Feminism Has a Race Problem

An anti-racist feminist reading list to counteract it

Photos are from the 1970 Women’s March. Source: Eugene Gordon Photograph Collection, PR 248, New-York Historical Society

Feminist is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Its aim is not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women. It has the power to transform in a meaningful way all of our lives¹.

Shock Over Racism in Feminism?

Last week, I posted a mini essay about the racism I’ve experienced here on Substack. Some of the commenters expressed shock that racism exists here and/or in the feminist movement(s); others said they weren’t aware but weren’t surprised.

This part of the essay is relevant to that —

The amount of racism I experience here is really harmful.

…

If I frame [the experience of racism] too gently, then I’m out-shouted, and if I frame it emotionally, then I’m “angry”?

Misogyny is terrible, for all of us. That’s undeniable. What I’m asking is this: why do women of not-color shift the conversation back to them when a woman of color speaks? And then a brigade of her sisters of not-color will try to use my note or my post to make the conversation about their experiences as women that aren’t of color, instead of having that conversation on their own pages. Change the subject I’m speaking to to ensure they stayed centered.

Sit that that, think about these dynamics for a while.

I’ve been a survivor advocate for eight years. My real-world experience tells me this: women of color are raped at disproportionality higher rates. And it’s not men of color who are raping us. That is why intersectionality is so important.

When people not-of-color comment to me: “ we just need more time “ — do you not understand that when we women of color are out here experiencing racism and sexual violence of the worst kind, we don’t have time to give you?

So check yourself. Why are you so deeply uncomfortable with the notion that both women and men can be racist? Ask yourself this: why does so much of the world decenter women of color?

As for the patriarchy as a defense to feminist racism. That’s hilarious. It’s insipid, and thoughtless too. Do these women that aren’t of color think that we women of color don’t experience harm under the patriarchy? Yet, we’re not out there, using our double, triple, quadruple, exponential harm to keep other people down. The “defense” fails because it’s actually privilege not oppression that allows these women to harm women of color.

And again, check yourself: why is “the patriarchy” a justification to racism? Sit with that too- think about why you think racism is justified? Why are you defending women being racist? Why are you taking the time to comment back to me, like you’re getting paid to calm me down? Why are you laying the blame on people of color for speaking up about it? Why are you treating me as if I don’t understand racism — especially when I have the lifelong lived experience of it?

I know the roots. I’ve intellectualized it to death, over and over. My most popular essay is here is 5000 words about why women hate on other women. I’ve written about it the fear- and compliance-driven origins of white women being racist toward Black men immediately after.

Why do people still believe that feminism is for white women only? Why is when a woman of color writes through the lens of intersectionality — but one who doesn’t have the fame of bell hooks or Angela Davis — why does she get so many trolls and racially biased mean girls?

I see other people drawing attention to the racism they either see or face on Substack near-daily. Mostly Black folks…that my post was the first that so many saw and that I’m not Black makes me question how the algorithm works here.

There’s plenty of racism within liberal/leftist/progressive circles, too. Racism is a particularly virulent problem, from the beginnings of the concept of race that were used to justify colonization and slavery through to today.

I loved

Ayoto

’s words on this (from this essay), although I also want to draw a distinction between white people as an abstract concept, and all white individuals.

Be wary of liberal….who chant Eat the Rich but mean someone else. Never themselves. Their guilt becomes virtue. Becomes identity. Becomes content. They do not want to lose. They only want to feel as if they’ve lost, while keeping what they’ve taken. Their pain is not a rupture.

Other people are the problem. Never the nice liberal.

No. Those folks would tell you that they are the victim. To call attention to their behaviors is hurtful to them. So they first deny, then attack, then reverse victim-offender. In their vivid imaginations, the ones they discriminate against are their oppressors. Important that their feelings remain centered. Of course they want equality, as long as they remain the most equal, as long they can keep their superiority. Especially their easy, comfortable moral superiority that allows them to feel superior and distant from the worst white supremacists, the ones they believe to be of a lower class than themselves.

To call attention to the racism itself — even when so by I citing the works of bell hooks, Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, and Audre Lorde — makes me the problem to some. It makes me the target of their ire. Had I known that my place is to be helpful, to keep spending hours researching, writing, and providing up my labor unpaid, quietly writing about feminism but always remembering to make myself small, never complain, and to keep giving myself to others, I would likely not be at the receiving end of long, angry, curse-word filled diatribes.

I receive their ire because of what I’ve chosen to write about, and not merely for my existence here alone. That I speak to the additional oppression through racism and misogyny (sexual orientation, cis-genderedness, classism, xenophobia…) likely makes some women uncomfortable — the ones who want to split the world into male and female, make themselves the most oppressed against a single, more powerful oppressor. To call attention other intersections interrupts this worldviews, and challenges it.

To be challenged feels harmful to those who refuse to change. And recognizing your own relative privilege is uncomfortable, too. I have done this in my life, sat with my discomfort with myself, updated my thinking, realized I was wrong in the past, apologized.

This, too: there’s something particularly insidious about that nice liberal racism. If I know someone’s a white supremacist, I also know to avoid them. If they’ve covered their hate and/or bias with the language of social justice and it comes out later, that’s more hurtful (emotionally) and can be just as dangerous too. It’s entering the snake’s den, but not knowing the snake lives there until after I’ve been bitten.

Eugene Gordon Photograph Collection, PR 248, New-York Historical Society

The Reading List

For me, using bell hooks definition of feminism that I opened this essay with…racism is anti-feminist. The struggle to end sexist domination must include domination of all woman; it must necessarily be intersectional and inclusive.

What’s shocking to me about the shock of others at racism within feminism within is that popular feminist thinkers and philosophers of color have been writing openly about it for over forty-four years.

Longer, actually, as Anna J. Cooper’s A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South (1892) is the earliest known Black feminist book — Black feminism being the struggle against antiBlackness and against sexist domination of Black women. Also, there was Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching journalist and feminist thinker, and Mary Church Terrell, civil rights and feminist activist — both of whom Angela Davis wrote about at length in Women, Race & Class. There was also feminist thinkers and abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.

Racism in the feminist context is still relevant and still a fight we’re fighting. It’s evidenced by the numbers of us still writing about this. That I cannot think of a single feminist of color that does not bring racial oppression into her work speaks volumes about our collective experiences, learning, and reading.

Here are some books that address racism between women and by women, and within the feminist movement. These stretch from 1981 through the present day, and they are written by women of different races, but all from the West:

1. Women, Race & Class (1981) by Angela Davis (my essay on it)

2. Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) by bell hooks

3. The Bridge Called My Back (1981) by Gloria Anzaldúa & Cherríe Moraga

4. Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center (1984) by bell hooks (my review/essay)

5. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987): Gloria Anzaldúa

6. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (1992): Vron Ware

7. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993) by Ruth Frankenberg;

8. The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (1999) by Louise Michele Newman;

9. Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism by Aileen Moreton-Robinson;

10. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (2019) by Stephanie Jones-Rogers;

11. Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (2025) by Sophie Lewis.

I also wrote an essay on essays by intersectional and Black feminists. The feminist thinkers whose essays I cited include Audre Lorde, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Smith, Combahee River Collective, Alice Walker. Then, this list to include feminist perspectives that extend beyond Western feminism.

There are so many books about racism in feminism that were published in the last five years or so — post George Floyd — addressing what I call “exclusionary feminism”. A lot of writers/thinkers use the term “white feminism”, but I find it to be too divisive — but it appears in nearly all of these title or subtitles. I’m not endorsing this second list of books as I haven’t read them. I’m provide this list to show much thought has been put into racism in a feminist context recently.

1. White Tears/Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad²

2. Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria;

3. White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind by

   Koa Beck
   ;

4. The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism by Kyla Schuller;

5. Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop by Serene Khader;

6. Mean Girl Feminism: How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss by Kim Hong Nguyen;

7. White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao.

Where Do We Go From Here?

If you’ve read the feminism of Betty Friedan, then also read the inclusive feminist advocacy of bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, in which hooks pointed out how Friedan’s feminism was exclusionary. That will help with a deeper understanding of how Friedan’s philosophy was exclusionary, so that your thinking can be more inclusive. Not only was the philosophy so narrow as to be exclusionary, Friedan literally called for lesbians to be excluded, in her position as president of NOW (National Organization of Women) in 1969. In the same book, hooks wrote that the feminist movement that she participated in allowed for women of color to participate, because the movement “needed” women of color to legitimize it, but that the movement also marginalized the women too.

Feminism is the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, disabled women, lesbians, old women - as well as white, economically privileged, heterosexual women. Anything less than this vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement.

Let me make it quite clear, before going any further, something you must understand. White women don’t work on racism to do a favor for someone else, solely to benefit Third World women. You have to comprehend how racism distorts and lessens your own lives as white women—that racism affects your chances for survival, too.

Quote: Barbara Smith, Racism and Women’s Studies, spoke at the 1979 National Women’s Studies Association Conference.

Legitimizing or beneficial to, the appeal to give us a seat at the table. For me, the answer is also make our perspectives and struggle heard — to bring our own folding chair, as Shirley Chisholm famously said.

For me, Black women, working class and impoverished women, immigrant women, women of color, disabled women, trans women, lesbians, women of the global south/global majority, women of Argentina’s #NiUnaMenos, China’s pink feminism, the women who mobilize and join massive protests when rape makes news in India, and of Afghanistan and Iran — especially as the West was instrumental in the reduction of rights and domination of the women of the latter two countries — we deserve to have our sexist domination end just as much as white, economically privileged, heterosexual women do. And the groups of women that make up the former will not allow ourselves to be dominated by parts of the latter that remain stubborn in excluding us — we will not ignore our intersectional oppressions to rid ourselves of only one.

Thank you for reading unknown canon. This newsletter is dedicated to intersectional feminist♀️and lesbian ⚢ literature, history, and analysis.

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1. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. (Boston: South End Press, 1984. Republished, New York: Routledge, 2015). p. 26.

2. This was published in September 2019, just before George Floyd’s murder. It’s based off Hamad’s viral essay.