Reading ‘Against White Feminism’ by Rafia Zakaria

So hyped that I began this year with some solid books like this one. My most compulsive internal fascination has been with my feminist journey. When people gush about their ‘aha’ feminist moment, a moment of big T truth in their lives after which they begin to recognise the gender inequalities around them, it dawns on me that I have no feminist epiphanies to share. Not that my parents raised me to be a feminist, or I grew up taking notes from feminist literature or benefited from a household that was not hardened to sexist or patriarchal ideas.

Whereas I was raised surrounded by women, who I always consider brave and resilient, whom Western feminist tropes would incuriously dismiss as oppressed and at the mercy of men. Growing up watching the world my mother and her sisters and their mother inhabited has helped me have nuanced insights beyond the good and evil about various aspects of the feminist journey.

When the West forced down ‘sexual liberation as the only way toward women’s liberation and portrays Muslim women as people without sexual control, I owe a great deal to my upbringing around these women for having unwavering autonomy over my own body, mind and sexuality, even in the face of abuses. I owe my core to my home, the women in my life and their lives.

Working towards the ‘ultimate liberation’ that the white women glamour up, failing to consider women’s ethnic and cultural diversity, would have been my feminist journey had I not inherited the grit and grace of women who nurtured me. White feminism would have asked me to shun all the knowledge and sensible wisdom I have inherited from them to embrace the ‘ultimate liberation’. Instead, I believe shifting through these diverse realities has enabled me to embark on my journey and has only made me empathetic towards people who have had different experiences and upbringings.

Rafia Zakaria’s book ‘Against White Feminism’ provides a clear and concise takedown of white feminism. The clarity and brevity displayed in 'Against White Feminism' would inspire one to explore new and alternative approaches to practicing feminism. She covers a vast amount of ground about how White feminism positions itself as the dominant discourse on women’s rights while it is not. She reviews the patronising trend of assuming white women as experts in liberation, despite lacking the knowledge and cultural competency and not accounting for the unique experiences of Women of Colour or even consulting them on their issues.

I highly recommend this book to those working in the international development sector for Zakaria’s scathing takedown of the nonprofit and aid industrial complexes’ failures to meaningfully support women of colour globally. Often the white interventions fail to centre the women to be ‘empowered’ and recognise the needs of women in developing countries where these programmes are targeted and end up tossing chickens and sewing machines at women who have asked for no such condescending acts of “aid”.

Zakaria reserves her most potent criticism for white women war journalists and other feminists who have contributed to the construction of women living in Afghanistan and Iraq as an oppressed and apolitical group, thereby legitimising the United States colonial and feminist rescue narrative. The chapter on sexual liberation where she dissects the idea of compulsory sexuality and how the brand of ‘sexy-feminism’ is co-opted by markets will be intriguing to many friends here.

As Angela Davis asserts in one of her lectures, “If we fail to perceive connections, relations, intersections, crossing, junctures, coincidences, overlapping and crosshatching phenomenons, we will forever be imprisoned in a world that appears to be white, and male, and heterosexual and cisgender and capitalist and US-centric or Eurocentric…..

…We have to develop habits of perception, habits of analysis that acknowledge the inadequacies of the conceptual tools we are compelled to rely on… One woman can’t stand in for all women, especially if that one woman is white and affluent. Racial and economic hierarchies often prevent us from understanding how we can most effectively unite and move forward.”