I’m currently trying to write poems critiquing and exploring the links between white supremacy and white femininity/womanhood, so recently I’ve been absorbing non-fiction and history books like a sapling sucks up water. Today I’m writing of two feminist books that really impressed me in how they tackled the issue of racism in (so-called) activist movements and the wider society they operate within today.
I feel, along with many others, that the proliferation of feminism into mainstream media outlets and conversations is at once a blessing and a curse when it comes to how the ideology influences publishing. Of course, I want everyone to be for everyone else! But my sneaking suspicion is that many of the most popular (eg-lucrative) feminist texts are not really about pulling off the scabs of history and working collectively for universal liberation. The number of times books focus on individualistic problems- like relationships, clothes, career success- to then completely ignore the more difficult topics of state violence, borders and social care, as if women are not affected by these things makes an implicit statement about who these books are addressing. Who feminism is working for. This implicit bias of feminism means catering to the comfort of white middle-class liberals under the age of 40, and remaining silent when it comes to protecting the lives of all other kinds of women and people who make our lives so much better. It’s become about making white women richer, entrenching their positions as white saviours or Karens. Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall is a direct and much needed antidote to this age-old appropriation of liberation.
Hood Feminism is a series of mini essays spanning a vast array of topics concerning feminism’s current and potential scope of concern. Throughout the essays is an argument put forth against ‘respectability politics’ that have come to dominate nearly all of our interactions when it comes to deciding who deserves justice. Mainstream (white) feminism is very disturbed about who are ‘the right victims’ to help: criminalizing sex workers and ‘illegal immigrants’, demonizing disabled and fat people, victimizing Muslim women, silencing Black, Asian and Indigenous communities and using TERF rhetoric to exclude trans people. Kendall brilliantly says to this fragmented and judgemental pomposity: FUCK OFF!!!
For Kendall, white feminism has never been about recognizing the needs of all and has merely continued the Western project of asserting white people above all others. Feminism has always claimed to speak for all women, but has never served the majority of women it ‘speaks for’. Being subsumed into the oppressive status quo, feminist activism targets areas for improvement, without ever accepting or even considering input from the very communities they supposedly want ‘to help’. It’s the injustice inherent in how white feminist activists can profit from what they learn off BIPOC communities, without ever giving any credit, or giving anything back for that matter, to the people who continue doing work in the shadows. Kendall fights the case for more grassroots activism, for BIPOC to be in control of how they run their communities: ‘no help’ (see- white interference) or charity needed. However, Kendall also points to the reality that ‘life in the hood’ for many women means that what is empowering to them may be deemed criminal or ‘a bad choice’ by others without the same risks of falling into poverty or prison. It’s hard for BIPOC people to organize marches and foodbanks when they themselves are trying to work multiple jobs to earn rent and food, looking after other family members and also needing their own precious down-time. The burden should not fall to the oppressed to convince others to stop oppressing them. Feminism should support women when making the decisions they must need make, not scold or exclude them for such choices.
For me, a particularly interesting point made by Kendall is the hypocrisy of white women appropriating the objectifying and dehumanizing stereotypes pushed onto women of colour for their own sexual empowerment. The recent phenomena of blackfishing white girls appropriating black hairstyles, fashion, dance moves and even dialects are all evidence of white women seeing the oppression of other women and opportunistically seizing it as a chance to dress up and be ‘exotic’, rather than for the disgusting legacy of Empire that it is. It isn’t just limited to white women appropriating the cultures of black women either. White women dress up in Native American costumes for Halloween when Indigenous women in the USA are the most sexually abused minority group. White women wear hijabs on the runway and then faux-cry about the oppression of middle eastern Muslim women. This lack of interrogation from mainstream feminism into how stereotypes and media representation negatively affect women of colour leads us to Ruby Hamad’s book, White Tears/ Brown Scars.
Unlike Kendall’s punchy essays jumping between topics, Hamad’s book is a more sustained argument following its trajectory through chapters. Hamad specifically focuses on the histories of settler colonies (the USA, Australia and colonial Zimbabwe mainly) to examine how the construction of gender for white women was also one of racialization. She delineates the harmful stereotypes pushed onto women of colour by colonizing white people as always teetering between binaries of sexual pet or angry combatant, with white womanhood deliberately constructed in opposition to all other racialized women as The Perfect Woman™. These stereotypes served colonial interests by marking out the bodies of women of colour as up for grabs along with the land being invaded.
The ‘Jezebel’ archetype that names black women as promiscuous is actually a mask to deflect the gross, endemic sexual abuse perpetrated against them by white men during the period of slavery. The ‘China Doll’ archetype reflects how the Empire expected deference and servility from its colonies, much like how ‘Princess Pocahontas’ belies the white gaze’s expectation that indigenous communities embrace and not resist forced assimilation. The flip side to these passive, sexualised stereotypes are ‘the Sapphire’, ‘Dragon Lady’ and ‘Squ*w’: caricatures of rage that make women of colour into aggressors whenever they try to voice their opinions, again cementing the opposing fragility of white women.
Hamad explains how white womanhood became the civilizing arm of Empire by imposing upon other cultures to conform to Western, Christian beliefs. White women took up this role of pure angel in return for their ‘protection’, freeing up men of their emotional obligations to give a fuck about anyone else. That would make men womanly, which threatened the rigid binary of gender that was all the shaky evidence white people gave to elevate them above colonial subjects. This tenuous authority of being the domesticated, morally impenetrable bulwark also meant white women became the perfect excuse to terrorize black and indigenous men. Lynching in colonial settlements and the USA was widely justified using the rhetoric that supposedly white women were too chaste, too modest to ever willingly engage in sexual relations with black men. White women’s bodies were the consolidating agent for European colonists to segregate communities along race lines to avoid their worst nightmare of ‘miscegenation’. Of course, it was only white women who were married and not working class who were ‘defended’ by these racist mobs. And of course, white men were not policed, they allowed themselves to continue abusing black women with impunity, so long as their wives didn’t find out….
This differentiation of racialized womanhood in service of colonial exploits still resonates in feminist circles today, with Hamad arguing the perpetuation of these stereotypes informs how white feminists view and interact with women of colour. Whenever a white woman cries tears of innocence, or mocks a woman of colour’s dress, or deliberately avoids listening to what another woman has to say: they do so in service of the violent status quo. White women continue to position themselves as saviours of other women from ‘backwards’, ‘third world’ (see- formerly colonized) areas, trying everything to avoid really seeing themselves as limited, flawed beings. Hamad makes the pertinent contrast between how allegations of sexual abuse perpetrated by white men versus men of colour are received by white women to illustrate feminism’s lingering allegiance to the Master’s House. Very rarely are sexual offenders convicted for their abuses, and if you’re a white man like Donald Trump or Brett Kavanagh, then being alleged of assault can actually cause more supporters to come out and defend your inherent innocence and upstanding character… This letting white men off the hook occurs in tandem with men of colour and immigrant men being painted with a brush of criminalization. White feminists fearmonger, conjuring shadowy figures prowling in the dark, hunting suburban teens and young single city dwellers; they call for tougher policing and criminal sentences, cautioning women to watch themselves as if it’s their own fault if they’re abused. Forgetting that ‘illegal’ immigrant sex workers and trans women cannot necessarily go to the police for protection, forgetting most women are abused not by strangers, but by people they know and maybe love. These inconsistencies in who feminism cares for, listens to, and gives its clout to show the glaring deficiencies of our current state of affairs.
Despite painting bleak pictures of our world, deftly destroying any myths of universal solidarity in womanhood, neither Kendall nor Hamad is gloomy in their concluding projections for feminism. More effective work will come when white women get off their high horses and honestly tend to the delusions and violent histories that scaffold their identities. The pain will cause anger and tensions, but white women must embrace the state of unknowing and humility in order to wield their privileges as axes not on the necks of BIPOC, but against the institutions that oppress us all. The white supremacist logic that underpins virtually all aspects of our society must be purged from within each individual capable of effecting social change, if our liberatory movements are ever to truly serve the majority of people they profess to value. When white women offer up their resources and time not as performative shows of saviourism, but genuinely pass the mic to sit, listen and support other women: then maybe sisterhood can be real. And as for women of colour, Hamad and Kendall give simple advice: be yourself, none of this is your fault. Never let anyone else tell you who you are or what you are capable of, and never feel like you have to pander to whiteness/ white people in order to get ahead. The different opinions and ideas of Black, Asian, Middle Eastern and Indigenous people from all across the world, working ‘illegal’ jobs or in government, of all backgrounds and upbringings, combine as the necessary pieces to an ongoing puzzle. The eternal struggle of how we can live beside each other without exploitation, and be happy on earth in the short time we have here.