When even Pragna Patel is called a “white feminist”
Zakaria’s book sounds only slightly less contemptuous and hostile than her social media persona. Joan Smith reviewed it in the Times (so Zakaria thought it would be clever to lob stupid insults at her on Twitter in response, which is very adult and sensible).
“White feminism” as a derogatory term, caricaturing it as a movement that imposes its preoccupations on women who are not white or middle class, has been around for a while. People claim it is reflective more of a state of mind than skin colour; even Pragna Patel, a founding member of Southall Black Sisters, has been accused of being a “white feminist”.
In other words it works pretty much the way “terf” does – as an excuse to shit on women without seeming like a common or garden misogynist.
Building bridges is definitely not what this book is about, and everywhere she finds feminists who accept “the benefits conferred by white supremacy at the expense of people of colour”. Defining people in terms they would not recognise or accept is a key ploy of identity politics, and feminists are lumped together and traduced throughout.
Much the way Katie Edwards did in the Independent today, then.
The book’s most serious flaw lies in its singularly ill-informed account of modern feminism. If the movement has a single unifying feature it is an analysis of the way oppression of women is linked to female bodies, regardless of race, class, age, religion or sexual orientation. Yet this is precisely what Zakaria denies: “An aversion to acknowledging lived trauma permeates white feminism, which in turn produces a discomfort and alienation from women who have experienced it.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. In this country refuges for victims of domestic and sexual violence were built by feminists who insisted they should be open to all women.
Never mind that, they were white feminists just the same.
Identity politics is rife with such facile judgments, designed to make its advocates feel superior. Zakaria appears to have missed the irony of dismissing every species of feminism but her own in the name of a supposedly more egalitarian politics. But when I see feminists being pitted against each other in this mean-spirited way, I can almost hear the patriarchy laughing.
So I guess Zakaria decided to use Twitter to demonstrate just how mean-spirited (and fatuous) she can be when she really puts her mind to it.
This accusation, white feminism, is not something I can take seriously. Even if we grant for the sake of argument that a feminist, e.g. our own host here, is only concerned with feminist issues affecting her own nation, so what? The principles put forth in supporting women there are still applicable abroad, and I would not fault a person for not explicitly stating that. A supporter and writer for any cause, be they a smallish blogger, a philosopher in academia, a columnist, or whatever else, must limit their scope purely for the fact that the world is too large for a single person to even attempt to mention every instance of an issue.
Take a writer on the topic of homelessness. Imagine this writer attempting to report on every nation’s homelessness issues. A large organisation might take on such a project, but a lone writer? It would be a project that consumes their entire time, and drive them to madness or drink. And so we accept that a person whose preoccupation is homelessness is probably not going to write about international homelessness, and may reasonably limit themselves to a single state or even city. Exhaustion and burnout are the alternative.
Except for feminism, where ‘white feminism’ is an accepted slur. It is motivated by the desire to tarnish sex-specific protections, and even recognition that there are only two sexes, as white and/or christian imperialism. We can see that this comes primarily from men wanting to enter female spaces from the fact that there is no equivalent slur for writers on mens’ issues.
I’ve seen Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s principles called white feminism too. Not openly in reply to her columns, open letters, and etc., because I think even the woke brigade are a bit too embarrassed to say it so directly, but they’ve labelled the things she says as white feminism when other feminists have said them.
@1 thanks for this, your comment made me realise that this issue is related to a personal hobbyhorse of mine–the inevitable criticism of any woman’s writing that she didn’t write about someone/something else. bell hooks criticised Betty Friedan for not writing about Black women. The host of a podcast I was listening to the other day about Virginia Woolf criticised her for not writing about poor women. Every woman who writes about her own experience, from her own point of view, is criticised for not representing other women (or trans-identified men) in her work. As you say, just in practical or logistical terms it would be impossible; any woman who attempted to represent everyone she’s criticised for not ‘including’ would be out of her depth, not do the ‘unrepresented’ groups justice, and probably be accused of ‘appropriation’ anyway.
Can anyone think of an example of criticism of a male author writing about his own experience from his own point of view (and, often, claiming universality among the races, classes and sexes for that point of view) for not writing about people who were different from him? Is there anything out there like, e.g., ‘Philip Roth only writes about middle class Jewish academic men, and that’s bad’?
Yes, I think so. John Updike for instance, and yes Roth. I think with the Famous Men there’s a more in sorrow than in anger note while with women it’s just regret-free bashing, but I do think the criticism happens.
I wish I could find some written examples of that kind of criticism of male authors, because I’ve never seen it.
Mind you you asked for an example and I don’t have one offhand, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen/heard such criticisms.
Tell me about it! I’ve heard it from every angle. And then there are the people who think I should write about poverty and the poor and the abused because I have been there, but until recently I wasn’t ready or able to rip open those wounds. Asking someone else to bleed for you is as unsavory as insisting someone include everyone else in their writing.
As for criticism of male authors, the comment on Philip Roth made me think of one, but it wasn’t written down and may not count, but a friend of mine refused to go to Neil Simon plays because he only wrote about New York Jews.
@6 :) no that doesn’t count–your friend wasn’t interested in stories about New York Jews, but it doesn’t sound like your friend went on to argue that writing about New York Jews made Neil Simon ‘problematic’, bigoted or evil, and only acceptable to read/watch/engage with with extreme caution. (It also doesn’t count because it’s not the kind of generally-accepted-as-legitimate criticism of any woman who writes about her own life, experiences and observations.)