35 Quotes by Mikki Kendall

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.

More important, as a whole, feminism has to focus on change inside individual communities as well as across the world. We have to shift the focus on anti-rape narratives away from what victims can do to prevent it and toward teaching people not to be predators in the first place. We have to stop ignoring the cultural messages we are complicit in transmitting that say some people deserve to be sexually assaulted.

Feminism must challenge these narratives, or risk yet another generation being told that respectability can save them while they watch admitted harassers and assailants face no consequences for their crimes. The problem has never been the ways that victims don't tell, so much as it has been that some victims aren't seen as valuable enough to protect.

Girls like me seemed to be the object of the conversations and not full participants, because we were a problem to be solved, not people in our own right.

An intersectional approach to feminism requires understanding that too often mainstream feminism ignores that Black women and other women of color are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine of hate.

Mainstream, white-centered feminism hasn't just failed women of color, it has failed white women.

Ignoring the treatment of the most marginalized women doesn't set a standard that can protect any woman.

Now mainstream feminism has to step up, has to give 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 platform and resources to supporting those in marginalized communities doing feminist work.

But the peculiar impact of white fragility on the dynamics between white women means that too often mainstream white feminists get hung up on being polite at the expense of being effective.