When white feminism ignores history, ignores that the tears of white women have the power to get Black people killed while insisting that all women are on the same side, it doesn’t solve anything. Look at Carolyn Bryant, who lied about Emmett Till whistling at her in 1955. Despite knowing who had killed him, and that he was innocent of even the casual disrespect she had claimed, she carried on with the lie for another fifty years after his lynching and death. Though her family says she regretted it for the rest of her life, she still sat on the truth for decades and helped his murderers walk free. How does feminism reconcile itself to that kind of wound between groups without addressing the racism that caused it?
There’s nothing feminist about having so many resources at your fingertips and choosing to be ignorant. Nothing empowering or enlightening in deciding that intent trumps impact. Especially when the consequences aren’t going to be experienced by you, but will instead be experienced by someone from a marginalized community.
It’s not at all helpful for some white feminists to make demands of women of color out of a one-sided idea of sisterhood and call that solidarity. Sisterhood is a mutual relationship between equals. And as anyone with sisters can tell you, it’s not uncommon for sisters to fight or to hurt each other’s feelings. Family (whether biological or not) is supposed to support you. But that doesn’t mean no one can ever tell you that you’re wrong. Or that any form of critique is an attack. And yes, sometimes the words involved are harsh. But as adults, as people who are doing hard work, you cannot expect your feelings to be the center of someone else’s struggle. In fact, the most realistic approach to solidarity is one that assumes that sometimes it simply isn’t your turn to be the focus of the conversation.
When feminist rhetoric is rooted in biases like racism, ableism, transmisogyny, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia, it automatically works against marginalized women and against any concept of solidarity. It’s not enough to know that other women with different experiences exist; you must also understand that they have their own feminism formed by that experience. Whether it’s an argument that women who wear the hijab must be “saved” from it, or reproductive-justice arguments that paint having a disabled baby as the worst possible outcome, the reality is that feminism can be marginalizing. If a liberation movement’s own representatives are engaging with each other oppressively, then what progress can the movement make without fixing that internal problem?
Feminism cannot be about pitying women who didn’t have access to the right schools or the same opportunities, or making them projects to be studied, or requiring them to be more respectable in order for them to be full participants in the movement. Respectability has not saved women of color from racism; it won’t save any woman from sexism or outright misogyny. Yet mainstream white feminists ignore their own harmful behavior in favor of focusing on an external enemy. However, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” only works as clichéd shorthand; in reality the enemy of my enemy may be my enemy as well. Being caught between groups that hate you for different aspects of your identity means none of you are safe.
So how do we address that much more complex reality without getting bogged down? Well, for starters, feminists of all backgrounds have to address would-be allies about the things that we want. And when we act as allies, feminists have to be willing to listen to and respect those we want to help. When building solidarity, there is no room for savior myths. Solidarity is not for everyone—it cannot realistically include everyone—so perhaps the answer is to establish common goals and work in partnerships. As equal partners, there is room for negotiation, compromise, and sometimes even genuine friendship. Building those connections takes time, effort, and a willingness to accept that some places are not for you.
Although the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen rose out of a particular problem within the online feminist community at that moment, it addresses the much larger problem of what it means to stand in solidarity as a movement meant to encompass all women when there is the distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others. It’s rhetorical shorthand for the reality that white women can oppress women of color, straight women can oppress lesbian women, cis women can oppress trans women, and so on. And those identities are not discrete; they often can and do overlap. So too do the ways in which women can help or harm each other under the guise of feminism.
There is a tendency to debate who is a “real” feminist based on political leanings, background, actions, or even the kinds of media created and consumed. It’s the kind of debate that blasts Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj for their attire and stage shows not being feminist enough, while celebrating Katy Perry for being empowering—via the fetishization and appropriation of cultures and bodies of color. Real feminism (if such a thing can be defined) isn’t going to be found in replicating racist, transphobic, homophobic, ableist, or classist norms. But we are all human, all flawed in our ways, and perhaps most important, none of us are immune to the environment that surrounds us. We are part of the society that we are fighting to change, and we cannot absolve ourselves of our role in it.
Liberation rhetoric cannot be lubrication for the advancement of one group of women at the expense of others. White privilege knows no gender. And while it makes no promises of a perfect life free from any hard work or strife, it does makes some things easier in a society where race has always mattered. The anger now bubbling up in hashtags, blog posts, and meetings is shorthand for women of color declaring to white women, “I’m not here to clean up your mess, carry your spear, hold your hand, or cheer you on while I suffer in silence. I’m not here to raise your children, assuage your guilt, build your platforms, or fight your battles. I’m here for my community because no one else will stand up for us but us.”
And if white women’s response to that is, as it has been, more whining about how we’re not making activism easier for them? We don’t care. We’re not going to care. We can’t afford to, because while Patricia Arquette was being lauded for a speech on equal pay that she delivered at the 2015 Academy Awards, one that called for “all the gay people and people of color that we’ve all fought for” to “fight for us now,” untold numbers of women of color were and are still fighting to get paid at all. That demand for solidarity, beyond being utterly tone-deaf, was more of the same one-way expectation.
It’s not silencing, or bullying, or toxic to refuse to make anyone else’s comfort more important than our lives or the lives of our children. We’re not here to be Mammy or whatever other convenient archetypes movies like The Help often reinforce. We’re not supporting characters in feminism, and we can’t afford to wait for equality to trickle down to us eventually. We can’t afford to believe that helping white women achieve parity with white men means that someday white, mainstream feminist ideals will reflect our needs. A hundred-plus years of history and day-to-day life teach marginalized women every day that making it easier for white women to become CEOs isn’t the same as making life easier for all women.
Cultural norms that center on the advancement of the individual at the expense of the community make that kind of feminism impossible to accept as a model. For many marginalized women, the men in our communities are partners in our struggles against racism even if some of them are a source of problems with sexism and misogyny. We cannot and will not abandon our sons, brothers, fathers, husbands, or friends, because for us they don’t represent an enemy. We have our issues with the patriarchy, but then so do they, as the most powerful faces of it aren’t men of color.