Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Kendall argues that the difference between wages and housing costs is driving a disproportionately high number of marginalized women into crisis. The housing crisis is a feminist issue because of the many consequences of not having access to housing. Women in abusive relationships are forced into staying in dangerous or unstable situations because the social support programs designed to make housing affordable are not keeping pace with the cost of safe housing. The problem appears in both rural and urban settings. Without access to affordable and safe housing, people without resources are forced to live with family members, which makes the real scope of the housing crisis invisible.

Using evidence from Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Kendall argues that the housing crisis is driving poverty, as opposed to being a simple effect of poverty. Basics—a place to house elderly family members and children, getting access to a school district, having a base from which to hold down a career—are all dependent on having a stable housing situation. In her own life, Kendall confronted temporary homelessness due to mold growth in her home; she had the resources to stay in a hotel, but that temporary problem would have been the financial tipping point into homelessness for people without two incomes in the family.

Existing resources and approaches are not up to the task of addressing the housing crisis. Community activists don’t have the resources to make a real change. People advocating for gentrification as an answer are largely young White women, and their solutions are problematic. Their efforts at revitalization change the face of neighborhoods, making them less welcoming to people of color who are aiming to age in place.

Gentrification also brings a greater chance of police harassment to long-time residents. Conflicts between gentrifiers and long-term residents may arise because gentrifiers may not be comfortable with the vibrant street life of these communities, and older residents may come to feel unwelcome due to the loss of older businesses that support them and increasing financial pressure due to rising taxes. On top of that, older people as well as people with disabilities and mental illness are more vulnerable to eviction. Women make up a large part of these groups, compounding their vulnerability to eviction.

Stable and safe housing is a human right. Feminists must follow the lead of people on the ground in threatened communities by supporting all women in accessing this right. If women want to run for office as feminists, they need to be ready to go beyond plans to sprinkle a few affordable houses among new, expensive units and figure out how to support revitalization of communities without pushing out long-term residents.

Kendall argues for a more nuanced and less hypocritical approach to reproductive justice among feminists. Such an approach would focus on ensuring universal access to reproductive care and systemic support for the whole woman, not just on securing access to abortion. Such an approach would also acknowledge and fight for the reproductive rights of people with disabilities, not just for the right of women to abort fetuses with defects. The prevailing emphasis on the right to abort fetuses with defects and the refusal to provide more support for reproductive justice for people with disabilities has its roots in an ugly eugenicist history that sees anyone who is not White and affluent as having fewer reproductive rights than the privileged group.

Finally, feminists would do well to call out providers who refuse to listen in a serious way to marginalized women who have concerns about their reproductive health. Kendall uses the example of Serena Williams, who is privileged in many ways but still had to fight against assumptions to save her life and her child when she suffered distress during her pregnancy. A more inclusive feminist approach to reproductive justice would approach reproductive justice in a way that is pro-family, pro-children, and pro-woman, rather than ceding these issues to the so-called pro-life lobby.

Kendall posits that parenting while marginalized really means “survival parenting.” Consumed with making sure children survive the school-to-prison pipeline, police violence, school closures, and the heavy burden of finances, working-class women have no time for debates privileged women have about organic food and vaccination.

Parents from marginalized communities are constantly dealing with the presumption that they are not competent to make parenting decisions, as Kendall found when doctors assumed she was a single mother or even addressed her White husband instead of her during appointments before the birth of their child. Marginalized women regularly deal with unsolicited parenting advice—some of it very bad—because people assume they don’t know anything about what their own children need.

There are real consequences to this bias and contemporary feminism’s focus on the parenting discourse of privileged women. If you are from a marginalized community, your worries are existential: Will you lose your child to prison due to draconian truancy laws? Will someone subject your child to bias? Parents without legal immigration status or on reservations confront the added pressures of protecting their children from forces that endanger them as well. All of these communities also confront the struggle to keep their children out of the hands of the carceral state, which is more likely to eat up young people of color, girls of color, and people who are transgender. These threats make parenting stressful because adults tasked with protecting children from these communities fail to do so due to racism, misogyny, trans- and homophobia, and classism.

White feminists are complicit enough in these systems of oppression that it is hard to make reliable allies of them. To become good allies would require that White feminists own their own role in White supremacy instead of passing the blame to White men. White feminists need to be just as willing to fight for girls and genderqueer youth of color as they are for White girls.

It also time for feminists of all stripes to acknowledge that being a poor, BIPOC parent makes it more likely that one’s children will end up in foster care. Parents in difficult situations do things like go to work and leave children with marginal caregivers or in substandard housing because they have no good options. Feminists who impose their notion of intensive parenting on parents by calling the police or state to intervene over parenting choices (like letting a child walk home alone) need to acknowledge that their notion of good parenting is rooted in privilege. They need to educate themselves about the ways systems of oppression shape these supposed choices.

Kendall closes by noting that being “middle-class adjacent” because she has a child in college and is a published writer means people see her as having made it: They are more likely to give her the benefit of the doubt as a parent. She closes by calling for every woman, including those with any degree of privilege, to fight to secure the resources for everyone to make it.

Kendall remembers that for the longest time, she just didn’t get the significance of the battles over bathrooms for people who are trans or gender conforming. She thought welcoming transgender women into women’s bathrooms made her a good ally. She might have been a good ally, but she was not a good “accomplice.” Kendall specifically defines the parameters of being a good ally and accomplice. A good ally recognizes that only the person experiencing the oppression can deem someone a good ally and that being defensive is not the best response when the person experiencing oppression calls you on your privilege. A good ally does not expect the person who is oppressed to educate them or expend emotional labor on keeping the would-be ally from being uncomfortable. The transformation from ally to accomplice comes when one does all of those things and then takes the next step of embracing and using one’s anger on behalf of the oppressed.

Anger is life-saving because it fuels activism, revolts against efforts to dehumanize marginalized people, and recognizes that politeness will never effectively counter the anger bigots have mobilized in spaces like social media and politics. In fact, White activists who tone police in response to the anger of the oppressed are actually all about “control,” not real change. The propensity to tone police is not feminists’ only blind spot. Academic or professional feminists are largely people of privilege, and all too often, their feminist work happens because of invisible work by marginalized women such as the caregivers who work for them.

Working-class and BIPOC women are more likely to live out their feminism via praxis or action in their particular social and public settings. They do not have the time or energy to coddle inconsistent allies or saviors who believe they have the right to define the right kind of feminism. White feminists cannot be good allies and accomplices until they acknowledge that their political program is largely about “shifting power to white women, and no one else” (256). Kendall cites several examples of prominent feminists who enabled White supremacists to gain platforms and resources because they refused to acknowledge this truth.

A good accomplice feminism will confront White supremacy wherever it appears, give up the desire to be centered in every discussion about oppression, and follow through with action—not words alone—to aggressively confront inequality. Kendall means this literally: White feminists should be willing to stand between members of marginalized communities and oppressive police during protests, for example. White feminists’ job is not to save marginalized communities; the marginalized communities can do that most effectively themselves, especially if White feminists instead fight to get resources where they are needed.