It’s hard not to get disappointed when white feminism strikes again. While we are trudging towards a path where intersectional feminism is gaining more traction, it’s far from perfect.
These past few months, we’ve been getting glimpses of the situations Palestinian women are living in. There were shortages of menstrual products, but that wasn’t as talked about as Margot Robbie getting snubbed at the Oscars. Or that there was more of an outrage about sexist jokes made at an award show while the suffering of women of color around the world gets pushed to the back burner. This isn’t something new. Women of color’s contributions usually come second to white women’s contributions and have historically come second to men’s contributions. The benefits of living in a patriarchal society.
Now, nothing really good comes from comparing struggles but when you scroll online, post by post, and see visceral anger towards those who didn’t understand the Barbie movie and still refuse to acknowledge the thousands of men, women, and children dying day by day in a genocide. But ‘oh no, he made a joke about the Barbie movie’; it feels very close to being in some sort of Twilight Zone episode.
There is always hope though. I think one of the biggest things we can do is educate ourselves on different cultures, keep an open mind, and let our voices advocate for those who can’t. Ethnocentrism doesn’t help whatsoever. Make sure that we don’t exclude anyone based on race, sexuality, or background in our feminism.
I’m not looking to make activism a profession of mine, but there is a difference between politics and basic humanity. Sometimes those get mistaken for the same thing in conversations, which they shouldn’t, but they do. And if you think these issues are still a strain of politics as a whole, then anything we do can fall into that category. Feminism, itself, has always been in politics. What then? Ignore it because it makes us uncomfortable or advocate for not only ourselves as humans but the rest of the world too.
It’s taken me a bit of time to really articulate all my thoughts and feelings about this whole thing because it’s both complicated and simple at the same time. I’ve always been very passionate about gender equality and women’s rights, with a very low tolerance for misogyny. I understand the feelings of frustration and becoming distraught about things that matter to us not being taken as seriously as things that matter to the opposite sex. However, what I don’t understand is having an uproar for a group of people who are already very privileged, and purposefully looking away from those begging us to make their pain seen and heard.
Not everyone wants to talk about that. Well, fine. But if you’re only concerned about feminism when white women are at the center of it, then it really shouldn’t be called feminism at all.