I was back home in Brooklyn when I began researching the final chapter of this book in June 2020. Inside, I kept the careful quarantine my mobility-limited and immunocompromised body required in COVID-19-ravaged New York. Outside, at least two Black Lives Matter marches a day streamed down the boulevard as part of a national uprising against state violence and its ruthless assault on Black people, marches I could cheer from the open windows and sometimes the sidewalk. The weekend of Brooklyn Pride, fifteen thousand people converged on the block, spilling across the intersections. As police choppers blustered overhead, the massive crowd, all dressed in white, rallied and then marched silently across central Brooklyn carrying one message: Black Trans Lives Matter. It was likely the largest gathering for trans rights in US history and it convened to underscore how gender violence, racist power, and police brutality intersect—and thus are experienced in heightened intensity—in Black trans lives. Organizers emphasized that police kill Black transgender people at the highest rates of all; in 2020, nearly half of the forty-four trans people murdered by civilians or police were Black trans women. Black trans death is an epidemic of state and individual violence, the deadly juncture of the biopolitics of race, sex, and state power. Fifteen thousand people came together to pinpoint and obliterate the underlying logic that some lives are less valuable than others, that police and prisons deliver justice, and that to be Black and trans is to be disposable. “Let today be the last day that you ever doubt Black trans power!” writer Raquel Willis proclaimed from the steps of the Brooklyn Museum.2 Justice demanded it.
The distance between the two events is at once calculable—two years and three thousand miles apart—and incalculable. In June 2018, the carceral agenda of white feminism reigned supreme in the successful Recall Judge Persky campaign, without regard for how protesting short prison terms might impact the most vulnerable. But in June 2020, intersectional feminism led the way as a large multiracial coalition of people, trans and cis, queer and straight, assembled to affirm that Black trans people are integral to the fight for racial justice, recognizing that the vantage of the margins leads right into the center of power in all its complexity.
A significant shift is happening across progressive movements, visible in the short time span of just two years. White feminism, and its agenda to optimize white women, appears to be losing some of its power. Empowering individual women to sidestep sexism in pursuit of their own rise to the top increasingly registers as complicity with the white supremacist status quo rather than representing the inspiring trajectory of a heroine. Across the country, a greater number of people took to the streets in the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising than had ever protested in the history of the United States, and they did so to call attention to racist systems and to advocate abolishing or defunding the police—not just to toss individual bad apples and ask for the slow drip of incremental reform.
A conceptual transformation mirrors this political move leftward. Progressives are beginning to ditch frameworks that posit that racism and sexism result from individual emotional responses such as fear and hate. Instead, more and more people recognize that discrimination originates from deeply rooted structures of injustice that individuals adhere to, wittingly or not, because they seem to serve their own self-interest.
The history we tell of the United States and its social movements is a key element of this political and conceptual shift. Has the United States come to have the greatest race, sex, and wealth inequality in the industrialized world merely by accident, or by design? Increasingly, particularly as researchers and readers alike are less likely to be white men in positions of power, we are uncovering new evidence of the latter. Discrimination does not originate from the unenlightened malice of closed minds. Rather, hierarchies of race and sex arise from centuries of social institutions, cultural practices, and economic structures designed to over-resource white men, and to a lesser degree white women, and under-resource everyone else. In getting the history right, we also open up the chance for a new kind of future.
Yet we still have a long way to go—the death, displacement, and job losses the racialized poor suffered in the COVID pandemic reveal the extent to which our social structures protect some at the expense of others. Tepid approaches to equality that target isolated incidents and individual success, rather than systemic problems, will not disappear on their own: they need to be out-organized. Capitalist imperialism and the white supremacist patriarchy that sustains it produce a paradigm hard to break away from—it is in the water, it saturates the air, it permeates both as individual common sense and as the climate, akin to weather, as Christina Sharpe has written of the afterlife of slavery.3
The counterhistory of feminism is seemingly becoming the history of feminism. Sheryl Sandberg is no longer celebrated as feminism’s most vital voice; the Squad, rather than the Facebook COO, captivates feminist imaginations. People frequently point to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality as the key feminist insight for the twenty-first century. Younger feminists are as likely to know about Sojourner Truth and her legendary “Ain’t I a Woman” speech advocating for Black women’s rights as they are to know the name Elizabeth Cady Stanton or perhaps even Susan B. Anthony. In 2016 Sojourner Truth was even set to appear on the $10 bill, before the Trump administration came into power and blocked all plans to diversify the figureheads on US currency.
There’s just one problem. Sojourner Truth never said, “Ain’t I a Woman.” Nor did she deliver any other sentence of the lecture that is now synonymous with her name. The speech is legendary in a literal sense. Truth was born enslaved in upstate New York in the 1790s, and her native language was low-Dutch. After learning English beginning at age nine, she prided herself in her mastery of its standard form. The word ain’t or any of the other southern dialect that fills the speech would never have fallen from her lips. In the 1990s, Black feminist historian Nell Irvin Painter showed that the text of the now famous talk Truth delivered at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, doesn’t come from the transcription the Anti-Slavery Bugle published a few weeks after the event. Instead, the most widely cited and anthologized version of Truth’s speech comes from an account the white activist and writer who led the convention, Frances Dana Barker Gage, published twelve years later. Gage crammed the text with ain’ts, other southern colloquialisms, and fabrications about Truth’s children and experience with the lash as if Truth were her puppet and she the puppet master. “May I say a few words? I want to say a few words about this matter,” the original transcription of Truth’s speech begins. But Gage ventriloquizes another character altogether, a stereotypical plantation mammie. “Well, chillen, whar dar’s so much racket dar must be som’ting out o’kilter,” opens her fictitious version.4
We remember a mythical, racist rendering of Sojourner Truth that white women found palatable, yet we forget the work of her contemporary, Frances E. W. Harper. How did this fabricated rendering of Sojourner Truth’s voice and image become louder than her own and louder than Harper’s, despite the numerous novels, speeches, and books of poetry Harper published to wide circulation? The answer is simple: the writers who created the possibility of such a thing as the history of feminism were the same activists who codified white feminist politics. When Stanton and Anthony assembled their History of Woman Suffrage, they represented their own priorities and investments as feminism, full stop. They disappeared the counterhistory. Feminism—like all social movements, a kaleidoscope of conflicting goals, strategies, and tactics—ground to a halt under their eye. In place of a moving mosaic, one monochromatic image dropped into place: a feminist is the defender of Woman. Woman was a being suffering only the injustices of sex, and feminism appeared to be the single-minded focus on winning her rights. All other social justice goals fell into darkness, altogether out of sight.
Sojourner Truth is so widely, but incorrectly, remembered today, Nell Irvin Painter proposes, because when Stanton and Anthony compiled their history of the movement, they
packaged Truth as “tend[ing] first and last toward women.”5 The History of Woman Suffrage included Truth’s speech, but it was Gage’s words that filled the pages. Truth was transformed into a colorful caricature who promoted the white feminist agenda.
Other white feminists also scripted Truth as a featured star of their own plots. After Truth introduced herself to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stowe subsequently published an extensive account of their acquaintance in The Atlantic. Like Gage, Stowe filled her columns with entirely made-up southern dialect and historical “facts” Truth allegedly shared about her life, such as her passage from Africa.6 (Again, she was born in upstate New York.)
Now, the counterhistory of feminism is gradually coming into view, largely due to the work of Black feminists who have, for decades, investigated the limitations of white feminism, uncovered another feminist history, and furthered the theory and praxis of justice developed by Black women. Over the decades, a pantheon of feminist activists has emerged who have been suppressed by white feminism’s attempt to monopolize the past. These historical figures, along with present-day activists, often still do not have the full recognition as feminist leaders they deserve. Other leaders of intersectional feminism I considered incorporating into this book include journalist Ida B. Wells, socialist Lucy Parsons, labor activist Mother Jones, writer and activist Lorraine Hansberry, activist-philosopher Grace Lee Boggs, organizer Dolores Huerta, scholar-revolutionary Angela Davis, and the women of the Combahee River Collective, including Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith, among many, many others. The counterhistory of feminism far outreaches the limits of these pages.
Intersectional feminism is building strength and power, and models to empower Woman are falling out of favor. But, at the same time, white feminism is not going anywhere. Instead, it has renovated to keep up with the times. Though it is challenged, the white feminist paradigm clings to life, reinventing itself into ever-new forms. Conservatives embraced the railroaded Supreme Court confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett as a triumph for feminism, while liberals expand the optimizing trap to ensnare Black women voters as saviors of the republic, placing the fate of democracy on their shoulders. And as white feminism updates itself with a veneer of inclusion and is increasingly embraced by liberals and conservatives alike, it becomes harder and harder to detect.
Liberal white feminism now embraces inclusion as a brand, believing that if Black women like Sojourner Truth and other women of color are stirred into the mix, an altogether new feminism is born. Often these renovated feminisms merely attempt once more to fill Black women’s mouths with white women’s words. But inclusion doesn’t eradicate white feminism—it merely extends its reach. The trouble with white feminism is not that it ignores and leaves out many women. Its harm is far more fundamental than a lack of awareness: white feminism perpetuates a pattern of dispossession.
In today’s white feminism, diversity and awareness become tools for optimizing white-dominated organizations. Black, Latinx, and Indigenous women and nonbinary people become prized tokens, valuable assets showcasing the progressive bona fides of organizational boards and social media feeds. Yet often while the employees have changed, the structure stays the same, and it is women of color who pay the biggest price. Black and other employees of color have exposed how white supremacy thrives within leading feminist institutions. “Top feminist organizations are plagued by racism,” the Lily recently investigated, while NPR broadcast that “NOW [National Organization for Women] president resigns amid allegations of creating toxic work environment.”7 The optimizing trap attempts to ensnare women of color like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with the demand for constant work and constant perfection, and to redeem white feminism. It saves its sharpest teeth, however, for Black women. Inclusive white feminisms cast Black women into a new role, ostensibly laudatory but in reality nearly as artificial and stifling as the plantation mammie with colorful, fictional patterns of speech: the Black woman savior/goddess.
Following the 2020 election, white women filled social media with outlandish reverence for Black women’s gallant deeds. Stacey Abrams was glorified as a goddess, unnamed activists as saviors, and Black women voters as rescuers of the nation’s soul. Black women organizers and voters indeed deserve an enormous amount of credit for swinging Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, pushing Trump out of the White House and flipping the Senate. The superhuman language, however, is counterproductive. Stacey Abrams merits far better than to be called a goddess and cast into plaster atop a pedestal, her tenacity becoming another optimizing trap. President? Perhaps. But not idol and deliverer. Insisting that Black Women Will Save Us fails to recognize how the rallying cry itself isolates Black women from the rest of the nation and even of humanity while saddling them with the burden of doing all the work. When Black women ride to the rescue, everyone else has tacit permission to carry on undisturbed. It is not Black women’s job to optimize their activism, saving white women or saving America. It is the responsibility of white women and all Americans, especially non-Black Americans, to change the structures that wield anti-Black and other racisms as tools for hoarding economic, political, and social power.
Mental health and nursing expert Cheryl Woods-Giscombé has found that the role of the “strong Black woman” that romanticizes tough and resilient heroines seemingly inured to hardship actually increases the negative impacts of racism and other structural inequalities on Black women. The “superwoman schema,” as she terms it, badgers Black women into a corner in which their feelings and vulnerabilities must be repressed, while they are expected to direct care freely and abundantly toward others. Energy flows only outward, draining the self. The superwoman sacrifices herself to save others, and chronic stress and associated mental and physical problems are her rewards.8
The caricature of the Black superwoman who rescues America from its own racism is but an updated version of the ventriloquized Black woman activist. Both are roles white women and sympathetic white men create for their own comfort. The details have changed since Gage and Stowe hijacked Truth’s body as a vehicle for their own words, but the structure of service remains. Today, inclusive white feminists attempt to siphon Black women’s intelligence and energy into their own consciences by scripting roles of Black superwomen who seemingly can bear the weight of the nation’s violence without suffering a bruise or shedding a tear. These are distinct forms of drain and theft, but the fundamental act of extraction continues unabated. So, too, does the psychological, physical, and social cost of being cast as an insensible stock character, bled of the birthright of fully dimensional personhood animated by tender flesh and even tenderer feelings, persist.
Even when it tries on inclusivity and praises its goddesses, white feminism is inherently an act of dispossession.
In these conditions, how do we recognize white feminism when we see it? And how do we grasp the growing countermovement, discerning when a feminist politics is genuinely aiming to challenge the broader structure of power that privileges the few at the expense of the many?
The past provides us with an indispensable guide to identifying and dismantling white feminist politics today. The histories in The Trouble with White Women make clear that though white feminism’s outward appearance may be changing, its internal structure has remained remarkably consistent over its nearly two hundred years of existence. White feminist politics developed in key stages, from the civilizing agendas of the nineteenth century to the cleansing campaigns of the twentieth and the optimizing imperatives of today. Yet these distinct styles are built on the same underlying supports: first, the theory that sexism is the most significant force of oppression and that the discrimination women face is, therefore, more similar than different—Woman is always on the receiving end of violence, never holding the lash; second, the method of extracting emotion, energy, labor power, and spirit from others, especially Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women and men and the poor, to benefit this mythical universal Woman; and finally, the promise that Woman’s ascension
into power will rehabilitate the institutions of racist empire, transforming them into bastions of equality.
We can recognize white feminism at work today wherever we see the elevation of a woman, of any race, to the top of the hierarchy on the grounds that she will allegedly redeem it. “The future is female,” an Instagram-friendly slogan proclaims in a sleek sans serif font, heralding in both word and image that progress hinges on the female sex. The phrase sounds new, but it isn’t—it was rediscovered via a 1975 photograph of TERF singer Alix Dobkin wearing the phrase on a T-shirt shortly before she was a ringleader of the protest against Olivia Records because of the presence of Sandy Stone.9 Yet the slogan is also a slicker version of something Margaret Sanger might have said while insisting that the world’s progress pivoted on the quality of women’s births.
Women’s “emotional intelligence is what’s going to make this company succeed,” New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand declared while campaigning for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and earnestly recycled a joke that “if it wasn’t Lehman Brothers but Lehman Sisters, we might not have had the [2008] financial collapse.” A sentimental capitalism: Harriet Beecher Stowe would have been proud. “Female leaders handled coronavirus better,” an international headline touts, seemingly announcing the arrival of this new, improved horizon. The article reports on an economics study revealing that countries led by women experienced fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths than their male-led counterparts. Yet while the study analyzes global lockdown policies and how soon they were implemented, the researchers claim that the crucial factor in health outcomes lies in the head of government’s identity—not in the decisions they made. “Being female-led has provided countries with an advantage in the current crisis,” the study’s coauthor asserts, as if leaders’ administrative choices ooze forth from some gendered essence pooling within.10 Apparently, when a woman is in charge, the arc of the moral universe bends more sharply toward justice, as if outfitting her curves.
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