Hood Feminism summary

Has feminism ever really been about supporting all women?

Far too often, the movement has focused only on the needs and concerns of privileged women. Disadvantaged women have seldom truly had their voices heard.

Mikki Kendall’s view is that this needs to be broadened by reconsidering what issues should be at the heart of the feminist agenda. These issues include everything from alleviating poverty to ensuring people have the right to vote. Because feminism isn’t truly speaking for women until it’s speaking for all women.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

• how the experience of poverty affects you for life;
• what it’s like to be told you’re “fast” before you know what it means; and
• why it’s not always good news when women reach positions of power.

Around 42 million Americans suffer from hunger on a regular basis. As more than 70 percent of Americans who live below the poverty line are women and children, that means that millions of women and children deal with food insecurity every day.

The author struggled to feed herself and her child while studying for her college degree. She made it through, and now lives comfortably – but she doesn’t look back at the experience as an inspirational story of overcoming the odds. Rather, she recalls the hunger she felt, and the tears she cried when she couldn’t afford a Christmas tree.

Hunger and poverty affect you for life, as so many American women of color know. Yet feminism hasn’t addressed these issues effectively. It needs to do better.

This is the key message: Progressive thinking often overlooks the realities of poverty.

When it comes to food policy, some supposedly progressive thinking actually makes life harder for those already struggling – women, children, and men, too. Soda taxes, which exist in various US cities, are an example. Taxing sugary drinks is intended to combat unhealthy diets – but the reality is that, for many families, soda is the least-bad affordable option.

Water isn't necessarily safe to drink in some US cities – most infamously Flint, Michigan. And, in the recent past, other affordable drinks have been found to contain mold and fungicides. In some cases, soda may seem like a family’s safest bet.

Housing is another issue in which women of color may lose out to white women. Because of the gender pay gap, white women are less able than white men to compete in the property market. That means that white women may move to less-desirable areas, which can contribute to their gentrification. This process can force people of color out of once-affordable areas. It’s a textbook case of how what’s good for white women isn’t necessarily good for all women.

The wealth gap that women face can also put them at risk of eviction or even homelessness – situations that don’t just affect women, but any children they’re raising, too. Housing affects whole families, not individuals. But feminism often glosses over the whole thing.

Poverty makes you focus on survival. That doesn’t mean buying a house or shopping for organic food – it means keeping the electricity on and feeding your family. Women in that situation still deserve support – from feminists, from politicians, from everyone.

Like many others, Kendall was called a “fast-tailed girl” when she was growing up – before she even knew what it meant. The only thing she understood was this: being a fast-tailed girl was bad.

In theory, a fast-tailed – or simply “fast” – girl is sexually precocious. But Black girls often get called “fast” long before they’ve even had the chance to be. Family members or neighbors might call you fast simply for talking to boys or wearing makeup – or even for experiencing early puberty. That alone can be enough to convince people that you’re heading down the wrong track.

Which means that if you end up being sexually assaulted, people tell you it’s your fault.

The key message here is: When growing up under poverty, Black girls are seldom given the support they need.

When older women caution teenagers about being “fast,” they mean it protectively, as a warning about the dangers girls may encounter. But that warning reinforces the idea that someone apart from the attacker is at fault in sexual assault. In other words, it’s victim-blaming.

This is a serious problem. Research has shown that between 40 and 60 percent of Black girls in the US suffer sexual abuse before they turn 18. And they don’t receive enough support after revealing abuse. Many government programs encourage teenage girls of color to avoid pregnancy and to obtain professional skills – but far too little is done to help them cope with the damaging situations so many face.

You might think that schools would represent a place of safety for Black girls, but they often don’t. Teachers are hardly immune to bias, and students who are Black and Latinx are particularly likely to be on the receiving end of that bias. What’s worse, school punishments can slip with worrying ease from detention or suspension to actual criminal charges. And of course, once police are involved – as they are increasingly often – students of color tend to suffer disproportionately.

Does placing police officers in schools make schools safer? It certainly increases a student’s chance of getting a criminal record. And Black students in particular risk experiencing brutality – as proven by video footage from several US cities showing school officers body-slamming Black girls.

Educators may be claiming they want to safeguard schools – but who are they really protecting? Whose futures are truly likely to benefit? This is just one more way in which society is failing young women of color.

Long before they called her a fast-tailed girl, Kendall’s family were trying to shape her appearance. When she was just three, an aunt tried to “fix” her hair with a lye relaxer – a powerful chemical meant to change her hair’s basic structure. It burned her head and left her in tears.

That wasn’t the end of it. Kendall’s hair wasn’t allowed to grow naturally until she was 17.

Her family was delighted by one aspect of Kendall’s appearance, though: she was light-skinned.

Here’s the key message: Body image issues affect Black girls in particular.

It’s a curious fact that, in the US, the same skin tone might lead to privilege in one community, and oppression in another – but that, in a nutshell, is colorism. Dark-skinned people have it worst, of course: they’ve long faced particular discrimination, whether in the form of worse career prospects, higher arrest rates, or longer prison sentences. It’s no wonder, then, that bleaching creams are so popular, even though they can be hugely damaging to health.

Feminism does talk about beauty culture, but mostly about the male gaze – the way women and the world are depicted from a masculine heterosexual perspective – rather than about the particular challenges Black women face.

Feminism talks about eating disorders, too – but again, there seems to be an assumption that it’s mainly white women who are affected. That’s not the case at all. After all, it’s girls of color who have to grow up in a society that’s constantly telling them that white women are the ideal.

The author herself still has an eating disorder that started in high school. Back then, people seldom noticed it. Losing weight is usually something you’re congratulated for, especially if you’re Black. These days, Kendall’s disorder is largely under control, but it hasn’t truly gone away. Stress still puts a strain on her eating habits.

The truth is, many girls of color struggle with problems like Kendall’s – but people aren’t looking out for these issues like they do with white girls. And if a girl of color’s eating disorder is caused by, say, post-traumatic stress disorder, it’s quite possible that neither condition will be noticed or treated.

As the “strong Black woman” cliché remains widespread, perhaps it’s no surprise that Black girls’ vulnerabilities so often get overlooked. But this is simply not acceptable. Feminism has a particular duty to understand better how these kinds of issues truly affect women and girls of color.

Some bedrock feminist issues seem universal. But they often look quite different if you don’t come from a privileged background.

Consider domestic issues. When Kendall was eight, her uncle, who was drunk, came to her family home – with a gun. He was trying to intimidate her aunt into settling a debt, and he’d picked that evening because he knew Kendall’s grandfather would be out – only women would be in the house. Kendall’s aunt managed to fend him off, but the incident stayed with the author.

That sort of experience affects your priorities. As a mother, Kendall cared about providing her child with a safe environment – but she understood better than most more privileged parents what basic safety and security really meant.

The key message here is: The debate around parenting and reproductive rights looks very different from the hood.

When money is short, parenting is especially hard.

To an outsider, the effects of poverty can look like neglect. But there’s a world of difference. When you earn less than you need to get by, tough choices are inevitable. There’s no positive solution – you simply have to make the best of it.

Faced with that sort of reality, it’s a privilege even to have the sorts of debates about organic food or boycotting certain stores that tend to absorb white feminists.

Reproductive rights, another foundational feminist issue that often intersects with poverty, are also complicated by matters of race. Kendall herself had an abortion to save her life when a pregnancy developed serious problems. She later wrote about her experience and received months’ worth of abuse from pro-life campaigners.

That’s not a surprise; the shock was that white pro-choice campaigners didn’t realize that being Black put Kendall at greater risk. They invited her to speak at rallies and even testify before Congress – but barely listened when she told them that, unlike them, she couldn’t trust the police or the legal system to protect her against threats.

Reproductive rights also deal with more than abortion. In the US, Black women’s risk of dying during pregnancy is 243 percent higher than white women’s. There’s also the alarmingly recent history of forced sterilizations in the US. From 1970 to ’76, almost half of indigenous women were sterilized. And allegedly, almost 150 female inmates in prisons in California were sterilized as recently as 2006 to ’10.

These issues tend to affect those who have the least – so they badly need the support of the privileged.

How should issues of sexual or gendered violence be addressed? Some feminists believe the answer lies primarily with the police and justice system, and they assume that perpetrators will be arrested and punished, while the victims will receive justice. This is known as carceral feminism.

But does it work? Too often, it’s assumed that once a woman has reported a problem, it’s effectively been dealt with – justice will be done. The reality, however, is that involving law enforcement often doesn’t help matters at all. In fact, women frequently find themselves facing even more trauma. Especially if they’re women of color.

This is the key message: Policing and law enforcement reassure white feminists, but not people of color.

Even what we think of as the best-case outcome of reporting abuse can have negative effects. If an abusive domestic partner ends up in jail, the victim may find herself with no income. Abuse survivors may not be able to go to work right away – but the welfare system doesn’t recognize this adequately. Abused women may well end up facing a new threat: poverty.

There’s also the fact that any woman who fights back runs the risk of being prosecuted herself. Consider the case of CeCe McDonald, a trans woman who managed to defend herself against an attack. She tried to run away after she was assaulted with a glass to the face, but her abuser caught up with her and she stabbed him in self-defense. She ended up imprisoned for second-degree manslaughter.

And those are just the women who survive. Statistics regarding murders and disappearances are stark. Black Americans account for around 34 percent of all missing persons, when they only comprise 13 percent of the population. The lack of attention paid to such cases means that the people are often found through appeals on social media.

Indigenous women face even worse odds. The Urban Indian Health Institute found that 5,712 indigenous women were reported missing in 2016 – but the Department of Justice logged just 116. In some places, the murder rate for indigenous women is more than ten times higher than the average across the US.

Evidently, carceral feminism is not always enough. Abusers will keep abusing – they’ll just make sure to target the women least likely to receive support. What we need is real feminist solidarity that is not bound by race. Communities of women must support each other.

Kendall, like many others, finds it disturbing that so many white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016. But the truth is that decades’ worth of problematic presidential candidates has consistently attracted plenty of support from white voters of both sexes.

And what’s more, women who have themselves risen to high public office have often used their platforms to argue for conservative causes that ultimately hurt women.

Here’s the key message: Some white women have done harmful things from platforms that feminism helped them reach.

You’ve already heard about the ways in which white women often gain where women of color lose out. But this isn’t just a passive thing: white women actively participate in it. It’s all too easy to assume that if a woman is in a position of power, that’s a good thing for women everywhere – but it doesn’t always play out like that.

Think of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, for instance, supporting the platform’s position on the alt-right, or Phyllis Schlafly campaigning against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Then there’s Megyn Kelly, who lost her job at NBC after staunchly supporting blackface. Earlier, while working at Fox News, she had actually received praise from feminists for calling out Donald Trump over his use of misogynistic language. But was she really an ally? Far from it.

People often say the solution to all this is to vote for the right candidate at election time. But that’s often easier said than done – and not only because the options on the ballot aren’t always great. White American women may have gained the right to vote in 1920, but lawmakers today are still working hard to suppress the vote, especially for people of color, in certain areas.

Once this was done through literacy tests and poll taxes, which deterred Black and indigenous potential voters. These days, some states use voter ID requirements to the same effect, and have also reduced the number of polling stations.

Women of color haven’t always had great choices at the ballot box, but the situation is worsened if they can’t even get to that ballot box. Voting rights for everyone should be a key feminist issue.

It’s so easy to look at things as they currently stand and feel angry. And, to be honest, that emotion is often justified.

After all, how are you meant to feel if the police kill your child, or your water supply is poisoned? It’s inhumane to expect people to keep cool heads when they suffer like that.

Anger gets bad press – especially when it’s the anger of Black women. But the truth is that anger can be used for good. It may not leave people thinking you’re nice or polite, but when it comes to getting things done, being angry is often far more effective than being pleasant.

It’s certainly a step forward from simply identifying yourself as an “ally,” which has become a convenient way to express support for disadvantaged people without doing anything.

The key message here is: Being an ally isn’t enough – you have to be an accomplice.

Accomplice feminists are committed to action rather than words – action that challenges white supremacy wherever they encounter it. And they stand up for marginalized communities even when they don’t have a direct stake in those communities themselves.

Being an accomplice isn’t easy. When an issue doesn’t affect you directly, it can be a lot harder to understand its importance – and if you think you’re an ally, you can often end up blind to your own biases. Allyship can often get confused with saviorism, too, in which white privileged people come in and drown out the voices of minorities in order to magically save the day. That’s never the solution.

Instead, we need a proper reassessment of feminism. Feminism has long been dominated by privileged voices. Much of its scholarly material is largely inaccessible – and irrelevant – to women who have to work long hours in low-paying jobs to support their kids. Yet feminism’s accomplishments have always been dependent on the support of carers, cleaners, and countless other women who have seldom received respect from feminists.

It’s time to start recognizing that feminism has invested too much in protecting white women, rather than in supporting women from marginalized communities who need it even more.

In other words, it’s time to get angry. It’s time to be an accomplice, and to work to make sure that feminism truly encompasses the realities of all women.