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White Feminism Quotes

Browse 50 quotes about White Feminism.

White Feminism Quotes

“I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don't wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all the negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The same onus is not on me to change. Instead it's the world around me..”

RaceClassFeminismEqualityGenderEquityIntersectionalityWhite FeminismIntersectional Feminism
Book:Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
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“White supremacy, whether in the US or Europe, is absolutely patriarchal—those far-right parties offer no gender equality...white women who vote for those parties are examples of women who accept crumbs thrown to them in return for limited power in the form of protection and privilege gained via proximity to powerful white men. They whip up xenophobia among white women voters by pitting immigrants against white families, portraying refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants as a drain on resources that should go instead to those white families. They want white women to have more white babies.”

FeminismPatriarchyWhite SupremacyWhite Feminism
Book:The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls
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“I am a Black woman. True, I have been told time and time again that my best chance of success is to emulate the preferred traits of white maleness as much as possible. Still, mine is not the image of the great leaders in our history books, nor that of the heroes in our stories. For someone like me to expect any greatness without having exceptional talent and luck was, at best, foolish and, at worst, dangerous. This is not my birthright.”

FeminismRacismSexismWhite Feminism
Book:Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America
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“White women wanted parity with white men at any cost, including by avidly taking on the domination of Black and Brown people. As white feminists have progressed within their societies, and began to occupy increasingly important positions, they're constructing a feminism that uses the lives of Black and Brown people as arenas in which they can prove their credentials to white men.”

FeminismWhite Feminism
Book:Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption
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“Now mainstream feminism has to step up, has to give itself to a place where it spends more time offering resources and less time demanding validation. Being an accomplice means that white feminism will devote its platform and resources to supporting those in marginalized communities doing feminist work.”

SolidarityWhite FeminismAllyshipAllyAccompliceAllyhoodCoalition BuildingWhiteminism
Book:Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
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“Mainstream white feminism, which uses the corporate media and state/institutional discipline to redress individual injuries, cannot tackle the intersections of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism that produce sexual violence. At the thicker end of this wedge, reactionary feminism is complicit with the far-right politics also produced by this intersectionality of systems. The necropolitics of reactionary feminism is where the political whiteness of the mainstream ends up.”

Far RightWhite FeminismCriminal PunishmentNecropolitics
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“Gender relations are currently being challenged and rethought, and equality gains staunchly defended as the resurgent right tries to roll them back. Perhaps this has given privileged white women the opportunity – and drive – to seize some power for ourselves. In a world of kill or be killed, or grab or be grabbed, this is Pussy Grabs Back.”

AngerFar RightWhite FeminismMetoo
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“Western borders are currently being reasserted in the context of economic crisis, to protect the global ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. And reactionary feminism is complicit with this capitalist and neo-colonial project. It foregrounds narratives of scarcity; it claims resources and support for the ‘good’ women rather than the ‘bad’.”

ColonialismSex WorkFar RightWhite FeminismTransphobia
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“I fear that, although white feminism is palatable to those in power, when it has won, things will look very much the same. Injustice will thrive, but there will be more women in charge of it. Feminism is not about equality, and certainly not about silently slipping into a world of work created by and for men. Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalized by an ideological system that has been deigned for them to fail. That means disabled people, black people, trans people, women and non-binary people, LGB people and working-class people. The idea of campaigning for equality must be complicated if we are to untangle the situation we're in. Feminism will have won when we have ended poverty. It will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default.”

FeminismIntersectionalityWhite Feminism
Book:Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
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“The theft of brown women's narratives is not only an injustice placed on them, but also one extended to their male counterparts; by insisting they need to be liberated from their 'barbaric' civilization, Laura [Bush] summoned the colonial assertion that brown women need saving from brown men, when, in actuality, brown women have suffered at the hands of white men more than at those of any other oppressor in history.”

FeminismRacismIslamColonialismMuslimIslamophobiaMuslim WomenWhite Feminism
Book:Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story
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“White women have a right to be angry about sexual violence. Survivors have a right to spaces without abusers. All survivors fantasise about revenge. But whose bodies are forfeit when white women mobilise punitive state and institutional power to achieve it? Who are the real casualties of the white feminist war machine?”

AngerRapeSexual ViolenceWhite FeminismCriminal Punishment
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“Trans-exclusionary and anti-sex-work feminism amplify the mainstream movement’s desire for power and authority, and pursue it by policing the borders of feminism and womanhood. The mainstream preoccupation with threat becomes an overt ‘us and them’ mentality, and the necropolitical desire for annihilation is deliberately turned on more marginalised people.”

VictimhoodSex WorkWhite FeminismTransphobia
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“The investment of sexual trauma in the outrage economy allows the ‘good’ woman (cis, ‘respectable’, implicitly white) to be used to withhold support and resources from the ‘bad’ ones. Trans women and sex workers are pitted against more privileged women, in a politics that does not challenge how neoliberal capitalism has created massive inequalities of distribution.”

TransgenderSex WorkSexual ViolenceWhite Feminism
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“Claiming the right to be nasty in resistance to gendered respectability politics is often done by women who continue to be positioned as respectable by the world at large. And the ‘respectability’ of bourgeois white women has been central to colonial narratives that construct us as superior to women marginalised by race and class. Affronts to this ‘respectability’ have justified fatal violence against men of colour. This position of race and class supremacy means that our anger may not always be as radical or transgressive as we might like.”

ViolenceAngerColonialismRespectabilityWhite Feminism
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“At a very basic level, anti-rape activism is about survival. Many of us are survivors trying to survive, and spectacles of mass wounding such as #MeToo evoke a gendered state of siege. Being raped often involves a visceral fear of death, whether the rape is physically violent or not – it is what makes us freeze, instead of fighting back. And if we freeze, perhaps we need our ‘kill’ after the experience is over. Unlike Arya Stark, we do not do our own killing. Instead, we ask the ‘Angry Dad’ or ‘White Knight’ of the state or institution to do it for us. And the destruction of bodily boundaries involved in criminal punishment mirrors the experience of rape.”

RapeSexual ViolenceWhite FeminismGame Of ThronesCriminal Punishment
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“Reactionary [trans- and sex worker-hostile] feminism accelerates the white feminist ‘war machine’, using the media and social media outrage economy to maximum effect. Although its numbers are small, this movement is tightly networked and highly organised. Its tactics are similar to the notorious harassment campaign Gamergate: it identifies and then relentlessly attacks target after target, seemingly with the aim of total submission.”

TransgenderSex WorkWhite FeminismTransphobiaGamergate
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“Today’s reactionary feminists are descendants of nineteenth-century ‘vice-fighters’, Christian moralists and anti-miscegenationists, the bourgeois women enlisted by Fordism to ‘improve’ the working class, and those who ran the reformatories for ‘wayward’ Black girls and who abused them ‘for their own good’.”

RacismProstitutionWhite FeminismTransphobia
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that is is the task of women of Color to educated white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.”

EducationIgnoranceOppressionSexismWhite Feminism
Book:Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
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“You can argue that conservative values are at odds with feminist ideology, but ultimately the question has to be not only what women are we empowering, but also what are we empowering them to do. White women aren't just passive beneficiaries of racist oppression; they are active participants.”

FeminismRacismSolidaritySisterhoodWhite FeminismShared SisterhoodSolidarity Is For White WomenSolidarityisforwhitewomenewomen
Book:Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
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“On the other hand, white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial "otherness" is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools. Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism, it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless. But Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is stitched with violence and with hatred, that there is no rest. We do not deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the places where we dare to verbalize our resistance. For us, increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living — in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.”

RaceWhite FeminismBlack Feminism
Author:Audre Lorde
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“Heroines of American journalism, writing in publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and reporting for major television networks, have all played a similar role of legitimizing America's new imperial project in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Middle East at large, promoting a narrative that violent military incursions are designed to liberate women and deliver better societies. Thus they also underscore their own superior status as white feminists, with their values of rebellion over resilience, risk over caution, and speed over endurance as the ultimate feminist values. Afghan women emerge as no more than prototypes whose wishes always align with what white feminists think they should want, rather than as people with independent political positions and perspectives.”

White Feminism
Book:Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption
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“He introduces me to his political friends from across the spectrum. Conservatives who oo and ah and nod, telling me I'm just what this country is about. And so articulate! Frowning liberals who put it simply: my immoral career is counterproductive to my own community. Can I see that? My primary issue is poverty, not race. Their earnest faces tilt to assess my comprehension, my understanding of my role in this society. They conjure metaphors of boats and tides and rising waves of fairness. Not reparations -no, even socialism doesn't stretch that far. Though some do propose a rather capitalistic trickle-down from Britain to her lagging Commonwealth friends. Through economic generosity: trade and strong relations! Global leadership. The centrists nod. The son nods, too. Now that, they can all agree to.”

NeoliberalismWhite Feminism
Book:Assembly
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“Instead of interrogating intersecting systems, politically white feminism roots violence either in aberrant or all male bodies. The mainstream focus on ‘bad men’, and the reactionary focus on male biology, do not account for how capitalist economic predation and misogynist sexual predation go hand in hand. They do not account for how this interplay is racialised, domestically and geopolitically.”

CapitalismColonialismSexual ViolenceWhite Feminism
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“For a few months, the political catastrophe seemed so dire that one's music and movie preferences were no longer considered the ultimate markers of one's moral fitness to fight fascism. Which became, incredibly, a buzzword. Though we could always 'do more' or 'do better', there was a sense that our embarrassment of privileges could be set aside to focus on the task at hand. Though what that task was, I wasn't really sure.”

White Feminism
Book:Fake Accounts
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“Capitalist forces have looked to depoliticize as many spheres as possible. To create a feminist politics of solidarity, women have to recognize the forces that push them apart and push them into meaningless competition, by keeping them from collective understanding and engagement. Individuality within the capitalist framework is an antidote to politics and solidarity.”

CapitalismWhite Feminism
Book:Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption
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“Sitting in that class, with other women who expounded on their opposition of housework, I dared once to ask, “Who will do the housework then?” Seventeen pairs of eyes turned to me, and I continued: “If men don’t do it and women don’t do it, who will? It has to be done. Do you propose that we hire other women to come and do it? Other women who clean people’s homes because they have the opportunity to do nothing else?” Silence greeted my question, as I had expected. I realized then that most of the women in the class were upper-middle and middle-class white women—and I felt like a complete outsider. -Susan Muaddi Darraj”

White Feminism
Author:Daisy Hernandez;Bushra Rehman
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“The scroll slowed on a post from Madison. Predictably, she was sharing more pregnancy content. Today's post was a column graph about maternal mortality rates, accompanied by the caption: This makes me so sad. Growing a human is hard enough. We shouldn't have to fear for our lives on top of that. Mae frowned. The graph was cut off. It showed rates for All, White, and Hispanic, but there was a sliver of what looked like another bar on the far right. Under it, the only part of the word that didn't get cut off was Bl. Ordinarily, Mae wouldn't have wasted any time on this. It was just Madison being Madison, thinking of herself and no one else. But after learning about her grandma Doris's racist past yesterday, it was hard to look past anything about the Parkers anymore. A reverse-image search turned up the original article, titled Black women three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. The full graph showed that the column for Black women towered over the other columns Madison had posted. Anger and annoyance rising within her, Mae returned to Madison's post and started typing. You'll be fine. If you'd read the article and shared the full graph, you'd know the point of the piece is that Black women are way more at risk. Or do you not care about that?”

ChildbirthWhite FeminismTruth BombBlack Women MatterMortality Rate
Book:The Townsend Family Recipe for Disaster
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“I understood that to be a woman in the world was to spend so much time trying to act the right way. Be loud enough, but not too loud. Stand up for yourself, but pleasantly. Beauty was everything, but you shouldn’t rely on your looks. Always, always I was trying to get it right, to find the balance, but here around this circle, naked but not sexualized, together we could flail and scream and open ourselves raw without worrying about anything else at all.”

White Feminism
Book:A Special Place for Women
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