To be feminist in any authentic self, incorporating the challenges of racism is essential.

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I’m sick of participating in feminist spaces built for the needs of white women. I feel like at best, I can fight it, at worst I have to learn to cope in it.

I’ve participated in feminist spaces where a large portion of the group rolls their eyes when I talk about race and racism. Where white feminism enforced its position when those who challenge it are considered troublemakers. Where white feminism dominates. Where its ideas are presented as universal, to be applied to all women.

I know what white feminism does to black women. I’ve smelled it.

I’ve sniffed at it.

From close quarters.

As long as I don’t talk about race, it welcomes me with open arms. If I talk about race, the room turns chilly.

This chilly atmosphere slices your dark skin off.

I’m writing this article after participating in a feminist panel discussion hosted by a white woman from Montreal, Canada. All of the participants were white, except me and four black women. When they talked about white beauty standards, I said, “I can’t change the color of my skin to fit these beauty standards.” When they talked about pay inequity, I said black women are paid less than white women. When they talked about their experiences as a woman, I talked about my experience as a black woman.

I wanted acknowledgment. Maybe they would grant me the freedom to share my experience that is both black and female. Maybe they would listen to my lived experience.

Except, when I talked about covert racism that still prevails, awkwardness loomed over the feminist space, like a fog looming over an entire city.

That is when I realized why with a sinking feeling to my stomach. When they were building this feminist space, black women are not who they had in mind as members. When they talked about increasing pay rise for women, black women are not who they had in mind. When they talked about equal opportunities for women all over the world, black women are not who they had in mind. When they talked about helping working-class moms, black mothers are not who they had in mind. When they talked about educating girls, black girls are not who they had in mind.

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Wikipedia defines white feminism or mainstream feminism as:

An epithet used to describe feminist theories that focus on the struggles of white women without addressing distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and women lacking other privileges.

Most feminist spaces talk about fighting unequal pay at work and catcalling on the streets. Yet they’re incredibly defensive when the same analysis of race is leveled at their whiteness.

They talk about reproductive rights. Street harassment. Sexual violence. Beauty standards. Body image. But this same space does not talk about intersectionality – the crossover of sexism and racism. This same space does not see clearly how race and gender intertwine when it comes to inequalities.

“Black women have a place at the table if we’re willing to settle for tokenism, but white feminism moans if we try to create any structural change. It moans when we try to challenge its beauty standards. It moans when we try to set the agenda.”

White women have benefited most from feminism.

Organized groups like the KKK have defended their honor when a white man’s eye lingers in their direction. Unfortunately, the ‘rights for all women’ does not include the additional struggles and racial oppressions black women face.

Even in 2021, white feminism prevails.

It shows up:

. When we talk about the pay gap between men and women without referencing the pay gap between white women and black women.

. When we center white women leaders while undermining and betraying black women.

. When we ignore or exclude the works of black feminist leaders. Kimberle Crenshaw. Audre Lorde. Bell hooks. Alice Walker. Angela Davis.

. When we neglect or minimize the issues of black women.

Even with white feminists I have been talking to for over a year now, they get agitated when I mention the phrase, ‘white feminism’. There’s a knee-jerk backlash against the phrase. An entitled need to defend whiteness rather than any yearning to reflect on the meaning of the phrase ‘white feminism’.

Some of my black students tell me ‘I don’t see race,’ is a common phrase they hear in most feminist spaces.

White women are saying race doesn’t matter. That we’re part of the group. That we’re one of them.

Except we’re black and they’re white.

‘I don’t see race’ hides a monstrous thought. When white people insist they don’t see color, they are insisting that talking about race fuels racism – thereby denying people of color the words to articulate our existence.

But here’s a truth we can’t deny:

All women share the experience of sexism at work, in communities, and at home. However, black women’s experiences are unique and different. We face discrimination based on race as well as gender. White women don’t have to worry about being bullied/harassed/discriminated against because of their skin color.

To ask us to set aside our race is to ask us to act as if we are white.

To ask us to focus on gender before race is to ask us to put our different identities in a hierarchical order.

But as black women, we’re not woman then black.

We’re black and woman.

Our blackness is as much a part of us as our womanhood, and we can’t separate them.

So why do you expect us to leave our racial identity at the door when we enter feminist spaces?

This is infuriating.

Black women have a place at the table if we’re willing to settle for tokenism, but white feminism moans if we try to create any structural change. It moans when we try to challenge its beauty standards. It moans when we try to set the agenda. Most feminist spaces viciously rip into the flesh of misogyny. They stick their chin out defiantly and scare the living daylights out of men who harass women.

But this same space who claims to work on behalf of all women doesn’t question its own overwhelming whiteness.

Why does this matter, you ask?

The answer is simple: it matters because how can you be a feminist and be wilfully ignorant on racism?

In her essay ‘Anger in Isolation: a Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood’ Michele Wallace wrote:

We exist as women who are black who are feminist, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle – because being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one has done: we would have to fight the world.

These words were written in 1979. That is 42 years ago.

And yet…

Many of us are still searching for sisterhood in feminist spaces. I wonder. Am I the only black woman who is dying of loneliness in most feminist spaces? I don’t know a single black woman who tells me she can talk about racism in feminist spaces without falling through the crack.

Even though we believe allies are important, many of us are tired of tiptoeing around whiteness in most feminist spaces.

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To be feminist in any authentic sense of the term, we must want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns. Liberation from domination. Liberation from racial discrimination and oppression. 

To be feminist in any authentic self, incorporating the challenges of racism is essential.

Intersectionality gives us a way of practicing feminism that is antiracist.

If you’re a white woman who hosts a feminist space or participates in one, it’s more useful to spend time asking yourself questions like:

. What are the ways I have benefited from being white?

. In what ways do I support and uphold a feminist space that is structurally racist?

Recognizing our differences is another way of practicing feminism that is antiracist.

This is important.

Because we cannot come together if we do not recognize our differences first.

These differences are best articulated when white women in feminist spaces remain silent. When they actively listen when a black woman talks. When they ask questions, not to guide a black woman somewhere but to better understand. When they do not try to reinforce white supremacy by inserting themselves in the middle of a discussion when a black woman shares her experience.

A feminist movement must work to liberate all people who have been economically, socially, and culturally marginalized. That means disabled people. Black people. Trans people. Women. Black women. Non-binary people. Working-class people. LGB people.

This is complicated.

But a true feminist movement must be complicated if we are to untangle the situation we’re in.

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Book recommendation:

Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria

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