Against White Feminism Read online

  In the gender-only narrative that has dominated mainstream feminism, all women are pitted against all men, against whom they seek parity. In this struggle, however, white women have taken for themselves the right to speak for all women, occasionally allowing a woman of color to speak but only when she can do so in the tone and language of white women, adopting the priorities, causes and arguments of whiteness. But the assumption that women of color and white women all stand at the same disadvantages against men is flawed. All white women enjoy white racial privilege. Women of color are affected not simply by gender inequality but also by racial inequality. A colorblind feminism thus imposes an identity cost on women of color, erasing a central part of their lived experience and their political reality. This makes it impossible to see the ways in which a white-centric feminism is not serving their needs.

  Growing up in Pakistan, I saw my mother, my grandmother, and my aunts survive terrible suffering of all sorts. They survived migrations, devastating business losses, inept husbands, lost relations, legal discrimination, and so much more, without ever giving in to despair, without ever abandoning those who relied on them, without ever failing to show up. Their resilience, their sense of responsibility, their empathy, and their capacity for hope are also feminist qualities, but not ones that the current feminist arithmetic will permit. In the value system of white feminism, it is rebellion, rather than resilience, that is seen as the ultimate feminist virtue; my maternal forebears’ endurance is labeled thus a pre-feminist impulse, misguided, unenlightened, and unable to deliver change. No attention can be garnered by Pakistani feminists unless they do something that is recognizable within the white feminist sphere of experience—skateboard while wearing their headscarves, march with placards, write a book about sex, run away to the West. The truth that resilience may be just as much a feminist quality as rebellion is lost in the story of feminism written and populated entirely by white women.

  This, too, is a legacy of white supremacy: the white gaze has never been disaggregated from feminism itself. It has become the only kind of feminism we recognize or even have language for. And that means that most of the times when women speak “feminism,” they unintentionally take on the cadence and color of whiteness.

  In my analysis I am deeply indebted to the work of political theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose groundbreaking essay “Can the Sub-Altern Speak?” first pointed out how Europeans assume that they know the other, placing it in the context of the oppressed. Spivak’s famous articulation of “white men saving brown women from brown men” has been a theoretical framework that undergirds much of this book.1 Spivak pointed out how the subaltern could not speak; I am interested in pointing out how the subaltern is now given some chances to speak but is not heard because the foundations of white supremacy (best represented by colonialism and neo-colonialism) have not been dismantled. Unlike Spivak’s work, this is not a book of feminist theory but of feminist practice and its problematic genealogies, the problems of the past and the new forms they have taken in our present.

  The consequence of being unable to separate whiteness from feminism’s agenda is that feminists everywhere continue to be tied to the genealogy and epistemology of white feminists. Black schoolgirls are taught about Susan B. Anthony, unknowingly imbibing reverence for a woman who, annoyed by the progress of the Fifteenth Amendment, told Frederick Douglass, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.” South Asian feminists who adore Jane Austen’s heroines as models of strength, wit, and judgment are also absorbing Austen’s imperialist views, her justifications for white colonizers taking over land without native knowledge. In countless cases like this, the uncritical presentation of white feminism as the definitive and only kind of feminism covertly recruits women of color in its own justification.

  There are two antidotes to this.

  First, we must excise white supremacy from within feminism. The disproportionate space that has been taken up by whiteness within feminism, and the implicit suggestion that this imbalance exists because only white women are actually feminists, must be repopulated by robust accounts of other feminisms: those that were actively suppressed or erased by colonial domination and white silencing, and those that have been eclipsed in the obliviousness, past and present, of white privilege.

  Second, since experience engenders politics, both must be recalibrated into the necessary vocabulary of feminism. The erasure of Black and Brown and Asian women’s experiences has meant the erasure of their politics, and both must be urgently revalued as integral to the feminist canon. To make their experience explicit, feminists of all kinds must work to develop their own genealogies, to look at the women in their lives and in their histories who have not been considered “feminist” because they do not mirror the projects and priorities of white women. This work has already been started by the many writers committed to telling the stories of women of color. Voicing and documenting experience is valuable in and of itself, a vital process of affirmation and collective solidarity. But it is also a catalyst to revitalize the political, such that feminism’s strategies and goals reach beyond white and middle-class interests to draw in those of all the women whose stories and politics are presently invisible, and whose needs, having been systematically underserved and elided for centuries, are most urgent. Moreover, documentation of experience is also valuable as an affirmation of humanity, solidarity, and collective experience, which are important kinds of self-care for women of color and other marginalized women.

  The new story of feminism will be a different story from the one we know today. It is not enough for alternative narratives of women of color simply to exist; they must actually influence the content and the course of the movement for gender parity. And before this can happen, white women must reckon with just how much white privilege has influenced feminist movements and continues to influence the agenda of feminism today. These are not novel suggestions, but they are ones that have been ignored with alarming obstinacy.

  I am tired of the pretense of engagement even as the white feminists in power cling to their fear, their filters, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which they include and exclude. I want to be able to meet at a wine bar and have an honest conversation about change, about transformation, about how we can bring a failed system down and build a new and better one.

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the Beginning, There Were White Women

  In 2007, the much-celebrated feminist playwright Eve Ensler wrote an essay for Glamour. “I have just returned from hell,” it began, going on to detail her visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she had met “girls as young as nine who had been raped by gangs of soldiers.” According to its title, the article is about “Women Left for Dead—And the Man Who’s Saving Them,” but this is not immediately clear.

  Even while detailing the anguish of Congolese women, Ensler manages to keep the attention on herself. “How do I convey these stories?” she asks. “How do I tell you . . .?” “I stay for a week at Panzi. Women line up to tell me their stories.” Having just recounted a horrific story about “Alfonsine,” rather than inviting the reader to reflect on that story, she writes: “I look at Alfonsine’s petite body and imagine the scars beneath her humble white clothes. I imagine the reconstructed flesh, the agony she experienced after being shot. I listen carefully. I cannot detect a drop of bitterness or any desire for revenge. Writing about the surgery that is needed to repair the fistulas suffered by so many women victims, again she centers herself, saying, “I sit in on a typical operation. . . . I am able to see the fistula.” And so on.

  Her repeated emphasis on what she herself is doing and hearing, rather than on what she sees and hears, strongly suggests that her goal is to show the crucial role that she, a white woman, is playing in the lives of these women. She is eager to enlist the rest of Glamour’s readership as well; they can write to the president of Congo, or they can donate to the hospital whe
re the rape victims are being treated and the rehabilitation center where “they will learn to become political leaders,” through Ensler’s own website.

  Ensler’s article in Glamour demonstrates how the white savior complex intersects with feminism in the twenty-first century. A white woman takes on the task of “speaking for” raped and brutalized “other” women, positioning herself as their rescuer, the conduit through which emancipation must flow. It is also an example of how the plight of “over there” exists as a foil against which the successes of women in the West can be judged. “How lucky we are,” readers of Ensler’s article are encouraged to conclude, mournfully shaking their heads at the circumstances of women who live in less civilized parts of the world. It is notable that the naming or erasure of the indentities of women of color is entirely at the whim of the white women telling the story. In cases where people should be mentioned by name, say the nurses and other medical staff (but which may draw attention away from the white woman’s central role as savior), they are left out; in others, where confidentiality would be helpful, such as not photographing victims like “Nadine,” we are told that she has agreed to be photographed if her name is changed.

  The 2020 Annual Letter issued by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides another example of this calculated and deliberate phenomenon, particularly as it relates to the optics of white women benevolently helping Black and Brown people.1 The first image used in the report sets the tone: it features Melinda Gates bending down to meet the eyes of an unnamed Black woman wearing a mask and lying on a hospital bed. The subject’s anonymity is typical of this kind of iconography. We may assume that the name has been omitted to protect the woman’s privacy, but the pattern continues. Even when the people of color depicted are appearing in their professional capacity, providing rather than receiving care, where there would be no need for anonymity, their names are left out. Bill and Melinda themselves, the only white people in the photos, are the only people ever named. A visit to the Gugulethu Health Clinic features unnamed Black and Brown “staff.” The section on gender opens with Melinda Gates flanked on either side by two unidentified, diminutive Brown Indian women.

  So effective is this mode of virtue signaling that it has even caught on as a trend on dating apps. A website called Humanitarians of Tinder is devoted to pictures of valiant and loving and oh-so-adventurous white women (and some men) dishing out hugs, cuddling babies, and partaking in customary “native” dances.2 The same template used by Ensler and Gates to harvest public approval or drum up financial backing is now reapplied to the task of attracting sexual partners. As ever, the Black and Brown faces are mere props in a white enterprise.

  Not just a recent cultural style limited to dating apps, fashion magazines, and billionaire philanthropists, this habit of centering the white woman when talking about the emancipation of women of color has a genealogy. The “white feminist savior complex,” rooted deep in epistemology and in history, took shape in the colonial era. In the home countries of white women, nineteenth-century gender roles and enduring male privilege constrained their freedoms significantly. But setting off for the colonies allowed these women a unique kind of escape. In India or Nigeria they had a significant advantage: white privilege. Still subordinate to white men, they were nevertheless considered superior by virtue of race to the colonized “subjects.” This superiority automatically granted them greater power and also greater freedom.

  “I am a person in this country! I am a person,” wrote an effusive Gertrude Bell to her parents in March 1902.3 She was writing from Mount Carmel in Haifa, where she had come to learn Arabic and get away from the unkind tittering of London society. Bell’s outburst was revealing. In her thirties and with a penchant for falling for the wrong men (they were either poor or married or dead or all three), or not falling for them at all (she friend-zoned more than one wealthy prospect), she was far too old still to be single. In a society that expected matrimony and motherhood of its women, this rendered her functionally redundant.

  Home reminded Gertrude of her failings, the damning deficiency of having tried and failed at landing a husband. In the exotic East, there was plenty of room for London ladies who had aged out of the marriage market, and as Gertrude soon learned, the privileges of empire more than made up for the disadvantages of gender. Indeed, she was a “person” in Jerusalem, because unlike at home, her whiteness placed her above most of the rest of humanity. No Brown man could control or question her as she traipsed the bazaars in her straw hat and white dresses or chastise her for riding a horse like a man.

  Bell’s example reveals how some of white British women’s very first experiences of freedom beyond home and hearth were caught up with the experience of imperial superiority beyond the boundaries of Britain and Europe. Contrary to the customary slow slog of history, Britain’s empire had swelled rapidly through the nineteenth century, and British women had become citizens of empire. At a time when white women were still the legal property of their husbands, the opportunity to taste a little of the power that was usually withheld from them was evidently too tantalizing to resist subjugating others. As one woman put it, “it was an escape from the old stereotyped existence whose comfortable, commonplace round we had run till it had become altogether monotonous and humdrum.”4

  Ironically, or perhaps simply staying true to the political pedigree of the family that supported her financially, Bell herself was opposed to women’s suffrage; in 1908 she would serve as the honorary secretary of the Anti-Suffrage League.5 It makes sense that Gertrude was in it for herself, her rugged individualism at odds with any collective effort. The idea that all women were equal to men and could do what she could do made no sense to her at all. Her faith was in her own exceptional nature.

  Bell’s opposition to suffrage did not much matter, for there were many other women pursuing the suffrage cause, and they, too, would benefit from their racial superiority as they tended to their lesser sisters across the empire. If Bell found in the breadth of Britain’s domain a freedom of movement and lifting of gendered constraints, these suffrage campaigners saw in the very existence of colonized native women the availability of a politically expedient moral contrast. The subjugation of women, they argued, could only be the practice of uncivilized cultures like the ones that had been colonized by the British.

  In her 1851 essay “The Enfranchisement of Women,” Harriet Taylor conjured a picture of the unemancipated woman in the minds of her readers: the “Oriental or Asiatic” woman who was kept in seclusion and was hence “servile-minded.”6 Later suffragists went much further; one pamphlet from 1879 argued that “if the physical health of a woman is admittedly impaired owing to confinement in a limited space, her mental health also suffers through legislative disabilities . . . it is unfair to deprive her of political liberty and as in the Oriental mode shut her up in four walls.”7 Others used terms like “abject subjection” and “our cruelly crippled sisters in the East” to describe the hapless women they imagined as desperately needing their attention and assistance.

  A whole cultural discourse thus highlighted the position of colonized Black and Brown and Asian women within the colonial universe. In the eyes of Victorian society, “Eastern women were doubly inferior being women and Easterners.”8 Even so, white women who traveled to South Asia and the Middle East were very interested in visiting them. Since the female quarters of any wealthy household or palace were known as the zenana, these visits were known as “zenana visits.”

  Bell herself managed several zenana visits with the famed Eastern women, encounters she records with almost snide condescension in her book Persian Pictures. During her first encounter, at the Sultan’s palace itself, she finds the conversation lacking despite the efforts of the French interpreter, noting that all their hostess seemed able to manage as a response is “a nervous giggle, turning aside her head and burying it in a pocket handkerchief”9 The lasting image of the Persian woman as a tittering idiot does not fade despite the appearance o
f two daughters who speak of their studies in French and Arabic. By the end of it all, Gertrude has determined everything, even the snacks served (lemon ices), to be unsatisfactory. Ever glad to be white and English, Gertrude and her friend take leave of the three ladies who stand gazing after them from the canvas walls. “Their prisoned existence seemed to us a poor mockery of life as we cantered homewards up the damp valley.” The sun, Gertrude notes contentedly, has dropped below the horizon in Persia, “bearing the fullness of its light to the Western world—to our own world.”

  The “zenana visit,” was already very much in fashion throughout the eighteenth century, when the first colonists and occasionally their wives set out for the mysterious “Orient.” Their novelty wore out a bit as empire ground on, and they became more commonly a stop on the Western tourist route, but the legacy of those intrusions lived on in the form of nineteenth-century feminist rhetoric situating these other women as their inferiors. Most of the women who wrote pamphlets preaching white women’s enfranchisement and certainly most of those that consumed them had never been to the East. It is even more doubtful that they had met any of the women from the harems and seraglios against whom they wished to contrast their own condition. The power of the comparison came not from the truth of any of Eastern women’s actual conditions but from the imaginative currency of whiteness and non-whiteness. Believing themselves to be superior, white women argued that they deserved higher status and more freedoms than colonized women. That potent “us” and “them” became an indispensable lever for white women pushing for their own emancipation.