For those who identify as feminist, but have never questioned what it means to be white, it is likely the phrase white feminism applies. Those who perceive every critique of white-dominated politics to be an attack on them as a white person are probably part of the problem. When white feminists are ignorant on race, they don’t initially come from a place of malice – although their opposition can very quickly evolve into a frothing vitriol when challenged on their politics. Instead, I’ve learnt that they come from a place very similar to mine. We all grew up in a white-dominated world. This is the context that white feminists are working within, benefiting from and reproducing a system that they barely notice. However, their critical-analysis skills are pretty good at spotting exclusive systems, such as gender, that they don’t benefit from. They spout impassioned rhetoric against patriarchy with ease, feeling its sharp edge of injustice jutting them in the ribs at work in the form of unequal pay, and socially, hurled at them in the street in the form of catcalling. And they rightly say, ‘I’m sick of living in this world built for the needs of men! I feel like at best, I can fight it, at worst I have to learn to cope in it.’ Yet they’re incredibly defensive when the same analysis of race is levelled at their whiteness. You’d have to laugh, if the whole thing wasn’t so reprehensible.
When they talk about equal rights and representation, white feminists deeply mean it. They can be witty, intelligent, eloquent and insightful on issues like reproductive rights, street harassment, sexual violence, beauty standards, body image, and women’s representation in the media. These are issues that so many women can strongly resonate with and relate to. It tends to be white women who find themselves representing feminism in the press, talking about it on television or the radio, enthusing about it in magazines.
It helps that the white women espousing feminist politics in the public sphere are conventionally attractive with enough of a quirk that renders them relatable to the everyday woman. They have chubby thighs or gappy teeth. They have bodies that are far from the supermodel standard that we’ve come to hold all women in the public eye to. This is refreshing, we shout. These women look like us. These women are real. These women are women’s women. These women are not afraid to say what they think. In an age of Twitter followings and YouTube subscriber counts, it’s also about personal branding and burgeoning careers. So we click, and like, and follow.
Being a feminist with a race analysis means seeing clearly how race and gender are intertwined when it comes to inequalities. Looking at the politics of race in this country, I can see how an entitlement towards white British women’s bodies plays out in what is being said. 2066 is the year white people will supposedly become a minority in Britain. Oxford Professor David Coleman is the man who estimated that date. In 2016, he wrote in a Daily Mail article – framed around the issue of Brexit: ‘women born overseas contributed 27 per cent of all live births in 2014, and 33 per cent of births had at least one immigrant parent – a figure which has more than doubled since the 1990s.’11 The article was titled, ‘RIP This Britain: With academic objectivity, Oxford Professor and population expert David Coleman says white Britons could be in the minority by the 2060s – or sooner’.
I think it’s easy to see how those who espouse white nationalist politics could take these figures and run with them, and insist that the year 2066 will mark Britain’s doomsday. It looks like there is a subtle ethno-nationalism in this discussion, almost worthy of The Handmaid’s Tale. It seems to be a racialised misogyny that is preoccupied with wombs, and urges white British women to fuck for their country while accusing women who aren’t white British of breeding uncontrollably and destabilising the essence of Britain.
Despite this pernicious narrative, there are quarters of British society who maintain that misogyny is somehow the reserve of foreigners. Never in a million years did I think I’d hear former Prime Minister David Cameron call out the ills of a patriarchal society. When, in 2012 and 2013, British women’s groups such as the Fawcett Society and the Women’s Budget Group did the laborious maths to argue that the government’s austerity agenda was hitting women the hardest, David Cameron and his party barely responded. It was interesting, then, that when Mr Cameron finally uttered the words ‘patriarchal society’ almost three years later, it was to lay out government plans of an ultimatum policy that demanded Muslim women who were living in the UK on a spousal visa either learn English, or face deportation.
‘Look, I’m not blaming the people who can’t speak English,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. ‘Some of these people have come to our country [from] quite sort of patriarchal societies, where perhaps the menfolk haven’t wanted them to learn English, haven’t wanted them to integrate.’ He continued, ‘What we’ve found in some of the work we’ve done is . . . [a]? school governors’ meeting where the men sit in the meeting and the women have to sit outside, [and] women who aren’t allowed to leave their home without a male relative. This is happening in our country and it’s not acceptable. We should be very proud of our values, our liberalism, our tolerance, our idea that we want to build a genuine opportunity democracy . . . where there is segregation it’s holding people back, it’s not in tune with British values and it needs to go.’12
Speaking on national radio, Cameron let it be known that alongside dedicated funding for Muslim women in what he called ‘isolated communities’ to learn English, the plans would also come with compulsory language tests for these women within two and a half years of them arriving in Britain. As surreal as it was to hear David Cameron challenging a patriarchal society, it wasn’t surprising that his idea of patriarchy was described in direct opposition to our own advanced, so-called egalitarian and meritocratic British sense of self.
When we tell ourselves that misogyny is simply an import from overseas, we are saying that it’s just not a problem here. David Cameron probably shouldn’t be too quick to insinuate that extreme misogyny is a foreign import to the British Isles. When the Office of National Statistics shows that, on average, seven women a month in England and Wales are murdered by a current or former partner,13 and 85,000 women are raped in England and Wales alone every year,14 we know that this is simply not the case. Misogyny is not a problem that can be solved with closed borders, nor a crash course in Received Pronunciation. It exists in the psyche of what it means to be a man in every country.
Despite this truth, it was the idea that multiculturalism brings with it a corrosive sexism and misogyny that was touted after mass sexual assaults took place on New Year’s Eve of 2015 in Cologne, Germany. The same angle emerged when a child sexual exploitation ring run by Asian men was uncovered in Rotherham, south Yorkshire, in 2013. In 2012 and 2013, the phrase ‘Asian sex gang’ occupied what seemed like a million headlines. The far right loves this Asian sex-gang angle. To them, the women are their property, the women are ‘ours’. But the reality is that if every Asian man left the country, child sexual exploitation on British Isles would not go away.
There is a race aspect to these incidents that can’t be ignored, and acknowledging this doesn’t invalidate any condemnation of grooming, abuse and misogyny. A lot of the time, being a black feminist situates you between a rock and a hard place, challenging the racism you see targeted at black and brown people and also challenging the patriarchy around you. And while the endless tug of war of political debate demands clear rights and wrongs, this topic desperately requires nuance.