Western Feminism: The Only Feminism?

        When reading "What Happens When Your Hood Is the Last Stop on the White Flight Express" by Taigi Smith, I couldn't help but notice a recurring theme of a feminism that accommodates women of color that was also present in "It's not an Oxymoron: The Search for Arab Feminism" by Susan Muaddi Darraj. Smith and Darraj went through very similar situations in discussing their first experiences of encountering western feminism and realizing that this type of feminism would not accommodate them as women of color. Smith states "I started calling myself a womanist while attending Mills College in Oakland, California. ... Many of the white women at mills who called themselves feminists didn't understand my experience as a black woman," (Smith 61). This was very similar to Darraj's experience when sitting in a feminist theory class in college surrounded by white women who called themselves feminists but were blinded by their ethnocentric ideals and their narrow-minded beliefs that to be a feminist you had to be just like them. The tone of white Western feminism was a responsibility to "save" women of different cultures from their oppression because they weren’t exactly like them. Both Darraj and Smith acknowledged the completely ethnocentric views on women by Western feminism and was baffled by this movement that was supposed to represent a “global sisterhood of women” (Darraj 298) but instead isolated any views that didn’t coincide with those of white Western women. Feminism became a view that was based on primarily Western ideals and failed to acknowledge the different ideals that women of different cultures held.

        Both Darraj and Smith also touch upon the idea of white privilege in the sense that white people are able to go into other nations, or neighborhoods and destroy people's cultures simply due to the fact that because they are white they believe they have the right to "save" people from their "backwards" ideals and find it necessary to white-wash or westernize anything they touch. Darraj discusses the blatant racism of Western nations claiming it their duty and responsibility to go into the Middle East and "save" the poor, oppressed women who veil themselves or wear Hijab. This is very similar to Smith's discussion of gentrification as she writes "To act as if our neighborhood is something that they needed to "clean up" or "take back" is insulting," (Smith 61). The concept of white privilege is extremely evident in both texts as both authors struggle within themselves as their cultures are being stripped away from them by white people who use the blatant joke of an excuse that they are merely saving them. I enjoyed reading this work as the similarities to "It's not an Oxymoron: The Search for Arab Feminism" by Susan Muaddi Darraj, jumped right out at me.

The Damage of Backhanded Compliments

It is Bigger Than Microaggressions by Kortney Ziegler, Ziegler touches upon many issues such as racism, classism, and sexism in the Tech industry as well as the struggles that he had to face as a black transgender man working in this industry. However, another thing that Ziegler touches upon are a certain type of microaggression known as a backhanded compliments. Of course backhanded compliments are something that the average person has to deal with very often but it takes on a whole new meaning when it is ignorant backhanded compliments in the transgender community. In this article Ziegler tells the story of an instance where he met up with a longtime twitter pal whose work he had followed across the years and the backhanded compliments that he recieved from her-- she said that he "looked more like a real man in person than in my avi."It is this type of ignorance that transgender people must face all the time and when reading about Ziegler's experience I couldn't help but relate this to someone else I know who is a male-to-female transgendered woman who speaks all about her struggle being a trans woman on youtube, go goes by the username "gigigorgeous." Many times on social media when gigi posts a picture of herself, or a selfie is you will, she is bombarded with backhanded compliments by people who legitimately think what they are saying is nice, and even worse socially correct. The types of compliments you see are things such as "You're so pretty for a man!," and "I can't believe this dude is prettier than me." And although the people who are saying these things think that they are genuinely nice compliments and that Gigi should be flattered they don't understand the ignorance that they are putting forth and not realizing that although they think that they are being accepting towards the transgendered community, their "compliments" are backwards and show nothing more than transphobia. To associate a transgendered woman as a man even after their transition and not being able to look past the gender that they were born with is nothing more than blatant disrespect for the struggle that they had to deal with. Ziegler also touches on this when he says "Though my Twitter friend followed my work, her comments implied that my expression of masculinity was not up to par — a slight that refuses to acknowledge me as real and instead as a gender imposter." These backhanded compliments are doing exactly this-- refusing to acknowledge a transgender woman as a woman, or a transgender man as a man and in a sense insulting their gender identity in not being able to consider them a "real" man or woman. The moral of this story is to think before you open your mouth because certain things that you consider compliments can be seen as horrible insults and the ignorance can be very damaging to the person you are "complimenting"