm

Thanks!

Gail Dines’ “Racy Sex, Sexy Racism: Porn from the Dark Side”

http://www.scribd.com/doc/31889259/An-excerpt-from-Pornland-Racy-Sex-Sexy-Racism-Porn-from-the-Dark-Side

The bad parent argument is reductive, ahistorical and fails to consider the complex realities of young black girls’ lives across class lines. So what influences the media? The cultural, economic and social history of race and gender. The social construction of black women as hos/bitches emerges from a long legacy of black women’s bodies being used for sexual and reproductive exploitation under the slave economy. 17th century colonial law institutionalizing racial slavery was specifically articulated through the control of black female sexuality — only black women’s bodies could “produce” new slaves and only black women’s reproduction was controlled to bolster plantation wealth and slaveowners’ market power. Within the cultural ideology of the plantation black women were natural jezebels, temptresses and amoral heathens in contrast to the pure ideal of the hyper-feminine civilized white woman. That legacy is borne out in the pervasiveness of black womens’ dehumanization as “unrapeable” (sexual assault of black women, by white and black men, was an oxymoron under the plantation regime and was only validated as a crime in the South in the mid-20th century) “crack hos” (i.e. Ken and John’s slur of Whitney Houston), nappy-headed hos (i.e. Don Imus’ slur of the Rutgers basketball team) and “bitches ain’t nothing but hos & tricks” (i.e., Dre Dre’s much emulated and much “admired” slur, as well as scores of others, of black women).For further reading see Paula Giddings “When and Where I Enter”, Dorothy Roberts “Killing the Black Body” and Danielle McGuire’s “At the Dark End of the Street: Rape and Resistance”