Reading 'Against White Feminism' Part 2/3
Part Two · An Intimate Reflection
Zakaria opens her conclusion with a fear: that the people she loves will read her words as a judgement of them as individuals. I recognised that fear because I have carried it too. It is the fear of the uncomfortable conversations we are not meant to have, the ones I have tried to begin around dinner tables, where I eventually find myself watching the scene unfold, knowing it is not going anywhere.
By all visible measures, I occupy a socially privileged position. I am a white, middle-class woman in my forties. I live a comfortable, quiet life with my husband and children. In many ways, I embody the traditional model I grew up believing was both ordinary and desirable. Yet, it took me a long time to understand that this position was not simply the result of personal choices or individual effort, but of structures that have consistently worked in my favour. Like so many women of my generation, I was raised within a society that prided itself on being a model of egalitarianism. Within that broader context, I inherited a version of feminism presented to me as a given: a set of hard-won victories I was expected to build upon and be grateful for. Its assumptions felt so ordinary that I never recognised them as assumptions at all. And yet I never felt at home within it. Whenever I encountered arguments in its defence, often wrapped in political jargon, they never quite convinced me. I looked at the feminism I had inherited and did not recognise myself in it. For a long time, I assumed this meant I was not a feminist, and I rejected the term altogether. Looking back, I realise that what I had really learned was to distrust my own perception.
Feminism is the desire to make all women visible and active participants in history. An honourable ambition. Yet the model of liberation promoted in the West, argues Zakaria, is built on individual choice, personal freedom and female independence, without fundamentally questioning the conditions that shape those choices. In this white version, feminism operates within patriarchal, capitalist and racial structures rather than challenging them at their roots. In other words, a feminism shaped by dominant structures ends up reproduces those very structures while believing itself to be liberatory. Additionally, by presenting the experiences of some women as universal, it also fails to account for the different realities of many others.
As mentioned earlier, I have been angry for a long time, and the reason I want to elaborate on this is that anger in women (especially white women with relative privilege) is often pathologised. You sound hysterical. You sound extreme. You have so much; what could you possibly have to be angry about? I know these responses well because I have received them, often from other women. The look that accompanies them is its own form of enforcement: a reminder of my place. The internalisation is that complete that women can police other women’s anger. But I am comfortable with my anger now, because it has language and purpose. I know that the feminist struggle cannot be separated from the wider struggles against capitalism, colonialism and all systems of exclusion. Reducing feminism to the rights of women is therefore to misunderstand it almost completely. It is a struggle for everyone the current order has decided matters less or does not matter at all. Which is why, when I hear feminism described simply as a women’s issue, or reduced to a conflict between women and men, something in me wants to weep with frustration.
I was given significant privilege - of race, class, sexuality and education - and I experienced none of it as freedom. From childhood, I was shaped into a desirable version of womanhood. In hindsight, I feel I was anonymised into a broad category, given a script and told it was a self. What I was not given was an honest education. By education, I do not mean only my family upbringing. Nor do I mean to place responsibility on any one woman, least of all my mother, or on any individual. I mean the broader education we all receive: a process of social formation and cultural inheritance that shapes what appears natural, reasonable and true long before we learn to question it. Although I had access to every material resource, the books I was given, the frameworks I was taught, and the questions I was trained to ask were those of dominant Western thought. Texts written from other perspectives are often excluded by choice. And you cannot miss what you have never been shown.
What changed everything was my journey through art history. One of the first realisations it gave me was that what I had always understood as the history of art was, in fact, the history of Western art. What I had accepted as naturally universal was only ever one perspective. So when I read Against White Feminism, I could not help thinking about the structures of power Zakaria describes. They are everywhere in the history of Western painting, encoded in posture, gaze and light for anyone willing to look honestly. They are sometimes conspicuous, sometimes present but subtle, and sometimes absent from the image altogether, their presence revealed by their very absence. Images speak, always in layers. They often shout one thing while murmuring another. Through those images, I began to understand what had never quite felt right by finding answers before I had even formulated the questions.
I have a confession to make. After all these years, I still catch myself reproducing white feminist instincts. Understanding does not erase conditioning, just like privilege is not freedom. White feminism lives in the body's reflexes. That is why I am not finished with this work. I am still somewhere on the threshold, still crossing. And I give myself permission to be angry about everything that made the crossing so slow.
Before turning to images in the final part of this essay, there is one thing I would like to add. During the weeks of reading and thinking that produced this essay, I looked at many artworks tagged with words such as solidarity, resistance and sisterhood. Very few of them moved me. I have come to believe that the language and images that matter are the ones that hurt a little. The ones that make you see something you would rather not see. The ones that refuse to let you leave feeling good about yourself.
This is the principle behind what follows. It is not a celebration. It is an attempt at honesty which is, I think, the only place any of this can begin.
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