Book Review - Against White Feminism By Rafia Zakaria

I’ve said this before in my review of Mixed/Other by Natalie Morris, but it is natural human instinct to categorise things (it’s not plagiarism if I steal from myself, its recycling). Our brains like categories because they make things neat, clear, and orderly. That’s fine for things like animals where you can say these are all mammals, those are all amphibians and so on. People however, are more complex, especially when talking about the discrimination and privileges they experience. For example, you can say Black people experience racism, and women experience sexism, but what about Black women? They experience racism, but it’s different to the racism Black men face. They experience sexism, but it’s different to the sexism White women face. All women of colour share this plight. It is an obvious thing to say, yet mainstream feminism historically hasn’t taken these differences into account, and often seems to centre White women, and White women’s concerns as the default, and priority assuming theirs is a universal struggle without recognising the added challenges women of colour face. Work has been done by many in recent years especially to address this imbalance with calls for greater intersectionality. One of these works is Against White Feminism. With Against White Feminism, Rafia Zakaria draws upon her own experiences as a woman of colour, the social critique of other feminists of colour, and well researched historical analysis to show how exclusionary mainstream, or white, feminism has been and can be to this day. Zakaria argues that by failing to acknowledge, or adequately prioritise the differences and needs of women of colour, white feminism reinforces the very power structures it seeks to take down.

According to Zakaria when feminism and the push for women’s suffrage first came to prominence as a movement in the west it did so while marching in lock step with white supremacy. A lot of early proto-feminist writings in favour of women’s suffrage explicitly linked White women’s need to vote to white supremacy and the idea that they inherently deserved the vote by dint of their whiteness, especially compared to women of colour from the colonies. “Most British suffragettes made no bones about tying their right to the vote to their racial identity as Anglo-Saxons. The archival materials of the age are full of evidence of this noxious truth”. Zakaria gives multiple examples of writing in favour of suffrage that follows this line of thinking, of white women raising themselves up by putting women of colour down. This can’t just be dismissed as a product of its time as Zakaria draws lines from the origins of feminism to modern feminism showing that this has become a troubling pattern to this day, albeit with the exclusion being less obviously racist in nature. Zakaria cites the women’s march in Washington DC in January 2017 as an example of this. She points out that even though the march’s organisers were talking a big game, they were still organising the event at a time most convenient to middle class white women: “The leaders of the Women’s March were proudly and publicly committed to an intersectional ideology, and yet they had not considered that Saturday, a day of rest for the middle class, was just another working day for those in the service and hospitality industries; for cleaners, transport workers, carers, and those engaged in many other kinds of low-paid and often insecure work usually performed by people of colour and immigrants.” Even when they were making a conscious effort to be inclusive the organisers of the march still put white women first, particularly middle-class white women. Zakaria points out that where there are attempts at inclusivity and diversity in white feminism it is usually performative, letting middle class white women maintain their positions of power while throwing a few scraps of recognition to women of colour.

One of the points of critique from Zakaria that stood out to me while reading was how she argued that modern feminism, or white feminism, has been defanged and commodified. She demonstrates the ways in which capitalism and neo-liberalism over time sanded the edges off of what could have been a disruptive force for equality and almost absorbed it; turning feminism into a corporate friendly neutered version of itself. She argues that this process broadly began during the movement to get more women the right to work and into employment. As time passed and women in the west entered the workforce en masse they started earning their own money that they had for themselves. This basically turned women into another target for capitalism. Where women were becoming more independent and taking control of their lives, to the corporations they became a new demographic to sell to. Once they started selling products to women specifically, they didn’t want to stop and give up the extra money they could get so over time feminism became corporatised emphasising the importance of women working for themselves, making their own money, and most importantly to the corporations becoming economically active and productive. As Zakaria put it: “The cult of the individual became the norm, along with its accompanying expression of power through consumer choice and accrual of capital. The window of discourse of feminism had shifted: instead of aspiring to develop a consensus and build solidarity based on what was good for all women, individual women were rewarded and even celebrated for looking out for themselves. The self-made woman rose to take her place as companion to the self-made man in the Western mythos of success.” Rather than challenge society this corporatised feminism became part of it with one very specific idea of what women’s empowerment looked like, and anything that fell outside of that very white, very middle class, very western vision was discarded. The experiences and needs of a lot of women of colour were ignored as a result. This is a perspective I hadn’t considered before and as a reader I can say Zakaria makes a compelling case for her view. As she moves deftly through the decades taking the reader on a tour down the long road to corporatised white feminism, she paints a picture of a movement that lost its way and is in desperate need of new voices and real intersectionality.

This book is a clarion call for intersectionality and shows why intersectionality is important not just in feminism, though that is the focus here, but in all social movements. Intersectionality as a term gets thrown about quite a bit, it was first coined by Kimberlé Williams to describe how the intersections of different identities such as race, gender, sexuality, etc. can cross over and affect the way people experience discrimination. It is not an oppression contest saying one person is more or less oppressed than another. It’s a recognition that different people have different experiences and there is no one size fits all approach to fighting discrimination. The problem here is some white feminists have pounced on the word intersectionality to claim awareness of institutional racism and discrimination without actually doing the hard work needed to try to dismantle it. Zakaria makes it clear that this isn’t acceptable and true inclusivity requires true intersectionality. While it can read like an attack, Zakaria makes it clear her intention isn’t to drive white women away from mainstream feminism with pitchforks and torches, but rather to encourage them to join women of colour in a more inclusive, truly intersectional version of feminism. Towards the end of the book Zakaria offers her own suggestions on ways to build that more intersectional, inclusive feminism. The thing here is none of her suggestions are particularly new or revolutionary, but rather things that seem obvious like dropping the idea some white women have, that they are the gatekeepers, or owners of the broader feminist movement, and accepting that letting women of colour have more positions of power within feminist organisations doesn’t represent a loss of power for them. True equality isn’t a zero-sum game where if one group gains rights another loses them. This line of thinking is deeply entrenched in white supremacy and people need to move past it.

This is not the kind of book I would normally choose to review, but I’m glad I did. Past reviews of mine have been books more explicitly focused on racism, or biographies where racism is one of the main focuses. While the focus here is on feminism first it is a book which challenges the reader to face some uncomfortable truths about the role race has had in shaping mainstream feminism and offers a critique of the ways white women have maintained their dominance within it. This book doesn’t just ask for a more inclusive feminism that doesn’t centre on whiteness. It demands a feminism that goes beyond the surface level appearance of diversity to examine the structural and institutional inequalities that women of colour face, and to factor those inequalities into its work. Overall, I think it is a book that should be as widely read as possible, though certain people might need to do so with an open mind and a willingness to self-reflect as it could be a bitter, but necessary pill to swallow.

If you would like to buy this book, please click here: https://tinyurl.com/yjbx9wfe