We cannot continue to ‘wage war’ driven by outrage and desire for power; we must not dwell on our own border anxieties while the Western ‘we’ is violently reconstituted in a futile drive to resurrect Empire. In other words, we need to dismantle power, not merely demand a shift in who wields it.

For white feminists, criminal punishment represents protection, not oppression. It is the colonial master’s intervention, the ‘empathy’ of Angry Dad. It is also the indirect demonstration of our own will to power.

Sometimes, sexual violence is a ‘cultural problem’ (but only when this culture is non white). Sometimes, it is a product of male anatomy (but only when this anatomy is assigned to a trans woman or a man of colour). Sexual violence is never the violence of heteropatriarchy or globalising racial capital. Instead, representatives of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism weaponise the idea of ‘women’s safety’ against marginalised and hyper-exploited groups.

Protecting white women was, and is, a key colonial preoccupation. Imaginings of Indigenous and/or slave uprisings were sexualised: fear of revolution was fear of rape. In colonial and neo-colonial cultures, white women’s tears are deadly to people of colour.

Instead of interrogating intersecting systems, politically white feminism roots violence either in aberrant or all male bodies. The mainstream focus on ‘bad men’, and the reactionary focus on male biology, do not account for how capitalist economic predation and misogynist sexual predation go hand in hand. They do not account for how this interplay is racialised, domestically and geopolitically.

Political whiteness is the systematic privileging of bourgeois white women’s wounds at the expense of others. Its obsession with threat is both sexualised and racialised, because of the role of colonialism in co-constructing race and sexuality.

Traversing borders is a threat – and in the colonial mindset, the borders of class and nationality are at one with the borders of gender. Binary gender is a colonial and capitalist project, what feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa called the ‘absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other’.

Western borders are currently being reasserted in the context of economic crisis, to protect the global ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. And reactionary feminism is complicit with this capitalist and neo-colonial project. It foregrounds narratives of scarcity; it claims resources and support for the ‘good’ women rather than the ‘bad’.