Against White Feminism

by Against White Feminism (retail) (epub)

  For white women, it is a matter of gilding their status. For women of color, it is a question of survival and not a choice. Whiteness confers power that can yield professional and personal success and generally make life far better than it could be otherwise. Many feminists of color have spoken out against white-centered feminism, but many more are caught in personal, professional, or economic circumstances too precarious to risk, finding themselves with no opportunities to confront the monolithic structures of white power or confront defensive white women who are more interested in feeling good about themselves than constructing a more egalitarian feminist conversation.

  For example, a close female friend of mine who is a woman of color got a job at a fancy new startup that focused on developing a women’s club geared primarily toward upper-middle-class and urban white women. My friend had a long and notably Indian name, so the CEO of the company, a white woman, started to call her by a shortened version that she (the CEO) devised herself. My friend complained about it to me, so I was shocked when, at a talk arranged by her company, the same CEO got up onstage and introduced my friend by her nickname and not her actual name. Then, when my friend took the stage, she, too, used the nickname to refer to herself. Not knowing how to correct her boss without jeopardizing her job, she had simply given in.

  I’ve known of examples where white women college professors in the United States have taught books that castigate Islam and demonize the veil, even when there were students who wore it in the classroom. Many of these students did speak out to other university officials, but the professor had tenure and so ultimately nothing was done. These sorts of interactions not only ignore the tremendous power difference between professor and student, it ignores the way power dynamics of whiteness within academia work to further delegitimize narratives from Black and Brown communities. The “white savior feminist” professor is in this sense a central culprit in pushing Western-centered narratives, not least the right of white and Western women to pass judgment on the rest of the world’s women. Recognizing these power dynamics means that white feminists, used to privilege, experience a de-privileging of their perspectives, but meaningful allyship requires just this.

  It’s hard not to see the way things are as the way things will always be—and as soon as you start to believe that, speaking out against the million microaggressions or the many large ones becomes an act of pointless stupidity and self-sabotage. Better to be the good Brown or Black or Asian handmaiden of mainstream feminism, assuring white women that they are doing everything right, that complaints are the product of hypersensitivity or misunderstanding or jealousy—anything other than the dominant power of whiteness within feminism itself.

  A few years ago, I was invited to lunch at the Women’s Caucus of the Indiana General Assembly. When I arrived, my host requested that I address the gathered women about the issues facing women in South Asia and also about honor killings. Put on the spot in this way, I could not say no.

  My audience’s fervent questions and interruptions made clear that they were most interested in hearing about the honor killings. I spoke honestly and factually about the brutal details of these kinds of killings. While I tried to emphasize the complexity of the issue, I had not had time to prepare. So I did not address the ways in which honor killing is functionally equivalent to intimate-partner violence, or tell them that “honor” is a euphemism for the male ego, which is seen to act alone in America and in the name of the collective in Pakistan. I told the binary story of good and evil that they were expecting.

  At the time I did not recognize the purpose of the event. I found out later that my host, an extremely well-intentioned, liberal feminist, had invited me to speak because she wanted the caucus, a mixed group of Republican and Democratic women, to have something that they could agree on. That something, she had decided, was a collective shudder and sigh at the terrible plight of foreign women who did not have their rights and privileges. It was the bipartisan issue that allowed white feminists of different political affiliations to speak to each other.

  In retrospect, I made a bad situation worse by my cooperation. I did not know how to separate the facts of honor killing from the frame of white feminist superiority which they invited; I had actively corroborated the white women’s stereotypes about Brown and Muslim women. The white feminists had ceded space, allowed me to speak, but only on the condition that I indict the culture of my birth, and affirm, at least indirectly, the supremacy of America, of white women, of Western civilization. It was a victory for white feminism, and I had enabled it.

  It is not that culturally coded crimes aren’t crimes. But there is a problem in so readily attaching a cultural dimension to intimate-partner violence that takes place in Brown and Black communities to indicate that it is somehow different or more brutal. Such attachments demand that feminists of color denounce their racial or cultural communities if they are to participate in feminist discourse. When Westerners focus on particular crimes in Afghanistan or Ghana, they create stunted forms of resistance where everything that is the focus of Western attention for “moral reform” is suddenly the most authentic expression of culture. Feminists in these communities get branded as agents of the West, and indigenous cultural opposition that would have castigated honor crimes or FGC are destroyed when the calculus becomes the Rest against the West. This then fosters a narrative in which white and Western cultures are amenable to feminist transformations while endemically barbaric Black and Brown cultures perennially lag behind them. If there is no parity between feminists who are having the conversation, gender parity as a whole becomes an unreachable goal.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  From Deconstruction to Reconstruction

  In June 2020, while I was writing this book, The Daily Beast published an in-depth report of racism within the National Organization of Women (NOW).1 NOW is America’s oldest and largest feminist organization, with 600 chapters across all 50 states.2 It is a very white organization: 17 of 27 board members are white, and 10 of 11 presidents have been white.3 One of its case studies was the organization’s 2017 leadership election, which included an all-women-of-color ticket for the first time in NOW’s history. China Fortson-Washington, an African American woman, ran for president, with Monica Weeks, a young Hispanic feminist, as vice president on the same ticket. But in the weeks of their campaign, they faced noticeably more hostile audiences than any previous candidates, or indeed than their opponents in that year’s race. Speaking at the Brevard, Florida, chapter, Weeks was heckled for saying that as the most oppressed women of color, disabled LGBTQI people needed to be given a voice to make everybody better. A white woman interrupted her, saying, “White women too,” and “yeah don’t forget the white women,” and another yelled, “Only the women with pussies.” No such interruptions or heckling took place when white women were speaking.

  That same June, Fortson-Washington addressed the audience at NOW’s annual convention as part of their bid for president and vice president. Even before they addressed members from a stage, they were getting racist pushback from one NOW member to “tone down the Hispanic a little bit.” Others dismissed Fortson-Washington as “angry” and Weeks as a “hot-headed Latina.”

  When Fortson-Washington took the stage, the racism was even more obvious. As soon as she began to speak, her white opponent, seated onstage, took out her laptop and began to type. It was an extraordinarily rude and dismissive gesture designed to undermine not the points her rival was making but the fact of her very presence onstage, the likelihood that she had anything of value to say at all. Fortson-Washington had not done any such thing when her opponent had been speaking. In the audience, a woman said audibly to her friend, “Just because she is Black she thinks that she would be a good leader?” Another complained about “all this Black Lives Matter crap.” When it was time for questions, Fortson-Washington and Weeks were asked what white women were supposed to do if everyone was focusing on Black women.

  It is not only NOW that has had
problems with race. In July 2020, the Lily, the Washington Post’s feminist-oriented online magazine, published a report focusing on three major feminist organizations in America: the National Organization of Women, the American Association of University Women, and the Feminist Majority Foundation. In their interviews with twenty staffers, Lily reporters found a landscape where racism was rampant. Staffers of color said that they were concentrated in the lower levels of the organization, with white leadership shaping organizational priorities that felt irrelevant to women who are not white, straight, cisgender, highly educated, and upper-middle class. Employees of color were often made to feel like “tokens,” many told the interviewers, rolled out to show diversity but dismissed within the confines of the office.

  In June 2020, Toni Van Pelt, the NOW president who had demeaned China Fortson-Washington onstage, was removed after increasing allegations that she sidelined women of color. The new president installed in her stead was Christian F. Nunes, a Black woman. When interviewed about whether her taking the helm would produce any changes, Nunes said, “I thought I was really going to be able to help this organization, but ultimately I feel like I have just been a token.”4 She added that when she called out the racism at NOW, she was kept out of executive meetings, with her duties reassigned to white women.

  The Feminist Majority Foundation, which notably supported the invasion of Afghanistan in order to “save” Afghan women by occupying their country, has its own problems. Sherill Dingle, a Black woman who worked at FMF from 2017 to 2019, reported that when staffers brought up instances of racism, the president, Eleanor Smeal, would deflect by reminding everyone of her own participation in the civil rights movement, and that she had marched with Coretta Scott King (the wife of Martin Luther King Jr.).

  Conversations about race, Dingle reported, often turned into “screaming matches.” Five other staffers from FMF verified Dingle’s statements. One of them, Shivani Desai, who had worked at FMF during the same period as Dingle, noted that Smeal had “particularly volatile reactions to young Black women” and would pointedly try to highlight various oppression experienced by white women, interjecting into conversations about women of color by saying, “and white women, too.”5 Smeal even complained about the 2016 exit polls that showed 53 percent of white women voted for Trump, claiming that number was “fake.”

  Other actions taken by Smeal showed a pointed disregard for her own white privilege. When the Trump administration implemented its “Zero Tolerance” policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border, Smeal announced that FMF would take immediate action. In order to raise awareness, the staff of FMF would all get arrested and then released. She told her staff that she had already arranged with the police the conditions of their arrest and release. “This makes absolutely no sense,” Dingle remembers thinking of the plan, the likes of which she had never seen in her career in organizing. Dingle refused to attend the protest, feeling unsure that she, a Black woman, would be treated the same as all the white women. For this, she faced reprimands from her white manager, who said attending the protest was part of her job.

  “They didn’t know their privilege,” says Dingle. “Do you really think I can go to the police right now and say, ‘Hey I’m trying to do a march, I need to be arrested and let go.’ Do you honestly think that would go well for me?”6 In another conversation in which Dingle tried to explain the experience of Black women, Smeal insisted that white women feel “powerless” or “unable to speak up” and fear they may be harmed because they are women. It was only later, when FMF was contacted for the Lily report, that they said, “We agree that Black women experience more oppression and discrimination than white women. Black women experience racism, white supremacy, sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny. White women experience sexism, patriarchy and misogyny.” Even in their clarification they failed to understand that it was not a competition of relative oppressions, or to recognize that white women always possess white privilege and Black women never do.

  At the AAUW, Raina Nelson kept suggesting research initiatives around the challenges faced by women of color. Her proposals never went anywhere, as the organization chose to focus its major initiatives on issues most relevant to white women. It was particularly frustrating for Nelson to be a part of the research team and see just how much AAUW focused on salary-negotiation workshops, which are largely irrelevant to women who work minimum-wage jobs. When Kimberly Churches, the chief executive at AAUW, was contacted about the organization’s failure to fund research around issues important to women of color, she forwarded two articles in response; one was 300 words long and the other (a blog post and not a research project) was 700 words.

  The Lily report also discusses how the white leadership of these organizations, particularly NOW and FMF, tend to support each other against allegations of racist conduct. Since board members of both organizations tend to be white and older, many are friends and form their own cliques on the boards. Eleanor Smeal and Teri Van Pelt (when she was still president of NOW), who are good friends, appeared at meetings together and backed each other’s ideas before staff.

  It seemed that not much had changed in the nearly four decades since Audre Lorde excoriated the National Women’s Studies Association for their blindness to the injustice imposed by race. “I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action,” she said.7 Then, just as now, the United States was threatened by racial strife and the rise of a rabid right-wing politics. The white women Lorde spoke to considered themselves allies to Black women, just as many well-meaning white women do today. And like white women today, they were largely unconscious of the many injustices they inflicted on women of color.

  Lorde listed some that she had personally endured in her speech that day. There was the woman who came up to her and said, “Tell me how you feel but don’t do it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” And the woman who, having just listened to Lorde read her poem about her anger, got up and said, “Are you going to do anything with how can we deal with our anger?” Finally, the time when the Women’s Studies Program of a Southern university invited her to read following a weeklong forum on Black and white women. “What has this week given to you?” Lorde remembers asking the audience after the reading. At this, “The most vocal white woman says, ‘I think I’ve gotten a lot. I feel Black women really understand me a lot better now; they have a better idea of where I’m coming from.’ As if understanding her lay at the core of the racist problem.”

  The first all-women-of-color ticket for the presidency and vice presidency of NOW lost the election, but their candidacy did initiate an unmasking of the organization, exposing an internal culture of endemic racism. There was a mass exodus from the organization by those who disapproved of the way NOW had handled the issue of race. Tess Martin, a Black attendee at the conference, saw the hostility with which NOW members and leaders treated the first POC candidates for president and vice president of the organization. “NOW’s true face is very different,” she told reporters from The Daily Beast. “Below the convenient lip service to sisterhood, it revealed itself to be the worst kind of clique and the members are not women who look like me.”8

  “The war we are in is a war for narrative,” Kimberlé Crenshaw told Abby Disney in an interview in June 2020.9 To create an egalitarian feminism excised of the dominating agendas of whiteness, all feminists, and particularly feminists of color, must reshape the story of the movement such that the role whiteness has played in its development is made visible. We must end the celebration of feminist “heroes” who have propped up white supremacy, past and present, as we too prop it up by failing to speak out against them, by acting under racist assumptions or in complicity with racist practices and structures. Both NOW and FMF are membership organizations whose membership is by and large white. The difficult work of feminist soli
darity happens when this demographic fact is not used as an excuse to focus solely on issues facing upper middle-class white women and map their concerns onto everyone else.

  Scores of feminists of color, including me, still believe that this is possible. This is not an elimination of white women from feminism; it is an elimination of “whiteness” from feminism, in the sense that whiteness has been synonymous with domination and with exploitation. And this goal can never be achieved without the support of white women.

  The justice system is inaccessible to millions of people because of the economic inequalities baked into our capitalist economic model. And poverty, along with many related issues like job insecurity, housing insecurity, educational disadvantage, and worse medical outcomes, disproportionately affects people of color. If race and gender directly determine an individual’s treatment in our society, so too does class. I learned just how heavy the impact of class really was when I was a shiny new lawyer just graduated from law school.

  After I passed the bar, the first job I took was as an associate attorney with a small African American law firm, owned entirely by Black attorneys and a staff made up mostly of persons of color. The firm specialized in civil-rights litigation, which includes Title VII cases of employment discrimination and sexual harassment. Young and idealistic, I considered the content of the job (if not the pay) to be a dream. Not only was I working for a majority-minority firm, but I would be helping those who had been discriminated against on racial or religious grounds. This kind of work was exactly what I had envisaged when I began training as a lawyer, years before. The firm was tiny and there was no empty office for me, so they set me up in the library ready to receive clients, and the clients came.

  In one case, a young Hispanic woman employed in a local warehouse described how her coworkers would constantly make sexual comments, rub up against her, and even try to pinch her breasts. In another case, a woman who worked stocking the shelves at her grocery store was being harassed by a fellow employee who kept making lewd comments when no one was around. A white woman who worked at a convenience store came in alleging that she had been assaulted on the job by a fellow employee who was off the clock.