Against White Feminism Read online

  The Gates initiative was touted in all its promotional material as a project focusing on families in sub-Saharan Africa (or “Africa poor,” as a BBC News headline crisply put it).16 Similar sorts of programs abound, all focusing on women’s relative lack of parity in the developing world. Sometimes, they are funded by the scions of corporations who are looking for some strategic virtue signaling to cover up activities that deplete developing countries of the resources that would actually lift their citizens, women included, out of poverty. At other times, they are promoted by Western governments who want to cover up their strategic interventions—for example, neoliberal plans to expand influence within a certain region. The empowerment of women and girls sounds good to political donors and ordinary voters alike. Yet these sorts of allegedly empowering interventions conveniently delink the current condition of women from colonial histories, global capital expansion, transnational investment, and the continued exploitation of feminine labor.17 Women, it is assumed, are poor because of their culture or their lack of agency or even feminist consciousness, not ever because colonial plunder depleted resources or because current capitalist investment interests calculate their value based on the lowest wage they can be paid to make T-shirts or jeans. The fact that poor countries like Vietnam or Bangladesh cannot compete at the global level without capitulating to these corporate demands (investors will simply turn elsewhere and exploit the women of some other poor country) is not considered. Neither is any attention paid to the fact all of these forces direct the women away from rather than toward a political consciousness.

  Similarly absent is any mention of how military invasions, the securitization of borders, and global financial crises all have often disastrous effects on the welfare of women and girls. But Western aid is often used both as a pretext for war and a means to whitewash its terrible humanitarian costs.

  In 2001, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. Aid and International Development Agency (USAID) began implementing one of the largest disbursements of development aid in history: a program called PROMOTE. Touted as “the world’s biggest program ever designed purely for female empowerment,” PROMOTE was intended to help 75,000 Afghan women get jobs, internships, and promotions. They would be given training in conducting advocacy and encouraged to set up civil organizations, gaining the leadership skills necessary for Afghanistan’s bright new future. In September 2018, seventeen years later, the New York Times published a report that showed how terribly PROMOTE had failed in this mission. It was, in the words of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), “a failure and a waste of taxpayer money.”18

  A lot of money: the program cost $280 million, most of which, according to the Times report, was allotted to administrative costs and payments to U.S. contractors. In an interview given to SIGAR, Rula Ghani, the first lady of Afghanistan, pointed out several problems with the program. The girls selected were too young and politically inexperienced to put their training to any good use. She ended with an exhortation: “Anyone working in development, take the time to sit down with the local population and really listen to them. They know better than anyone what is going on.”19

  Trying perhaps to remain in the good books of USAID administrators (to ensure future aid disbursements), Ghani did not mention the official reports from SIGAR that noted serious flaws in the program, including that the metrics of evaluation were continually adjusted to make the program look like a success. In some cases, women who attended a single workshop on women’s leadership were counted as having benefited from the program, without any follow-up on how the training had helped their long-term prospects. Elsewhere, metrics of “deliverables” were lowered, such that only 20 women out of 3,000 receiving employment and leadership training would have had to find a job with the Afghan Civil Service for the job-training component of the program to be considered a success. But even that number was not “delivered.” In the end, the SIGAR report noted, only 55 women could have been said to have benefited from the program, a far cry from the 75,000 target.

  For its part, USAID continued to peddle the premise of success. In its formal response to SIGAR, the agency stubbornly insisted that PROMOTE had: “directly benefited 50,000 Afghan women with the training and support they need to engage in advocacy for women’s issues, enter the work force and start their own businesses.”

  The aid industrial complex is a massive part of the global economy, estimated to be worth more than $130 billion per annum.20 This is money that is funneled through to governments, aid agencies, transnational NGOs, and the thousands of people that work for them.21 The leadership of this massive system comprises mostly white and Western development professionals, charged with formulating the programs and policies of how aid will be disbursed. The image of the white Westerner as savior, then, is not only a pervasive stereotype, it is built into the organizational and policy-making architecture of the aid industrial complex.

  The aid industrial complex is inherently steeped in a power dynamic that mirrors the racialized wealth differential across the globe, in which those who have systematically extracted and accumulated wealth (historically, through stolen resources and stolen labor) hold structural power over people of color (who have been on the receiving end of this exploitation, and the violence and oppression required to enact it). White and Western charity donors will eagerly donate money for girls’ education in Bangladesh for the uplift of women, but they will not give up the cheaply produced “fast fashion” that is sold by major American brands and is based on exploiting women in poor countries. The implied goodness of the charitable act thus works to erase complicity in a global system that is instrumental in enforcing global racial hierarchies.

  These racial hierarchies also operate within the aid sector. Most policymakers and program directors in major development NGOs are also white, Western, and paid salaries that are astronomically higher than those paid to locals working for the same NGO and doing the same job.22 Angela Bruce-Raeburn, regional advocacy director for Africa for the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, in an essay titled “International Development Has a Race Problem,” affirms that “inherent in the very concept of aid is race and racism because only in this system can majority white societies with ample resources determine what poor people of color need, how much they need, set up parameters for the delivery of what they need and of course create elaborate mechanisms for monitoring how well they have managed the donated funds to meet their needs.” And, she observes, “ ‘helpers’ and ‘do-gooders’ arrive in places like Sierra Leone oozing natural confidence and bravado, buttressed by their titles as expatriates holding advanced degrees from elite schools in UK and the US and earning significantly higher salaries than their local counterparts.”

  When women of color do get into programmatic roles, they continue to face discrimination and are often denied leadership roles. One African woman described her experience working at the United Nations in Geneva as riven with racism: “When I was at the UN my skin color got in the way of my advancement,” she wrote, and the good lady in charge told her that she could not be selected to lead projects because she “would not be able to command any respect.” At other times she was told to change her tone and her “strong personality” even as she witnessed her white male boss yell at people and refer to her female colleagues using the C-word.23 A recent staff survey of UN employees in Geneva backed up these descriptions, with 1 out of 3 workers surveyed saying that they had either experienced or seen someone else experience racial discrimination. Fifty-nine percent of the survey respondents said that the UN was not good at dealing with racial discrimination.24 Given all of this, it was a dark moment when, at the start of the Black Lives Matter protests in response to the death of George Floyd, the UN secretary general told UN staff in New York that they were banned from attending. Widespread outcry forced him to reverse his decision.25

  The result of an absence of women of color in these roles means that there is no one to question
the hypocrisy in arrangements whereby those who donate money to maintain the face of white benevolence are routinely undercutting the power of the same women they are purporting to help by investing or leading companies that squeeze the life out of the women workers in poor countries to maximize profit. Feminist theorist Gayatri Spivak identifies the well-worn trope of the “rescue mission,” saving Black, Brown, and Asian women and girls (inherently helpless and primitive) from their woe-filled realities while masking histories of oppression perpetuated by exactly those white saviors. Silencing the voices of the women involved and sustaining the operative logic of “white men saving Brown women from Brown men,” such advocates of development aid would never consider, for example, supporting women in the garment industry in Bangladesh who are trying to unionize to agitate politically for better working conditions. No large garment corporation has ever committed to using only unionized factories and thus “empowering” these women; instead, they donate to and elevate only those causes that fall along the rescue-mission model.26

  Gita Sen was invited to submit an expert paper for the fall 2019 pre-meeting of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing—planned for March 2020, but canceled due to COVID-19 concerns. It is a glum document, one in which Sen still was trying to draw attention to “human development” in a world obsessed with “economic growth” while noting that women’s rights, social mobilization, and empowerment are confronted by even more retrogressive policies now than twenty-five years ago.27 “Feminist mobilizing does not take place in a socioeconomic or political vacuum through the volitional intent of women’s organizations if the environment and institutions are not supportive,” Sen noted. Strategies for progress during such a time have to be “defensive and protective” and focused on alliances.28

  When she wrote the paper, Sen was no doubt gearing up for the tussle that was expected to take place when the Beijing 25 Conference began in New York in March 2020. A global gag order issued by the Trump administration in the early days of his tenure forbade any NGO receiving money if their work touched on “abortion,” and had allied with China and Saudi Arabia to ensure that there would be no mention of reproductive rights in the conference resolutions.29 Individual economic power was still considered empowering, but bodily autonomy was now deleted from the platform altogether. Making no mention of political transformation at all, “The Political Declaration” drafted by the members of the UN Commission on the Status of Women failed to present any meaningful path forward for the world’s women.30

  CHAPTER FOUR

  White Feminists and Feminist Wars

  I’m fine,” the pale, red-haired Jessica Chastain says as she takes off her full black jumpsuit and face mask. The scene is from Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which despite the seeming banality of the dialogue, says a lot about a new flavor of feminism that has evolved in the white and Western world since 9/11 and the War on Terror. In the film, Chastain plays a CIA “targeter” named Maya who is physically delicate but tough as nails in every other way, which in this particular conversation also means that she is up for torture. In fact, that is what she and her male CIA colleague have been doing inside a makeshift bunker that also serves as a torture chamber. “Let’s go back in there,” she tells the men after they have rested a minute from the hard toils of inflicting extreme pain on other human beings.

  Here, then, is gender equality at its most perverse, a white woman trying her best to show a white man that she has as much of an appetite for cruelty as he does. And the laconic white men appear to approve. “She’s a killer,” her boss says in her wake as she disappears down a hallway. If this had been an entirely fictional film, all of it could have been discarded as the morbid fantasy of some Hollywood director. As it happens, Maya is based on a very real CIA sleuth, whose identity the agency has never released but to whose gritty greatness many have made pointed allusions. Maya (along with others, also mostly women, CIA sources have said) was responsible for the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. The film Zero Dark Thirty may be a souped-up, cinematically slick, and action-packed retelling of what the real Maya managed to do, but it is based on fact. For her now-feted heroism, the real Maya won the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, an honor about which she was happy to boast to all her CIA colleagues through a mass email.1

  I watched Zero Dark Thirty in a nearly full movie theater in Indiana. Jessica Chastain’s Maya may have been “fine” in makeshift torture bunkers, but I definitely was not. Beyond the movie theater, the shopping mall was all aglow with holiday decorations and around me, my fellow moviegoers seemed snug in the cozy darkness of the theater and smug in this elevation of white women as the ultimate weapon in crushing Brown terrorists.

  The crowd repeatedly cheered, once during a scene that showed a Brown man being waterboarded, another time as Chastain’s Maya inched closer to catching the man whom the Americans had been hunting for a long decade, and of course at the end as she is hailed as the heroine who crushed the most evil man in the world. The whole exercise was an elaborate revisiting of glory designed to puff the chests of patriots. The end of the film was never a mystery, America had won, and at least for the purposes of the film, a slight, flame-haired, delicate-featured “killer” had sleuthed and tortured her way to ensuring the obliteration of the most wanted Brown man in the whole world.

  I cringed, not just because Maya’s search for parity with men extends to trash-talking and torture, or even because she calls Pakistan “a really fucked-up place” within the first few minutes of the film, but because it seemed that I was the only person who saw in Zero Dark Thirty an utter perversion of the general project of gender equality.

  I cried at the end, because the audience stood up to hand the movie a standing ovation. A few months later, the movie was further regaled at the Oscars. Jessica Chastain won Best Actress. The real and the fictive white women had prevailed, become equal to white men in their capacity to subjugate Brown men.

  In Zero Dark Thirty (and the trueish story behind it), American feminism—once a movement that existed in opposition to the state, as a critique of its institutions and mores—was recast as one that served the state’s interests through any means imaginable. This identification with state interests, and the idea of going out to conquer the world with the same mindset of subjugation and domination possessed by white men, seems to have become a warped feminist goal. Put another way, white women wanted parity with white men at any cost, including by avidly taking on the domination of Black and Brown people. As white feminists have progressed within their societies and begun to occupy increasingly important positions, they are constructing a feminism that uses the lives of Black and Brown people as arenas in which they can prove their credentials to white men.

  In her 2019 book A Woman’s Place: US Counterterrorism Since 9/11, Joana Cook writes that feminism, particularly in relation to the state, used to be focused on promoting peace and nonviolence.2 Being a feminist used to entail a sense of sisterhood with all women, discouraging actions where one woman hurt the life and livelihood of other women. The state was understood as propagating and institutionalizing patriarchal norms, and resisting those (rather than adopting them) was considered a feminist act. But in America’s War on Terror, the state had subsumed the struggle for equality within itself, giving white women seeming parity with white men in the opportunity to crush Brown, Muslim men, who had become the ultimate antagonist in the white imagination. Crucially, these white women are allowed to take on the ‘unfeminine’ characteristics of violence and warfare, which would typically threaten the dominant patriarchy they exist under, but only when they exercise this power over someone even lower than them in the white-supremacist hierarchy—that is, on Brown foreigners. Clearly visible in this trade-off is the kind of conditional, limited power that wealthy, nineteenth-century British women experienced when they ventured overseas to British colonies. In both cases, freedom is a zero-sum game, more for one group (wh
ite women) only possible as the reinforcement of less for another (non-white people). It is not just the notion of women being violent that is shocking and antifeminist but the racial dimension that is central to this assumption of greater power by white women.

  If white American feminists of the 1960s and the Vietnam era advocated for an end to war, the new American feminists of the newborn twenty-first century were all about fighting in the war alongside the boys. Warfare, traditionally one of the most starkly gendered activities in human society, was opening its arms to women in even its most gruesome and violent moments, and this was seen as a great step forward for everyone.

  The War on Terror, at least in theory, was America’s first “feminist” war. It wasn’t just CIA analysts who were glorified, it was also female soldiers. The story of Pvt. Jessica Lynch is another example. On March 23, 2003, Lynch, a nineteen-year-old truck driver with a maintenance unit of the U.S. Army, was caught in an ambush and captured by Iraqi forces. Eight other soldiers were killed, and Lynch was taken to a hospital, where, according to the Pentagon, she was mistreated by the Iraqis. The U.S. Special Forces launched a secret mission to rescue Lynch; it was alleged that the first words she said when she was found were “I am an American soldier too.”3

  The rescue was recorded and a five-minute video was released to the media by the Pentagon. Within hours she became a media heroine, her courage was feted all over the news, she appeared on the cover of Newsweek against a giant American flag, and she was called a “female Rambo” and an “American hero.” It was much later that the heroics of Lynch began to be questioned. The BBC aired a scathing documentary that accused the U.S. government of exaggerating the heroics of her rescue and mistreatment by the Iraqis to bolster public support for the war.4 Many of these allegations were later proven to be true, but the hero-making the Pentagon set out to do in the immediate aftermath of the rescue was already in play. The female American soldier as heroine in the Iraq war was the image Americans would remember. It was notable that the television film Saving Jessica Lynch, aired on NBC in 2003, told the same heroic story that had been challenged by the BBC and others. America wanted a soldier-heroine, and they got one.