Politeness as filtered through fragility and supremacy isn’t about manners; it’s about a methodology of controlling the conversation. Polite white people who respond to calls for respect, for getting boots off necks with demand for decorum, aren’t interested in resistance or disruption. They are interested in control. They replicate the manners of Jim Crow America, demanding deference and obedience; they want the polite facade instead of disruption. They insist that they know best what should be done when attempting to battle and defeat bias, but in actuality they’re just happy to be useless. They are obstacles to freedom who feel no remorse, who provide no valuable insight, because ultimately, they are content to get in the way. They’re oppression tourists, virtue-signaling volunteers who are really just here to get what they can and block the way, so no others can pass without meeting whatever arbitrary standards they create. And if you get enough of them in one place, they can prevent any real progress from occurring while they reap the benefits of straddling white supremacy and being woke. They have less power than they think, than anyone realizes, but like any small predator, they manage to be flashy enough to be seen.
In general, feminism as a career is the province of the privileged; it’s hard to read dozens of books on feminist theory while you’re working in a hair salon or engaged in the kinds of jobs that put food on the table but also demand a lot of physical and mental energy. For many who are coming to feminism in the way that I did, through lived experience, the work that feminists do in the community is more relevant than any text.
We must understand that any feminist work done in public is supported by the under-recognized, feminized work done by caregivers, sex workers, clerks, and cleaners. We must be careful not to come in as gentrifiers of the feminism that comes out of survival. We have the power to help or to do harm, and the risk imposed on communities by ignoring what has been built—in favor of some idea that we can do it better than the people who have to live with the consequences even when we do not—cannot be ignored.
I’m far from the first person to talk about being an accomplice instead of an ally, and I would certainly never presume to speak for other communities, but I think there are some areas where our concerns overlap. No one needs a savior to ride in, take over, and decide for them what would be the best approach to solve a problem. No one has time to play emotional caretaker for allies who would be accomplices. In general, if you have come to these spaces looking to take things away for your benefit instead of looking to contribute, then you’re already doing it wrong.
This is a space where we must be able to have the hard conversations after conflict, because sometimes the political is personal. Being a good accomplice is where the real work gets done. That means taking the risks inherent in wielding privilege to defend communities with less of it, and it means being willing to not just pass the mic but to sometimes get completely off the stage so that someone else can get the attention they need to get their work done. We can’t afford to silo the work into what we think counts as a feminist issue and instead must understand that the issues a community faces can cover a wide range, and that being able to eat, see a doctor, work, and sleep in a place free from the dangers of environmental racism are important.
Too often white feminism lies to itself. It lies about intent and impact; it invests more in protecting whiteness than in protecting women. It’s not a harmless lie either; it does direct harm to marginalized communities. Being harmful is a source of power that some white feminists have embraced in lieu of actually doing any real work. They get drunk on power and they can’t resist the urge to exert it as much as possible. This isn’t just about the vicious bigotry that lets Kirstjen Nielsen get on Fox News and blame the death of a seven-year-old girl on her family for the “crime” of seeking asylum. Nor is it just the petty power jolt some white women seem to get from calling the cops. Feminism can’t afford to prioritize supporting whiteness over actively combating racist and misogynistic policies that will end up hurting everyone.
The fundamental problem with white feminism has always been that it refuses to admit that the primary goal is shifting power to white women, and no one else. It says that it supports all white women being empowered regardless of whether they are ethical or not. For white feminism, anyone can claim to be an ally as long as they occasionally do the right thing, but the reality is that the performance of allyship is ultimately untrustworthy and useless. It allows white feminism to do damage control with apologies—after incredibly shitty behavior, feminist author Laurie Penny would probably call herself an ally, but she’s been absolutely complicit in the validation of white supremacist narratives around culture and race in her work. Though Penny’s recognition in “A Letter to my Liberal Friends” that her decision to give Milo Yiannopoulos access to a broader stage is a welcome moment of accountability after the fact, it remains to be seen how much harm can be ameliorated with a few words. She’s an ally, all right, but not a good one, and she will probably never be an accomplice because her privilege lets her find people who will accept her performance without expecting any real work from her.
In a way, it makes sense that white feminism reflexively protects white women from consequences of their actions. A movement that wants equal rights to oppress has a vested interest in not cleaning house. But the innately abusive nature of white supremacy has shaped white feminism, seen to it that investment in white supremacy is easier than investment in actual equality for themselves with all women. White feminism has to move past any idea of being an ally and into being an accomplice in order for it to be meaningful.
Accomplice feminists would actively and directly challenge white supremacist people, policies, institutions, and cultural norms. They would know they do not need to have the same stake in the fight to work with marginalized communities. They would put aside their egos and their need to be centered in our struggles in favor of following our instructions, because they would internalize the reality that their privilege doesn’t make them experts on our oppression. This style of feminism would be performative, would not pay lip service to equality while sustaining and supporting those who actively work against it. Becoming an accomplice feminist is not simply semantic. Accomplices do not just talk about bigotry; they do something about it.
Accomplice feminists not only address the dangers of the normalization of extreme white supremacist views, they interrogate and challenge the cultural standards that underpin those views. They don’t just stand on the sidelines watching while marginalized people are brutalized for protesting, they stand between the white supremacist systems (which are less likely to harm them) and those that the systems are trying to harm. This isn’t a single-day fight; this is a commitment to working against white supremacy in the same way that other marginalized communities do.
This goes beyond white feminist savior narratives and into challenging those who are more interested in weaponizing bigotry than in advancing women’s rights. We have to get past peak white feminism and into actual feminism. This is not to say that problems within marginalized communities should not be addressed, but they can no longer be used to deflect from the accountability and the work of being an accomplice. Marginalized communities have already developed strategies and solutions as they do their own internal work. Now mainstream feminism has to step up, has to get itself to a place where it spends more time offering resources and less time demanding validation. Being an accomplice means that white feminism will devote its platforms and resources to supporting those in marginalized communities doing feminist work.