Rich White Feminism

About six months ago, I wrote a short confessional article about a friend I drove to the grocery store, and I missed the point of that entire experience. Recently, I've started reading Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall, and I achieved some clarity about where the feminist movement really needs to divert its attention.

This friend I took to the grocery store does not have a car and was on food stamps for most of her life. About a year ago, just before I was fired from my job because of COVID-19, my friend went to the hospital. She usually did not go to the doctor because it was too expensive, so I knew that whatever had happened must have been really bad. It was. Her gallbladder was close to giving out and had caused her tremendous pain, so she was put on a fat-restricted diet. The doctors should have operated when she went into the emergency room, but because she did not have insurance, they have to wait until she is septic to operate. Septic. As in, until her organs began to turn on each other and turn her body into a warzone. Because she did not have medical insurance, which she cannot afford.

So, she has to wait until she is on the brink of death because if she is not, she will be saddled with medical debt she cannot possibly pay. She works a full time job at a food establishment, and if she was operated on, she would have to miss work for who knows how long. Not only would she be suddenly massively in debt, she could not work to pay it off. She is a single mom with a four year old child and an ex husband who is always five minutes away from becoming a domestic terrorist, and she has no help besides her friends and her boyfriend.

White middle- and upper-class feminist culture has decided that it is time to move away from things that still affect millions of (poor) women: healthcare, food, shelter. There are women who live in poverty despite how hard they work. They cannot go to the doctor until they are on death's doorstep; they struggle to put food on the table; they make ends meet any way they can. No wonder our mothers and grandmothers stayed with abusive men. There is no support system for women, especially when they are single mothers, and if you think there is, you had better realize real quick that not every poor feminist woman lives in an urban metropolis. Some live in rural red-stained Timbuktu with not so much as a whisper of a Planned Parenthood.

I cannot articulate the problems that poor feminists face better than Mikki Kendall, but I thought I would share my own anecdote because I have seen hood feminism. I have seen financially-stable feminists who do not know what it is like to be poor dismiss a poor woman's issues. I have another friend who often has trouble wrapping her head around the idea of not being able to go to the doctor because her parents still pay for that, and she is twenty-six. It is incredibly wonderful that she has parents who have the disposable income to pay for her even though she is older and still meandering her way through the world, but it is intensely important to recognize that kind of privilege. Not everyone has great parents, parents with money, or even parents at all. Not everyone lives in a liberal SoCal city with resources for young single mothers. The best some single mothers have is the local Salvation Army or homeless shelter, and if you are a trans woman, you might as well just not even bother (especially if you do not pass.)

White feminism has done what it does best, which is turn its back on poor people (specifically poor women of color.) White feminists may have been granted the right to vote in 1919, but Black women were not given their right to vote until 1964. If that is not a fantastic example of the discrepancy white feminism has placed in the feminist movement, I do not know what is. In fact, if you look up when women were allowed to vote on any search engine, the first answer will not specify white women. It will say nothing of Jim Crow America. It will not specify that only some women were granted the right to vote in 1919, and it implies that no, white feminism does not believe women of color are women.

The feminist movement is far from over. We need to turn our attention to the poor women who we have long neglected as a movement and begin to mend the racial and classist rifts that has divided the feminist movement since its birth.