The following is from a speech given by CODEPINK co-director, Danaka Katovich, gave at Palestinian Feminist Collective’s International Working Women’s Day Vigil for Palestine on Friday March 8th.
I was three years old when CODEPINK was founded, by women I still interact with on a daily basis. So I’ve been able to hear what sort of discursive battles they had to face in the United States with other “feminist” groups in the lead up to the US invasions and occupations of the early 2000’s. Media or politicians would show pictures of women in Kabul or Baghdad wearing hijabs and insist that it was actually the US military that would bring them empowerment.
That notion is obviously, to us at least, rooted in racism, condescension, and quite frankly – misogyny. And I want to talk about the condescension part and how I feel it’s my responsibility as a feminist in the west, a part of a feminist organization in the west to throw condescension out the window, and what sort of political clarity it provides in incredibly important moments like right now.
I looked up the definition of “condescending” for this, just to see if it would provide anything I didn’t already know. What we immediately assume the word to mean if we had heard it before is something like patronizing, or talking down to people. But what is also included in the definition of condescension is “disdain”. Disdain is the feeling that someone is unworthy of your respect.
We know how mainstream western feminists talk about Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim women. Examples include insisting, either directly or indirectly, that war and occupation will help them somehow or that their oppressors treat women better than they do. “Feminists” like Tammy Duckworth or Nancy Pelosi will always agree that Israel treats women great, as if Palestinian women who are murdered and abused at the hands of Israel don’t exist at all. The subtext of this being that Palestinian women couldn’t possibly know what’s good for them. That’s disdain. That’s not feminism.
Having a perspective on feminism that rejects condescension allows us to avoid the same pitfalls so many people didn’t when the US was talking about invading Afghanistan under the guise of “liberating women.”
When the New York Times came out with a story about mass rape on October 7, we were able to ask “where is your evidence?” And we were right to ask those questions, right? And we should be asking a lot of questions when the intent of the story was to galvanize feminists in the west to support the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. They didn’t need evidence. They just needed western women to consent to dropping bombs on Palestinian women to exact revenge for something that they completely made up. It demanded we value Israeli women over Palestinian women because that’s what they do.
Feminism that is free of condescension allows us to act with clarity in these moments. It allows us to act with humility. It allows us to be in genuine solidarity with women all over the world and not just in our hyper specific contexts. We can only know what’s best for us as individuals, but what’s best for women as a whole will be shaped by Palestinian resistance struggles, and struggles for gender oppressed people all over the world. May we all operate with this razor sharp clarity, without condescension until Palestine is free and long after.
Danaka Katovich is one of CODEPINK’S National Co-Directors, based in Chicago, Illinois.
Imperialist feminism is an interesting observation, but I suppose what isn’t weaponized by the regime these days
I recommend this book
Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
by Lila Abu-Lughod
“ Mainstream Western feminism is often deeply hypocritical and centers white, affluent women. Not only does this feminism exclude those outside of the racial and class hegemony, but it also has been historically employed to justify colonial and imperial rule by using rhetoric about “liberating” or “saving” women in the Global South. One of the earliest examples of this was in colonial India, when British feminists claimed they were “saving” Indian women from practices such as child marriage by colonizing the country.
British feminists relied on a popular colonial concept: “the white man’s burden,” or the idea that it is the white man’s obligation to civilize brown and Black populations through colonization. British feminists saw Indian women as victims who needed saving from their religious and cultural practices. Though these ideas and rhetoric seem antiquated, this is the same rhetoric that was used by Laura Bush in 2001 to justify the U.S. invasion in Afghanistan.
In a 2001 speech, Laura Bush said, “Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror … Because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan … Because of our recent military gains, in much of Afghanistan women are no longer imprisoned in their homes … The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” In this speech, Bush draws on the colonial discourse of the West’s obligation to “civilize” non-white people.
In both the case of British feminists in colonial India and American feminists in the 21st century claiming to liberate Muslim women in the Middle East, white women position themselves as the saviors of women in the Global South, furthering imperialism without considering the agency of the women they claim to be “liberating.” War, occupation and military violence perpetuate the very violence these white women claim they are liberating other women from.
Another woman who embodies the hypocrisy of white, mainstream feminism is Madeleine Albright. Albright is celebrated as the first woman Secretary of State and a feminist icon. She was even the commencement speaker at Scripps College’s 2016 graduation.
Albright was also the U.S. representative on the U.N. Security Council during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 that tragically took about 800,000 lives. During the genocide, Albright refused to recognize the situation as a genocide, preventing U.N. peacekeeping forces from being deployed to the region. The genocide of Rwanda was one of the bloodiest atrocities of the late 20th century. Rwandan women faced the brunt of much of this violence, with around 250,000 women experiencing rape and sexual violence.”
https://tsl.news/opinion-the-hypocrisy-of-white-feminism/amp/
Right. As if she wasn’t part of an administration led by men, with a set of things to say and how to defend them if need be. Instead it just falls on Feminism. Idiot!!!
The Unheard Struggles of Palestinian Women Amidst Global Feminism
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/12/the-unheard-struggles-of-palestinian-women-amidst-global-feminism/