What I Mean When I Say White Feminism Summary

To italicize, Lorde believes that it is not differences between races that separate women, but rather it is a “refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from…misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation” (Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” 115). By stressing the belief that the differences between women “are insurmountable barriers, or do not exist at all” (Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” 115), valuable cognition is wasted when it should be challenged towards dissecting the roots of difference, “[developing] new definitions of power[,] and [pioneering] new patterns of relating across difference” (Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” 123). Lorde surmises that “human difference

The ostracization of women of color is inherently “reinforced when [only Caucasian] women speak for and as women” (Crenshaw 154), an ingredient of the homogenous trend referred to as white feminism in mainstream media. In her piece “This Is What I Mean When I Say "White Feminism”, African American freelance writer Cate Young explicates the phrase white feminism in correspondence with Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality. Young delineates white feminism as a “specific set of single-issue, non-intersectional…feminist practices…that allows for the exclusion of issues that specifically affect women of color” (Young). According to Crenshaw, the values of white feminism do not take “the interaction of race and gender” (Crenshaw 140) into account of its mission for gender equality. Unfortunately, white feminism is the standard on which much of popular feminist theory is structured upon. Women of color are “theoretically erased” (Crenshaw 139) under the umbrella of white feminism, which treats “race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” (Crenshaw 139). Young communicates that white feminism fails to take into account Caucasian privilege and neglects the acknowledgement of “race as a factor in the struggle for equality” (Young), a claim substantiated by Crenshaw’s discussion of how the challenges faced by women of color are invalidated through the lack of discourse on their experiences in juxtaposition to the experiences of Caucasian