29 Quotes About White-feminism

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.

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.

You can argue that conservative values are at odds with feminist ideology, but ultimately the question has to be not only what women are we empowering, but also what are we empowering them to do. White women aren't just passive beneficiaries of racist oppression; they are active participants.

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’.

If you don't have an anti-racism plan, you plan to be racist.

The theft of brown women's narratives is not only an injustice placed on them, but also one extended to their male counterparts; by insisting they need to be liberated from their 'barbaric' civilization, Laura [Bush] summoned the colonial assertion that brown women need saving from brown men, when, in actuality, brown women have suffered at the hands of white men more than at those of any other oppressor in history.

Instead of using the white feminist wrecking ball, we should build towards a world without sexual violence. This is not about forgiveness, empathy or being ‘nice’ – it is about the fact that we cannot end violence by doing violence. Even – no, especially – if that violence manifests as tears.

White feminist narcissism has no truck with the idea that we are anything but victims.

The investment of sexual trauma in the outrage economy allows the ‘good’ woman (cis, ‘respectable’, implicitly white) to be used to withhold support and resources from the ‘bad’ ones. Trans women and sex workers are pitted against more privileged women, in a politics that does not challenge how neoliberal capitalism has created massive inequalities of distribution.