Kylie Cheung

Author, lawyer, and domestic violence survivor Rafia Zakaria makes her definition of “white feminism” clear within the first sentences of her groundbreaking book, Against White Feminism. “White feminism,” she specifies, isn't defined by an individual's race, but their refusal "to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played… in universalizing white feminist concerns, agendas, and beliefs as being those of all feminists."

A scathing takedown of the nonprofit and aid industrial complexes’ failures to meaningfully support women of color globally — or to really even consider how marginalized people may have needs that differ from what white women activists imagine for them — Against White Feminism is a call to action for feminists around the world to reflect on who and what we’re centering in our activism.

Zakaria’s book was written over the course of the pandemic and comprises years of study, reporting, and lived experiences and anecdotes of being minimized and harmed by white feminists and their exclusionary agendas. But upon its release in August 2021, as the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan and white pundits flooded cable news segments, Against White Feminism felt like — and still does feel like — a direct response to the headlines of today.

Zakaria offers cutting analysis of how the United States’ feigned concerns over the well-being of women in oil-rich Middle Eastern countries propelled our warmongering, imperialist agenda — with many white feminists at the helm of these efforts. She traces a through line between those in the white women–led suffrage movement who cast out people of color and the imperialist conquests justified by white female colonizers seeking to “liberate” colonized women of color from their supposedly backwards, savage men. Against White Feminism is an expertly researched, unapologetic manifesto for an increasingly diverse coalition of feminists — many of whom are rightfully fed up after years of being sidelined, our unique histories of identity-based oppression erased.

Zakaria’s book explores a range of deeply connected modern and historical issues, injecting her lived experiences as a survivor, mother, and activist of color navigating the white feminist minefield in which we live. Rather than fracturing or dividing feminists, Against White Feminism is an attempt to salvage a movement that will cease to be relevant if it continues to center whiteness.

Her book requires us to understand the dangers of global philanthropy that doesn't seek input from its supposed beneficiaries, and of opportunistic white women who claim to be the saviors of women in the Middle East by advocating military action in the region. Against White Feminism requires Western readers to consider why we label some acts of domestic violence "honor killings" when they involve Muslim families, while we treat white-perpetrated domestic violence as an aberration.

Zakaria raises even more questions, boldly and thoughtfully offering answers for each. Beyond simply trying to repeal abortion bans, why are we not organizing to ensure pregnant people of color aren’t criminalized for the outcomes of their pregnancies — a tradition that can be traced to colonial rule in India? Why have we allowed white female capitalists to co-opt feminist rhetoric and define “empowerment” as the act of purchasing an expensive pair of high heels rather than equitable access to health care and education?

A bold call to action to eradicate white supremacy and neoliberalism from feminism and to ground the movement in inclusive, liberatory values, Against White Feminism is indispensable literature to understand the crises we face today. It is a thorough and transformative manual for creating real change — and not just for wealthy white women.

Shoniqua Roach

As a committed teacher and student of Black feminist thought, I was not sure that Rafia Zakaria's Against White Feminism would articulate anything about the white feminist project (or, quite frankly, about white women) that Ida B. Wells, Claudia Jones, Audre Lorde, Hazel Carby, Thavolia Glymph, bell hooks, Brittney Cooper, and Mikki Kendall had not already theorized and put forth. I was already clear on the fact that white feminists had historically presumed whiteness as the normative state of existence for “women” and that this logic had reproduced white supremacist social, political, economic, and intimate conditions within the feminist movement and in those spaces and places where white and women of color have intersected, historically and contemporarily—the household, the workplace, the welfare line, the classroom, the ballot box, the Women’s March, the feminist foundation meeting, and so on. Zakaria writes herself into this lineage by asking: Is it possible to have feminism without whiteness, which is to say, without white supremacy? And if we are against white feminism, what are we for? What possibilities are opened up for Black and Brown feminists, specifically?

At the outset of her project, Zakaria writes that one does not have to be white to reproduce white feminist politics, and that one can be white and feminist without reproducing white feminist politics. “White feminism,” for Zakaria, is a project of white supremacy, in which white women in positions of economic and political power (re)produce and constrain the intimate, everyday lives of Black and Brown women. Taking her experiences as a poor Muslim Pakistani migrant cum domestic-abuse survivor cum single mother cum feminist grad student cum public feminist writer, Zakaria produces a fresh feminist vision of solidarity in which transnational feminist politics intimately touch and engage with the transatlantic slave trade. Zakaria performs a deft and rigorous historical and historiographic analysis of white women’s sociopolitical domination of Black and Brown women under the guise of “feminism” across a range of historical and geopolitical flashpoints.

Using diverse examples – from nineteenth century white feminist efforts to enfranchise Indian women still under British colonial rule to nongovernmental-organization discourse about female genital cutting in Africa – Zakaria poses critical questions about the (im)possibilities for cross-racial feminist solidarity, given white women’s place in a global racial political-economic contract that constructs, reproduces, and sustains racial hierarchies. Zakaria demonstrates how “madam-maid” relationships (to use communist feminist Claudia Jones’s term) between white and Black/Brown women within and beyond the United States are reinforced, and how, in most (white) feminist efforts for gender parity, the project is to save women of color from men of color.

While more attention could have been paid to the persistence of anti-Blackness in so-called Brown communities--what with the politics of Brown exceptionalism (from the Asian American model minority myth to the tensions between Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate) that pervade global movements for racial justice and inclusion--Zakaria’s book reads like an ethical, if imperfect, exercise in what M. Jacqui Alexander terms “becoming women of color.” Alexander writes:

We are not born women of color. We become women of color. In order to become women of color, we would need to become fluent in each other’s histories, to resist and unlearn an impulse to claim first oppression, most-devastating oppression, one-of-a-kind oppression, defying comparison oppression. We would have to unlearn an impulse that allows mythologies about each other to replace knowing about one another. We would need to cultivate a way of knowing in which we direct our social, cultural, psychic, and spiritually marked attention on each other. We cannot afford to cease yearning for each other’s company.

By demonstrating how white feminist advocacy for gender parity reproduces the racialized oppression of Black and Brown communities, Zakaria demonstrates a “way of knowing” for women of color. Indeed, Zakaria’s provocation for everyone and anyone who claims to be a feminist is to dispense with whiteness (white supremacy) and to become women of color. In the process, Zakaria imagines, rehearses, and enacts new possibilities for Black and Brown feminism—and for radical feminist epistemological and everyday cooperation.

Benita Roth

I read Rafia Zakaria’s book, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption as being of a piece with other recent feminist books for “trade,” like Koa Beck’s White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind.  But Zakaria’s book takes a transnational view of the politics of feminist whiteness, which is a welcome shift of the lens often applied to feminist activism. She also makes claims about the purpose of feminist activism itself: that its goal is to transform oppressive structures rather than advocate for women to hold oppressive power.  This stance is one that is intrinsic to some feminisms and ignored by others.  In the current moment of Black Lives Matter protests and the popularization of the term “intersectionality” – which is a moment of backlash as well – Zakaria’s book represents a distillation of the dynamics of neoliberal power that “white feminism” ignores.

First, Zakaria defines white feminism as a political, not (just) racial, status.  Her definition of a “white feminist” opens the book: “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.” This approach to whiteness as politics makes decentering whiteness possible (though not easy) and creates a basis for making alliances among feminists. Second, the histories that Zakaria recounts of white, individualist feminists with savior complexes – beginning with Gertrude Bell and moving forward to Gloria Steinem and others—are bracing ones, insofar as the errors of even the well-meaning compound and complicate the lives of Black and Brown women because of global histories of power discrepancies.  Third, through an examination of the genealogy of the word “empowerment,” Zakaria insists that positive changes in women’s lives cannot be accomplished as a result of top-down, donor-driven feminist directives. Local women are the experts on their own lives and needs.  Fourth, Zakaria advocates a culturally comparative view that not only undermines and decenters Western whiteness but forces Western feminists to think differently about their own culture—for instance, the way that “honor killings” plague women in the West even as we fail to label domestic violence as being about male honor and the control of women, or the way in which a fixation on female genital cutting in Muslim countries leaves unexamined the Western practices of invasive plastic surgery aimed at making women conform to male notions of the acceptable female body.

Lastly, Zakaria’s book is beautifully written and free from jargon; she makes her theoretical investments clear to the reader and makes theory legible to readers who haven’t taken a feminist theory seminar.  I do think the book needs a bit of editing, because there are moments where sentences are repeated verbatim close to each other in a way that made me wonder if entire slices of the book were misprinted.

Despite all that is noteworthy in Zakaria’s book, I take issue with her depiction of the history of feminist praxis in the US.  Her characterization of US liberal feminism as one arm of the post-war feminist movement and radical feminists as the other leaves out the effort of US-based Black and Brown women. Black and Chicana (and Asian American and Native American) feminists organized within and across communities, and their politics can’t be described by mapping that activism onto the standard liberal/radical—and, I would add, socialist—poles around which white feminist organizing is understood to have taken place. Zakaria cites Kimberlé Crenshaw’s central concept of “intersectionality” and notes Audre Lorde’s contribution to feminist thinking about solidarity. But there is no Black feminism in this book, only a few Black feminists. There is a large and varied history of Black and Brown feminist activism in the US, work that shows how grassroots and institutional struggles by feminists of color challenged the status quo in ways that led to lasting changes in their communities. When I assign Zakaria’s book – and I will – I will teach it alongside the history of the efforts by Brown and Black feminists to decenter whiteness and speak to and beyond their communities to create change.

Jamia Wilson

"Girl, you can't be a feminist. You're not white." In 1991, when an older African American male in my family’s circle hurled those words at my tween self after I said I believed Anita Hill, it was as if he scalded my skin. As our conversation went on, his words were laden with the weight of betrayal, with a tone that said that if I etched this stigmatized "F" upon myself, I would be working against our community and our liberation.  Our exchange was so striking that it led me to research the origins of feminism through the pages of dog-eared books by Black and Brown feminists, loaned to me by my Black feminist professor mother.

After hearing about our interaction, she started me off with the first Black gender studies reader, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave. In addition to educating me about history, it pushed me to examine the limitations of dualistic thinking about social justice issues and movements, as well as the limitations of lines of thinking that do not leave room for nuance, growth, and ever-expanding evolution. I realized that multiple realities could exist at once—misogyny within and without my community and racism inflicted by some white women who prioritized their individual interests over collective liberation, which led to distrust from people like our family friend.

As an African American former ex-pat kid who grew up in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War era, I wish Zakaria's book had also been available to read as I attempted to make sense of holding and embodying several truths, including how my US citizenship and upper-middle-class upbringing abetted my privilege and my Black dis/abled womanhood contributed to marginalization at home and beyond. Although Zakaria distances herself from what she sees as the white-centering framework of "three or four waves of feminist analysis," her intervention continues conversations that books like Brave and This Bridge Called My Back ignited about dismantling exclusionary hierarchies and unjust structures instead of aiming for one-dimensional representational reform.

While citing our groundbreaking Black and Brown feminist foreparents, Zakaria addresses dominant culture's hyperfocus on white women’s empowerment as the default. Calling on readers to "forge an authentically constructed solidarity," Zakaria asks feminists to "excise" patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy from our words, work, coalitions, scholarship, and institutions.

Peeling away each of these systems and constructs, Against White Feminism analyzes how and why white feminists became centered as the "ultimate" feminist archetype as opposed to those of us who are too often sidelined as the other, even when we’re visible in white spaces. Zakaria writes about how “relatability” “exerts its cultural tyranny, using the language of personal preference to legitimize the narrowness and rigidity of the collective white imagination” and about the tensions that exist when people of color don’t “fit” into the limitations of “zero-sum…feminist thought and praxis.” As a Black woman who has both held decision-making roles in the media and also received feedback from some white self-described feminists that stories about my “privileged” upbringing, education, and travels abroad might make my story “less accessible” and “relatable” to (code: white) readers, I yearned to read more about what it means to experience and embody the contradictions that exist within all of us who participate in academia, the media, nonprofit organizations, and other such institutions.

After I read Zakaria’s interrogation of the well-defined and clear intersectional limitations of Simone de Beauvoir and later Betty Friedan’s definition of “otherness,” I desired more engagement with what it means for visible and in some ways powerful people of color to personify disidentification (as defined by the late Jose Muñoz) by negotiating within and outside of dominant spaces, transforming oppressive mechanisms with agency and purpose.

Muñoz’s modality acknowledges the negative contradictions that may result from what can be seen as a “survival strategy” within a white or colonialist framework that marginalized people did not create. It might also help people who disidentify with more conventional, “liberal” civil rights to disrupt assimilationist feminist discourses about the cultural and political nature of visibility, reappropriation, cooptation, and the political economy of our bodies.

No one mind or one voice defines the entirety of what feminism is and can be, and that is why it is so visionary and ever relevant. While I hear and respect the author’s clear call for accountability beyond complicity, it begs a question for me: Can counterhegemonic transformation exist within the messiness of the contradictions most of us hold?

Overall, Zakaria’s intrepid examination of the failings of "feminism as a brand" offers readers who operate with different theories of change an opportunity to explore collective disruption as a pathway to transformation outside of the white savior "aid-industrial complex."  Through the unflinching pages of her declaration, readers are reminded of the radical power and possibility of both reimagining and rebuilding as we navigate the turbulent tremors of our current cultural and political zeitgeist. Even in places where I differed with the author’s perspective, I remained connected to the backbone of her push to create an inclusive and multidimensional movement in which we can all “see a (collective) path forward and a reason to stay” without losing our freedom to stay actively connected to what she describes as our “specialized” (Black, queer, Muslim, etc.) movements.

Urging us to seize the opportunity presented by this pivotal moment, Zakaria provides an incisive feminist examination of Pakistani history as it relates to her personal story. She calls on readers to come together in solidarity with righteous accountability, writing, "the change...that feminism needs is transformational change. The analysis of where and how to make this change must be intersectional, considering race and class and gender and the redress must be redistributive and recognitive. These are the demands of the moment, but none can be met without the revival of the collective, and most important, a return to the political."

Rafia Zakaria

I would like to express my deep gratitude to this esteemed group of respondents who have written responses to my book Against White Feminism. It is an honor to have my work considered by such eminent feminists whose work I have long admired. My goal with Against White Feminism was to reveal just how deeply white supremacy is embedded in the structures and functions of the feminist movement as we know it today. I am thankful to Kylie Cheung, who notes that one of the book’s original contributions is to show how white supremacy originating in Western colonialism is also built into the operative assumptions of development aid and transnational feminist conversations that continue to uphold the upper-middle-class white woman as the feminist archetype.

I also was moved by Shoniqua Roach’s response, in particular her quote from M. Jacqui Alexander: “We are not born women of color. We become women of color….” In retrospect, this would have been a fitting quotation for the first few pages of the book since it underscores the urgent task of “becoming fluent in each other’s histories” without succumbing to the “rush to claim the first oppression” so that this knowledge can be the basis on which a sisterhood of women of color is constructed. I am excited to take Roach’s essay to audiences of Pakistani feminists who will benefit from the clarity of her analysis.

As a reader and admirer of Benita Roth’s work, I was especially honored to have her respond to Against White Feminism. As she notes, what sets the book apart is its focus on transnational feminism. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests, I wanted very much to try to illustrate how the antiracist politics developed by Black feminists within the United States had relevance far beyond its borders and presented strategies of resistance and models for advocacy for women of color all around the world. The racist condescension toward Black women that is deeply sown into the history of the United States, is a technology of oppression that is replicated to oppress women of color in faraway places like Iraq and Afghanistan. It is true that this is not a book about Black feminism—the very short deadline for the manuscript meant that I could not present a concurrent history of Black feminists’ work—but all of my work is informed by their struggles and fortitude. I am so very delighted to hear that this book will be taught alongside those accounts.

Jamia Wilson’s discussion of the “cult of relatability” as a pivotal concept that applies to her own life and experiences echoes that of many readers. In retrospect, I wish I had expanded this idea because it relates to the larger issue of how we imagine issues of “relatability” to be beyond the ambit of moral analysis and hence of racial critique.  Sadly, much racial discrimination is now carried out through these allegedly benign choices.

All of the responses were incredibly thought provoking and have provided avenues for exploration to further expand and clarify the thesis of Against White Feminism.