“White Feminism” and Building Solidarity
“I probably grew up in a very white feminist background.”
It was likely inevitable that I would broach the subject of “White Feminism” at some point. So, when Lynn Dalsing (Sr. Digital Marketing Manager at CamelBak) made this reflection during our conversation about her Equity Sequence™ learning experience and practice, it seemed like the time had come.
The fact is, I was drawn to Lynn in the first place by her desire to wade into complex issues, combined with her musings about her own sense of identity, which she shared in her online learning reflections.
“I’m a white woman,” she wrote, “and that is a group that has a complicated history of helping to maintain and extend white supremacy, while also being disadvantaged themselves. Historically, advances made by white women have been without, or at the expense of, other disadvantaged groups, and I feel like there's a lot to re-learn in the approach to gender equality.”
Lynn also posed a question that I suspect many of us find ourselves wondering when we feel both a sense of grievance on behalf of one form of group identity, but an equal or perhaps even greater sense of moral outrage on behalf of others:
“How do we best build solidarity within and among groups with differing needs, while still ensuring that the needs of each group are heard and met?”
How, indeed?
Lynn Dalsing and Suhlle Ahn
Lynn characterized the disparities that sparked her awareness of gender inequality growing up as “more-or-less second wave.”
The wave metaphor—something close to our hearts at Tidal Equality—has been used to delineate different phases of feminism as a political, social, and intellectual movement, with historians tying the first and second waves in America to specific legislative achievements.
In the US, the fight for voting rights (from 1848-1920) and passage of the 19th Amendment are generally considered hallmarks of the first wave. The fight for a broader kind of social freedom—of expression; of sexual, marital, and occupational choice—is seen as a product of the second. You might sum up the second wave as the fight to liberate women from the bonds of domesticity, with all that entailed.
Through this lens, the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is seen as one bookend, while the general backlash of the Reagan era, which tended to stamp feminists as “humorless, hairy-legged shrews,” has been cited as the other. Between these, legislative advances like The Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title IX (equal education), and Roe vs. Wade (reproductive freedom—now on life support, in case you weren’t paying attention), marked its middle.
Many of the examples Lynn told me about from her childhood echo these second wave concerns.
For instance, while both her parents worked—and are both fantastic!, she’s quick to preface—it was 100% her mom’s job to make sure she got to and from school; had a place to go after school; had something to eat when she was hungry. And there was always the sense that her mom knew she couldn’t have it all, because of the day-to-day burdens of child-rearing, which largely fell to her.
Lynn also grew up playing sports. And it was something she excelled at and always felt confident about in her own abilities. But when playing basketball (with boys), she noted,
“You would still have this moment of being the last one to get picked, even though I knew I could outplay all of them!”
Over time, Lynn explained, through meeting people and hearing stories—especially these last few years—she’s become aware of ways in which she, as someone who identified with one cause of disadvantage that became her focal point, missed seeing other sources of disadvantage—in particular, race.
She spoke of “jaw-dropping moments” that made her think, “Wow, yeah, I'm a part of that. That is mine to fix.”
She compared this to her own moments of frustration in past conversations with gay male friends about gender, which at times led her to think, “Oh, you’re not getting this,” only to later realize about herself in relation to race, “Oh. I’m not getting this.”
So she feels this is a next step to take, and she’s excited to have the Equity Sequence™ in her toolkit—a practical exercise to help her intercept potentially biased decision-making moments that might unwittingly perpetuate patterns of exclusion.
“I’ve taken more time over the last few years to really grasp what those experiences are,” she said. “And to try to understand as best I can. I can't live that experience, but I can at least listen and, in particular, understand that some of the things women have acquired—especially white women—have come from oppressing other groups.”
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As I mentioned, I’ve sensed this topic percolating in my brain for a while. But what’s surprising is that, as I’ve mulled, I’ve found myself relating to Lynn’s experience of belatedly “getting it”—except from the opposite side.
The fact is, it has long been my belief that race trumps gender as a root cause of inequality in America. And in the broad, historical scheme, I still pretty much do.
Certainly in my lifetime race has felt like the bigger burr in my saddle. Or, to put it more accurately, the gender issues I’ve faced have been entangled with race in such a way that the gender element felt subordinate to the racial.
Take “yellow fever” as a phenomenon. In learning to recognize its predictable ickiness; in finding myself on its receiving end all-too-often as a younger person; it was the yellow that stuck in my craw, more than the fever.
And yet, I’m coming around to a more nuanced view. (Not of yellow fever. That remains as icky as ever. But of the weight between gender and race in my life).
A fresh insight for me has been this: in underscoring the weight of race consciousness as a constant albatross around my neck, I’ve probably under-acknowledged the weight of gender.
And as with pretty much everything, context is key in helping me wade through some of the reasons.
So let’s dip in...
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In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s been a recent spate of criticism—you might even call it verbal dumping—aimed at white women as a group. To be specific, it’s aimed at a subset of “privileged white women” who wield their racial and social status like a weapon against people of color going about their day—as if to insist the person is answerable to them—and in doing so earning themselves the viral “Karen” moniker.
Alongside this, the term “White Feminism” received official coinage this year, specifically by author and journalist Koa Beck, whose book of this title builds the case for a distinct brand of feminism with discernible ties to a specific history and set of ideas, including:
emphasis on self-realization and individual attainment of equality, vs. a more collective movement. (Think “Lean In” vs. solidarity)
a kind of liberation predicated on the exploitation of labor, in the service of attaining power, status, and wealth. (Children still had to be cared for; dinner still had to be cooked.)
origins in the white, middle-to-upper-class suffragette movement in America (one of whose champions, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, is known to have said, re: universal suffrage for African American men, “What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?”)
pursuit of education as an avenue of expression, but with capitalist purchasing power and consumerism as a corresponding means toward achieving status. (Think Macy’s selling suffragette merchandise in 1912 and influencers sporting “Feminist as F***” T-shirts today.)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Beck is careful to note that the “white” of White Feminism is neither determined by race nor intended to be essentialist. By her definition, you can be racially white and a feminist without buying into White Feminism as a brand. (She cites Gloria Steinhem as one example.) And you can embrace the White Feminist brand without being white.
This, of course, begs the question whether choosing “white” as a descriptor may lead to more misunderstanding than illumination in support of the ultimate aim, which is to encourage a more inclusive, collective feminism, which tries to challenge and democratize existing power structures, rather that pursue individual status and power within the system as it stands.
But whether or not you agree, Beck explains her choice of “white” over, say, “corporate” or “bourgeois” as a very deliberate one, because she feels that reflected in this brand of feminism is an ideology and aspiration toward the social advantages that have come with white privilege.
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As a non-white woman born and raised in the U.S., I can’t pretend not to understand what a lot of the “calling out Karen” negativity is about. (I say this, by the way, knowing that my racial experience as an ethnic East Asian overlaps with, but does not mirror, the experience of being Black or African American in America.)
Unless you’re exceptionally lucky, or too young, or utterly lacking in perception (and plenty are), if you’re a person of color, you can’t not have picked up on that occasional dismissive tone; the glance of disregard; the once-over that sees you and sees past you in the flicker of an instant, by a certain subset of (normally white) women of a certain status, who somehow convey the message that you are lesser in their eyes.
Or there’s the flip side: a more positive but patronizing regard, which often accompanies charitable interest or what I think of as missionary intent—a style of benevolence inseparable from paternalism.
Or is it maternalism?...since women are as apt to display this posture as men—something I saw throughout my early life, when my mother was addressed with well-meaning interest, but also a certain tone.
I’ve written previously about what I called the colonialist mentality in the fashion industry (my previous field), where promoting charitable causes can all-too-easily take on a flavor of White-Saviorism.
Even as that industry is pushed toward greater awareness of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, you still find an awkward mix of humanitarian impulse and Eurocentric bias that has generated a circle of (mostly white) fashion luminaries who may, on the one hand, take up the cause of underpaid garment workers across the globe, while, on the other, un-self-reflectively omitting their Black, brown, and yellow diasporic counterparts from the front covers of magazines, the front offices of editorial rooms, and the front rows at fashion week.
In fact, it’s no surprise to me that Koa Beck, who includes “exploitation of labor” as a feature of White Feminism, was both an Executive Editor at Vogue and a Senior Features Editor at Marie Claire.
I will even confess: I sometimes involuntarily flinch when I hear complaints about patriarchy, if they fall into a certain, recognizable cadence. I don’t like that I do!! But it’s as if a mordant thought bubble escapes my head before I can catch it, ready to deliver the comeback: “Eh. Try being a minority.”
Deep down, I know at least one source of my ambivalence toward the call to sisterhood lies in social wounds I sustained at college.
I was nothing if not wet behind the ears, as they say, when I entered. But I was perceptive enough to know to prevent myself from becoming a third wheel when it became clear some of my female friends were coalescing into a distinct—and distinctly feminist-identified—band of sisters. Thirty years on, these women individually have remained my lifelong friends (and I love them dearly!). But it was always clear without needing to be said that I was somehow not of their group.
To this day, I feel the source of this exclusion was more nebulously cultural than even implicitly racial. To characterize it as the latter is too rigid. Not true to the complexity of things. And perhaps a separate essay examining the layers of difference between culture and race is in order.
But layers can be difficult to disentangle.
And somewhere along the line, I think this vague sense of not having been invited into to an inner feminist sanctum—together with (separately) starting to hear the term “woman of color” applied to me at a time (the 80s) when I was quick to balk at racialized labels of any sort—colored my view (no pun intended).
Even today I can get prickly about the term “woman of color,” although I now use it readily in the spirit of solidarity with which it was originally intended—something I wasn’t aware of at the time.
But bottom line—if the women’s movement had not somehow caused a lot of non-white women to feel the presence of a color barrier, the term wouldn’t exist because it wouldn’t have had to.
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More recently, I’ve realized many non-white women raised in countries where they are the majority have had an easier relationship to feminism as a movement that speaks to them and for them. My guess is it’s because the element of race consciousness has been absent from their daily lives.
At the same time, I’ve also spoken to non-white women raised in America for whom gender identity has played a more prominent and problematic role in their consciousness than race.
And, as I mentioned, I’ve begun to recognize ways that gender bias played a critical role in my own self-formation, separate from race.
For example, if those college friends felt some affinity toward each other that they didn’t toward me on the feminist-consciousness front, might it also have been the case that, pre-college, I was heavily (and I mean heavily) influenced by a father who didn’t approve of the ERA movement? (The answer is yes.)
As ever, there are chicken-and-egg questions…
All of which is to state the obvious: that racial bias doesn’t nullify the reality of gender bias, nor vice versa. Both are real. And whether one or the other is magnified can depend on context and situation.
Likewise, the relative weight of either can shift in the presence of other factors of identity—class, age, educational background, sexual orientation or identity, even height and level of attractiveness—depending on circumstance.
And just to add—while I understand the desire to out all the “Karens," I do also feel a touch of defensiveness on behalf of the many white women who are anything but. (Including any named Karen!) Who are horrified by that behavior. And who hardly deserve the shade-by-association.
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In describing her use of the Equity Sequence™ in her work at CamelBak, Lynn brought up an example that struck with me in this way (and also resonated because of my own experiences in fashion.)
Lynn’s team is largely made up of white women. And some segments of the business have traditionally catered to a female customer base. So in her marketing role, Lynn has used Equity Sequence™ to question whether their decision-making in choosing images for ad campaigns has also skewed in this direction, and she is now making a conscious effort to choose images in a way that widens the tent.
“So more people start feeling like they see themselves,” as she put it.
Perhaps predictably, this has meant expanding image selection to include more women of color and women of different sizes, shapes, and ages. But perhaps less expectedly, it has also meant expanding to include more men, whose images have been traditionally bypassed in the ads for this segment.
Similarly, recounting a non-work-related experience, Lynn told me about a community debate (via Facebook) that took place in her neighborhood in Chicago, concerning the fate of a neighborhood parking lot, in the context of a city re-zoning project. Was the parking lot in question really needed? Should the community instead be taking steps to reduce their dependence on automobiles altogether?
Lynn, who is aware of and concerned about the climate emergency, was initially negative toward those who argued in favor of keeping the parking lot. But by asking herself the Equity Sequence™ questions, she also began to think about who would be disadvantaged by a decision to eliminate the lot.
She began to think about people who have children. People who can’t, as she is able to do, walk easily from home to the train station. Who might not live within a walkable distance to the train.
While the conversation didn’t in this case result in an immediate solution, Lynn felt they at least began to see how more than one conversation and more than one solution was needed to move forward on this problem. They need a solution that answers both how to start moving in a direction of less fossil fuel use in an urban area, but also how to make this neighborhood livable for people with kids, people with disabilities, and people with unequal access to public transportation.
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Returning to Lynn’s question, then, how do we balance the needs of different groups that have been disadvantaged, in order to build solidarity? And how use the Equity Sequence™ toward this end?
For one thing, I think it helps to start with the recognition that bias and inequity can arise for any identity, any group, sub-group, or category of persons, depending on context.
While Tidal Equality shares what many current DEI initiatives take as a starting point—that specific groups have long faced and continue to face greater hurdles and biases when it comes to addressing inequality and marginalization—using Equity Sequence™ as a tool can, I would argue, allow for greater precision in figuring out exactly how and where.
This is because you apply Equity Sequence™ in the real, empirical world, and you ask its questions in relation to real, concrete situations.
As a content-agnostic methodology, Equity Sequence™ doesn’t come with predetermined answers about who has been included or excluded from a given decision-making instance. Rather, it creates the reflective space for you to uncover these, situation by situation.
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Turning back to the example of white women who face both advantages and disadvantages, let’s look at two scenarios in context. (Again, I use the example of being Asian as a contrast, because it’s what I know.)
When I worked for a large, corporate women’s fashion retailer—a very female-dominated environment—being female was hardly a source of exclusion.
Statistics about the field bear this out, with 73% of fashion designers in America identifying as female, 19.5% as male, and 7.5% not specified.
By contrast, it’s well-known that being female in the STEM fields puts you in a small minority at only 28%.
In both fields, the racial breakdown yields a comparable pattern: whites are either overrepresented or on par relative to the U.S. population, while Asians are actually overrepresented. Here are the stats:
While this might lead you to assume biased decision-making would affect you similarly if you’re female and white vs. female and Asian in either of these fields, a context-specific focus might lead to very different conclusions.
My own sense (admittedly anecdotal) is that, in the specific context of design (for the record, I was not in design), if you are East Asian and female, biased decision-making may actually work to your advantage for entry-level, design assistant hiring. Asians are often perceived as good worker bees, with an aptitude for detailed work involving hand-eye coordination. And looking younger than your age by Western standards is not an obstacle in this context.
But in the context of visual representation, magazine inspiration tears, or ad campaigns, where aesthetic bias is (still) often white and European, this kind of positive Asian bias might not translate.
And in the context of trying to advance to a manager-level role, biased perceptions might begin to work against you—first because looking young and physically small by Western standards might cause you to be seen as less authoritative; and later because the same stereotype of Asians as unassertive worker bees tends to brand them as not leadership material.
By contrast, in the context of a career in STEM, biased perceptions about Asians and math aptitude might carry you further as an Asian female compared to, say, a blonde white woman, for whom stereotypes about intelligence might more easily bias decision-making against you.
By using Equity Sequence™ questioning in very different decision-making contexts in this way, you might find that who is disadvantaged does not necessarily match the profile you might expect. It might even be (gasp) a white male.
In the context of the modeling world, for example, gender pay inequity adversely affects male models more than female. In the context of a child custody dispute (between a white, cisgender couple), gender bias often favors the woman and disadvantages the man.
And in an academic setting, where an elite educational pedigree is traditionally prized, class bias may favor a Black male of non-British, upper-class descent who speaks with an Oxbridge accent over a white male candidate with blue-collar mannerisms and a noticeable New York accent.
None of this, by the way, should be misinterpreted as ammunition for the bad faith whataboutism of white male grievance provocateurs who try to allege that the most discriminated-against group in America are white, Christian, heterosexual men. When you are adopting the bird’s-eye view inherent in making an evaluation of this kind, you cannot ignore HISTORY, with its temporal sweep, and STATISTICS, with its trove of empirical data, as part-and-parcel of CONTEXT. Taking these into account, it’s not hard to see which identities have been consistently excluded from so many areas of decision-making.
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For me, looking at these context-based exceptions to the expected rule does two things: 1) it sharpens your ability to think about inequality in all its manifestations; and 2) it reinforces how accurate the broader trends truly are, when you bump up against them time and again. (Recent case in point: see Emmy results, 2021.)
For the doubters who tire of hearing how the systemic cards are stacked against Black and brown people, if they can recognize the exceptions to the rule, then surely they can recognize the rule? Unless they are reluctant to look.
Here, then, is the beauty of Equity Sequence™:
If you use it with the aim of earnest discovery as a guide, the hope and expectation is that an element of balance will emerge naturally through the course of its repeated application, by virtue of the fact that various biases do arise differently in different contexts.
At the same time, those well-known (and sadly, more predictable) biases (like race and gender), which continue to prompt backlash and stir up defensiveness the more we work to uncover them, are also going to re-surface, again and again, through the application of Equity Sequence™. Because they are real.
When it comes to race, for example, the post-George Floyd, post-BLM, anti-Critical Race Theory backlash we’re seeing in the US only proves how real racial bias remains; and how deep the fear of acknowledging it remains for some; and what an uphill battle it’s going to be all the way to try to move past it.
When it comes to gender, what we’re seeing in Texas proves equally how real is the threat of seeing women gain agency, power, and voice.
So if, as you practice Equity Sequence™, you find that you keep coming up with the same groups over and over, it just might be because the obstacles to undoing these biases are the ones that remain the most stubbornly and frustratingly trenchant.
Finally, I will add that I think continued excavation into the topic is needed because those of us of all identities fighting against the injustices of bias and exclusion need cooperation and solidarity, and the recognition that we have a greater common adversary than each other. That obstacle and adversary lies in denialism, intransigence, and the unwillingness to challenge set patterns of thinking and seeing in order to ignite and inspire change.
