Amid the Outpouring for Ginsburg, a Hint of Backlash
New York Times via Yahoo News ^ | September 21., 2020 | Jennifer Schuessler
Posted on 9/22/2020, 8:57:51 AM by John W
The internet learned to love Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so it was not surprising that when news of her death broke Friday evening, social media lit up with outpourings of love and admiration for this diminutive octogenarian who had been cast as an iron-pumping, dissent-slinging legal ninja.
But those who celebrated her as a one-woman bulwark against the collapse of democracy might have been surprised by something else bubbling up. Within hours of her death, there also appeared snarking about the pop-hagiography around her, edged with insinuating questions about just how far-ranging her vision of equality was.
Some noted her poor record of hiring Black law clerks and her comments in 2016 (which she later apologized for) calling Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests “dumb” and “disrespectful.”
Others re-upped long-standing critiques of RGB-mania, and perhaps even of the judge herself, as reflecting a myopic “white feminism.” On Twitter, there were calls to remember those “left behind” by the brand of feminism Ginsburg supposedly advanced, along with mocking references to the public grief over her death as a “white women’s 9/11.”
“What conception of women’s rights, and what kind of feminist movement, might have died with Ginsburg?” Melissa Gira Grant wrote in The New Republic, questioning what she called “the false idea of Ginsburg as liberal or feminist savior.”
The whiff of a backlash reflects long-standing tensions within feminism, as a movement sometimes criticized for being symbolized by, and primarily serving, middle-class white women has been challenged by a perspective that emphasizes the interplay of race, class, gender and other factors. It’s a tension that has only grown amid the Black Lives Matter protests of the past summer, as some have questioned whether a highly empowered older white woman ensconced in an elite institution was a fit hero for the moment.
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