Research Review: Against White Feminism

At The Melanin Collective, we are always learning something new about how harmful practices are rooted in the infrastructures of our organizations and institutions. In our Research Reviews, we will share back lessons, resources, and information that we find helpful in our own work of creating structural equity in the workplace.

Against White Feminism had been on our reading list for a while, and it did not disappoint. It is commonly understood that mainstream feminism has never been for everyone – feminism has traditionally been designed and centered around the experiences of cis-gendered, able-bodied white women, which leaves out the experiences of those who do not fit within those narrow confines. Author Rafia Zakaria took this principle one step further, outlining how white feminism functions and harms in everyday interactions. Here are a couple of our favorite themes we uncovered throughout our reading. 

AVERSIONS TO LIVED TRAUMA

White feminism has an aversion to including the experiences of lived trauma, perhaps preferring instead to operate in the land of buzzwords. While the forced separation of mind (theory) and body (experience) means our understandings can never meaningfully penetrate the surface, Zakaria reminds us that white feminism enforces the division of women who speak feminism and of women who live feminism. White feminism likes to co-opt and highlight the stories of BIWOC+, but those stories are never made part of the “legitimate” epistemology of feminism. 

We pushed back on this tension throughout our work on our brown paper: we knew that taking the traditional route of academic publishing would result in the delegitimizing of the stories we collected, even though stories are data. Traditional methodologies require that we compare our experiences to white women, but at The Melanin Collective we are wholly uninterested in treating white women as standard or neutral. This segues us nicely into the next theme, which is all about objectivity.

TOXIC RELATABILITY

BIWOC+ know that in order to be accepted by white feminists, we have to be relatable. Not that we want, need, or should be – it’s just a mechanism of white feminism. But it’s not simply the reframing of experiences that we encounter. It’s also the requirement that we somehow water down our experiences as a means of sounding less threatening, less emotional, and more objective.

Think back: have you ever called something racist, only to have a person counter, saying that you’re just trauma responding? Or have you ever recalled a harmful scenario, only for someone to tell you to use less violent language? It’s not just that our experiences must be digestible for white feminism, it’s that how we tell them must be palatable as well. Harm and abuse BIWOC+ face in the workplace and beyond are not neutral occurrences, and asking us to treat it as such – less we be seen as less credible – is a function of control. This is one of the reasons we decided to re-name “microaggressions” as “violence” in our brown paper. Tame terminology, meant to assuage temperate sensibilities, gives people leeway to skirt accountability. When racist abuse becomes an “accident,” the harm loses its significance. 

What do you think? Do you have any experiences with aversions to lived trauma or toxic relatability? Let us know on Twitter

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Moving Beyond Ableism: Verbal Diversity on Proud Stutter

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Equity at Work: Resources for Creating Meaningful Cultural Change