Against White Feminism Read online

  AGAINST

  WHITE FEMINISM

  Notes on Disruption

  RAFIA ZAKARIA

  W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  For Rania,

  my bright shining star

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  INTRODUCTION

  At a Wine Bar, a Group of Feminists

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the Beginning, There Were White Women

  CHAPTER TWO

  Is Solidarity a Lie?

  CHAPTER THREE

  The White Savior Industrial Complex and the Ungrateful Brown Feminist

  CHAPTER FOUR

  White Feminists and Feminist Wars

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sexual Liberation Is Women’s Empowerment

  CHAPTER SIX

  Honor Killings, FGC, and White Feminist Supremacy

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I Built a White Feminist Temple”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  From Deconstruction to Reconstruction

  CONCLUSION

  On Fear and Futures

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A white feminist is someone who refuses to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played and continue to play in universalizing white feminist concerns, agendas, and beliefs as being those of all of feminism and all of feminists. You do not have to be white to be a white feminist. It is also perfectly possible to be white and feminist and not be a white feminist. The term describes a set of assumptions and behaviors which have been baked into mainstream Western feminism, rather than describing the racial identity of its subjects. At the same time, it is true that most white feminists are indeed white, and that whiteness itself is at the core of white feminism.

  A white feminist may be a woman who earnestly salutes the precepts of “intersectionality”—the need for feminism to reflect structural inequalities drawn along the lines of race, faith, class, disability, et cetera, as well as gender—but fails to cede space to the feminists of color who have been ignored, erased, or excluded from the feminist movement. White feminists can attend civil rights marches, have Black, Asian, and Brown friends, and in some cases be Black, Asian, and Brown themselves, and yet be devoted to organizational structures or systems of knowledge that ensure that Black, Asian, and Brown women’s experiences, and so their needs and priorities, remain sidelined. More broadly, to be a white feminist you simply have to be a person who accepts the benefits conferred by white supremacy at the expense of people of color, while claiming to support gender equality and solidarity with “all” women.

  This book is a critique of whiteness within feminism; it is directed at pointing out what must be excised, what must be broken down, in order for something new, something better, to take its place. It explains why interventions that simply add Black, Asian, or Brown women to existing structures have not worked. Because it is a critique, it has not been possible to present the diversity of views that exist among and between Black, Asian, and Brown women. Others are doing this work, but for that effort to be given its due, this project of dismantling has to be done. This book tackles what “whiteness” has done within the feminist movement; similar work can and needs to be done about how whiteness operates within lesbian, gay, trans and queer movements.

  The goal here is not to expel white women from feminism, but to excise whiteness, with all its assumptions of privilege and superiority, so as to foster the freedom and empowerment of all women.

  AGAINST

  WHITE FEMINISM

  INTRODUCTION

  At a Wine Bar, a Group of Feminists

  It is a warm fall evening and I am at a Manhattan wine bar with five other women. The mood is warm and cheerful. Two of the women are writers and journalists, like myself, and the other three work in the media or publishing industry. Everyone, except for me, is white. I am excited to have been included this evening, eager to impress and befriend these women I have only known professionally through phone calls and emails.

  The first hurdle comes when the waiter comes to take our order. “Let’s split a pitcher of Sangria!” someone says, and everyone agrees excitedly; then they turn to me, looking for agreement. “I am on some medications but please, you guys, go ahead, I will drink vicariously through you,” I declare with a smile whose wattage aims to cover up all the discomfort, my own and theirs. It is the truth, but I feel ashamed saying it. They know that I am Muslim and I imagine them wondering immediately if I am too uptight to belong among them. “It’s not a religious thing,” I add once the waiter is gone, “you have no idea how much I would love a glass right now.” There is laughter all around the table. Now I worry that the laughter is forced and that this audition for belonging is already over.

  The second hurdle arrives a little later, when everyone except me has been softened by Sangria and is exchanging more personal stories, bonding in the way you’re supposed to at wine bars in Manhattan on warm fall evenings. I see it coming when one of the women, a noted feminist author, looks at me mischievously. “So Rafia . . . what is your story?” she asks conspiratorially, as if I’ve been hiding some tantalizing mystery.

  “Yeah,” one of the others, an editor at a literary journal, chimes in, “how did you even come here . . . like, to America?”

  It is a question I detest so much that I learned to deflect it with a stand-up comedy piece. I am performing now, too, but I know the comedy won’t do, will seem like too much of a deflection. But I am prepared for this moment, not least because it has proven tricky to navigate so many times before. Often (as I dramatized in the stand-up routine) I offer up a few white lies. I tell people I came to America when I was eighteen to go to college and then stayed.

  It is only two-thirds of a lie. The truth is, I came to America as a young bride. One night after dinner, sitting at the edge of my bed in mid-’90s Karachi, I agreed to an arranged marriage. I was seventeen; my husband, thirteen years older and a Pakistani-American doctor, had promised to “allow” me to go to college once we were married. There were other reasons why I said yes, but the possibility of going to college in the United States, something that my conservative family would never allow (or be able to afford), was a major factor. My life until then had been constrained in all sorts of ways, hardly extending beyond the walls that surrounded our home. I had never experienced freedom, so I gladly signed it away.

  Arriving in the United States, I moved directly to Nashville, Tennessee. There I attended a Southern Baptist college (when it was still closely affiliated with the Church and where exhortations promising fire and brimstone for all non-Baptists were commonplace), which my new husband had selected and enrolled me in and for which I was to pay via student loans. After graduating college, I begged him for permission to go to law school, to which I had applied, earning a partial scholarship. He refused, then relented, then “changed his mind,” reminding me that his marital promise was to let me attend college, not law school.

  The transactional nature of our relationship glared at me. The next seven years did not change things for the better. During our last fight, the police officer who arrived on the scene took his cue from my suddenly calm and courteous husband and told me to “patch it up.” It was only much later that I would learn that this is what police officers tell women who look to them for help, all the time.

  I did not “patch it up” but I spent the night clutching my sleeping toddler. The next morning, after my husband left for the hospital to do his morning rounds, I took her, a small suitcase of clothes, a box of toys, and an inflatable mattress, and dr
ove to a domestic-violence shelter, an unmarked and unknown house. A woman with blond hair and bright-blue eye shadow led me there. “Just follow my car,” she told me when we met at a Kmart parking lot, and I did, the Barney theme song playing on a loop inside my car to keep my daughter quiet.

  I calculate the costs of presenting the abbreviated version of my story to the literary drinks group. Even if I added a few details, the redacted version of the truth could seem curt, closeted. Telling secrets is the material of friendships; I could begin to weave that fabric now, encompassing them in the warp and weft of my story.

  But I feel I cannot present the unedited version either. The truth of that ordeal, and what I endured afterward in my struggle to make my own life as a young single mother in the 2000s, seems glaringly inappropriate for the wine bar and my prettily dressed, slightly soused, fashionably woke companions. I have told the whole truth to such women before and the reaction has always been the same. There is the widening of eyes, the look of seriousness and shock, the hands over mouths, the arms slung around my shoulders. When I finish there is genuine sympathy, a fervent digging around in their own imaginations for some similar story, an aunt, a friend, a connection to violence. Then one of two things happens.

  If I am lucky, someone makes a joke or suggests a toast and we move on to other topics, which I eagerly take up. More often, when I am not lucky, there is an uncomfortable silence as everyone stares at the table or at their drinks. Then a grabbing of purses and phones and reasons to leave amid declarations of “how good this has been” and “we should do this again” and “thank you for sharing your story.” The words are well meant, but the tone is unmistakable. I don’t remember ever “doing this again.”

  I know why. There is a division within feminism that is not spoken of but that has remained seething beneath the surface for years. It is the division between the women who write and speak feminism and the women who live it, the women who have voice versus the women who have experience, the ones who make the theories and policies and the ones who bear scars and sutures from the fight. While this dichotomy does not always trace racial divides, it is true that, by and large, the women who are paid to write about feminism, lead feminist organizations, and make feminist policy in the Western world are white and upper-middle-class. These are our pundits, our “experts,” who know or at least claim to know what feminism means and how it works. On the other side are women of color, working-class women, immigrants, minorities, Indigenous women, trans women, shelter-dwellers—many of whom live feminist lives but rarely get to speak or write about them. There is an inchoate assumption that the really strong women, the “real” feminists, reared by other white feminists, do not end up in abusive situations.

  Of course, they do. But a multitude of factors, notably their access to resources, means that they do not usually/often have to expose themselves by ending up in shelters or in need of public resources. Conversely, women of color, more often immigrant and poor, do have to take help from strangers and the state, they are the visibly needy and the obviously victimized. It is a complex situation; but it fosters/maintains an image of white feminists as the rescuers and women of color as the rescued.

  So an inchoate aversion to lived trauma permeates white feminism, which produces in turn a discomfort with and an alienation from women who have experienced it. I’ve sensed it every time but have only recently been able to attach it to tacit social assumptions around who undergoes trauma. By highlighting Brown and Black and Asian women suffering trauma as the “usual,” their victimhood stemming from their cultures, while suffering white women are portrayed as an aberration, a glitch, white culture, including the feminism that has sprung from it, asserts itself as superior.

  It is for this reason that it has been hard for me to own up to the hardships I have endured. Being one of these non-white “others”—and particularly identifying myself as someone who has done time in the trenches, lived in fear of my life, moved from shelter to shelter, and carries the scars of that trauma—will win me momentary praise from white women, I know. And in that moment they will say the right things, marvel at my courage, ask questions about what hiding from an abuser was like, what being a single mother entails. But my ownership of this othered identity will also allow them to demote me mentally below the women who do the real work of feminism, define its boundaries, its intellectual and policy parameters. “Real” feminists, in their eyes, are fighting for the cause in the public arena, untrammeled by the shifting burden of messy experience.

  What I feel in these moments is not imposter syndrome. I know that I have experienced more and overcome more than the women with me tonight. But I also know that my companions’ world is split into women of color who have “stories” to tell (or to be told on their behalf) and white women who have power and an inherently feminist outlook. Here lie the mechanics, the levers and pulleys of how Brown and Black and Asian women’s experiences are othered, slotted by white feminists under the mental label of “not-applicable to me.”

  Here, too, “relatability” exerts its cultural tyranny, using the language of personal preference to legitimize the narrowness and rigidity of the collective white imagination. The academic departments, publishing houses, newsrooms, boards of powerful international NGOs, and civil-rights agencies of the Western world are filled with white, middle-class women. In order to be welcomed into these spaces of power, I need to be “relatable” to them, to “fit” into them. And if the spaces are white and middle class (and they are), I must be recognizable in my humanity specifically to white and middle-class people.

  On a superficial level, I can demonstrate this kinship via mentions of fervent feminist awakenings in college, dating mishaps on various apps, curated details of an affluent urban life, and diligent skin-care routines. I can also demonstrate it by not mentioning the kinds of experiences that white people believe do not apply to them—certain kinds of domestic abuse, for example, certain kinds of migration, certain kinds of internecine conflict.

  The cult of relatability fosters the exclusion of certain kinds of lived experience from the hierarchies of feminist power, with pervasive consequences for feminist thought and praxis. Many institutions involved in feminist policy-making do not just refuse to consider the lived experience of women of color as a useful perspective for colleagues to bring, they actually treat such experience as a strike against applicants, claiming/fearing they will be “less objective” because of it. During my six years of service on the board of directors of Amnesty International USA, I never once saw any of the many prisoners of conscience whose cases had been highlighted by the organization be invited to participate in policy discussions or be nominated for the board. Even the shelter where I worked had a rule that excluded those who were residents of the shelter from volunteering or working there for an intervening period of several years.

  The great lie of relatability is its implied claim that there is one truly neutral perspective, one original starting point, against which all else can be measured. Relatability is subjectivity dressed up as objectivity. The question we’re not supposed to ask, when presented with the “problem” of insufficient relatability, is: relatable to whom? And so the stories of women of color are often told but the perspective gained from living such stories never becomes part of the epistemology of feminism.

  The functional dichotomy between expertise and experience is in no way incidental. Many white feminists have forged successful careers in punditry and policy on the basis of formal expertise, accumulating qualifications, conducting research, getting published in journals and books. They have staked out a professional space in which ideas can be constructed and dismantled. And because access to educational and professional opportunity is unevenly distributed in favor of white people, this emphasis on expertise becomes a kind of gatekeeping of power that locks out people of color, as well as working-class people, migrants, and many other groups. The introduction of a different kind of authority to this space, then, one founded i
n lived experiences that these “experts” may not share, is seen as a threat to the legitimacy of their own contribution to women’s rights—as if feminist thought and praxis is a zero-sum game, with one kind of knowledge supplanting the other.

  This anxiety around the challenge to the primacy of expertise, which goes hand-in-hand with a challenge to whiteness and its hoarding of power, leads to a particular kind of racialized calculus. If an experience or characteristic is associated with a non-white group, then it is coded automatically as valueless, and in turn anyone associated with that experience becomes themselves devalued. This is the way that hegemony protects itself: silencing and punishing difference by stripping away its legitimacy. These kinds of motivated value judgments are at the heart of white supremacy. And this is how white supremacy operates within feminism, with upper-middle-class white women at the top ensuring that the credentials that upper-middle-class white women have remain the most valued criteria within feminism itself.

  Sitting at the wine bar, I am aware of all of this. And I can feel my rising anger at having to “keep it light,” accommodating the expectations of people unfamiliar with all the things that can and do go wrong for women like me. But a voice deep inside me insists, “You’ve come so far.” I know precisely what it means: I want to have a voice in a way women like me, single mothers, immigrant brides, abuse survivors, women without safety nets or connections or fancy college degrees, rarely get to have. And I almost have it, I tell myself. I’m so nearly there. It’s just the difference between being proud of my truth or censoring it.

  I choose the latter. “Oh, I was married young and came to college in the U.S.,” I say breezily. “He was a jerk,” I roll my eyes, “so I divorced him and never looked back.” It is just the right amount of information. “Good for you!” one of them gasps. “Wow, I haven’t even been married once and you’ve already been divorced,” laughs another from the end of the table. The conversation moves seamlessly on. When the bill comes for the three pitchers of Sangria, it is divided equally among us all. I pay a full share, even though I have nursed a single Diet Coke. Nobody cares to notice.