Author Koa Beck discusses her new book White Feminism

As editor-in-chief of Jezebel from 2017 to 2018, Koa Beck frequently sat on panels about feminism, during which she said she was often asked the same question: “But what about white feminism?”

One of the things that she always wanted to convey in response to that question, she told The FBomb in early February, is that “there is a long history” of the dynamic of white feminists making comments that can be “intensely personal” and “extremely denigrating” to nonwhite feminists. These types of interactions, Beck added, “originated with the women's movement in the United States itself.”

After witnessing how the years of the Trump administration were a boon to the type of feminist movement exemplified by the Women’s March and viral #MeToo social media campaign, Beck said she noticed a “real need” to convey these developments against a historical backdrop. She got the opportunity in 2019, when she left Jezebel and received the Joan Shorenstein Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School. Beck said the fellowship gave her the time to work exclusively on her investigation into that question she’d received from so many young audience members.

The resulting project is White Feminism: From The Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind. Beck’s book reflects white feminism for what it really is: a strategy for gender equality that’s shaped by colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy.

“I really want people to walk away from this book with an enhanced understanding of feminisms — plural,” Beck said. “There has never been a singular feminism, ever. There has never been a default feminism. There have been many feminisms, many gendered movements, and they have very complex and rich strategies towards achieving gender equality.”

While some have called the release of her book “timely,” Beck points out that other scholars have previously invoked these ideas before. Beck considers her work to be a library of gendered experiences for the reader to learn from: “I would like to think that White Feminism engages with the archives of gendered experiences in this country.”

Beck juxtaposes the approaches of many feminisms — Black, Native American, Muslim, LGBTQIA — with the values of white feminism, and shows through a collection of narratives that while other feminist movements seek to overcome systemic oppression as an assembled body, white feminism is imbued with individuality. Ego is the mechanism of white feminism, according to Beck.

In this version of feminism, progress is anchored in capitalistic acts — like investing savings, paying for a membership to feminist communal spaces like the Wing, and purchasing “The Future Is Female” shirts to claim feminism as one’s own, Beck writes. Icons à la Sophia Amoruso and Sheryl Sandberg perpetuate the white feminist ego through messaging of the #GIRLBOSS and “leaning in.” This one-size-fits-all ideology is aimed at what Beck writes to be “the accumulation of individual power” as so-called progress.

“Even collective actions have to be translated into directly personal gains,” Beck said. The result is the dominating theory that people with enough capital to steer their self-optimization — typically wealthy white women — are seen by society as successfully improving the lives of all women.

“Money is what propels a lot of images of white feminism and money is the threshold, a lot of times, by which you can participate in white feminism,” Beck said. “For other [gender] movements that are led by Chicanas or Black lesbian feminists, a lot of queer movements, they remove money as a barrier and are very critical of money functioning as a barrier to participate in spaces for equal rights.”

This monied feminism has a “sanitizing” effect, Beck said, and has pushed nonwhite feminisms to the edges of the gender equality conversation for decades. The roots of what Beck calls “polishing” lay with the U.S. women’s suffrage movement, when white women took it upon themselves to determine the best path to progress for all female people.

Beck exemplifies this in her book by telling the story of Clara González, a feminist from Panama who advocated in 1928 for the concerns of Cuban feminists to be on the agenda for the first Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW), an unprecedented global meeting of feminists. Although American suffragist Doris Stevens was eager to pose and publish photos of herself performing feminism with González, Stevens cleansed the IACW’s agenda of topics that would really matter to Latin American feminists, such as economic conditions for female sugar workers. In the end, González pulled out from the commission.

Beck said her own career in women’s media has mirrored this sanitizing effect. She writes that pitches from herself or other writers involving overlooked gender experiences (nonwhite, noncisgender) in articles were often met with colleagues’ looks or comments shrouded in white feminism. That is, other feminisms rippled the delicately layered white feminism dictating the magazine/website/newspaper’s coverage, which is inherently controlled by what “sells” clicks to advertisers. Anything that tears apart that guise risks not only real accountability, but also a loss of money.

A fair warning about White Feminism is that it will become impossible for any reader to un-see white feminism’s sanitization once they follow Beck through her carefully curated archive.

Take the litany of headlines about the thousands of women who have left the U.S. labor force due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The media coverage has been centered around women losing or opting out of paying work for unpaid work. Revolving the conversation of women’s progress around getting paid or not indicates a white feminist way of thinking, Beck said.

“Women's equality is being directly, but in other ways indirectly, quantified as having white-collar positions or founding white-collar businesses or having work outside the home,” Beck said. “That’s what gender progress is being stapled to. And that is a very white feminist approach to understanding gender oppression.”

It’s by giving so much page space to these other feminisms in her project that Beck makes her ultimate point: In order to undo the roots of white feminism society has planted, she directs us to learn and see alternative feminisms.

Author Sara Ahmed writes in Living a Feminist Life that “if talking about racism within feminism gets in the way of feminist happiness, we need to get in the way of feminist happiness.” Beck opens White Feminism with this quote in order to signal the trouble she’s about to stir — as if to say, “This book will self-destruct.”

The book’s reason for being is not the presence of white feminism itself, but, in fact, the thoughtfully curated bibliography of other feminisms Beck cites. Beck's goal is to make the reader notice what progress looks like in the absence of white feminism.

“A trick that I was able to pull off with this book is that I drew you in with an ideological examination of white feminism,” Beck said. “I have left you with many other movements and with a richer understanding of gender and gender history.”

Perhaps that same self-optimizing version of feminism is the very reason a reader purchases Beck’s book — the white and pink cover emboldened with the word “feminism” in big text signals the perfect product for a woman seeking to stage herself a revolution. But by the final chapter, the very feminism for which the reader bought the book has been dismantled before their eyes.