The submissive femininity of radical feminism was bourgeois, white and heterosexual. There was no acknowledgement that this ‘enslaved’ femininity was not universal, or that it was complicit in the actual enslavement of generations of Black people.

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.

How might mainstream feminist activism help or hinder other social justice projects, for instance around class inequality, race discrimination, migrants’ rights and transgender inclusion? When violent men and governments profess their concern for ‘women’s safety’, how should feminists respond?

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.

Right-wing attacks on feminism and Gender Studies are a defence of the heterosexual nuclear family. This is also a defence of capital and nation: protecting ‘our’ economy and ‘our’ way of life. It is impossible to disentangle the war against ‘gender ideology’ from the widespread racism and anti-immigrant sentiment directed at other Others also seen as threats.

I do not want to centre white feminists and our problems; I want to expand our capacity to deal with them without expecting others in our political communities (and women of colour especially) to do the work for us.

Today’s reactionary feminists are descendants of nineteenth-century ‘vice-fighters’, Christian moralists and anti-miscegenationists, the bourgeois women enlisted by Fordism to ‘improve’ the working class, and those who ran the reformatories for ‘wayward’ Black girls and who abused them ‘for their own good’.