Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Looking back over her own childhood and young adulthood, Kendall remembers that she knew many smart kids in her under-resourced neighborhood and school. She was one of them, but unlike those who were a little more socially adept and had a better sense of personal style, she was a nerd who didn’t learn to fit in until friends taught her to code switch by changing the old-fashioned clothing and speech she picked up from her grandmother and her reading.

Kendall doesn’t put her early sense of social alienation down to that old myth that people of color hate smart people and that part of the standard narrative of escaping a marginal childhood is leaving behind a community that despises excellence and intelligence. Like many Black people, Kendall’s ancestors and family members prized literacy and did whatever they could to help the next generation be more successful. Kendall argues, “Whether we’re talking about the hood, the rez, or the barrio, the truth is that no community hates learning or success” (144). Some people get the resources they need to leverage initiative and intelligence, but others do not. They don’t get to experience success because resources are thin on the ground in marginalized communities. The idea that Black people see overt intelligence as “acting White” reflects not truth, but “a narrow, stereotypical image” of people of color (145).

Adults with these narratives are very frequently re-writing their narratives to cover over some lack of social skills or even guilt over consuming resources that others may well have deserved just as much. Conservative endorsement of this myth allows conservatives to blame individual people of color and their cultures for a lack of success instead of admitting that there is something deeply inequitable about the system. Some of those who hold these conservative ideas about success are people of color as well.

Kendall believes it is time that such successful survivors and White feminists hung up on White saviorism acknowledge that the people who didn’t get out are worthy of respect and appreciation for the support they’ve given to those who do get out.

Despite several brushes with near kidnapping at home and abroad, Kendall has survived a disturbing phenomenon: Black, Indigenous, and Latinx women going missing with little effort expended to find them. Cases in which White women disappear receive wide coverage, but the police and the media ignore cases when others disappear. In Chicago alone, Kendall notes, the bodies of multiple women of color have been found, indicating that someone sees them as primary victims; the police claim there is not a serial killer operating in Chicago, but the low rate of case clearance leaves Kendall feeling skeptical.

Kendall cites startling statistics to show that women from many groups are going missing and dying with little attention from the authorities and media. According to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, “Black Americans account for an average of 34 percent of all missing persons every year” even though they are only “13 percent of the total population” (149). Even this kind of data is missing for Indigenous women, especially in the United States. For Latinx women, especially those who seek refugee status in the United States after fleeing gender violence at home, there is a similar lack of data. People who are LGBQTIA face high rates of violence, and the United States is rife with high rates of femicide, the murder of women. People with disabilities are regularly abused, killed, or disappeared by caregivers because our culture has a bias in favor of caregivers. People who are transgender disappear in the statistics as well because the government fails to appropriately note their gender when reporting data.

Complicating this problem of reporting is that the legal system is stacked against women—especially transgender women and young women—who do defend themselves, despite the high likelihood of them being killed if they do not defend themselves. Kendall cites the cases of CeCe McDonald and Cyntonia Brown as examples of this terrible dynamic. When the missing people are underage like Brown, the police may even fail to issue AMBER alerts, or they may simply write off the child as a runaway.

Structural forces and inequality compound the problem. Predators and potential predators know that racism, neglect, and a refusal to put resources into locating the missing or possibly murdered make it easier to operate in marginalized communities, so they take advantage of these conditions when choosing victims. The family members and community members in a community may fail to reach out to the media because they expect the media to seek them out, and they may also be reluctant to call on resources like the police because the missing person may have had brushes with the law that make the missing person “an imperfect victim”(156).

If feminists want to help, they need to acknowledge that this is an epidemic worthy of their attention and that many forms of oppression and inequality are playing a role in the problem. Jail and laws like the Violence Against Women Act cannot be the only answers feminists pursue. This is just more carceral feminism and demonstrates willful ignorance about the impact of racism and class on who gets prosecuted.

Communities have their own work to do. Kendall prefers the “sister’s keeper” model in places like India and Kenya, where women defend other women in their communities and other communities to avoid making people with even fewer resources the preferred targets. Communities can also reject the patriarchy and a misguided desire to protect offenders until the violence escalates enough to gain the attention of law enforcement. When people do offend by victimizing women, probation and diversion programs should be on the table.

Kendall advances the argument that feminism as an effective political movement is being held hostage to the fears of White women. White women fear being called out for not fighting hard enough against misogyny in their own communities. They retreat to fragility when BIPOC call them out in less-than-polite tones and thus ignore the real complicity of White women in maintaining the oppressive status quo.

Kendall provides several examples to support her contention. She notes that White women voted for Donald Trump in droves, that White women failed to present a united front of support for Christine Blasey Ford when she testified against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and that White women readily called Megan Kelly a feminist hero instead of calling out her racism. Kendall also notes that in many fights to secure even the barest of rights and protection for people of color and Black women—school integration, fighting for affirmative action, pushing back against xenophobia—White women have endorsed conservative positions that prop up patriarchy and White supremacy.

Although one would assume such frequent failures would make White women more sympathetic when Black women struggle to address patriarchy in their own communities, that assumption is incorrect. White women instead feel comfortable telling Black women that their approach to balancing responses to multiple oppressions inside and outside of their communities is wrong. Black women, for example, are not interested in supporting carceral feminism because it endangers them and their communities.

An effective feminism must accept that being a good feminist may sometimes require being afraid and uncomfortable, especially when it comes to owning one’s own complicity. White women’s fears have always been the pretext for attacks on Black communities, so it is a powerful and dangerous force that must be named by White women. White women should instead, Kendall contends, leverage the fact that they function in mostly White communities and families to attack misogyny, fear of the other, patriarchy, and White supremacy head on.

Kendall makes the case for voting rights as a central feminist issue. She opens the essay by noting that she understands on a personal level why many people of color see voting as an exercise in harm reduction. Both dominant political parties have failed miserably to address issues like poverty, and they have both been content to demonize poor people of color.

Meanwhile, politicians use White working-class voters in the Midwest to represent all working-class voters, thus erasing the common interests of working-class people across racial identities and ignoring the way US policies also hurt people abroad, immigrants, and asylum seekers. The backlash against Obama and a more inclusive politics bore fruit in the elections of 2016 and 2017, when White resentment over the perception that Black success was their loss once again shaped American politics, culminating with the election of Donald Trump.

In this failure of politics as in others, White women have played a central role. In fact, if one examines the history of the American women’s suffrage movement, one discovers that early White suffragists like Laura Clay made explicitly White supremacist arguments to encourage White men to see enfranchising White women as a way to stave off Black voting power. In contemporary politics, that same attitude appears in White women who defend Brett Kavanaugh. It appears in the attacks of fervent Bernie Sanders supporters, many of whom felt comfortable claiming that people of color who did not support Sanders were simply “low information voters” (179), not simply people with different interests from supporters of Sanders.

Given this history, it is no surprise that White feminist efforts to mobilize against the confirmation of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court failed. White feminists, Kendall claims, helped create a culture of ignoring victims when they themselves discounted the experiences of women of color who were victims. The truth of White women’s failure to mobilize is also apparent because almost no one is willing to rely on them as a monolithic, reliable voting bloc or special interest group.

Kendall believes Black women’s experiences of using community to make survival more likely means they are more likely to embrace politics that will benefit everyone. When Black women vote, they are focused on harm reduction because they understand that America’s political system gives more power to affluent and White voters. Their mobilization is not always enough to counter the influence of White working-class voters and women who support politicians who do not have their best interests at heart.

Kendall’s warning to White feminists is that as Black voters go, so go all. At present, people have the right to vote (unless they are felons, in some states), but many lack access. The same voting restrictions that prevent people of color from making politics address their concerns are having an impact on issues feminists see as women’s issues, including reproductive rights. White feminists can protect their own interests and those of other communities by fighting hard to protect voting rights and voting access for all.