• White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind by Koa Beck

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• "Like a lot of oppressive precepts, white feminism is a belief system more so than being about any one person, white, female, or otherwise. It's a specific way of viewing gender equality that is anchored in the accumulation of individual power rather than the redistribution of it. It can be practiced by anyone, of any race, background, allegiance, identity, or affiliation. White feminism is a state of mind. It's a type of feminism that takes up the politics of power without questioning them — by replicating patterns of white supremacy, capitalistic greed, corporate ascension, inhumane labor practices, and exploitation, and deeming it empowering for women to practice these tenets as men always have."

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• " 'In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line, but I can't seem to get there no-how. I can't seem to get over that line.' --
• Well beyond apt criticisms of structural inequality, (Viola) Davis's echoing of (Harriet) Tubman's quote has always stayed with me. Not just for using the very public opportunity to acknowledge fundamental differences between white and Black women, but for implicating that there is a place that we are trying to get to together. That white women and other disenfranchised genders are making efforts to get to one another. And yet, that common place continues to evade us — despite the 'beautiful white women with their arms stretched out' and the promise of the 'green fields and lovely flowers.'
• It's a haunting image, particularly because I've often interpreted Tubman's description of the white women as beckoning to her — of saying that they've made space for her, that they want her with them. I've felt that too. That the white women or white-aspiring women I've worked with or been on panels with or who I've interviewed or who have interviewed me ultimately want me to join them. They want me to feel like I belong with them.
• But it's been significant to me that Tubman's description of this dynamic begins and ends with the 'line.' I know this line so well, this fundamental halt in conversation or space where you get quiet or I get quiet and we don't really see each other anymore. We just see that we're different. That's the line. That we've experienced gender in such completely, almost opposing, ways and we often seek to invalidate each other's experiences by asserting our own.
• I used to spend a lot of my professional life trying to get to the other side of the line — often by trying to code and recode these realities in ways that white straight women would respond to. --
• But I feel a certain intimate understanding for Tubman's description of ultimately not getting there. There's an echoing to her disappointment of 'can't... get there no-how' that I know in my own way, in my own century, from my own vantage point — when white feminists deny that this history is valid, refuse that they have perpetuated these patterns in this particular way, oppose examples, explanations, or even questions.
• I've often taken this disappointment inward, running through alternative language I could have used or different approaches I could have taken. -- But the ideological divide is still often something I can't cross.
• And somewhere along my career specifically, I've reread Tubman's imagery and deciphered that I'm not actually supposed to. The reason that I can't get over the line is that it's not for me; it's for you. You need to come to me.
• Where white feminism begins is precisely where white feminism will end: with the people who uphold it. It's by their hands that this ideology will either endure, evolving with another wave of feminism and gender rights, or dying out among other practices. White feminists will be the ones who decide how long we will keep playing to these historical scripts and when we will stop mythologizing that we are all aligned in the same way under the same power.
• We won't wait for them. Many of us have long ago built our own feminisms, our own movements, our own strategies for pulling apart what subjugates us, and we will continue those legacies with or without their efforts.
• But to them, I say that we have green fields and lovely flowers and our arms stretched out."