Thoughts for White Women Moving into Resistance Work

A couple thoughts specifically with white women in mind who are moving more into resistance work:

1. Your identity is intersectional (across race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, and dis/ability).
2. Women of color feminist labor developed the tools to understand these intersections of identity. Google Kimberle Crenshaw who coined the term intersectionality and look up the work of Angela Davis.
3. Learn women of color feminist history. You might start with anything and everything by Audre Lorde, This Bridge Called My Back, the 1977 Combahee River Collective, and Islands of Decolonial Love by Leanne Simpson (who is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg and a member of Alderville First Nation). Note that women of color feminist traditions have grounded their work in transnational networks, so there are many ways to connect these intellectual lineages across boundaries of nation-states.
4. As you learn and read, simultaneously donate money or other resources if you can to women of color feminist organizations as a way to not just take/consume those knowledges but to give back and to acknowledge these histories of labor relations. Donate to Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy is based on exploiting the labor of women of color in particular. It’s also based in white settler colonialism and relations of Christian hegemonic domination toward land and Indigenous communities. We white women need to work against this and not reproduce this exploitative dynamic as we learn from and engage women of color feminism.
5. Strategize your resistance, especially how you will work in your various white communities, understanding the resources and limits your own intersectional identity has. Examples: A) Do you live with chronic health conditions? Then you will need to take seriously everyday taking care of your body. Our movements should not perpetuate ableism. Try to differentiate between your white fragility and your internalized ableism. B) Are you queer-identified, trans, and/or non binary and targeted by your family of origin when you speak out against white supremacist patriarchy? What you can say at the Thanksgiving table (a white settler and Christian hegemonic holiday!) will be different than what a hetero and cis passing person can say. Let’s thoughtfully strategize when and where and how we will bring our voices, all the while taking care of ourselves.
6. Sort through your emotions in your own learning process with white friends. Don’t ask people of color to do that emotional labor with you. Again, that’s reproducing the exploitative labor relations of white supremacist patriarchy.