Books with category Cultural Critique
Displaying 3 books

White Women

A no-holds-barred guidebook aimed at white women who want to stop being nice and start dismantling white supremacy.

It's no secret that white women are conditioned to be nice, but did you know that the desire to be perfect and to avoid conflict at all costs are characteristics of white supremacy culture?

As the founders of Race2Dinner, an organization which facilitates conversations between white women about racism and white supremacy, Regina Jackson and Saira Rao have noticed white women's tendency to maintain a veneer of niceness, and strive for perfection, even at the expense of anti-racism work.

In this book, Jackson and Rao pose these urgent questions: how has being nice helped Black women, Indigenous women and other women of color? How has being nice helped you in your quest to end sexism? Has being nice earned you economic parity with white men?

Beginning with freeing white women from this oppressive need to be nice, they deconstruct and analyze nine aspects of traditional white woman behavior—from tone-policing to weaponizing tears—that uphold white supremacy society, and hurt all of us who are trying to live a freer, more equitable life.

White Women is a call to action to those of you who are looking to take the next steps in dismantling white supremacy. Your white supremacy. If you are in fact doing real anti-racism work, you will find few reasons to be nice, as other white people want to limit your membership in the club. If you are not ticking white people off on a regular basis, you are not doing it right.

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

2022

by Rafia Zakaria

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption offers a radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights. For too long, upper-middle-class white women have been heralded as the 'experts' on feminism, presiding over multinational feminist organizations and writing much of the feminist canon.

Rafia Zakaria, an American Muslim woman, attorney, and political philosopher, champions a reconstruction of feminism in this transformative overview and counter-manifesto. She centers women of color in the dialogue, challenging the global, long-standing affinity of white feminism with colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist ideals.

Zakaria covers topics like the legacy of the British feminist imperialist savior complex and the condescension of the white feminist-led 'aid industrial complex.' She critiques the conflation of sexual liberation as the 'sum total of empowerment,' following in the tradition of intersectional feminist forebears like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde.

In this staggering, radical critique, Zakaria refutes and reimagines the apolitical aspirations of white feminist empowerment, placing Black and Brown feminist thought at the forefront.

Face: One Square Foot of Skin

2022

by Justine Bateman

Writer, director, and producer Justine Bateman examines the aggressive ways that society reacts to the aging of women's faces.

Face: One Square Foot of Skin is a book of fictional vignettes that delves into the fear and evolutionary habits that have led to the belief that older women's faces are unattractive and undesirable.

Based on the experiences of the author and interviews with dozens of women and men, the book explores the root causes of society's negative attitudes toward aging women's faces. Bateman rejects the ingrained assumptions that older women's faces need to be "fixed," and suggests that we move beyond judging a woman's worth based on her face.

With passionate prose and a sharp eye, Bateman argues that a woman's confidence should grow as she ages, not be diminished by society's misguided attitudes about that one square foot of skin.

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