Third-wave, post-modern feminists believe in a neat, well-defined hierarchy of sexes and races; regardless of the specifics of a given case, members of a "lower" group can by definition never be sexist or racist to a member of a "higher" group.
Is that your interpretation?
It's also odd that you think the third wave promotes a well-defined hierarchy of sexes and races when a lot of what it is about is recognising that many people fall outside of society's definitions of gender and sexual identity. But as ever, I imagine much of this is just a semantic argument wrt your definition of third wave postmodern feminists.
As for the Django leadership's definition of sexism and racism? Something tells me they don't have a crazy proportion of people with the beliefs you described, so they'll probably stick with the standard "discrimination/prejudice against a gender/race/ethnicity/group/etc"
> feminists reject the notion that women can be sexist towards men because women lack the institutional power that men have.
I understand this to be the standard reasoning among contemporary feminists, and the same reasoning is widely applied wrt racism.
There's even the complaint that the given definition is inappropriate for a Feminism 101 definition, saying "If I had no prior knowledge of feminist theory or the contentions that really _abound_ in the rather amorphous field of feminist theory, I would take what has been presented here as established fact rather than a specific argument and one of many hypotheses on the matter of “what sexism is.”"
I just this evening read a few chapters of the excellent "A Law of Her Own: The Reasonable Woman As a Measure of Man", by Caroline A. Forell, Donna Meredith Matthews. I think you'll agree with me that it's written with a feminist voice. Page 72 starts its discussion on female-on-male harassment in the workplace. They give the example of Richard Williams v. Runyon where Williams' supervisor, Clora Grant, was the alleged harasser. The court decided that it wasn't harassment. I read the court decision, and I agree with the authors of "A Law of Her Own" - the court was wrong and it was clearly harassment.
Which means I easily found an example of feminist legal scholarship which was using the same definitional premise you quoted as applying to all feminists.
I assert that it's much more likely that that quote is wrong than that Forell and Matthews do not understand feminism.
BTW, the interpretation of Title VII has changed since 1995. That's why now there can be a decision like:
> DETROIT – LensCrafters, a major eyewear company, will pay $192,500 to settle a female-on-male sexual harassment lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency announced today. The EEOC had charged that LensCrafters subjected a male employee to a sexually hostile work environment at its Saginaw, Mich., retail location.
> According to the EEOC’s suit (Civil Action No. 1:09-CV-12694, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan), LensCrafters violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by subjecting a male lab technician to sexual harassment and failing to address his complaints that a female co-worker was abusing him. The EEOC said the harassment included the female employee touching the male and making inappropriate comments about his appearance. In its suit, the EEOC charged that LensCrafters fostered the hostile climate by disregarding the male technician’s complaints because he was a man.
Edit: and, to be honest, I don't care that much. It is a fact that a significant number of feminists hold that sexism can only be directed by men towards women. That is really all I wanted to say. I don't particularly want to argue about whether they're right, or what implications this has.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism says the movement started in the early 1960s, and that first wave ended when women were enfranchised in the early 1900s.
But the Civil Rights act of 1963 had decades of work behind it. The National Woman's Party, which was the militant branch of the Suffrage Movement, started pushing for the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 and "the Republican Party endorsed the ERA in its 1940 platform, and the Democratic Party followed suit in 1944." (Quoting from http://www.jofreeman.com/lawandpolicy/titlevii.htm ). The Equal Pay Act also has its roots in the 1800s.
It feels then like 40 years of work towards gender equality in the workplace - including the inroads made during WWII by seeing that women can definitely hold jobs in industry - are ignored by the three-wave view of history, and that the successes of that ignored era are claimed solely as 2nd wave victories.
In any case, that's neither here nor there. It's idle musing that I wrote down so it's easier to come to mind next time I talk with someone who can tell me about the history of feminism.