A White feminist is defined by author Ruby Hamad, White Tears Brown Scars, as: “White feminists -which does not mean “any feminist who is white” but refers to feminists who prioritize the concerns of white, middle-class women as though they are representative of all women. “

Rafia Zakaria author of Against White Feminism explains white feminism/feminist as: “A White feminist is someone who refuses to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played and continue to play in universalizing white feminist concerns, agendas, and beliefs as being those of all of feminism and all of feminists. “

So, in other words, a White feminist or white feminism does not refer to the race of women. Instead, it is referring to white privilege, that is experienced by white women and other women. In this way all white women living in the West experience white privilege because Western societal structures are developed from the concept of whiteness. Not all white women who are feminists are white feminists, just as not all Christian women who are feminists are Christian feminists. My book Demystifying the Niqab actually covers the topic of white feminism and race theory, I highly recommend you check it out if you want a more in-depth look.

While White feminists do not need to be white women themselves, they often are white women. Rafia Zakaria explains, “that most white feminist are indeed white, and that whiteness itself is at the core of white feminist.”

White feminists usually are women of middle-class background who are unaware of their racial and economic status. At the same time, these women try to speak for other women that they deem need help. The perfect example that I give in my book and Zakaria gives in hers is the early feminist movements in the 1800s that correlate with colonialism. This is important to note because these white women enjoyed freedom in the colonies by acting like “men”. Since they were treated as men, they were not given access to oriental female spaces. Meaning that these white women had little to no relations with the women they “spoke” for. Those that they did have meetings with were wealthy class women, who had separate social functions for these white women. It was the colonized woman who prevented white women from gaining access to their private spaces, not the colonized male. It was through colonization and slavery that the white woman was able to become something other than a woman, in white discourses. So, the structure of the western female gender and the notion of femininity is directly related to the subjugation of non-white and non-Christian bodies.

Most women tend to choose their ethnic or cultural identities over the supposed union of gender. Meaning White women tend to side with white people. This reflects Ashley Jardina’s (2019) study on why white people who identify as non-racist or non-sexist will still go with their collective white identity rather than the ideals that they supposedly support. Jardina found that white identity is rather “invisible” because they are considered the norm in the West. Whites remain dominant in Western society -economical, socially, and political- and open racial conflict is relatively rare today. As a result, whiteness is not noticed by white individuals, their whiteness is like breathing air. (Jardina, 2019) Whites do not think about being white, while the ‘other’ always have to think about being the other. White women take for granted that the norm for the Western female identity is a middle-class white Christian woman. So, when they call on a so-called “universal” gender identity of females around the world, they are often stumped that women in the non-Western world do not want what white women want. Audre Lorde (1997) says “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” that there does not exist a uniform experience for women; Simone de Beauvoir also mentions this concept in her book The Second Sex. Lorde further explains that white women “ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experiences alone, then women of Color become “other,” the outsider whose experience and tradition is to “alien” to comprehend.”(Lorde, 1997)

The phenomenon that Audre Lorde and Ashley Jardina point out about white women is important to understand why white women lack acknowledging the numerous discourses written by other women. What they don’t describe however is the orientalism and Islamophobic rhetoric white women play into at the expense of Muslim and Jewish women (and even other Christians!). Western women use their own achievements as a yardstick, emancipated of the white woman relies upon the representation of the Muslim woman as her devalued other. This then allows the white woman to preserve and identify what constitutes herself. (Yeǧenoǧlu, 2005) It is said that modernity had to formulate the other. Creating the other helped the West conquer the world, without dealing with morality. Western women like their men are not immune to othering women. There is a homogenization of Muslim women, the inability to acknowledge women’s diversity, ideas of gender, class, ethnicity, culture, and colonial past. There are common themes of the “third world woman” she is oppressed, passive, uneducated, radical, and ignorant. To define women this way allows for Western women to define themselves as complete opposites.

White feminism started to formulate around abolitionist writings, women used anti-slavery to help create discourses that they would not be allowed to write in the first place. Women would compare the female condition to that of slavery. Antoinette Burton says, “feminist deliberately cultivated the civilizing responsibility as their own modern womanly burden because it affirmed an emancipated role for them in the imperial nation state.” (Yeǧenoǧlu, 2005) By connecting themselves to the emancipation of the woman in the colonies or to those women suffering under slavery, white women were able to use the ‘others’ struggle to support their own struggle. In colonial India, Hindu women were portrayed by Western feminists as victims of “barbaric cultural customs from which they needed help to escape.”(Ware, 1992) For white women to construct their own subjectivity she had to look for alternatives within her society like slavery or outside her society, like the Hindu women. Meyda Yeǧenoǧlu (2005) claims that it was in the colonies that the white woman was able to become an individual. In the colonies the white woman no longer had to follow white society norms, she was different. This white woman was masculine in the Muslim land, she could walk into Muslim male spaces while the female Muslim woman wouldn’t dare. In the colonies, white women had more power than back home. Gayatri Spivak’s comments on imperialism and female individuality, “as the female individualist, not quite/not male, articulates herself in shifting relationship to what is at stake, the “native female” as such…is excluded from any share in this emerging norm.” (Yegenoglu, 2005)

So in this vain white feminist are often ignorant of what they actually are doing because their notions of gender in the Western context coincides with the advent of colonialism, orientalism, and race theory. This doesn’t mean white people were sitting around a room doing evil laughs nor that white women didn’t fight for years for equality. Instead, what we are looking at is how this particular type of feminism ends up hurting other women. The reason it is such a popular study at the moment is because we are looking at women not as victims but as active participates within their societies.