(Credit: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing/Getty)

Youâd think that Suffs, a play about women’s suffrage, would be considered to be pretty progressive. Itâs currently playing on Broadway, and has enjoyed broadly positive reviews from all the usual outlets. Yet earlier in the year, this most liberal of liberal shows was nonetheless assailed. In July, activists stormed the Music Box Theatre mid-performance, and began chanting demands for the musicalâs cancellation. Just to make their point clear, they also unfurled a banner, emblazoned with the words âSuffs Is a White Washâ.
As that last phrase implies, and a quick glance at the protest the Cancel Suffs website confirms, the protesters are ultimately unhappy about Suffs for one fundamental reason: the whiteness of its feminism. A self-declared group of âradical, anti-racist, queerâ feminists, the group rejects the idea that âwhite women are always aligned with progressive causesâ â even as they attack Suffs for underplaying the supposed racism of those early electoral reformers. Taken together, in fact, Suffs is nothing less than âa betrayalâ of the next generation of feminists.
The chaos in July is far from unique. At least according to a certain kind of intersectional feminist â the sort of person who believes trans women are women and sex work is work â âwhite feministsâ are now to blame for everything. Consider, to give one example, the wild popularity of the âKarenâ slur, an implicit (or sometimes not-so-implicit) attack on white women standing up for themselves. Then thereâs the explosion of books. The titles speak for themselves: White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color; The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women; Against White Feminism; The Problem With White Feminism.
The latest to land is Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop by Serene Khader. An academic at the CUNY Graduate Center, Khader credits white feminists with propagating five key myths, devoting a chapter to each. Demolishing everything from the claim that feminism is about personal freedom, to the fantasy that it aims to free individual women, Khader clearly sets her sights high.
But as a feminist myself, albeit of the white variety, what Khader seems to constitute as feminism feels utterly unrecognisable. Every âmythâ she dispels, after all, is nothing more than an invention of liberal âlean inâ feminists. Quite aside from the infamous shallowness of such people, theyâre anyway a group that includes both white and non-white women. The idea that Khader is somehow demolishing the racial monolith of white feminism therefore feels rather implausible. In any case her liberal targets â white, affluent, #girlbossy â donât include robust, grassroots feminists like me and countless others around the world.
Not that Khaderâs actual arguments are much better. Unlike their white counterparts, for instance, she claims women of colour have always had to work outside the home. Really? There is no such thing as wealthy black or brown households? Then thereâs the facile cultural relativism. White women are accused of contributing to the destruction of traditional cultures, even as Khader argues on several occasions that prior to colonisation, indigenous Americans enjoyed pretty much total gender equality. For such a sweeping claim, you might have imagined Khader would have rallied a host of serious scholars to her cause. No such luck. Instead, she cites Kim TallBear, a Native American academic who claims that non-monogamous lifestyles are a âdecolonizing projectâ that challenge âsettler sexualityâ.Â
And though laughable, at least that idea can basically be understood. Thatâs not always true, for instance when the author claims that when looking at victims of gender-based violence, âpeople are being targeted to preserve the hypervaluation of masculinity, and victims are not only people who were assigned female at birthâ. I have no idea what Khader means by this. Maybe my white feminist brain just isnât up to such intersectional wisdom.
In a sense, itâs almost too easy to mock Faux Feminism, filled to bursting with all that pseudointellectual nonsense. Yet I think that Khader and the rest really matter. After all, every addition to the âwhite feministâ stable ultimately mischaracterises what mainstream feminism actually is. Rather than seriously engaging with a serious ideology, with a history and deep internal debates, it instead creates a strawman. Feminism, Khader and her colleagues disingenuously argue, is now about little more than lipstick and promotions at work.Â
And if thatâs bad enough for feminism generally â though the girlbosses should surely be criticised, thereâs clearly more to us than that â books like Faux Feminism are equally poisonous from a racial perspective. Not once in over 40 years of activism have I witnessed an actual feminist advocate for white women exclusively. Indeed, I spent my early years in the women’s liberation movement, throughout the Eighties, discussing real intersectionality: how feminism had to represent and include all women or progress meant nothing. From abortion rights to tackling male violence, I have never been in a group that wasn’t racially and ethnically diverse.Â
Thatâs equally true when it comes to specific struggles. Consider polygamy, which many of the black and Asian feminists Iâve worked with consider a form of patriarchal control. Yet Khader dismisses this view as âwhite imperialismâ â handily ignoring the fact that many ex-Muslim women abhor Islamism and the culture it brings. If, then, the âwhite feminismâ slur is sexist, itâs also racist. By refusing to give women of colour any agency in shaping their own feminism, it patronisingly assumes that theyâre simply been duped by their nefarious white sisters.Â
I donât want to be unfair here. Khader certainly writes well, and parts of her book are meticulously researched. The chapter on the âindividualism mythâ â where she outlines the history of womenâs unacknowledged labour â was especially enlightening. Yet between generalisation and cliche, she ultimately only succeeds in ignoring most of what feminists, white or not, have achieved over the last century or more. Say what you like about Susan B. Anthony, and even by the standards of her age, she was fairly progressive on matters of race, surely better that she prodded women towards the ballot box than simply stay at home? That isnât to say, of course, that feminism begins or ends with Suffs. Itâs just that the march of womenâs liberation is a long one, and every step in the road deserves to be remembered.Â
Thatâs especially true given plenty of women alive right now would surely love something as simple as the vote. As the Taliban steps up its torture of women and girls in Afghanistan, and increasing numbers of females worldwide find themselves shackled by Sharia, those that dismiss âwhite feminismâ equally dismiss the millions of non-white women who expect support from their sisters in the West. Then again, as an academic at CUNY, or anyway an activist with time to picket musicals, itâs presumably easy to set these questions aside.Â
Looking for absolute moral purity in a musical is ludicrous. These activists are mad.
Reminds me a story of somebody who cemented the loos of an X rated cinema. I hear she blames the next generation of activists for being “over the top”, nowadays.
I am sick and tired of the anti-white activists (or whatever theyâre called). Yes, the suffragettes were white. They had the luxury of time that black and brown women didnât have. Were some of them racist? Probably. But from what Iâve read, they never said that black women should not be allowed to vote. They spoke to all women. White people are the indigenous people of the West, just like black people are the indigenous people of Africa (sub Sahara). Our history is white history. Get over it. If you hate white people and their history, go back to your ancestorsâ home. Iâm sick of it. Second Wave feminism had a number of important black women, like Audre Lord. Apparently, they have been forgotten, just like the white feminists. Young women donât read their books anymore (they donât read anything). History is what it is. We canât go back and change it. And quit judging it by todayâs values.
“…âwhite feministsâ are now to blame for everything”
Well at least it make a change to white men being responsible for everything
Let’s say that white people in general are to blame for everything.
Racists. They are called racists.
Except the dyslexic ones
Correct me if I’m wrong but I seem to recall suffragettes chaining themselves to the railings of Downing St. back in the day.
So tippy-top lefty activists have always done the performative activism thing. Darling.
What goes around comes around.
The question is: are we talking here about peaceful protest or mostly peaceful protest? We gap-toothed peasants would like to know.
Christopher has trouble noticing even glaring differences of context:
Women chaining themselves to the railings of Downing St. in 1908 when women’s rights were far more limited (the protest was for the right to vote, which Christopher thinks is worth mocking, at least when it comes to women), when women were generally far more vulnerable (one of the women was jailed for 2 months; they were often treated violently by police),
Versus women recently interrupting one showing of a musical, when women’s rights are vastly better and women are generally more secure (the protesters were removed from the building, no arrests were made).
Maybe Christopher has a sticky on the door to tell him it’s not the same as the rest of the wall, and he can use it to get in and out.
Fiery but mostly peaceful lootings, I believe, may be on the agenda for November, partly depending on America’s Electoral College.
“It’s just property,” is the rationale. Someone else – usually of the male gender – can dowse the fires, and haul away the rubble.
Cancel Suffs is right about the Suffregettes. They didn’t believe in intersectionality. Suffragettes only wanted the vote to go to women on the same basis as men of the time, meaning monied men and women. Pankhurst positively lobbied AGAINST the vote being extended to working class women AND men, who didn’t have the vote, but to whom she exhorted her followers to hand white feathers if they thought they were dodging the war.
She expected these men, with no vote, to go out and die fighting for the comforts she enjoyed, but wanted to go on refusing not only them, but women of the same class, the vote.
What would she have made of Blacks getting the vote!
are we talking here about peaceful protest or mostly peaceful protest? We gap-toothed peasants would like to know.
This gap toothed peasant has never heard of intersectional feminism, or radical, anti racist queer feminism. I still don’t get what intersectional feminism is after reading the article.
It seems feminism, much like gender, now requires a dictionary of definitions.
When we asked my nan about the suffragette movements from back in her day, she responded that she didn’t know what they were on about, people with too much money and time on their hands probably, read too many books that had given them funny ideas.
Literally had no time for it. Quite funny.
Trigger warning: this comment has been sent to moderation. My feminist rights are being infringed.
Any woman worth her X chromosomes remembers the adolescent experiences of being bullied, cast out, unfriended, conspired against by other girls. To my enduring shame I engaged in it myself once or twice. A psychotherapist called it the female equivalent of male antisocial personality. It seems like the current crop of malevolent bitches are the oestrogenised males and testosterone infused females. Doesn’t change the dynamic though. It should be up to society to call out misbehaviour. But we seem to have lost that ability.
Itâs just that the march of womenâs liberation is a long one
What is it, exactly, they want?
Fried ice.
The Chinese are to blame.
Good question. I think that if you devote your life to a cause and you get very close to your original aim, you no longer have a life. Then you need to have a never-ending list of goals, which may be unattainable, so that you can carry on with the campaign.
From what I can gather, most feminists only want an equal share of the good things – the rewards some few men attain, but without the danger, effort, and defeats the rest of us all suffer.
For example, most feminists believe that women are shamefully kept out of the tech industry, because of sexism.
This does not, however, inspire them to study electrical engineering, nor quantum physics, nor quantities analyses. They’re a fairly rare sight even at the Windows help desk.
they want to perpetuate the air of grievance. Seriously. Is there some battle for women’s rights that has been lost in your lifetime? One might say the same about race, gay rights, and pretty much other form of activism. The common bond is the activists’ refusal to accept ‘yes’ as an answer.
They just want to be understood. And get what they deserve. And maybe a bit of getting a better deal because other people have it better.
Something like that.
Well, if they want to be understood, they might express their grievances and demands in a language approaching English. By the time you’ve decoded today’s demands, they’ve moved on to tomorrow’s, and you’re an ignorant bigot if you can’t tell if they’re new demands or yesterday’s demand in different language. It’s all very exhausting.
JB’s updates on the latest developments in the feminist sphere are always worth reading; but surely, in the interests of feminism, Khader’s writings should be deemed as setting up a straw-woman argument?
Or even, a straw-coloured argument?
Yes Kadher is a racist first and feminist second
‘academic who claims that non-monogamous lifestyles are a âdecolonizing projectâ that challenge âsettler sexualityâ’. A moron who never heard of the mormons who settled in Utah.
Intersectionality is the philosophical equivalent of Humpty-Dumpty’s famous dictum about words in Through The Looking Glass: When I use a word it means what I choose it to mean and nothing else.
They pretty much just make it all up as they go along to promote their pre-conceived hierarchy of victimhood which places white, straight, male westerners at the top oppressing everyone else. As long as they can fit whatever they are saying somewhere within the omnicause, then it explains everything as far as they are concerned. So they will have lots to say about “institutional racism” in the West, but are almost completely silent about brutal oppression of women and girls in places like Afghanistan and Iran.
Now I would never label myself a feminist and I’m sure Julie Bindel and I would disagree about many things, but I am a great admirer of what I think of as her “coal-face” feminism. She is indomitable in her refusal to compromise her advocacy for women and girls who suffer violence and sexual abuse, whether that happens in Canterbury or Kabul, in the name of intersectionality.
But it does sometimes strike me that radical feminists like her shouldn’t be so surprised to have ended up lumped in with the white, straight, males at the oppressor end of the hierarchy. Competitive victimhood was always going to lead to factionalisation and they were simply the next cab off the ranks when it comes to carving out an oppressor to be victimised by.
“Omnicause”…..Very useful, thanks.
Well said.
Is it really true that they — people who speak about intersectionality — “are almost completely silent about brutal oppression of women and girls in places like Afghanistan and Iran”?
It’s a common pattern for someone to claim that X group they don’t like, which critiques Western (or Northern) internal oppression, is silent about conditions elsewhere. The idea is to make an innuendo of hypocrisy, while avoiding the group’s critique itself.
People make a similar kind of accusation when they don’t like what critics of their country’s foreign policy say. They accuse critics of not speaking of other countries’ oppression. The answer is always 1) yes, they do actually speak of those things, and do take up those causes; 2) a fundamental moral principle is that you should act primarily where you can be most effective, and standing against oppression that stems from your own country fits that bill, especially if your country is powerful and has significant influence. You actually have a chance to do something about it.
It’s been a while now for feminism, and by it’s fruits ye shall know it.
Not really. Feminism isn’t a single, monolithic, absolute theory. Thereâs always going to be controversy about what it stands for and who are the spokespeople, which is totally natural to any social movement. It’s the same for civil rights, the environment, etc.
For example, feminism is about much more than equality. Like other social movements, it talks about broad social structures. As an academic and activist movement, it addresses various sources of oppression related to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, disability, age, ideology, and so on.
Many who disagree with feminism on principle have heard a message that isn’t necessarily accurate. Even though feminism doesn’t have a single party line, people make that assumption all the time. That’s because one voice or one description has reached them, and they don’t hear others.
Again, this is the same in any social movement. Sometimes the voices that get heard and end up with sticking power are not necessarily the best ones.
Was it predictable that some Western feminists would argue against the emancipation of Muslim women?
Bindel is slowly but perhaps inexorably getting warmer.
Will she one day realize the the neo-Marxist politics of victims and oppressors – of which her self proclaimed working class feminism is surely composed – is as equally fatuous as the plaintive demands of “intersectional,” “progressive” feminists?
If she thinks through these things a bit more thoroughly, she may be at risk of voting for someone like Ron DeSantis or JD Vance, in the not so distant future. An introductory class in economics could even be a sufficient nudge.
How are you proposing to stop the accelerating reach of Sharia in the West, Julie? You’re going to need some of those macho males you despise to take some pretty robust action on your behalf. At least find the grace to be grateful.
Tribalism is always, always divisive, by definition, whether your tribe is gender-specific or nationalist. Very occasionally that’s a good thing, but so-called progressives should not be surprised at all their one-time allies cannibalizing each other.
I tried telling folks that the attacks on white men would not stop there, that white women would be next. And here we are. Meanwhile, feminism does what activism always does – perpetually re-invent itself for the sake of perpetuating the racket. Never mind that women outnumber men on most college campuses. Never mind that the professional opportunities available to them. Those things just mean that it is time to pivot to the next imagined grievance.
never forget, white feminists can have penises too
Much ado about nothing. Does anyone besides a few really care? The Feminist movement, starting in the 1800’s was coopted by Nazi feminists during the 70’s and 80’s and there is now no difference between them and what they wanted to kill. The Pendulum will start the opposite swing soon, as soon as women wake up.
If Africans had not been selling fellow Africans as slaves, would Europeans have been involved in the slave trade?
A point made to me first by an African friend.
Just shows that we are all predisposed to take advantage of less powerful people whatever their identity, and that considering the impact or our actions on others of whatever grouping is important.
Still, movements that have identified genuiunely vulnerable groupings for whatever reason and fought for them should be celebrated (women’s suffrage, end to slavery). Those of us sceptical of modern progressives can nonetheless respect the necessary progress that has been made in the past, most of which we surely would not want to undo.
Why yes. Yes they would have.
I don’t tend to agree with this writer but this is a worthwhile case to make.
With the affirmation of a values-neutral multiculturalism, identity politics has pretty much trumped feminism. Queer activism has run rampant in its place, deploying transgender politics as its tool.
What new wave feminists of the Millennial generation and younger want to do is attack the racist and patriachal imperialism of the post-colonial West, so running an anti-white (-European) discursive machine that Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam would be proud of.
âpeople are being targeted to preserve the hypervaluation of masculinity, and victims are not only people who were assigned female at birthâ
I wonder if Julie is being a bit disingenuous saying she doesn’t know what is meant by this? The clue is “not only people who were assigned female at birth.” Of course, it means violence against trans-identified males who are (allegedly) being targeted for not conforming to societal standards of masculinity. So, it is utter balls, but it isn’t that hard to follow.
A few things:
1 – itâs no fun to be generalized based on ones immutable characteristics is it Ms. Bindel.
2 – Funny, if anything âwhite feministsâ have gone out of their way to turn a blind eye to the current and flagrant misogyny discreetly included in Islamic fundamentalisum to their grave discredit .
3 – There are many subtle in-congruencies in this piece, some that are very self serving but overall to many to mentionâŠ.
The (largely white) intelligencia has so completely pulverized straight white males, past and present, it’s a natural pivot to deconstruct white female action. No real surprise all radical ideology always turns on itself.
With thanks to Quillette.com. The theory of intersectionality, is a totaliser system of collecting up perceived victim status(s). So if you are a trans black disabled neurodiverse trafficked citizen you have champion victim status compared to anordinary white person, straight or even, a normie LGB. the theory invites you to believe that individuals face systemic oppression and the scope increases according to the number of victim statuses a person holds. The fewer boxes you can tick (straight white men donât get any) the more âprivilegeâ you are deemed to possess. This “privilege” , which now serves as a sort of intersectional mark of the devil, is invoked to justify reverse racism (though a true intersectionalist would argue that this is a misuse of the word âracism,â since the term only may be applied in regard to the mistreatment of a so-called âperson of colorâ). Identity politics divides and does not bring any benefit as far as I can see. but this utter b0ll0cks is now seen as a legitimate ‘theory’………………..