Dear white women, we need to do better.
It is the year 2023, and International Women’s Day is upon us.
And white women, we need to do better.
I have written before about why men need feminism too. I prefer the way bell hooks puts it:
“Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. I liked this definition because it does not imply that men were the enemy.”
This definition names the problem as systematic rather than the problem as the most likely agents of that system. Men aren’t the enemies of feminism; patriarchy is. The truth is that anyone is capable of upholding patriarchy, including women. Think of Amy Coney Barrett, who stepped on the backs of women to become a Justice on the Supreme Court and destroy women’s legal right to abortions in the US. Think about Phyllis Schlafly, a token of the national conservative movement, who opposed feminism, abortion, and gay rights and successfully campaigned to prevent the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
It is up to us, including women, to unlearn patriarchy, just like it is up to us to unlearn white supremacy culture.
And we – white women – have utterly failed at unlearning white supremacy culture. Much of our feminism has excluded women of color, starting most notably with the exclusion of women of color from the women’s suffrage movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a racist who did not support voting rights for Black women.
While the 19th Amendment to the Constitution may have granted white women the right to vote in 1920, many women of color were not guaranteed that right until the US Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. But the culture of white women throwing women of color under the bus did not end there.
“As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.”
–bell hooks, Feminism is for Everbody: Passionate Politics
Although many white men are now using it as a sexist and domineering term, the term “Karen” is part of a long legacy of criticizing the racism of white women. The Karen trope is only the most recent name to criticize loud, racist white women. In the 90s, it was “Becky.” In the antebellum era (1815-1861), it was “Miss Ann.” These are women who call the police on Black people for simply existing. The women who weaponize their whiteness.
It’s easiest to see this weaponization of whiteness in the public meltdowns of Karens recorded in the wild on a camera phone. But what’s harder to see is the more subtle, insidious racism that happens every day from white women towards women of color.
Are you aware of your implicit bias? If not, I recommend you take Harvard’s implicit racial bias test. Most of us, even most people of color, are socialized to have implicit biases that white = good and black = bad. This is the norm – our status quo.
So what do we do? We must commit to unlearning white supremacy culture.
I recommend the book Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla F. Saad.
“Your desire to be seen as good can actually prevent you from doing good, because if you do not see yourself as part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution.”
–Layla F. Saad
And as bell hooks reminds us, it’s not just about race, it’s also about class. The United States exhibits wider disparities of wealth between rich and poor than any other major developed nation. Billionaire wealth has skyrocketed during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet – three white men – collectively own more wealth than the bottom 50% of US Americans.
It’s also worth mentioning that non-men possess less wealth than men, and non-white people possess less wealth than white people. And while white women have been growing their wealth, women of color have not.
Wealth is power, and as long as wealth is distributed unequally, a power imbalance will remain. Equitable wealth distribution is pivotal in achieving equality.
I recommend the book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas to learn more about how even many well-intended people who want to end world suffering instead uphold the status quo wealth gap that creates this suffering in the first place.
We as white women need not only reaffirm our commitment to dismantling patriarchy but also affirm our commitment to dismantling white supremacy culture, ableism, capitalist exploitation, and the domination of religion. White women, we must commit to a full decolonization of our minds to earnestly pursue an end to the politic of domination.
“The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.”
–bell hooks
We can do better. We will do better.
In Solidarity,
Anya