‘White Feminism’

23 Aug

‘White feminism’ is feminism that is centred on the experiences of white women. This basically just means taking the experiences of white women to be universal (so applying to all women), and building our theory and activism up from there. The problem with this, is that class, race, and loads of other factors all impact women’s experiences. So, if we take white women’s experiences to be central, we miss out on understanding the experiences of the majority of women. This means that white feminism at best ignores, and at worst can harm, a lot of the women it claims to help.

We’ve put ‘white feminism’ in apostrophes because it is a negative tendency of feminism, rather than an official type of feminism. Someone might call themselves an intersectional feminist, but nobody would describe themselves as a ‘white feminist.’ It’s much more likely that someone would call part of the movement ‘white feminism’ in order to criticise it on these grounds.