Afghan women: Against White Feminism (video)

Mitch Jeserich, Letters & Politics; Amber Larson, Dhr. Seven, A. Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Who is that remarkable green-eyed "Afghan girl"? It is the Pashtun/Aryan Sharbat Gula

Afghan children attend school in the Marawara district, 2020 (Lorenzo Tugnoli/Washington Post)

The Biggest American F*ck Ups That Screwed Afghanistan (thedailybeast.com)

US loves its state killers...until they get home.

What have "the Americans" (the US military-industrial complex that serves empire in our name) done for females in Afghanistan? Not much of anything but promoting hegemony and a big lie about saving girls. Guest author Rafia Zakaria explains. She is a human rights attorney, American Muslim, political philosopher, and journalist. She is the author of her latest book, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption and The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan.

• Resurrecting Afghanistan: Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed (Rafia Zakaria/The Daily Beast)
• Huge corporate profits for US war profiteers (The Intercept)

Taliban says it will be more tolerant toward females. Some fear otherwise (MSN.com)

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Against White Feminism

Against White Feminism (Rafia Zakaria)

This book is a radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights.

Upper-middle-class white women have long been heralded as “experts” on feminism. They have presided over multinational feminist organizations and written much of what we consider the feminist canon.

They espouse sexual satisfaction and liberation, LGBTQ inclusion, and racial solidarity, all while branding the language of the movement itself in whiteness and speaking over Black and Brown women in an effort to uphold privilege and perceived cultural superiority.

An American Muslim woman, attorney, and political philosopher, Rafia Zakaria champions a reconstruction of feminism in Against White Feminism, centering women of color in this book.

It is a transformative overview and counter-manifesto to white feminism’s global, long-standing affinity with colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist ideals.

The Dark Defile: Britain's Invasion of Afghan...

It covers such ground as the legacy of the British feminist imperialist savior complex and “the colonial thesis that all reform comes from the West” to the condescension of the white feminist-led “aid industrial complex.”

It also covers the conflation of sexual liberation as the “sum total of empowerment,” as Zakaria follows in the tradition of intersectional feminist forebears Kimberlé Crenshaw, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde.

Zakaria ultimately refutes and reimagines the apolitical aspirations of white feminist empowerment in this staggering, radical critique, with Black and Brown feminist thought at the forefront.

RAFIA ZAKARIA: director of Amnesty Int'l USA, columnist for DAWN, writer, PhD candidate in political philosophy featured in NY Times, Dissent, The Progressive, Guernica, and on Al Jazeera English, BBC, KPFA Berkeley, The Hindu, NPR.