White women need to reckon with their privilege to save feminism, argues author

White feminism is killing the project of equality, argues Rafia Zakaria. She says dominant feminism is based on a set of beliefs and principles that upholds an exclusive system of "whiteness" and bolsters white supremacy — ultimately ignoring the challenges and concerns of women of colour. 

The lawyer and author of Against White Feminism says she felt compelled to write an alternative history — a story that turns the spotlight off whiteness and on to the intersectional perspectives from brown, Black and Asian women.

Zakaria says her book is intended to provide different dimensions of the feminist movement that exists today and to also give women a reason to press on, "such that every woman who calls herself a feminist, of any race, class, nationality, or religion, can see a path forward and a reason to stay."

She writes that alternative narratives of women of colour need to "influence the content and the course of the movement for gender parity. And before this can happen, white women must reckon with just how much white privilege has influenced feminist movements and continues to influence the agenda of feminism today."

Zakaria spoke with IDEAS producer Naheed Mustafa on how to stop the march of white feminism through history.

Here is an excerpt from their conversation.

Naheed Mustafa: Were you concerned that the reaction to your book would be reactionary rather than one that was really engaged with this idea of what is feminism?

Rafia Zakaria: Until the book was actually in book form and I was holding it, I didn't think it would get published. When I first came up with ideas around this book, my then-agent completely dismissed them as absolutely unpublishable and unsellable. And I had to get a different agent and then go through the proposal process again. And then the book sold. 

And a lot of pushback [came] from women who are white. Even though on page one, the book says that a woman who is white is not a white feminist. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about whiteness as a set of beliefs and principles. And as a system that upholds white racial supremacy. Despite that, I saw among older white feminists a very visceral reaction, that my book was a sign of disrespect for the battles that they had won and in those particular cases, it has been hard to push through and try to explain that it doesn't have to be an either-or.

The feminism that we would want to have is a feminism that should be all inclusive — meaning represent all women. The problem that I see with the argument with the most common retort against the book is, 'Well, you're just dividing women. And if we're divided, we can't fight men.' And my response to that is simply that we can handle complexity. We don't have to create this sort of fake unity to say, 'OK, the only way we can fight men is if we ignore all the differences among us.' So in that sense this is an envisioning of a feminism that is not afraid to engage with difference and that recognizes that sometimes engaging with that difference, which has, in my view, become the elephant in the room. 

Inequality in, say, majority Muslim countries has a history. There's a history to why these are unequal societies for women — colonialism, predatory capitalism, harsh interpretations of religion. I think if my family had stayed in Pakistan I would not have had the same opportunities for self-actualization. But that creates a tension for me because the reasons why life in the West is good also have a history. It's a tricky line. How do you engage with that?

I'll tell you the part about it that truly worries me. What worries me is that there's a sort of moral ranking of societies, right? And hence of feminism. And in that moral ranking, obviously, the West is considered to be at the top. And other places go farther and farther down, you know, following World War Two, that ranking has been maintained through these networks of international aid.

And this idea that the countries that have a lot, somehow altruistically promote development in other countries, which in turn, of course, continues to bolster their moral supremacy... and therefore feminist white supremacy as well. So the part that bothers me now is that that has become so entrenched, that in post-colonial societies, people believe the narrative of themselves that the West projects back at them.

So those are the things that worry me more than rather the simplistic, 'Oh, well, I came here and then life was so great.' I mean, life IS great, but I will say that, you know, I've given up community. The sort of effortless community that exists when you're born in some place and you exist there. I've had to embrace alienation from even the people who I am closest to in my life — of my daughter. I mean it's the sort of alienation that comes when you realize that your kids have a completely different frame of reference, and childhood, and memories then you have. And in that sense, there's a broken link there that otherwise people take for granted. 

One of the things that you talk about in your book is the idea that the war on terror was a feminist war. It was fought on the basis — at least in Afghanistan — of bringing freedom to women. But I think that this narrative has taken hold in a lot of places in a way that frames the conversation about women's rights as an imperial project. Women's equality becomes a shorthand for imperialism. How do you think about this problem? 

The goal of the book in that very essential sense is to try to disaggregate these things, to try to separate imperialism, colonialism and whiteness, and racial privilege from feminism. And obviously, the reason for it is that if we don't do that, then feminism is over. Because right now, feminism as it exists, is synonymous with acting Western and acting white. And for as long as that happens, individual feminists in their own places, countries and regions are not able to define feminism or women's empowerment as culturally authentic. 

And if you're not going to be able to obtain some kind of authenticity for yourself and for the ideas you're pushing forward, you're never going to have enough legitimacy to produce the cultural transformations that have to occur for women to get some semblance of equality or empowerment. So that really is the gist of the book.

Do you see the feminist struggle as being in a healthy place right now? How would you answer that question? 

I would say it's on life support. I wrote this book because it's almost like I think of this as a brown woman, as a last ditch effort. That nothing else seems to have conveyed the urgency of what women are facing and the absolute ineptitude and inability of feminism as a movement to respond to those struggles. Things have only become more urgent since COVID because we know that the brunt of most of the setbacks have been borne by women and women are going to start from a much more disadvantaged place when we finally begin to move on whenever that will be so, yeah, I really feel that feminism is on life support. 

The vast majority of the world's women do not see it as something relevant to their lives… it's not a lack of faith in feminist ideals. It's simply a lack of faith in the idea that, white feminists will sort of cede the space, so to speak, for the movement.  


*This episode was produced by Naheed Mustafa.