AGAINST WHITE FEMINISM

RAFIA ZAKARIA

Hamish Hamilton, 206pp, £14.99 Rafia Zakaria’s polemical book about the sins of white feminists who haven’t checked their privilege was received less than enthusiastically by white feminist reviewers. Interviewed by the Guardian, Zakaria laid it on the line: ‘I don’t think white women are truly aware of how uncomfortable other women feel, how much they have to edit themselves, how fed up they are.’ In the Sunday Times, veteran second-waver Joan Smith disliked Zakaria’s determination to look for divisions, calling it an ‘attack that goes for the jugular’, with a ‘sketchy’ grasp of argument and history. Smith went on: ‘Defining people in terms they would not recognise or accept is a key ploy of identity politics, and feminists are lumped together and traduced throughout.’ The author’s ‘singularly ill-informed account of modern feminism’ was particularly jarring: ‘When I see feminists pitted against each other in this mean-spirited way, I can almost hear the patriarchy laughing.’

The Washington Post’s Mythili Rao was also dismayed by the book’s blanket generalisations (and its author’s tendency to employ pseudoacademic jargon): ‘At times it’s as if the sins of White feminism – which can be seen in everything from United Nations commitments to Sex and the

City plotlines to Virginia Slims advertisements – are too vast to number. But Rao concluded her review by conceding that the heart of what the book demands – ‘a feminism that is less self-satisfied and secure in its power, more curious about the differences in women’s experiences and more generous and expansive in its reach’ – is worth fighting for.