Let Us Age in Peace
It’s no news that us women face a lot of pressure. From having thriving careers, being perfect mothers, to keeping up with unrealistic beauty standards. No wonder women are more burned out than men. But in addition to balancing it all, we are also expected to prevent one of the most inevitable things in life: aging.
We begin using anti aging products in our early 20s, we do fillers, Botox and various beauty rituals that are questionably unhealthy. Some of us are even unwilling to share our actual ages, or feel that speaking about things like menopause is taboo or unattractive.
We get the pressure to maintain a youthful look from everywhere: fashion magazines, advertising and, of course, social media. There is no denying that these platforms have a huge effect on how we see ourselves. From the filters designed to make people look younger, to the highly curated images influencers post on Instagram; social media can reinforce the mentality that looking young is a prerequisite to feeling beautiful.
TV, and movies are also flooded with images of smooth, wrinkle-free skin. And while oftentimes we know these pictures are photoshopped, it’s very easy to feel the pressure. But this year, female celebrities have discussed ageist standards set in Hollywood. In an interview with The New York Times, Kate Winslet said she wanted to send back two posters in which she felt her face had been photoshopped: “I’m like, guys, I know how many lines I have by the side of my eye, please put them all back.”
Sarah Jessica Parker also recently came forward to condemn ageist commentary when she was mocked and criticized across social media for “looking old.” Read that again. Let that sink in please…
In response, she told Vogue that “Everyone has something to say. ‘She has too many wrinkles, she doesn’t have enough wrinkles.’ It almost feels as if people don’t want us to be perfectly okay with where we are, as if they almost enjoy us being pained by who we are today, whether we choose to age naturally and not look perfect, or whether you do something if that makes you feel better. I know what I look like. I have no choice. What am I going to do about it? Stop aging? Disappear?”
She is right. The only alternative to aging is disappearing, aka: dying. And as our dear Maria Bethânia once said: “aging is a privilege.”
So, as we approach the end of 2021, a really challenging year for all of us, I began to reflect on the absurdity of the pressure to look young. Look, we survived all the hardships of the pandemic and all the sociopolitical issues going on in the world. Here we are, despite it all. And just the fact that we are sane and alive is already an accomplishment.
As we wrap up the year, let’s remind ourselves that aging is something to be celebrated. We should feel free to honor the marks on our bodies documenting just how deeply we have lived, from the wrinkles we got from smiling, to the body changes that we got from giving birth.
Aging is obviously challenging—physically and emotionally. The human body is bound to change with the years, and well, change is never easy. But instead of fighting against it, what about embracing who we are and honoring the history written in our flesh? What about instead of fixating on how young we look, we focus on our health and wellbeing?
While it is fun to take care of our skin and bodies, we all know there is a big difference between doing it out of love or hate of our bodies. Let’s give ourselves a break. Society, please let women age in peace.
A frank conversation about Afghan women
University of Virginia’s professor Helena Zeweri talks about US withdrawal, the Afghan diaspora, and challenges the idea that muslim women need saving
The eyes of the world have focused on Afghanistan since August 15, when the Taliban took over Kabul and the former president, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country. Since then, thousands of people have scrambled to escape, fearing a return to the harsh realities of the 1990s, when the Taliban forbade women to work or go to school. It all happened in the context of the US troops withdrawal, raising questions about the role the United States played in the country, and what the future of Afghans, especially Afghan women, will look like.
EmpowHer talked to Helena Zeweri, a founding member of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association and assistant professor of Global Studies at the University of Virginia, where she teaches courses on global migration, humanitarianism, and colonialism. Currently based in Virginia, Zeweri identifies as a diasporic Afghan American and has been working alongside the Afghan community in the US since 2008.
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[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length]
Helena, thanks a lot for taking the time—I can only imagine how exhausting this week has been. Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your work?
My family members were displaced from Afghanistan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and they ended up in New York, specifically Queens, which is where I grew up in a close-knit Afghan community. I have incredible memories of being a part of this closely bound community.
The Afghan American Artists and Writers Association (AAAWA) seeks to amplify the multiplicity of voices within the Afghan diaspora. Our collective began through the pioneering work of Afghan diasporic writers and poets. Our organization wanted to just show that being Afghan means so many different things--we saw our identities being boxed into definitive scripts.
What do you think was the overall feeling in the Afghan and Afghan-American community about the US withdrawal?
The decision to withdraw a military presence in the country is not inherently a bad one. However, it is the nature of the exit from the country that many people are completely shaken by. How could a country that has spent 20 years in the supposed name of nation-building, who then created the economic and political conditions for the Taliban to regain a significant foothold, leave in such a hasty and completely disorganized way, so as to leave millions behind fearing for their lives and futures?
The evacuation of Afghan civilians has been an utter disaster. Diaspora groups in the US and other countries have witnessed first hand what a complete failure this has been. We are literally working around the clock to get people’s visas expedited—doing the things lawyers and government bureaucrats are supposed to be doing.
Are there any misconceptions going around that particularly frustrate you?
Well, the misconceptions have been going around for hundreds of years across multiple imperial powers—beginning with British conceptions of Afghans as savage barbarians who require ‘taming’. The US media specifically has fallen into repurposing those tropes in all kinds of ways. For example, we’ve seen discussion of Afghan women as in need of being saved. While in this moment [sic], the US and NATO’s presence is critically important, women do not need the US and NATO to give them flourishing lives and the opportunity to thrive. Afghan women and men throughout the country have worked together toward these goals, but this never gets covered by the media. While they need critical help at the moment, this help should be geared toward creating the conditions under which displaced Afghans and Afghan nationals can thrive and flourish.
Can you talk a bit more about why the idea of “saving Afghan women” should be challenged?
The general public is left with the belief that women in this part of the world are simply passive victims of repressive regimes. My question becomes what happens after the immediate humanitarian crisis? Do the same Western feminists who talk about rescuing Afghan women today, feel comfortable when Afghan women speak out against injustice in the new countries where they end up? My question becomes, is liberal feminism really interested in Afghan women once these women start resisting injustice, and calling out imperial violence? Is their relationship with Afghan women one of true solidarity or one of pity? Do they expect women to continue to inhabit the role of the passive, silent recipient of humanitarian aid?
It is important to understand that when the US talks about ‘saving Afghan women,’ it is a way for the US to erase its own role in all of this. It ends up negating the violence of the War on Terror, and through the ongoing financial and political linkages the US and other state actors have maintained vis-à-vis the Taliban. According to Brown University’s Costs of War initiative, as a result of the last 20 year war which was justified under the pretense of ‘saving Afghan women’, over 70,000 Afghan civilians have died many of whom were women and approximately 6 million Afghans have been displaced as a result of the fallout.
It is also important to recognize how the Taliban’s violence is materially and historically linked to decades of imperial intervention, by both the Soviet Union, the US, Pakistan, and increasingly China and Russia. We need to be able to show that the violence Afghan women face today and have been resisting for decades has been conditioned by the political chess games of these interventions.
What do you think about the overall coverage since the Taliban takeover?
I think a key assumption of media coverage of Afghanistan are the following: Afghans do not know what they are doing and are responsible for the botched evacuation process. And the idea that this is the Taliban 2.0. This framing assumes that the Taliban have found ways to recreate themselves or that their power this time around is not as invested in things like gender-based violence or the systematic oppression of ethnic minorities, like the Hazara community. This is not the case from reports I am hearing from family and friends. The Taliban’s very essence is rooted in the logic of dehumanization, subjugation, economic exploitation, and human depravity.
Having said that, it’s important to point out that the media coverage has done well in the sense that it has featured more voices from the Afghan diaspora and Afghanistan than usual.
Darul Aman Palace; Photo taken by architect, Rafi Samizay.
Darul Aman Palace; Photo taken by architect, Rafi Samizay.
It seems that the advancement of Afghan women’s rights in the last 20 years is one of the country’s biggest successes. How can we avoid a Euro or Ameri-centric approach to Afghan women’s Empowerment?
We need to stop treating Afghan women as a geographically insulated blob of people who are just dealing with their own issues that are completely disconnected from our own. It’s possible for women’s issues in different parts of the world to be qualitatively different, yet historically connected.
I think key to overcoming this double bind is to first unsettle the idea that the Taliban’s takeover marks a clear break with the regime that was in power two weeks ago. Under the Ghani regime, women’s rights were not in a good place. Women were actively fighting and protesting around gender equality for decades.
What is the one thing you think all people in the United States should understand?
Afghans like all communities are multi-dimensional complex human beings who have dreams, aspirations, and want to live fulfilling lives. They don’t need to be ‘resilient’ or ‘perfect’ in order to be eligible to get that opportunity. That goes for all displaced peoples. There is nothing essentially good or bad about Afghan people.
Any displaced community knows how things work, so to speak. They understand how bureaucracies work, they understand how the ‘system of inequality’ in which they live and which they must confront works—whether it’s the Taliban or the global refugee system, which is centered around how to keep people out rather than take them in. I say that to point out that Afghans are not helpless victims who need to be saved so that they can then be re-dominated by their saviors. Afghans need help right now, that is true. But what they need help with is to create the fundamental conditions that are necessary to go on and live a flourishing, and fulfilling life.
What are your hopes for the future?
That the Afghan people will continue to resist and push for revolutionary change. I hope that one day we in the diaspora will be able to have a flourishing physical connection with our ancestral homeland.
How do you think people in the United States can support Afghans?
1) Helping the current evacuation – we can no longer extend the evacuation deadline but there are private NGOs that may still operate and so ensuring they have the funds they need to continue evacuations would be good. If you live in a country whose government is considering staying, continue to push for that.
2) For those Afghans who are in transit countries, we should do all we can to advocate for the expediting of their visas and for them to be registered with UNHCR if need be. We should also ask our governments to expand asylum eligibility requirements.
3) For those Afghans who have arrived to the US, there is a ton of need for resources, basic living supplies, as well as foster parents for recently arrived unaccompanied minors. Please follow some of these orgs [sic] for more information on that. Legal assistance with those who have arrived in the US would also be good.
4) And for those who will inevitably be left behind, civil society needs to step in and see if there is the political will to continue to help those people. We cannot leave those people behind and force them to cross land boundaries through human smugglers.
I would say that a good place to start is to start following some key coalitions and organizations, including @afghansforabettertomorrow; @adeprogress; @afghanamericancoalition; @aaawa_art; @afghansinsolidarity; @afghanamericanfnd; @swanalosangeles; @wiseafghanistan.
There are tons of congressional action items that people can get involved in.
Pushing (And Chalking) Back At Catcalling
Meet Sophie Sandberg, the woman behind a global movement against street harassment @ChalkBack
Photo: Nathalia Alcantara
Photo: Nathalia Alcantara
Sophie Sandberg was only 15, but on that sunny morning in 2012 she relished the idea of becoming an adult. As she dressed up in her bedroom in the Upper West Side, the then shy teenager anticipated meeting her boss and coworkers on the first day of her job in a downtown New York bakery. Wanting to make a good impression, she picked her outfit carefully: a purple sundress and white espadrilles sandals, the perfect combination to take on the steamy summer streets. She checked her purse. Wallet, check. Phone, check. Keys, check. Great, she was on time.
As she got out of the subway in Union Square, a deep voice pierced her ear:
“Hey, sexy”
She continued walking. After all, the day was good. She felt like a grown-up. She was on time.
“Nice legs,” a stranger said a block later.
With every block, a new comment, and with every “Hi, beautiful,” a new question: Maybe there was something wrong with what she was wearing? Maybe it was the way she was walking? How was she supposed to respond? The questions frazzled her for the rest of the day and distracted her from what had otherwise been a great start at her summer job.
Later that night, she told her parents about the comments. “Ignore it and keep walking,” they said. Street harassment, she learned, was accepted as a part of life by most people around her. But it did not seem acceptable to her, and she would not rest until she found the right way to respond to these lewd comments.
It took four years for her to find a way to push back at street harassers, but eventually she ignited a wave of activists in six continents, 49 countries and 150 cities who joined her. Chalk Back, her nonprofit organization, uses street chalking to raise awareness about catcalling and has to date chalked the harassers’ own words on sidewalks in over 800 sidewalks in New York and many more abroad.
Also referred to as stranger harassment, catcalling is defined by psychologists as a “form of sexual harassment, or unwanted verbal or nonverbal sexual attention.” It is a one-sided interaction that can be accompanied by “whistles, winks, or grabs,” according to a paper published in the journal Current Psychology in 2019. Like all forms of sexual harassment, it can impact people’s quality of life, body image and self-esteem, experts say.
That summer when she was 15, Sandberg avoided certain streets, night walks and revealing outfits. Catcalling, she said recently, harms people by restricting their access to public spaces due to intimidation. @CatcallsOfNYC aims to give victims a way to reclaim the public spaces where they have been harassed.
The project started with a writing class assignment in 2016, when Sandberg was a freshman at New York University, majoring in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Asked to immerse herself in an issue and document it on social media, she had the subject at the tip of her tongue. At that point, the 19-year-old was fed up and had already been writing about catcalling in school.
With no plan other than to get a good grade, Sandberg went to a hardware store near Washington Square and bought chalk, the only material she needed to execute her idea. The plan was simple: She would go to the spots where the catcalling happened and chalk back the words on the sidewalk for other people to confront it.
The first chalk was a short one: “Hey beautiful,” the words a man said to her while following her late at night on 10th Street and Second Avenue. She enjoyed how passersby sometimes slowed their walking pace with their eyes directed at the quote, and fought her shyness when people talked to her. The daughter of two therapists, Sandberg often tried to listen and engage when polite strangers approached her with questions about the chalking.
One day, she spent several minutes explaining the project to a man, who then asked her out on a date. “I think he just pretended to be interested in the project,” she said, laughing. More recently, a man persistently asked for her phone number while she was working on a quote. “It’s ironic,” she said. Until now, not realizing what the project is about, men often catcall Sandberg and other activists from @CatcallsOfNYC while they chalk.
For the first two years, the project’s Instagram page had no more than 100 followers. They were mostly Sandberg’s friends, who would share their experiences with street harassment; she would go to the spots where it happened and write the words down. It wasn't until the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, in 2018, that more people started paying attention. Articles featuring Catcalls of NYC at BuzzFeed and Mic News were the first to attract an audience. Today, the page has roughly 175,000 followers.
The media attention attracted women from different parts of the world who reached out asking to bring Catcalls of NYC to their cities. Faraj from London was the first. After that, everything happened so fast that Sandberg can’t remember what city came next. In 2018, she founded “Chalk Back,” an umbrella organization to manage the dozens of local branches of “Catcalls of'' around the world: Catcalls of Frankfurt, Catcalls of Cairo, Catcalls of Paris, Catcalls of Bogota, among others.
Catcalling occurs around the globe. In 2016, ActionAid, an international organization against poverty and injustice, conducted a survey revealing that 79% of women living in cities in India, 86% in Thailand, and 89% in Brazil have been subjected to harassment or violence in public. While Sandberg is amazed by the traction her movement received, she is not surprised the message resonated with women around the world.
Today, one of the most challenging aspects of her work with @ChalkBack is multitasking: “I feel like on a given day, I'm kind of doing five things,” she said. “I'm learning about how to write grants, and maybe editing videos for our page. And figuring out our leadership structure for the global movement. I'm planning local events in New York. And I'm working on social media and giving advice to different call accounts about how to run their pages.”
Sophie Sandberg during a 2021 @CatcallsOfNYC demonstration with @TheRealCatwalk, a grassroots organization that promotes body acceptance. Photo: Nathalia Alcantara
For an income, Sandberg does freelance speaking and educational workshops to students and youth groups, freelance writing, and occasionally, she does cat- and baby-sitting. Although she has got small grants and has done some crowdfunding for chalk back, she receives no salary from the organization. This January, near its five-year anniversary, Catcalls of NYC attained a legal nonprofit status thanks to volunteer lawyers.
One of Sandberg’s next goals for @CatcallsOfNYC is to start working on quotes on long-lasting murals. Street art, she said, has the power to provoke new thinking and start conversations that ignite social change. To Sandberg, the solution to catcalling relies heavily on bystanders intervening by speaking back on behalf of victims. That is the premise of Catcalls of NYC: the more awareness, the more people respectfully intervene.
To learn more about Sophie Sandberg and get involved, go to:
Instagram: @CatcallsofNYC and @ChalkBackOrg
We Need to Talk About White Feminism Part III—Solutions
During the last couple of months, we have talked about what the term white feminism means—in short, an exclusionary type of activism that only looks at the experiences of white, straight, able-bodied, cisgender, middle- and upper-class women. Part II of this series exposed some of the ways in which white feminism is disguised as actual feminism. At this point, you must be asking yourself what the solution against the shortcomings of white feminism is.
As you’ve probably heard before, the very first step to solve a problem is to recognize there is one. White feminism is not an exception. But recognizing the problem does not only mean calling out other people’s white feminist practices or denouncing approaches like carceral or corporate feminism—it also means recognizing your own biases, and calling out the white feminist within you.
You are not exempt from this work. We all need to do it, even if we are not racist and even if we are not white, rich or straight. And that is because of a sneaky thing called implicit bias.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, implicit bias is when we “act on the basis of prejudice and stereotypes without intending to do so.” In other words, you don’t have to be racist to be unconsciously guided by racist impulses.
Jennifer Eberhardt, a psychology professor at Stanford University and author of Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See Think and Do, said that unconscious prejudice “can affect everyone, even a black child,” referring to an instance when her son worried that a fellow black passenger would blow up a plane.
“We’re living in a society where we’re absorbing images and ideas all the time and it takes over who we are and how we see the world.” Eberhardt said.
This process of socialization also affects how we develop our feminist thinking. If we are not cautious, the “default” and mainstream approaches of feminism—often in the form of white feminism—might influence our actions.
If you are still convinced you are immune to this, I highly recommend taking the Implicit Association Test. As Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard University psychologist and one of the creators of the test said: "Think of implicit bias as the thumbprint of the culture on our brain."
So, what can we do to avoid our implicit biases?
We can start by self-reflecting and educating ourselves on issues that don’t affect us directly. Keeping an open mind when others talk about the issues that they face is also a must to remind ourselves that our individual experiences don’t represent the diversity of experiences of all women. We can only grow and learn as feminists when we make the effort to get to know women from different backgrounds. Ultimately, we must acknowledge and fight against our implicit biases by listening to, connecting with and learning from a diverse range of voices.
After acknowledging our implicit biases and learning about gender issues that we have no direct contact with, we can embrace intersectional feminism.
If you never heard the term, don’t be intimidated, it sounds complicated but once you have a good grasp of what it means it will become second nature in how you see gender.
Intersectionality is a term coined in 1989 by American law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to highlight how racial and gender prejudice simultaneously impact the lives of black women.
Intersectional feminism is basically the opposite of white feminism. It is “a prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other” Crenshaw said. That is, intersectionality, as opposed to white feminism, understands how class, gender, race and other identities overlap with one another.
“We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts,” Crenshaw said.
An intersectional approach, therefore, requires centering on the voices of those experiencing the greatest number of overlapping forms of oppression. Not to create a “contest of who is more oppressed,” or to conflate disadvantages with moral superiority, like some critics say. But to acknowledge how interconnected these issues are, and to understand how they impact the lives of those most oppressed in society. Again, the first step to solve a problem is to recognize there is one.
According to the UN, using an intersectional lens also means “recognizing the historical contexts surrounding an issue. Long histories of violence and systematic discrimination have created deep inequities that disadvantage some from the outset.”
That is, the impact of intersecting inequalities extends across generations; they are systemic. That means one’s individual “willpower” is not enough to overcome them. Intersectionality helps us separate the individual from the collective—the anecdotal example from the systemic nature of social issues.
In 2020, from the disproportionate impact of the pandemic in communities of color, to the global uprising against police violence, it has been made clear that we, as a society, are not close to achieving anything resembling equality or justice. Women’s issues are inserted in this context.
It is challenging to think about a myriad of issues simultaneously. After all, isn’t patriarchy bad enough in and of itself? Also, most of us are already overwhelmed with an economic crisis, a pandemic and a high-stakes U.S. presidential election. There is, however, no better time to educate ourselves on intersectionality, and to revise our feminism. This crisis has exposed injustices in such obvious ways that it gives all of us, no matter our background, the chance to turn this moment as a catalyst for reflection.
I hope that this series helped you recognize the power of your voice. Feminism is nothing but a group of people coming together to demand equality—you get to choose the direction that the movement takes.
We Need to Talk About White Feminism—Part II
Last month, we discussed why it’s important to talk about white feminism, and—more specifically—why it is harmful not to talk about it. (If you feel confused or defensive after reading this, make sure to check the part I of this series.) Today, let’s focus on what white feminism looks like, so you get savvy at spotting it.
White feminism has a limited idea about what feminist issues are
Whenever women of color talk about the issues that are more prevalent in their communities (e.g., police brutality, Black maternal death rates, attacks and murder of trans women, racism, voting suppression) white feminists will say that these are race problems, not gender problems. These issues, they argue, are outside of the scope of the feminist movement. So, if you ever hear a feminist say something along the lines of “we’re not talking about (insert any issue that pertains to women of color, queer, low-income or immigrant women), we’re actually talking about gender.” or “talking about this issue is divisive” well, chances are you are dealing with some form of white feminism.
Corporate feminism
Corporate feminism means demanding that a few women achieve positions of power to “break the glass ceiling,” while ignoring the systemic unequal structures that further block low-income women or women of color from these leadership roles. This type of feminism is satisfied with a world where there are more women CEOs and political leaders, yet it is comfortable with other current inequities.
For example, corporate feminism focuses on closing the wage gap between men and women, while it ignores how Latina and Black women make significantly less than white women in the first place. As Mikki Kendall, the author of the book Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot, said:
“It's great to want to be a CEO or to be president, but you should also probably make sure that your neighbors have enough food to eat and their homes are safe.”
Ignoring Stereotypes
Toni Morrison made a very emblematic observation in this 1971 New York Times article. She noticed how Jim Crow signs for white women were designated “White Ladies,” while the signs for Black women read “Colored Women.” Morrison highlighted how the word ‘lady’ implied “a quality softness, helplessness and modesty” while ‘women’ implied that black women were: “unworthy of respect because they were tough, capable, independent and immodest.” Language matters, and this language really exemplifies how womanhood is seen differently according to race.
White feminism fails to deal with this narrative or even buys into it to this day. This is particularly problematic because the stereotypical image of white women’s ‘purity’ is fundamental in the perpetuation of racist stereotypes that depict Black men as predators and dangerous. In this narrative, Black men are the ultimate threat to a supposed white lady’s victimhood, vulnerability and purity--and this discriminatory image has been used as a justification for racial profiling.
An example of this happened this year on Memorial day in Central Park, when Amy Cooper tried to intimidate Christian Cooper, a bird watcher who requested her to leash her dog. She threatened to call the police saying that there was, in her own words, an African American man threatening her life. Basically, she was weaponizing the racial stereotype against Mr. Cooper.
An intersectional feminist approach calls out this narrative and harmful behavior, while a white feminism approach ignores it and sees it as a race problem, one that is isolated from women’s issues.
White feminism fails to call-out white supremacy
It is vastly documented how women of color have historically called out racism in the mainstream feminist movement. And it is equally documented how a great number of white feminists were unwilling to call out white women when they supported exclusionary narratives in the movement and beyond (make sure to read the book This Bridge Called My Back or the The Combahee River Collective Statement to get a better taste of this).
A white feminist approach ignores the historical relationship that white women have with white supremacy. For example, some leaders in white supremacist organizations were women (e.g., WKKK), many in the movement against school desegregation were women, confederate statues were often erected by women (most notably through the United Daughters of the Confederacy.) and even some feminist leaders supported eugenics. (Also, make sure to check our article about the 19th amendment to learn more about how white supremacy played out even in the suffrage movement.)
But this is not something we can only read in history books. More recently, in 2020, several female business founders step downstep down after being accused of supporting toxic workplaces for people of color they employed (oh, hi there corporate feminism). So, just because someone is a woman, it does not mean that they can’t perpetuate oppression. Again, white feminism ignores that.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. A few other examples of white feminism practices include: Carceral feminism (when feminists exclusively advocate for increased policing, prosecution, and imprisonment to create justice for women, as if the justice system worked equally for all of us and police violence wasn’t an issue), tone policing (when white feminists try to silence the voices of women of color by labeling them aggressive or angry), the white savior complex (when feminists think they are more rational and civilized than other women and should “free” other groups of women.), cultural appropriation, the whitewashing of the contributions of people of color in feminism among others.
It goes without saying that all of the practices described are anti-feminist. Let’s be vigilant to spot, avoid, and call out all of these exclusionary approaches.
And stay tuned. Next month, we will discuss intersectionality. See you soon to talk about solutions!
We Need to Talk About White Feminism—Part I
If you identify as feminist, you probably have come across the term “white feminism.” It’s all around social media, in women’s marches, protests and sometimes even in our (nowadays socially distanced, I hope) social life. But do you really know what white feminism means? Can you spot it when it’s in action? More importantly, can you see how it affects your own actions and views about issues of gender? To help you answer some of these questions, we are launching a 3-part series where we will break down this term. We believe that it is only by understanding the issues related to the exclusionary nature of white feminism that we can fully embrace a more inclusive and intersectional approach. This series is particularly important for white intersectional feminists, who should take the lead on fixing the problems we will be talking about--it is not the responsibility of women of color to do this work.
Stay tuned and let’s dive in!
What Is White feminism?
Simply put, white feminism is a branch of feminism that exclusively looks at the experiences of white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, middle- and upper-class women. In other words, it only cares about women who have most of the privileges that society can offer—besides, of course, being a woman. Because it exclusively focuses on this demographic, white feminism inaccurately universalizes womanhood, assuming that the white-normative aspirations particular to this group of women reflect all women’s aspirations. This is extremely harmful, because by making white, cis (insert the whole list here) the default, white feminism totally marginalizes everyone else’s concerns. But before we go into more detail, let’s first get some misconceptions out of the way:
Isn’t talking about white feminism divisive?
No, quite the opposite. The only way to actually unite all women is to acknowledge the vast diversity in our experiences and educate ourselves on how race, class, sexuality, nationality and other identities intersect with gender. But white feminism does not allow the space to do that. The main reason why some people feel that critiquing white feminism divides us is because they probably had a false sense of unity in the first place.
If we don’t see how white feminism operates, chances are it is because we are currently operating within its lenses and are—inadvertently or not—overlooking a whole range of experiences within gender. The only way to solve this, is by acknowledging how white feminism influenced our perceptions on gender. We are already divided in many ways. Not talking about this division will not magically make us come together; it will just make privileged women more comfortable.
Are all ‘feminists who are white’ white feminists?
Of course not. White feminism is an ideology, not a race. If you are white, there is no need to feel defensive when anyone calls out white feminism. They are not talking about the color of your skin; they are talking about a type of activism. Yes, most (but not all) white feminists are white. But that’s because it’s easier to assume—and be comfortable with—the idea that the experiences of white women are universal when you are one. But nobody is saying that there is some inherent quality to being “white” that makes white women bad feminists. Critiquing white feminism is never about silencing white women or rejecting white women’s experiences. It’s about supporting all voices in the movement.
Are all white feminists racist?
To answer this question, we need to understand the difference between impact and intent. Beverly Tatum brilliantly explained this difference in her book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?. According to her, the ongoing cycle of racism is “like a moving walkway at the airport.” People walking on the conveyor belt, in this analogy, represent actively racist individuals, deliberately promoting and identifying with the direction of white supremacy.
Many others, however, are not actively trying to move in the direction of racism (or white feminism) and are simply standing in the moving walkway. Just by being bystanders, however, they are still moving towards the same destination as those who are actively racists. That is, their intent is different from their impact, because they are still reinforcing a lot of racist beliefs even if they are not actively being racists. A lot of white feminists fall into this group. They don’t consciously understand that they are complicit in the oppression of others by leaving white feminism unquestioned and merely standing still.
There is a third type of person, however. The type of person every feminist should aim to become. They are those who recognize the motion of the conveyor belt and choose to walk in the opposite direction. As Tatum explains, this type of person: “see the active racists ahead of them, and choose to turn around, unwilling to go in the same destination as the White supremacists. But unless they are walking actively in the opposite direction at a speed faster than the conveyor belt—unless they are actively anti-racist—they will find themselves carried along with the others.” Doing this requires more work, but it is the only way to create an actually inclusive feminism.
To become this type of feminist, the first step we all need to take is to educate ourselves on how white supremacy operates in the women’s movement. It’s only by recognizing the direction of the conveyor belt, that we can turn around. That’s why conversations about white feminism are so important, it helps bystanders to recognize the impact of their inaction, and how white feminism is often the “default.” Remember, the impact of feminism comes from our actions, not our intentions. See you “in a couple of weeks,” when we will go into more detail about what white feminism looks like today.