When looking at the 2016 Presidential Election voter polls, 52% of White women voted for Donald Trump. At the Women's March, on January 21, an estimated 4.2 million people showed up with a majority of them being white women. That doesn’t sound so bad, except for the fact that a majority of white women are electing a president that thinks so lowly of our current president.
I believe that most of the women who came to the Woman’s March were also white, based on the countless photos of people protesting that were displayed in the photos of the march. I also believe that most of the women who came to the march would consider themselves to be feminists. But in case you didn’t know, there are about two main forms of feminism: white feminism and intersectional feminism.
White feminism is the belief that is centered around the ideals and struggles of primarily white women, people who don’t experience the same types of oppression that communities of color, LGBTQ, religion, and lower-income face daily. Intersectional Feminism is the idea that all of these issues exist within another and that it includes all people, even people with extreme differences. Both brands of feminism fight for equality, but one of them is inclusive while the other one is excluding marginalized groups of people. See the difference?
A lot of people, who happen to be white and call themselves a feminist get upset with the idea of being called out on their brand of exclusive feminism that actually is destructive in the overall fight for equality. They say “I shouldn’t be punished for being white and being a feminist”, but that’s not what intersectional feminists are saying; they’re calling you out as a way to better yourself in the overall fight for equality.
White feminism isn’t called "white feminism" because of the color of your skin tone and you happen to be white, it’s because the issues that white feminists are talking about aren't the hard hitting issues that need to be addressed. Yes, wage-gaps are important to talk about, but we also need to address the fact that trans people are not being allowed into certain housing districts because of their gender identity.
Yes, we should “free the nipple”, but we also need to address why a black person is more likely to be incarcerated at alarming rates for unnecessary charges over a white person who wouldn't be incarcerated in the first place. There are issues that need to be addressed and fixed that are surrounding marginalized communities, and at this point, this demands attention.
A lot of the time, white feminism is exclusive towards very marginalized groups that are becoming more self-aware within the country. A huge problem with the Women’s March was the amount of cisgender, straight, white women that showed and had signs like “No Uterus, No Opinion” and “Pussy Grabs Back”.
But how does that affect transwomen, who don’t have the same biological organs that cisgender women have, despite the fact that they identify as women and go through some of the same experiences as cisgender women? Signs like “The future is female” are also trans-exclusionary in that, yes there aren’t that many women in the political world, but there’s even less of people of color or other marginalized groups. Where are the signs for them?
Where are the signs that are advocating for non-binary identifying individuals who may be designated female at birth and have those reproductive organs but don’t identify as woman or man? Who is advocating for the people who are silenced the most? While marginalized groups are yelling about issues they face, they are constantly ignored. If we, as a group of empowered marginalized communities, want to make a change we have to realize that other marginalized communities are affected as well; to make our alliance stronger, we need to include them.
White feminism was built upon the people of color and marginalized groups that actively fought for equal rights but were always stepped over. We need to face the facts that white women are not under attack right now— but your family, friends, and strangers amongst you are being targeted by laws, legislature, and societal circumstances that are preventing us from being able to achieve the greatness that many of us have worked hard for and deserve.
I don’t write this article as an attack on those who find those issues to be important because they are, but they’re not important right now. We need to stick up for our fellow people, people who may be entirely different than us in every way, by realizing that those strangers may not be as strange. They may have aspirations and hopes, dreams and desires that they want to fulfill as well but are unable to.
We need to stand up for those who are being stepped on right now, we need to use our privilege to do that. White women: we have some of the most privilege to be able to do that. Remember, 52% of you all voted for the very person that you voted in, other marginalized groups of people should not have to clean up the mess that you made.
