Third, white feminists must recognize and understand the distinction between whiteness, whose inequities have left such rot within the innards of the movement, and being a feminist who is white. The former creates hierarchies that further entrench the race-based inequities in society and enshrines white culture, white ways—of eating, drinking, sleeping, speaking, communicating, and organizing—as “the” ways. The latter is a descriptive term unattached to an agenda of domination.
The difference is important; it refuses to allow white women to disengage from feminism under the pretext of being “banished” by an anti-white feminist agenda. When you are called out for white feminism, this is not a mere description of your racial heritage, something you may feel guilty about but can do nothing to change. It is a description of your words and actions. It is crucial that white women realize that being white and a woman are not the criteria that make a woman a white feminist; it is instead refusing to recognize white privilege. She can, instead, eschew territoriality and let go of individual egoism to help forge an authentically constructed solidarity.
Finally, white feminists must accept that true solidarity, where all races of women interact at a level of parity, means accommodating and valuing many different kinds of knowledge and expertise, first and foremost the kind that comes from lived experience. Accomplishing equality will require lifting up women who are not slick with jargon or rhetoric and venerating their contributions as much as those who know how to package themselves appealingly.
I began this book lamenting the evisceration of the “political” from feminism. “Empowerment,” as I pointed out in Chapter 2, was a word coined by feminists from the global south and had collective political mobilization at its center.26 Before its reduction to the mere economic process of handing out chickens or sewing machines or clean stoves, this idea of empowerment rested on three core components: power, conscientization, and agency. In the defanged version of empowerment that exists today, each of these components of empowerment has been redefined and repurposed: instead of power, women are given “livelihoods”; instead of conscientization of the structures of oppression, women are given leadership-skills training; and instead of meaningful agency, they are told to just lean in and push harder.27
The populist moment can also be a feminist moment, its possibility the reconstruction of feminism itself. But it requires solidarity to catalyze potential energy into meaningful action.
Solidarity, sadly, is easy to prescribe but far more difficult to actually create. You might think that “womanhood” is a fairly powerful shared “we” in itself, but it bears the taint of having meant “white women” and their interests and agendas from the days when Sojourner Truth asked “Ain’t I a Woman?” to more recent events like the Women’s March. Contemporary feminism is missing a clear political frontier toward which to unite; it cannot exist simply as a force in search of an inchoate equality or the undefined eradication of patriarchy. We must unite behind specific political claims, and perhaps the most important of those claims is that the dominance of capitalism is bad for all women, even white women.
Anticapitalist threads within feminism have historically been suppressed or inverted in order to protect the interests of white women, members of the richest race in the world. But the feminism that results—depoliticized, corporatized, atomized, affiliated with hollow consumerism or with violent domination—doesn’t even serve the interests of those white women in the long run.
When every woman is individually “leaning in,” no one is left to build mutual aid and support. And so the focus for each person is on conquering the system, just like white men have conquered it, rather than noticing the ways in which such conquest is structurally closed off to others around them. When you are pitted against an imagined “other” to win a still-miserly crumb of power, you do not pool knowledge with that other, you do not communicate about your different experiences, and you never build up a cumulative picture of the deep faults in the system itself. You never reach the point of questioning its very existence. This erosion of the collective impoverishes all women’s lives, stunting networks of support, slowing the progress of rights and redistribution campaigns, and wasting enormous amounts of energy within feminist ranks on the continual fight for some of our number to be heard even amongst ourselves. Individualism is, in a very crucial sense, a building block of capitalism. One task that Helen Gurley Brown accomplished with the creation of the Cosmo Girl was to transform women into individualist and careerist economic producers who could be installed into the capitalist machine sated by the things they could purchase with the money that they made. For these reasons, capitalist forces have looked to depoliticize as many spheres of public life as possible. To create a feminist politics of solidarity, women have to recognize the forces that push them apart and push them into meaningless competition by keeping them from collective understanding and engagement. Individuality within the capitalist framework is an antidote to politics and solidarity.
The past forty years have seen the persistence of a neoliberal hegemony in all parts of public life. Around the world, people have been told that they have no choice but to accept the neoliberal consensus, which in turn has eviscerated the idea that politics can and must have a transformative component. Before the rise of authoritarians like Trump in America, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Modi in India, politics seemed to have reached a point where there was no real difference remaining between the right and the left. Successive administrations in both the United States and the United Kingdom effected very little difference in policy, in the grand scheme of things. It’s neatly summed up in Tony Blair’s famous claim that “the choice is not between right-wing economic policy and a left-wing economic policy but between a good economic policy and a bad one.”28
That incontrovertibly “good” economic policy, it turns out, was neoliberalism. But when political questions are reduced to mere technical issues whose outcomes are to be determined by experts, there is no space left for citizens to make choices about ideology.
Several decades of unchallenged neoliberalism has fostered a fear of the contentious and the political. It has also created a constant demand and elevation of technical, bullet-pointed “solutions” that suggest that complex policy issues can nevertheless be solved in a few easy steps and technocratic rearrangements. The NGO-ization of various political issues, such as the provision of services to women who undergo abuse or women who need legal aid, has taken these issues out of the arena of political contention. Waves of government defunding that have directly affected women are not even recognized as women’s issues/feminist issues. When money for a grant that provides legal services to women in domestic-violence shelters is cut, it is difficult to even find out about it, so obscured are these decisions within layers of funding bodies and third parties, let alone to organize in resistance of those cuts. As with so many other formerly public goods, philanthropy unevenly tries to pick up the slack—but its priorities are shaped even more than those of government by the interests of wealthy white donors. A reconstructed feminism must go beyond the installation of women of color in key leadership positions in such charities. It must transform the very terms of leadership to move away from technocratic, politically “neutral” solutions and into the messy and vital arena of political contention. NGOs have a role to play in society, but the technocratic NGO-ization of the political space has left too many, particularly feminists of color, disenfranchised because of their inability to influence the agendas of these organizations. More attention should be given to activist organizations that can push for political change even if it means foregoing the tax deductions that accrue owing to donations in the former.
When everything is feminist, nothing is feminist. The we-can-all-agree-on-this brand of choice feminism has not only proven impotent, it has eluded accountability. After all, if everyone is responsible for ensuring an education for all girls, then no one is. This lack of accountability is why feminism has been reduced to a branding me
chanism rather than a force for real change.
But giving feminism political meaning must not be conflated with exclusion. The definition of a feminist frontier as a line of political action and organization means that there will be women who fall outside it. But they will be women who disagree with its aims, as is their right, and not those who want to participate but find themselves in a devalued and persecuted identity category. The women who fall outside the group are not “excluded” in the sense of being devalued or ignored but rather women who for their own reasons make a political choice not to align themselves with the politics of feminism. To stand for something inherently means that some will choose not to stand with you. This is essential for the constitution of a movement, not a harbinger of its inadequacy.
CONCLUSION
On Fear and Futures
As I neared the end of writing this book, I was overcome with an acute sense of foreboding. Separating women into white and non-white means that many of those whom I love and respect could read my words as an indictment of themselves as “white women” as opposed to as friends, colleagues and family members. I recognize that this is both a reflection of our riven society and of the raw emotional contours that discussions of race incite in all of us. Recognizing this as the reality is the first step in considering how we move beyond calling one another out and toward a conversation that is urgent and necessary. If the Trump era has weaponized racial divisions to end conversation, my hope is to normalize the discussions so that we can move past being reactive and toward being transformative.
Toward this end, I have tried to construct an argument here for the possibility of seeing the world through the eyes of other women. This is an individual and collective challenge, and we must start from the understanding that this challenge is one that women of color have been undertaking for centuries, not out of any great compassion or racially inherent caring quality but out of the need to survive in a white-run world. It is time now for white women to meet them in this work and share the burden.
We must also realize that framing one another in the language of racial difference bears within it the possibility of turning away, of relinquishing others we have known and respected and loved because they belong to the opposite category of white woman or non-white woman. White women who have spent lives arguing and working to uplift the voices of women of color can feel as if they are being unjustly lumped with others who have racist views. Similarly, women of color can fall prey to overinterpretation or to ascribing racist motives even to overtures that are sincerely born of a desire for mutual understanding. I acknowledge these pitfalls because I have encountered and experienced them and also because I ardently hope that we, as women and as feminists, can get beyond them. I think it is crucial that discussions of white feminism not be understood as an indictment of all white women or a prescription to discard working across difference because racial difference makes mutual understanding impossible.
Writing this book has been instructive for me personally as to the emotional mechanics of race: the struggle to distinguish between what is genuinely part of the scaffolding of systemic racism and what is a reaction born of the trauma of exclusion. If white women must see beyond their own actions as individuals and to an understanding of power and privilege of the category that they inhabit, feminists of color must also reject the temptation to pathologize every flawed interaction. It is easy to be immersed in the paranoia that no sincere solidarity is possible and retreat to our own racial categories; it is much harder to relinquish the sense of being wronged and work toward coming together. I am hoping we can do this.
Critique is the first step in a long process of opening debate. Arguing for reinvigorating the possibility of political contestation necessitates that the ideas in this book be challenged and argued, be accepted or rejected without any interlocutors fearing being labeled as racist simply because they do not find them convincing or because they see alternative possibilities beyond the ones that are suggested here. It is my hope that in inviting this sort of critique and opening my own work to it that I can model its necessity. The history of systemic racism within feminism, some of which I have attempted to outline here, should not be a dead end to debate and contestation within feminism. White women must not feel that the critique of whiteness within feminism is some crude intimidation tactic meant to silence them altogether. Women of color should avoid using critique as self-defense against having their ideas and arguments challenged by feminists of any color, nor should they deploy it as a panacea against self-examination. If feminism and the feminist project are to be taken seriously in this moment of cultural transformation, this is absolutely essential.
This book is an argument for feminism to pitch itself against a very specific frontier, that of whiteness, where whiteness is not construed as a biological category but as a set of practices and ideas that have emerged from the bedrock of white supremacy, itself the legacy of empire and slavery. At the moment, that frontier cuts directly down the middle of feminism, making a true unified “we” of womanhood impossible, in part because we are unwilling to discuss and confront what whiteness has done to feminism, what it has stolen from it. But it can be cast out—through vocal and visible upheavals of structures of power. We must abandon the appendage style of inclusion, which assumes that the addition of one woman of color to your panel or your curriculum or your committee is enough. We must denounce those who continue to cling to exclusionary histories, stories, and forms even in the name of tradition. And the feminists who have too long used the privilege of whiteness to imagine a trickle-down feminism, its parameters defined from the top, must give way to feminists committed to punching up and dismantling the establishment.
Feminists today face the great challenge of transformation: an embrace of the adversarial while knowing that adversaries are not enemies, an embrace of community that does not require endless compromises by those with the least power, and a realism that accepts women as they are and where they are today. Prescient as ever, Audre Lorde knew this crisis that would confront us, the women of the future, when she wrote “without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”1
When I look around me today, I see too many women of color turning away from feminism. In some cases, they are saying goodbye to mainstream white feminism in order to build more specialized movements: Muslim feminisms, Black feminisms, queer feminisms. These smaller groups have a powerful role to play, but we also need to create a space where different tribes can work together on issues that affect us all—and, vitally, where they can lend one another equally ardent support for issues that do not affect us all. Communities must remain free to have their own specialized groups, but that need not reduce their capacity or potential for coming together to create a potent and transformative mainstream feminist politics.
No movement that is unable to do justice amongst its own adherents is likely to accomplish any wider goals toward justice. This book has attempted to see clearly the different dimensions of the feminist movement as it exists today, how it has arrived at this point, and where it could go from here, such that every woman who calls herself a feminist, of any race, class, nationality, or religion, can see a path forward and a reason to stay.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With deepest gratitude to Alane Mason of W. W. Norton, Hermione Thompson at Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House (UK), and Sarah Bolling of the Gernert Company.
NOTES
Introduction: At a Wine Bar, a Group of Feminists
1 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Sub-Altern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation, eds. C. Nelson and J. Grosberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.
Chapter One: In the Beginning, There Were White Women
1 Bill and Melinda Gates, “Why We Swing for the Fences, ” Gates-Notes, February 10
, 2020, https://www.gatesnotes.com/2020-Annual-Letter.
2 “Humanitarians of Tinder,” https://humanitariansoftinder.com/.
3 Gertrude Bell, A Woman in Arabia: The Writings of the Queen of the Desert (Penguin Press, 2006), 21.
4 Constance Gordon Cummings, In the Himalayas and on the Indian Plains (Chatto and Windus, 1884), 138.
5 Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, Adventurer, Advisor to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia (Anchor Books, 1996), 80.
6 Harriet Taylor, “Enfranchisement of Women,” available at: http://www.wwhp.org/Resources/WomansRights/taylor_enfranchisement.html.
7 Taylor, “Enfranchisement.”
8 Irvin Schick, “Representing Middle Eastern Women: Feminism and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990), 345.
9 Gertrude Bell, Persian Pictures (Anthem Travel Classics, 2005), 47.
10 Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture 1865–1915 (University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 125.
11 Burton, Burdens of History, 125.
12 Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism, Complicity and Resistance (Indiana University Press, 1996), 145.
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