It’s easy enough for white women (like Hillary Clinton) to assume that their concerns are sufficiently representative of all women’s concerns, because the whiteness of their womanhood often serves to center not only their conceptions of what it means to be a woman, but also their understanding of gender oppression, and the content of their feminist program of liberation.

Reflections on the Status of Continental Feminism

Philosophia, A Journal of Continental Feminism
Volume 7.1, Winter 2017

The last election cycle in the United States featured an unprecedented moment in history. For the first time in the life of the nation, a woman was the presidential nominee of a major political party. The feeling in my heart of hearts is that, because of the axis of race, Hillary Clinton’s political agenda and my own political priorities as a black woman may have nothing in common. Upon winning, her administration might have proven me wrong, but this is where I begin my encounter with her candidacy for. president. I begin with the assumption that, as a white woman, her fight is not my fight.  Perhaps my ambivalence is really less about the kind of president Hillary Clinton herself would have been, and more about the kind of feminism that I’ve come to reasonably expect from white women. It’s easy enough for white women (like Hillary Clinton) to assume that their concerns are sufficiently representative of all women’s concerns, because the whiteness of their womanhood often serves to center not only their conceptions of what it means to be a woman, but also their understanding of gender oppression, and the content of their feminist program of liberation. The black womanhood that arises  at the intersection of gender oppression and racial oppression may not figure into such accounts, precisely because, in being thus centered in terms of whiteness, these accounts remain blind to their own racialization.

Download Full Essay