Feminism has a whiteness problem. The decades of feminist activism, the suffragettes, feminist philosophy that emerged in the 1960s (greatly owed to Simone de Beauvoir and female philosophers alike) the criminalisation of marital rape, the married women's property act and many other milestones in the feminist movement…focused on the privileged few.
Until the 2017 #MeToo movement took flight and brought to light the injustices many wealthy (and white) women faced in relation to sexual abuse by powerful males, many non-white women began to understand that this phrase ‘me too’ did not apply to them. Most women have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace and in society as a whole. Being the target for sexual harassment is an all too familiar feeling for girls and women, especially among women of colour and women identifying in the LGTBQ+ community. Black trans women and queer women (specifically bisexual women) are among the most targeted when it comes to sexual violence.
I bet you can name numerous women in the public eye who have spoken up about sexual assault. How many of those women are non-white women? Now think, was the problem that black and brown women don't speak up...or were you just not listening. I get it, for public figures it's pressurising to discuss any violence done onto them, but if by today's standards it's acceptable for women to openly talk about sexual assault, why do we rarely hear (or listen to) non-white and non-hetero women's stories?
Shouts of ‘me too’ don't circulate around the echo-chamber of society when black or brown women talk the same way they do for white women. While the phrase ‘me too’ has been used by African American activists, beginning with Tarana Burke, since 2007 to voice solidarity with socio-economically oppressed women of colour, many do not recognise this. Instead, we associate the fight for justice as a fight for the white. When there’s not a white tone attached to the message, who’s listening?
Feminism - not just the #MeToo movement - is overgeneralised to the white narrative. Some parts of the feminist movement ignore intersectionality all together; A movement created to empower all women but instead helps the few.
So what is white feminism?
It’s less about the individual, white, female or otherwise, and more about a state of mind or a belief system. A belief system which favours and benefits singularly white women but can be practiced by anyone, of any race, allegiance or affiliation. Within feminist centred conversations, the second tiering of women is often the case; a hierarchy with cis heterosexual able-bodied whiteness at the top and everything else below. Whether you’re queer, trans, black, Latina, Native American, disabled/differently-abled, you’re inherently lower on this ranking of a quintessential ‘woman’.
I’m not feminism bashing in the slightest, as I believe the core of feminism being about the fight for equal rights between men and women and non-binary people still stands within many people who call themselves feminists, but rather the connotations of the movement are whitewashed.
On a larger scale, white feminism takes issues that affect all women (unequal pay, healthcare inequalities, barriers to citizenship and property ownership, unaffordable health care and childcare) and makes it a personal problem. White feminism advocates personal solutions for mass problems. The way it does that is allowing large institutionalised and systemic issues to be dealt with personally by white women who have the facilities and accessibility to solve these problems, but non-white and queer women often cannot access the same solutions.
Take, for instance, a child custody court case. Historically, women are more likely to get full custody of their child over the husband due to engrained idea that only mothers are the nurtures and emotional providers for a child. So, historically a white woman would face little challenge in gaining custody of her child over her white husband, assuming she is deemed a ‘fit’ mother and the father is deemed a ‘fit’ father (excluding his, as some argue, inherent inability to nurture his child). Now imagine the same circumstances between a ‘fit’ and ‘good’ Asian, Black, Latina or Native American mother and a ‘fit’ white father. Because of the racial differences between the non-white mother and the white father, imagine how much more difficult and strenuous it would be for this mother to gain full custody. In 2013, a report by WNYC found that black children are four times more likely than white children to enter foster care in New Jersey, despite the fact that they only make up 14% of New Jersey’s population. Many might say that it is more a case of socio-economic differences between white and non-white women than race. These preconceptions that 'non-white women will be worse mothers due to their low socio-economic status than white women of the same status' is fuelling these prejudices to circulate. Two mothers could be equally rated as ‘unfit’, but the state would more likely take the child out of the non-white mothers custody. That is the sad reality of white privilege dominating feminism.
No two women are the same. No two white women are the same. No two trans women are the same. No two black women are the same. Yet, feminism has a dark history of telling two women what their feminism should look like. As feminism began as a white movement, this history of white-washing feminism is essentially a powerful organization telling a disenfranchised one ‘You should look like me’. This echoes another history that runs parallel to that of feminism; an international history of colonialism which, for centuries, was a story of the oppressors telling the oppressed that they should resemble their oppressors. White feminism acts in the same way, where those at the foreground of this movement act as gatekeepers to who is female and who is not.
We see this all the time with cis women deciding that trans women are not ‘woman enough' to be considered within feminism. Usually, it's cis white woman (or so-called 'TERFS' which stands for "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist(s)") petitioning to exclude trans women from female public restrooms or women's shelters as the acceptance of trans folk in female public spaces is deemed unsafe.
Who's to say that a trans woman is less a woman than one who's chromosomes and genitalia are of the female sex? We saw this in J.K Rowling’s bizarre transphobic rants and essays, that some cis white women use their position of power to oppress other women, while ironically calling themselves ‘feminists’.
The same was true years ago in 1960s America with many while women fearing the integration of black communities into the white suburbs and the reality that granting black people human rights in post-segregated America meant giving black women equal rights to white women, which many white women feared. The now-infamous report ‘The Negro Family: The Case for National Action’ blamed black women for hindering black men’s socio-economic mobilisation and ability to achieve financial stability because of their, as the report quotes, “deviant” family structure. “Deviant”. What did that mean and why did it allegedly hinder socio-economic mobilisation in 1960s America. Apparently, black women had too much power in their family dynamic, inhibiting black men from being the breadwinner and, as the review suggests, kept the Black population impoverished. The terrifying prospect that black women were single-handedly causing poverty in America lead many white women to disapprove of black communities integrating into the suburbs. Yes, this is nonsense but the report allowed these ‘fears’ of black women to fester. You could go as far to say that these ‘fears’ grew and moulded into the ‘Karen’s’ we see today, with numerous videos of white women crying wolf, brutalising black women and recycling the label of an ‘angry black woman’ into the decade.
As I discussed, the #MeToo movement, while a massive achievement within feminism and for victims of sexual violence, generally excludes women that do not tick the ‘white’ box. In May of 2016, it was reported that 4 in 5 Native American and Native Alaskan women have been victims of violence, with more than half being sexual violence. 96% of Native women rape survivors in the US have non-native attackers. If you have watched the movie 'Wind River’ this will ring true, with the movie following an FBI agent who
attempts to find the man who raped and murdered a young Native American woman based on thousands of true cases just like it. Native American women disproportionately go missing, are forced into sex trafficking, are murdered and endure sexual violence more than any other minority in America. There is not even a reliable count of how many Native women go missing or are killed each year. Because some tribal lands are not in police jurisdiction, like areas in New Mexico and Alaska hundreds of statistics of violence on Native women not being collected by police leaving Native American women erased not just from the feminist movement (one that supposedly protects all women) but society as a whole. In fact, Law enforcement felt that recalling data from memory was an adequate method to dealing with records, according to the executive doctors of Sovereign Bodies Institute, meaning that these names of Native women are not even spoken, not even whispered in discourse of violence against women. These names are wiped out of memory, wiped out of existence, these lives of women are left to fizzle out as generations pass.
In the same way, black women are often excluded when it comes to conversations on sexual autonomy. Take for example the ‘Jezebel’ stereotype of sexually liberated back women as devious, alluring and promiscuous while equally sexually empowered white women are praised for their transgression against this ‘pure’ and ‘innocent’ Christian European stereotype. White sex-workers and contributors to Onlyfans are praised but black women in the same line of sex-work are ridiculed. Black women are often ignored from conversations on healthcare and maternity, with black women still 4 times more likely to die in childbirth than white women, with the death of Nicole Thea foregrounding this disparity in the UK media in 2020.
If feminism is about protecting women within patriarchy and ensuring women have equal rights to men, why are so many women who belong to non-white and/or LGBTQ+ communities cut out of the picture all-together; elevating white women in society but disenfranchising the rest. ‘Feminists’ can’t claim they’re ‘pro-women’ but pick and choose who they defend.
Why does white feminism continue to be the standard for the entire movement? As Kao Beck, the author of the 2021 book ‘White Feminism: from the suffragettes to influences and who they left behind' said
"White feminism is enduring because it's so palatable and because it doesn’t really challenge much about our structure, our life, the way we make money or the way we relate to other women"
Women are not a monolith. Aspects of womanhood are experienced differently by different woman. It's not a crazy concept that our race, sexuality, social class, immigration status and gender all overlap and create a compounding experience that is unique for each human.
“All inequality is not created equal” ~ Kimberlé Crenshaw (who coined the term 'intersectional feminism')
It's easy for white, straight, cis women to not have to think about their race, sexuality or her biological sex, like it is easy for white people to not think about race at all. To use an intersectional lens, we acknowledge the historical context surrounding a feminist issue; whether it's police brutality against black women, sexual violence against First Nation women, issues with trusting the healthcare system which historically neglects female health concerns for women of colour or homophobia against queer women.
Worse yet, we not only setting white feminism as the standard but profit off of it; selling feminism as a progressive and inclusive movement. The ‘women unite’ taglines we see on 'feminist' merchandise are cute but do no good when white feminism ignores intersectionality. The ‘future is female’ mantra does not ring true when some disregard trans women as women at all. The ‘believe all women’ motto holds no substance when we ignore the experience of sexual violence by women of colour. By glorifying white feminism as pretty, progressive and perfect, wrapping it in a charming pink bow and packaging it as an 'inclusive' movement, we are selling a lie, a white lie.
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