Against White Feminism Read online

  De Beauvoir’s own assumptions about Western consciousness and progress are boosted by her thoughtless reiterations of common stereotypes of her place and time, in which the “Oriental lives in the Orient, a life of Oriental ease, in a state of Oriental despotism and sensuality”; the Orient itself is “separate, eccentric, backward, silently indifferent, femininely penetrable”; and the narrative of human progress unfolds in the West “against the timeless culturally static oriental who never quite rises to the occasion of human freedom and history.”13

  Just as de Beauvoir dismisses Indian women as trapped in perpetual slavery, she constantly uses “slavery” to describe the condition of women, by which we now know meant only white women. Yet through her visits to America and access to libraries, she should have known about the particular horrors faced by Black women who had experienced actual slavery.

  There are noxious whiffs here of the same beliefs that British suffragists also held, that white women in being companions to white men, the most evolved of all men, automatically deserve equality and better treatment than the women of savage and uncivilized men.

  Today, Simone de Beauvoir has been elevated as a timeless feminist heroine. Yet through her powerful influence, her belief in Western cultural supremacy and essentialization of the white woman as the model of all women became baked into the very epistemology of feminism. Successors like Betty Friedan, author of The Feminist Mystique—who called de Beauvoir “an intellectual heroine of our history” and credited her with having “started her on the road” of feminism—have repeated her mistakes.14 Friedan focused on the anomie (“problem with no name”) experienced by white middle-class and upper-class women whose sole focus was on their homes, their children, and their husbands, and like de Beauvoir, Friedan essentialized “women” to mean these women.

  In the 1970s, another successor to de Beauvoir, the American radical feminist Kate Millett, tried to do better in forging solidarity with non-Western women. She had given theoretical foundation to what became known as second-wave feminism in a book called Sexual Politics, a sharp amalgam of literary criticism and sociological study that dissects the work of three of America’s literary and artistic heroes—Norman Mailer, John Ruskin, and Henry Miller—to expose how patriarchy serves as the core organizing principle in American society. One commentator credited her with having “destroyed the authority of the male author.”15

  I loved Sexual Politics when I read it decades later (just as I had loved de Beauvoir; I had been hurt when I discovered her Orientalist bigotry). I admired Millett’s irreverence and was also attracted to her interest in feminist solidarity, built on the sort of radical questioning that could be built in the book. As author and radical feminist Alix Shulman wrote, the book tried to breed in its readers a healthy “epistemological skepticism,” which meant a robust questioning of the foundations of knowledge that produced a certain idea, text, or philosophy.16 The purpose of the stance was to look at the world without considering any foundational truths as unassailable, or as existing in isolation.

  Millett modeled the feminist as standing in opposition to many given truths, comfortable in her reading of the world through a gender lens. Millett’s stance of epistemological skepticism toward the literary canon created by white men can also be applied to the collusion of racial privilege and feminist thought. If all women adopted this perspective, I wondered, would it be possible to bring about a true feminist solidarity?

  At a time when America was at the cusp of the sexual revolution, Millett argued that sex was not just sex after all. Sex between a man and a woman was a matter of power, and hence of politics. Just as she unraveled the unequal power dynamics in the sexual encounter, so too is “feminist solidarity” a political project that inherently involves conflict and contestation. It cannot be a tasty amalgam of meetings and conferences and photo ops and lectures. Constructing a true feminist solidarity involves exposing and excavating the supremacy of whiteness within feminism today. But even Millett found it harder to subject herself, and the domination of white women within feminism, to the same sort of epistemological skepticism that she applied to the “love”-making scenes in the literature of white men.

  A lesbian Socialist feminist who believed in a robust internationalism, Millett decided in 1979 to test her own universalism against the reality of working in solidarity with other women who were feminists but who were not white or American. Idealistic and well-intentioned (like so many other white feminists then and now), Millett was interested in collaborating with other women on a basis of equality and mutual learning, one that was attendant to the power differences that race and nationality and class had dealt. So she decided to travel to Iran.

  She knew a little bit about the country; the years and months before she ended up in Iran, Millett had been critical about America’s foreign policy, in particular its meddling in Iran, not least its installation of the Shah in a CIA-orchestrated coup. Nonetheless, she seemed a bit unprepared when she arrived in Tehran: “The first sight of them was terrible. Like blackbirds, like death, like fate like everything alien. Foreign, dangerous and unfriendly. There were hundreds of them, specters crowding the barrier, waiting their own. A sea of chadori, the long terrible veil, the full length of it, like a dress descending to the floor, ancient, powerful, annihilating us.”17 These Iranian women hardly seemed suitable for the project of feminist political solidarity that the young Millett, raised as she was on the unrest of the 1960s and the transformations of the 1970s, had come to execute in Iran.

  Things improved after Millett and her lover, journalist Sophie Kier, met up with activists from the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran, the group that had invited her to participate in their celebration of International Women’s Day that March 8, 1979. Most, if not all, were affiliated with the Communist Tudeh Party and had protested the Shah for years. During his regime, the Shah had banned the celebration of International Women’s Day, preferring Iranian women to celebrate the day when he had ordered them to remove their veils. So the group had made a point of including veiled women in their program, to underscore that the issue of veiling or not veiling was not the basis of true progressivism and that political freedom was at the center of their leftist populism.

  Fervent and idealistic, these activists, who had spent the preceding months protesting in the streets of Tehran, young and chic with a disdain for fear, cast a spell on Millett. Between March 5, when she arrived, and March 8, when she would speak, the days were full of political tumult, marching in the streets, huddling and planning in this or that hotel room or apartment. During this time, Millett appears to have realized that the covering and uncovering of women was part of the political theatre of the revolution and had political significance that was more complicated than she had assumed when she characterized veiled women as predatory birds during her first hour in Iran. While most of the women in CAIFI did not wear the veil, they were insistent on courting women who did, believing that solidarity among all women was what ultimately mattered; they knew, too, that in the country’s post-Shah future, they could not afford to alienate religiously conservative Iranian women. They wanted to show Iranians as a whole, and Iranian women in particular, that the left and the Tudeh Party stood for political freedom for all women, not the superficial modernity that removing the veil implied.

  The idea that veiled women had political identities and feminist views was news to Millett. In her account of the event, she describes the first speaker, who “had four of her sons shot down in the insurrection,” not as a predatory bird but rather as adorned in a “beautiful garment,” her words those of “a firebrand.”18

  But despite her eagerness and openness to learning and understanding, Millett could not completely shed the “white woman in charge” role that white feminists tend to assume when surrounded by women of color. Nor, more sadly, could she apply the idea of epistemological skepticism she had pioneered to expose the power differentials involved in the heterosexual sexual
encounter to the power differential between herself and her Iranian feminist counterparts. Whiteness and Westernness, then as now, confer privilege and power regardless of the consent of those endowed. Often white women play along, pretending these were earned, or that they don’t exist. This was evident once Millett came before the foreign press.

  From the start, Millett wanted Iranian women to engage with the international press themselves, but she seemed blind to the possibility that in a country ripped apart by U.S. meddling, the choice not to engage the Western press might itself be a legitimate political position held by the female freedom fighters who wanted their anti-American credentials to be clear. These women fighters with whom Millett was so enamored did not share her eagerness to engage with the Western media, and were focused instead on the protests that would transform Iran rather than the narrative being conveyed to the rest of the Western world.

  Faced by a Western press eager to treat her as a spokesperson for the Iranian Women’s Movement, Millett convinced herself that she was in fact a representative of “the rest of the world” in Iran in that moment, and that changing the narrative on Iranian women was too important to quibble about whether she had the right to serve in such a role. “At this moment I am feminist in a fight they are calling espionage, imperialist provocation or anything they can get away with” she wrote. “If I can tell my side, the truth has a chance, I have a chance, all the women here have a chance to go on.”19 Willy-nilly, a white woman had once again put herself in charge of speaking for women who were not white. Millett had deployed the automatic legitimacy conferred upon her, a white American woman, by other Westerners and put herself in the center of a struggle for freedom and justice that was far beyond her knowledge or experience. Not all Iranian women appreciated this.

  Millett had failed to apply her technique of epistemological skepticism and the analysis of who has the power to speak and why, as she allowed her own whiteness and Westernness to impose her own frame of analysis on a situation that was never about her, making it the primary lens through which the Western world saw Iran and Iranian women at that moment.

  Gloria Steinem and Simone de Beauvoir had also been invited by CAIFI to participate in the International Women’s Day celebrations. Millett took pains in her speech to portray other white and Western feminists as having genuine concern about their sisters in Iran. She began “with greetings from Gloria [Steinem], Robin [Morgan], and Angela Davis.” In reality, Millett notes, most of the famous women like Steinem had given her the run-around, ignoring her messages and not returning her calls.

  This too-busy-to-call-back attitude of VIP feminists transformed just as soon as the world realized that a revolution was under way in Iran. Suddenly all the feminists, including Steinem, now wanted to get into the action, and Millett had to explain why more white women were not likely to do any good (Steinem’s onetime CIA employment may have posed a particular problem) and would divert attention from the Iranian women themselves. Instead, she pleaded for “bread [money] for offices, to start publications,” and help with getting articles placed—anything and everything so “they know you’re with them.” No such practical help ever arrived (except in the shape of a loan by French feminists to pay Millett and Kier’s hotel bill). Not long after her phone call with Steinem, Millett herself was deported from Iran.

  As an otherwise lesser star in the white feminist firmament, Millett became territorial about Iranian women, now functioning as an expert on what others should do. Within this white feminist conversation, Iranian women are peripheral and Millett’s being brave enough to be there first becomes primary. Like most white feminists now and then, she explains her wrongheaded role as spokeswoman as a matter of good intentions. She had wanted to help—even if she had never been able to answer the question: “How do you help? How in the hell do you help?”20

  At the time of Millett’s trip, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s landmark paper in which she coined the term “intersectionality,” arguing that race and gender should both be considered in legal cases involving Black women plaintiffs, was still a decade in the future. Crenshaw’s logic, if applied to Millett’s trip to Iran, might have suggested that Iranian feminists’ religio-cultural identity was just as important in understanding their situation as their gender, and that their political positions were more complex than a visiting white woman might immediately grasp. Millett’s tacit assumption that feminism in Iran should follow the same model as Western feminism—including in its strategic use of the media—was a failure at such a multidimensional understanding.

  In theory, some white feminists today seem eager for a reckoning with the role of whiteness within feminism. The hesitation, the discomfort, the squirming in seats, and ultimately the turning away comes later, when foundational texts or long-adored heroines become the subject of the reckoning. Epistemological skepticism has the potential to uncover theoretical infirmities, cloaked bigotry, or just blatant racism. It reveals how and why the general term “woman” has, in the Western world, been intentionally deployed to mean “white” women.

  Can we take what is useful from de Beauvoir’s and Millett’s pioneering texts while exposing and excising their underpinnings of white privilege and even bigotry? Or should all white feminists with racist and Western-centric failings be eliminated from the story of feminism? In the reckoning that must take place in order for feminism to represent all women, feminists must question whether excising one or another idea from a heroine’s corpus can still permit the remainder to stand. Simone de Beauvoir’s work is at the center of many white feminist awakenings, but her erasure of Black women, her dismissal of Brown women, is also embedded in her idea of the “self” and the “other.”

  The cases of Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett reveal the lack of epistemological room there has been in white feminist theory for a true understanding of women who are affected by more than one system of oppression. De Beauvoir undoubtedly recognized both race and gender as systems of oppression, but still imagined that race-based oppression happened to Black men and gender-based oppression happened to white women. And despite her radical leftism, Millett could not, for example, understand why her easy assumption of the role of spokesperson trampled over the possibilities of the very solidarity that she and her white feminist sisters were so eager to achieve. But by bringing together the intellectual tools of Millett’s epistemological skepticism and Crenshaw’s understanding of intersectionality, can a true feminist solidarity finally be born?

  Today, from Art Fairs in Indiana, where dancing African women and Brown henna artists are the entertainment, to feminist seminars in New York City, white feminism is still unquestioningly presented as the feminism. If women of color have roles in white feminism, they are cameos, the supporting cast or the targets of pity, grasping for survival, or for a school or a health clinic, rather than whole and complex humans. We are expected to be tellers of sad stories, where we detail how our particularly brutal men, our inherently flawed culture, our singularly draconian religion (but never the actions or inaction of white people) have caused us indescribable pain. For their part, white feminists offer us their precious, and perhaps their righteous indignation at the savagery of our native cultures, which have left us in such a hopeless mess, pitiably but patiently waiting for their interventions (by force or by money) to sort things out.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The White Savior Industrial Complex and the Ungrateful Brown Feminist

  For a long time, development professionals, NGOs, and the United Nations have been trying to eradicate woodburning stoves in rural India. In the 1990s, after the Beijing Declaration set out the vague agenda of “equality, development and peace for all,” the eradication of woodburning stoves became the focus of feminists, modernization advocates, environmental activists, and a slew of other reformers. Together they set about tackling the task of liberating rural Indian women to participate in a wage-earning economy by giving them a better stove than the one that, according to excavations in
the area, had been in use since 1800 BCE. The project would deliver empowerment and cleaner air and would end the depletion of forests. The UN Global Alliance for Clean Stoves promised to distribute 100 million “clean stoves” by 2020. The World Bank amassed a $130 million portfolio from thirteen donor countries for the provision of clean stoves.

  But no one asked the women who did the cooking whether they wanted the new stoves, or considered the reasons why, it turned out, they did not want them: for one, that collecting fuel wood (which does not involve the cutting down of whole trees or have the environmental impact it was alleged to have) had been for centuries a ritual way in which rural women established and maintained their social bonds. It was in these exchanges that they discussed how to solve problems in their lives, how to overcome the many hardships faced by their communities and share their joys and losses, news of relatives and friends. It was an essential part of women-only socialization in these areas.

  Also, many/most of these rural Indian women rejected the idea that the route to empowerment was making themselves available for wage-earning work rather than for the literal tending of their own hearths—the cooking and caring for the household from that central point that they saw as an exercise of power. Adhering to traditional recipes and cooking methods that required the old stoves was a reflection of their commitment to the traditions they saw as sustaining their own and their families’ lives.

  In its original iterations, empowerment was understood as something notably different from its relative meaninglessness today. In the early 1980s, an Indian feminist named Gita Sen and a group of feminist researchers, activists, and political leaders from the global south got together to form DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women in a New era). Based in Bangalore, India, this collective sought to push forward women’s voices from the global south.1 Then and now, the terms of “international development,” or aid disbursements to postcolonial nations, were predominantly dictated by the global north to the global south—and included imposing the goals of white, Western feminists upon women who were neither white nor Western and did not necessarily share their concerns.