Reading 'Against White Feminism' Part I/3
Updated: Jun 18
Foreword
This is not a traditional book review.
I am not here to help readers decide whether Against White Feminism is worth reading. It is. Historically grounded, intellectually sharp, and politically urgent: it is a necessary read.
What follows is closer to a critical essay, a cross-examination prompted by a book that I am not reviewing so much as thinking with. I am deliberately weaving together analysis and personal reflection because I believe - and because Zakaria's book confirms - that separating them is part of the problem.
This essay unfolds in three parts.
The first traces the core argument of the book and the thinking behind it.
The second is a reflection on what the book brought back to me about my own experience, as a white woman born and raised in early 1980s France.
The third takes the form of a visual essay - as an art historian, I think in images. As I was reading the print - and later listening to the audio version, artworks kept coming to my mind. What I want to share here is not simply an illustration of the text, but my visual reading of it: a curated selection of works that, in my view, speak to the themes Zakaria raises and to the broader questions they open up.
Part One · A(nother) Foundational Text
What do consumerism and the assassination of Osama bin Laden have to do with feminism? Put like that, nothing. Through the lens of Against White Feminism, absolutely everything. The book reads modern history against the grain, connecting seemingly unrelated events to reveal a continuous structure: the way Feminism has claimed to liberate women while serving, above all, the interests of whiteness.¹
Who is Rafia Zakaria? It depends who tells her story.
Wikipedia describes her as 'a Pakistani-American attorney, feminist, journalist, and author.'² She describes herself as 'a writer, mother, intersectional feminist, Pakistani-American, Hoosier, and woman.'³ Asked the same question, AI combines both sources to produce the following: 'Rafia Zakaria is a Pakistani-American attorney, journalist, columnist, and author.'⁴ The variations in these labels, and their order, might seem incidental. They are not. Two of these introductions place her dual nationality first, spotlighting her origins above all else. AI discreetly drops 'feminist' as an identifier altogether. And only Zakaria calls herself 'a woman', although she chooses to mention it last. Such revealing choices.
These side observations alone are a teaser for the book. Zakaria’s whole argument revolves, first and foremost, around her lived experience. She does not write from a theoretical distance, but as an insider - someone who has been simultaneously female, brown, Muslim, and immigrant. Her lived experience is the expertise; the analytical tools she relies on come in second. The tools serve the experience, not the other way around.
Throughout the book, she methodically demonstrates the mechanisms of white feminism, using personal accounts, case studies, and close reading of policy, media, and institutional practice. Grounding her argument in the ‘us and them’ logic, Zakaria is sharp and ruthless. And while the white ego is being punched in the face, the non-white anger remains, she argues, a legitimate political tool to this day. The sting, I believe, is intentional - discomfort, it turns out, is an effective path to awareness. Her words are necessary; this book is the wake-up call the conversation needs.
Before going any further, let's make a few things clear. This book does not aim to fuel internal feminist fights. Nor is it about rejecting feminist ideals and victories. And it is not about inverting racism. Given what one hears across the current Western political landscape, I think it is necessary to preempt any misreadings and distortions.
Zakaria herself clarifies the title in the very first pages. This book, she writes, is a critique of whiteness within feminism. Not a criticism of white feminists. Here, whiteness is not a biological category, but a way of understanding one's place in society, constructed through the legacy of imperialism and colonisation. Crucially, whiteness is the assumption of privilege that comes with a Western, historically white, interpretation of cultures. As a consequence, white feminism is not determined by skin colour since anyone can potentially reproduce its underlying logic.
Because whiteness has long been presented as the route to progress, Western feminism has adopted it as an implicit model of emancipation. However, by the late twentieth century, a number of powerful critiques had already challenged this assumption. They had long called for greater attention to the voices of those excluded from dominant narratives, and exposed the ways in which feminism often failed women facing multiple forms of oppression.⁵ Why then, write more books on the topic in the 2020s? Is it because the ones that came before had become outdated and irrelevant? On the contrary, Zakaria insists. In theory, these earlier critiques should have entirely reoriented the course of the feminist conversation. Instead, they were acknowledged without ever becoming central. Given a seat at the table, they nevertheless remained marginal echoes, never legitimate enough to occupy centre stage in the production of feminist knowledge. The reason? Politics, Zakaria argues.
Despite successive feminist movements spreading over a century of struggle, Zakaria argues that the internal logic of mainstream feminism has remained unchanged. In its imperial form, for instance, feminism featured white Western women fighting for their rights. By positioning themselves as more advanced than the women of the colonies, they framed liberation as a value to be delivered and earned, rather than an entitlement for all. In the post-9/11 version of feminism, Muslim women became a rhetorical weapon in the service of national security agendas, military intervention, and targeted surveillance. More than a century separates the two contexts, yet only the justification for a biased form of feminism has changed.
According to Zakaria, complete feminist emancipation can only occur if we strive to dismantle the hierarchies that subject us. It starts with questioning our frames of thought, the words we choose, and the assumptions they carry. It is also about cultivating the humility to examine our place within the social order, and to recognise the privileges that have enabled us to be where we are. It is not about sitting in our boats side by side; it is about sharing the same boat.
One important point Zakaria makes is that these inequalities do not exist in isolation. They are supported by capitalism, a broader economic system whose power lies in its ability to absorb and neutralise opposition. It is an adaptive system that makes collective movements lose their momentum by selling them back to us in individualised forms. Once these socio-political movements have been repackaged as matters of individual success, empowerment, or choice - they cease to be threats, and even become vehicles for the endless reproduction of the power dynamics they set out to challenge. Rather than transforming the relations of power at their root, such struggles are made to seek inclusion within them. Feminism, Zakaria argues, is only one example of this recurring process. For Zakaria then, the point is not performance, but measurable impact. What matters is not whether feminism should be louder, but whether the noise actually transforms the institutions it claims to oppose, or on the contrary, if it sustains them.
On closing the book, I return to the idea that feminism is 'a fight about narrative'.⁶ This, I think, is deceptively simple: it is about who gets to tell their own story, and how much their voices matter in the conversation. In the end, Against White Feminism is about everything but feminism. Because if all voices do not receive equal attention, gender equality itself becomes an unreachable goal. This is not a moderate stance - it is not a moderate book either.
Notes
¹ 'Feminism' is capitalised deliberately, to signal the single, universal version of feminism as presented by the white West - one Feminism, claiming to speak for all women.
² Rafia Zakaria, Wikipedia, accessed May 26, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafia_Zakaria.
³ Rafia Zakaria, 2024, accessed May 26, 2026, https://www.rafiazakaria.com.
⁴ OpenAI, Response to the prompt: "Who is Rafia Zakaria?", May 26, 2026. Note: AI-generated content is not independently verifiable and the exact response may not be reproducible.
⁵ For further reading on the question of whose voice counts as knowledge, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988). On intersectionality, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" (1989). Both essays are freely available online as PDFs.
⁶ Kimberlé Crenshaw, quoted in Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism, p.157. A scholar and civil rights activist, Crenshaw is famous for coining and theorising the concept of intersectionality.
References
Zakaria, Rafia. Against White Feminism. Penguin Books, 2022.
Zakaria, Rafia. Against White Feminism. Narrated by Ulka Simone Mohanty. Penguin Audio, 2021. Streaming audio.
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