Whose Rights Are Being Discussed When it Comes to Women’s Rights?

How white feminism serves to further marginalize women who aren’t white

Feminism is the belief in the equality between women and men, plain and simple. So why is it that a movement that, in theory, should be operating with the combined force of all it’s members is, in reality, frayed and divided by class and racial lines?

The reason is quite simple: contemporary feminism fails to properly account for issues of intersectionality. Intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is a concept that describes the multiple dimensions of oppression that are interwoven throughout each other. Crenshaw argues in Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color that these interlocking oppressive institutions cannot be addressed individually, but must be addressed as a whole.

“As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become “other,” the outsider whose experience and tradition is too “alien” to comprehend.” — Audre Lorde

White feminism fails to account for women of color by focusing solely and primarily on the experiences of elite white women. According to Bell Hooks in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center,

Racism abounds in the writings of white feminists, reinforcing white supremacy and negating the possibility that women will bond politically across ethnic and racial boundaries…Yet class structure in American society has been shaped by the racial politic of white supremacy; it is only by analyzing racism and its function in capitalist society that a thorough understanding of class relationships can emerge.

This reality can be incredibly dangerous especially when considering 47% of the U.S. female population is non-white. It appears, according to Bell Hooks, that a combination of capitalism, white supremacy, and the general belief in American society that white women matter more than non-white women lies at the core of the societal train wreck that is white feminism.

Not only does white feminism exclude and disenfranchise women of color, it also marginalizes women struggling in developing countries. Taking an overwhelming western approach, white feminism operates under a “struggling sisterhood” narrative that fails to account for the needs of women living in developing countries. Because a majority of women in the modern feminist movement are white women, there is a incredible loss of perspective in the movement as a majority of the world’s women do not have a seat at the table. White women do have ways of responding to this critique, with behaviors such as cultural appropriation, defensiveness, and self-paralyzing guilt. In Chandra Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes, she describes this very phenomenon:

The ways in which appropriation or stealth, in the colonial gesture, reproduces itself in the political positions of white feminists is formulated convincingly in a passage about what Pratt calls “cultural impersonation,” a term that refers to the tendency among white women to respond with guilt and self-denial to the knowledge of racism and anti-Semitism, and to borrow or take on the identity of the other in order to avoid not only guilt but pain and self-hatred.

Mohanty is describing the way white feminists have attempted to quell their guilty consciences regarding women of color, to no avail. It is quite something, all of the creative ways those who belong to the ruling class attempt to appease their guilt.

Instead of running from their guilt through further oppressive means, white women need to understand that their voice is not the only voice that matters in the Women’s Rights Movement. Contrary to what this white supremacist society has lead them to believe, they need to understand that there are voices that the movement has been dying to hear. The sooner white women recognize their privilege and their role in uplifting the voices of women of color and international women, the sooner the Women’s Rights Movement will work to benefit all women.