“I am a strong person; I am a flawed person. What I am not is superhuman. Nor am I a Strong Black WomanTM.” With this sentence, from the introduction to Hood Feminism, Mikki Kendall lays down the gauntlet. There will be no reverence here, no tiptoeing around mainstream feminism’s dreams, no grateful acceptance of a black space that is in the gift of white proprietors. From the start, the author is forthright about her purpose and role – she is the sort of feminist who is here to unsettle.
And her intervention is timely. We have been stuck for years now in a rinse-and-repeat cycle of feminism as privilege laundering, where middle-class white feminists work through their gender grievances via the “girl boss” T-shirt, the “I’m a feminist” necklace and battles on social media. Or as Kendall, an American writer, puts it, “last names, body hair and the best way to be a CEO”. Her book brings it back to the real world, where feminism is about “food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighbourhoods, a living wage and medical care”. Kendall uses both anecdote and analysis to make her case. Her survival after her abusive marriage and the raising of her son in poverty were both underwritten by a public service support network that is fast disappearing, and which needs to be revived as a specifically feminist priority rather than simply an economic one.
Kendall’s voice is passionate, and moves easily between the personal and the political. She is at her strongest and most refreshing when rejecting the fetishisation of black women for being strong or fierce or the embodiment of “black girl magic”. Black girls aren’t magic, they aren’t to be reduced to sassy gifs. They are not Beyoncé, or Serena Williams. They are everyday people, navigating treacherous territory and often taking risks with no safety net.
Running through Kendall’s work is the notion that “solidarity is for white women”, the name of a campaign she started in 2013. It sounds divisive (and has been accused of being so), but look closer and it’s obvious what Kendall and others mean when they identify cliques and exclusivity among white feminists. They seek not to eject white women from the movement, of course, but to point out how those women, because of their platforms and access, bury the needs of others. Kendall cites as an example the fact that concern about rape culture in the US focuses on the date rape of suburban teens, and not the much higher rate of sexual assault faced by, for instance, indigenous and Alaskan women.
Kendall is often unsparing and honest about issues that aren’t related to racism, pointing out that colourism among black communities predated contact with Europeans. In doing so she pulls off two things at the same time. She exposes the yawning chasm between what constitutes mainstream feminist activism and the urgent needs of women of colour in maternity wards, single-mother households, abusive homes, hungry families – and those of disfranchised trans people and sex workers. And she does so without absolving her own communities, or elevating them into saintly victimhood.
Lola Olufemi’s Feminism Interrupted seems also to be a book about the excision of non-white battles from feminism. Yet at its heart it is about the failure of imagination. “Because we imagine state power as inevitable,” she writes, “it seems ludicrous to think about another way we might organise.” Olufemi, a British writer, identifies the state as an arm of patriarchy. She points out that 57% of women in prison are survivors of domestic abuse, and that universal credit benefits are paid into the account of the highest household earner, usually a man – making women even more vulnerable to abusive partners. But women of colour suffer twice, as the state can also be racist, as evidenced by the black women discussed here who essentially died at its hand: shot by accident, neglected in poor mental or physical health until they took their own lives or died of illness.
Olufemi shows how women of colour as victims are readily pressed into service to serve causes but then excluded from activism, and its spoils. The abortion referendum in Ireland, for example, leaned heavily on the cases of two women of colour, but there is little mobilisation for the rest of the maternal experience of women of colour. She points to those middle-class feminists who make much of Muslim women as needing saving from a system of oppression that is “other”, without recognising that oppression is everywhere: in the UK, two women a week are killed by a partner or former partner. Olufemi argues that mainstream feminism is too often obsessed by personal choices: she refers, as others have, to the mind-numbing genre of articles that pose the question: “Can you be a feminist and … ?”. This frippery turns questions of agency into ones of pleasure, of entitlement, of being worth it.
Olufemi takes her feminism so seriously that sometimes it compromises her authorial tone, rendering it drily determined; her work sometimes reads like a military pamphlet. But she makes up for it in optimism, looking ahead to a feminism that includes the experiences of all women. Reading her is to believe that another world is possible.
• Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall is published by Bloomsbury (RRP £16.99) and Feminism Interrupted by Lola Olufemi is published by Pluto (RRP £9.99). To order copies go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
