I wrote a thoughtful response to your comment but my wifi spazzed and it got deleted so here we go again…albeit less articulate than the first time.
An excerpt from the article you linked:
“Yet that is exactly what lazy polemics about terrible white feminism do: they empower men to use the fact that all white women are supposedly high up in the privilege pecking order to tell middle-aged women to shut up or, even worse, accuse them of weaponising their abuse and trauma.”
I think this article is silly, no offence intended to its author. In my piece, I made a distinction between white women who are feminists and “white feminists.” The first describes a white woman who may embody any form of feminism under the sun. The second describes a white woman who follows the academic definition “white feminism,” a term coined many moons ago to describe a form of mainstream feminism that ignores the experiences of non-white women. Not every white woman is a “white feminist.”
The author of the piece doesn’t acknowledge this distinction, though it’s an important one. The term is also not a recent or novel concept like she suggests, which tells me that her argument is in bad faith and she hasn’t made any effort to understand the people she’s critiquing. Critiquing white feminism isn’t about participating in some Oppression Olympics like she suggests…although BIPOC women experience forms of discrimination that white women (regardless of class) never will. It’s not about upholding the patriarchy (lol)…although isn’t punting the blame for men’s criticism of white women onto women of colour a form of “upholding the patriarchy” by her logic? It isn’t about guilting or shaming anyone, either.
It is about pointing out the differences of experiences across groups of women to allow for the progress of ALL women. Did you know that even though women got the right to vote in 1920 in the US, many black women couldn’t vote until the 1960s? I can’t help but think if members of the suffrage movement didn’t have an aversion to conflating the causes of race and gender, this might not have been the case.
To conclude because this response is getting long, I fundamentally disagree with the thesis of the article you linked. I do. I don’t think it’s fair to blame WOC for the criticism that white women receive from men as a result of their rejection of white feminism. It’s not our fault, some men are just dicks.
That line of thinking reminds me of an article I read recently that accused the Karen meme of being sexist and “upholding the patriarchy” (even though it emerged as a necessary critique of the behaviour of some white women by black women) because some men use it to criticize white women. How is that black women’s fault? You called Jessica a Karen. Are you upholding the patriarchy? I don’t think so because the critique was justified.
