How Intersectionality Killed Feminism
24th October 2024
You’d think that Suffs, a play about women’s suffrage, would be considered to be pretty progressive. It’s currently playing on Broadway, and has enjoyed broadly positive reviews from all the usual outlets. Yet earlier in the year, this most liberal of liberal shows was nonetheless assailed. In July, activists stormed the Music Box Theatre mid-performance, and began chanting demands for the musical’s cancellation. Just to make their point clear, they also unfurled a banner, emblazoned with the words “Suffs Is a White Wash”.
As that last phrase implies, and a quick glance at the protest the Cancel Suffs website confirms, the protesters are ultimately unhappy about Suffs for one fundamental reason: the whiteness of its feminism. A self-declared group of “radical, anti-racist, queer” feminists, the group rejects the idea that “white women are always aligned with progressive causes” — even as they attack Suffs for underplaying the supposed racism of those early electoral reformers. Taken together, in fact, Suffs is nothing less than “a betrayal” of the next generation of feminists.
The chaos in July is far from unique. At least according to a certain kind of intersectional feminist — the sort of person who believes trans women are women and sex work is work — “white feminists” are now to blame for everything. Consider, to give one example, the wild popularity of the “Karen” slur, an implicit (or sometimes not-so-implicit) attack on white women standing up for themselves. Then there’s the explosion of books. The titles speak for themselves: White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color; The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women; Against White Feminism; The Problem With White Feminism.
Revolutions always eat their children — often, unfortunately, not soon enough.