At least according to a certain kind of intersectional feminist — the sort of person who believes trans women are women and sex work is work — “white feminists” are now to blame for everything. Consider, to give one example, the wild popularity of the “Karen” slur, an implicit (or sometimes not-so-implicit) attack on white women standing up for themselves. Then there’s the explosion of books. The titles speak for themselves: White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color; The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women; Against White Feminism; The Problem With White Feminism.
The latest to land is Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop by Serene Khader. An academic at the CUNY Graduate Center, Khader credits white feminists with propagating five key myths, devoting a chapter to each. Demolishing everything from the claim that feminism is about personal freedom, to the fantasy that it aims to free individual women, Khader clearly sets her sights high.
But as a feminist myself, albeit of the white variety, what Khader seems to constitute as feminism feels utterly unrecognisable. Quite aside from the infamous shallowness of such people, they’re anyway a group that includes both white and non-white women. The idea that Khader is somehow demolishing the racial monolith of white feminism therefore feels rather implausible. In any case her liberal targets — white, affluent, #girlbossy — don’t include robust, grassroots feminists like me and countless others around the world.
And if that’s bad enough for feminism generally — though the girlbosses should surely be criticised, there’s clearly more to us than that — books like Faux Feminism are equally poisonous from a racial perspective. Not once in over 40 years of activism have I witnessed an actual feminist advocate for white women exclusively. Indeed, I spent my early years in the women’s liberation movement, throughout the Eighties, discussing real intersectionality: how feminism had to represent and include all women or progress meant nothing. From abortion rights to tackling male violence, I have never been in a group that wasn’t racially and ethnically diverse.