Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Kendall is widely known for the #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen Twitter hashtag, which went viral in 2013. She created the hashtag because it was clear at the time that mainstream feminists were too focused on the needs of middle-class, White, and professional women over those of all other women. Then and today, White feminists fail to show up when Black women, trans women, and working-class women need allies to gain the barest necessities to survive. They are instead concerned about securing leadership roles in corporations, for example. This willful erasure of the needs of all other women needs to stop. Feminists must come to recognize that “everything that affects women is a feminist issue” (3). The root of the willful blindness is the assumption that the experiences of White and middle-class women are universal to all women. The truth is that race, class, gender, and other facets of identity differentiate women’s experiences.

White feminism’s racism and glaring failure to center the voices of other women is this problem writ large, and the signs of their failure to be more inclusive are everywhere. Lena Dunham, a White actress, felt perfectly fine in calling out Black football player Odell Beckham for failing to flirt with her, a complaint that ignored how often a “white woman’s tears” served as a pretext for killing Black men and boys (6). Mainstream feminists police the bodies of figures like Beyoncé and Nikki Minaj because they cannot conceive of these women’s feminism as acceptable. They ignored Black women’s warning that Hugo Schwyzer, a self-proclaimed feminist and writer, was regularly abusing and exploiting women of color, his partners, and his students. They ignored online abuse of Black women for years until the misogynistic Gamergate trolls came for mainstream White feminists.

When called out by Black feminists over this behavior, White feminists become defensive and tone police to avoid listening to women of color, who are tired of being silenced and expected to be good allies despite the lack of reciprocity. Donald Trump’s 2016 election to the American presidency with 53% of White women’s votes forced White women to reckon with the practical consequence of failing to be good allies to other women. The platform and policies of Trump, they learned, had the potential to damage anyone who was not White, male, and affluent.

White women can demonstrate solidarity by using their power and privilege to support other women. Kendall has experienced this kind of allyship with Gail Simone, a writer who helped Kendall gain access to the male-dominated comics industry and who rejects the notion of respectability.

Kendall makes the case for anti-gun-violence initiatives as feminist issues. In her own life and the lives of many women in lower-income communities, the presence of guns makes it more likely that women will be killed during domestic violence incidents. Girls—not just boys, who are frequently presumed to be most at risk from gun violence in their neighborhoods—have to navigate streets in which guns are a threat to their safety and lives. Women and families in such spaces bear the cost of living in the midst of gun violence. The truth is that gun violence should be understood as a “full scale public health crisis” (16), and mainstream feminists need to agitate to gain the resources to address it.

The popular narrative that gun violence is “a problem that only exists in the hood” (17), or else that seeps out of the so-called hood into safer, Whiter neighborhoods, ignores the context of gun violence all over America in the form of mass shootings and rising violence in rural communities, for example. This popular narrative also means that crimes by White people in suburban and rural settings get less airtime. In racially homogenous communities, working-class White people become the Others who bear the brunt of oppressive policing. Nevertheless, their gun culture is presented as justified, while the decision of some Black people to use guns for self-protection is situated as more evidence of some special pathology of Black people.

Kendall cites statistics to prove that children, especially Black children, are subject to high rates of gun violence in the home, not just school, which is the current focus in gun violence prevention efforts. The practical impact of this epidemic is that girls in particular lose out on educational opportunities and attainment because of gun violence and the post-traumatic stress disorder that comes with being around it. Having had a near-miss with being killed by gun violence as a girl and regularly threatened with guns despite not being in a gang or involved in crime, Kendall can attest to the impact of such violence on one’s sense of safety.

Gun violence is an American problem, but it is also one that has a disproportionate impact on women and girls. Kendall again appeals to personal experience to explain the dangerous and potent impact of intimate partner violence on women and girls, who are disproportionately the victims of gun crimes in the home. Kendall went through a series of abusive relationships, culminating with a husband who stalked and threatened her with violence when she gathered the resources to move herself and her children out after he attacked her. The only reason he did not have a gun to make good on his threats was that his legal history of domestic violence prevented him from owning a gun in the state of Illinois, where they resided.

Gun violence by the police threatens Black women and girls as well, as attested to by the #SayHerName movement and the many not particularly well-publicized killings of Black women by police. If feminism is worth anything, it will act in response to this state of affairs. Feminists should also confront hate speech, verbal threats, and domestic violence as warnings that violence against the women on the receiving end of them are at risk and must be protected legally.

Kendall opens by recounting how glad she was to have access to now-diminished social safety net programs like food stamps to take care of her son after she left an abusive relationship. Despite these supports, she vividly recalls how hungry she was. Hunger goes hand-in-hand with poverty, and although feminists readily recognize such poverty-related issues in other countries, they frequently fail to see that hunger and poverty operate right here in the United States and that women, children, and elders are bearing the brunt of this crisis.

The social safety net programs in place to address these needs are inadequate due to the difference between the cost of food and the subsidies, lack of access to healthful and affordable food due to food deserts, and wages and subsidies that do not keep up with the cost of living and rents. According to Kendall, “[alleviating women’s poverty is a critical feminist issue. Yet when we talk about hunger and food insecurity, we rarely talk about it in those terms” (35).

Adequate nutrition is a baseline survival issue that has both long-term and short-term impacts on hungry people, yet the approach to addressing food insecurity ignores this basic fact. When you or your dependents are hungry, you may resort to things like sex work to put food on the table, but feminists and government policies fail to use compassion to understand why people might make these choices or to offer alternatives, like adequate support.

When help does come from feminists and the government, it is punitive and judgmental, including initiatives like soda taxes, which do nothing to address why buying a soda might be a logical choice if you need calories and have no refrigerator. If feminists want to find models of effective help to confront food insecurity, they need to look at grassroots initiatives like food banks and informal community networks that do things like help people get to the grocery store. These initiatives don’t have the scope or resources to address the problem fully, so feminists can help there as well, so long as they make sure grassroots leaders gain leadership roles in these initiatives.

In addition, government programs that add work requirements for food assistance ignore the fact that many people laboring under food insecurity are already employed, sometimes in industries and workplaces that are responsible for food preparation and distribution. Their food insecurity can only be resolved through an attack on systemic oppression and inequality. Finally, Kendall states: Food is a human right” (45). Satisfying the need for food is a precondition for the energy needed for women to be engaged politically.

Kendall opens this chapter by recounting how she first encountered the idea that being respectable would somehow protect her from rape and other forms of sexual assault. She learned these lessons at home when she lived with her grandmother and later when she lived with her mother. Her mother in particular harshly took her to task for engaging in behaviors that are typical for girls and young women attempting to assert their bodily autonomy. As is often the case, being respectable did not protect Kendall from the babysitter who molested her or the older relative who sexually harassed her.

What Kendall experienced is a dynamic that operates on a societal level. Women and girls, especially those who are of color, are required to hew to a rigid set of respectability politics, and when they are assaulted (between 40% and 60% are sexually abused, based on the figures Kendall includes), they are subject to victim blaming, while the perpetrators are not held accountable.

This kind of victim blaming comes from the notion that Black women, Indigenous women, other women of color, and trans women are inherently promiscuous and thus “unrapeable” (60). This misogynistic perspective on women and girls has its roots in colonialism and imperialism, in which the rape of Indigenous and Black women was a tool of conquest and domination.

Contemporary rape culture has picked up on these beliefs, leading to potential allies such as college-age White women being less likely to intervene when they see their Black peers being assaulted and a whole genre of useless rape avoidance pieces written by women and directed toward women. Lena Dunham appears again in this chapter, this time as an example of a self-proclaimed feminist who sided with the perpetrator when Aurora Perrineau, a former co-worker, accused the man of sexual assault and harassment.

Rape can happen anywhere, but it most certainly occurs more in communities and spaces in which rapists know they can operate without being held accountable. The truth is that under-resourced communities in urban settings, on reservations, and in prisons are just such places, and even the police are complicit since they sometimes are the perpetrators of sexual assault.

A good feminism will acknowledge this fact and act to directly confront the conditions that create these kinds of spaces. Instead of victim blaming, feminists need to teach their sons and communities about consent; they need to critique rape culture and the devaluation of women of color by naming them as people in need of and deserving of protection.