Mikki Kendall is an eminent author, activist, and socio-cultural critic who’s created a foundation of compelling arguments and facts that white feminism chose to eradicate from the feminist movement.
Mikki dives deep into intersections of struggle the patriarchy, race, class, status, privilege, and power black women and minorities within society face. She’s focused on deciphering the different experiences black women experience.
As an African feminist, African feminism must be understood as a type of feminism innovated by African women whose experiences within society are in their entirety significantly different hence why it specifically addresses the conditions and needs of continental African women.
African feminism often conflicts with Western feminism and its hegemonic tendencies, holding that it fails to address corporate globalization and decolonization concerns. This same conceptualization is in black feminism.
Mikki explains how a feminist movement during the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment relegated the needs of black women to the background while centering the desires of white women to take their rightful place alongside white men.
She highlights evidence of the nonexistent changes’ modern feminism’ claims to have generated; modern feminism is an inclination to a white-centered and white-washed movement.
‘As debates over last names, body hair, and the best way to be a CEO have taken center stage in the discourse surrounding modern feminism, it is not difficult to see why some would be questioning the legitimacy of a women’s movement that serves only the narrow interests of middle- and upper-class white women.
While the problems facing marginalized women have only increased in intensity, somehow food insecurity, education, and healthcare- beyond the most basic of reproductive needs – are rarely touted as feminist issues,’ Mikki says.
It is necessary within the feminist movement that we recognize due to white supremacy, colonization, and white heteropatriarchy, a majority group of women, termed as minorities, are at stake.
An uproar will always suffice until there’s a demolition of social constructs and the hierarchy of privilege systems infringing on the majority of women and the woman experience.
