Angela Davis Criticizes "Mainstream Feminism" / Bourgeois Feminism

and perhaps that we move on to say that you know the mainstream feminist movement has made serious serious mistake you know I often point out that when I wrote my when I wrote a book that was published in 1981 called women raisin class everybody started referring to me as a feminist and my response was I'm not a feminist you know I'm a black revolutionary because I didn't see how the two had anything to do with each other but I realized that I was talking about a certain kind of feminism a bourgeois feminism a feminism that

is still unfortunately yeah white white bourgeois feminism which is unfortunately the the most represented feminism today and most people think that as feminism but but that ignores the fact that huge numbers of organic and-and-and-and and academic intellectuals who are women of color have transformed the very nature of feminism and the hallmark of feminism today is what we call intersectionality a recognition of the and not only not only the inter relating character of identities but as I frequently say I think intersectionality is is most helpful when we think about the intersectionality of social justice struggles the

mistake made by mainstream feminism and its continued reliance on categorical representations of women as soon as one assumes that that women can be categorically represented it means that there is some cleanse and Rachel ization happening there right and you hear the term glass ceiling feminism I don't know whether you have that here glass ceiling feminism this is what Hillary Clinton represented but but glass ceiling feminism is represented it's grounded from the very outset in hierarchies I mean how else does that metaphor work those who are already high enough to reach the ceiling are probably white

and then if they're not white they are already affluent because they're at the top all they have to do is push through the ceiling and as long as I have identified as a feminist it has been clear to me that any feminism that privileges those who already have privilege is bound to be irrelevant to poor women working-class women women of color trans women trans women of color standards for feminism are created by those who have already ascended economic hierarchies and are attempting to make the last climb to the top how is this relevant to women

who are at the very bottom revolutionary hope resides precisely among those women who have been abandoned by history and who are now standing up and making their demands heard i truly believe and men should applaud this that this is the era of women I truly believe that and I am referring not to the women who just have who only have to break the ceiling to get where they want to go but I'm referring to the women at the very bottom poor women black women Muslim women indigenous women queer women trans women as a matter of

fact trans women of color have been most despised most subject to state violence most subject to individual violence and so it seems to me that we can say then that people who have suffered in that way when they begin to rise the whole world will rise with them the whole world will rise with them if we stand up against racism we want much more than inclusion inclusion is not enough diversity is not enough and as a matter of fact we do not wish to be included in a racist society if we say if we say

no to hetero patriarchy then we do not want to be assimilated into a misogynist and hetero patriarchal society if we say no to poverty we do not want to be contained by a capitalist structure that values profits more than human beings if we recognize that those who wanted to solve the problem of slavery by creating more humane forms of slavery were employing the logic of racism we say that those who call for police reform and prison reform while retaining the racist structures as they pretend to address the problems of racism that they are absolutely wrong

and this is why we say no to carceral feminism and yes to abolition feminism yes to evolution feminism and so I want to conclude by suggesting that our notion of revolution our notions of revolution need to be far more capacious than they have been in the past certainly we need to dispose of what has become an unmanageable system of global capitalism that permits the eight richest billionaires in the world to control as much wealth as the poorest half half of the population that is absolutely obscene and even those billionaires should think that it's obscene but

also recognize that we must be prepared to continually challenge that which appears to us to be most normal revolution upsets normative processes class-based gender base race-based sexuality place ability pace and I'm just beginning the list and in this sense there will always be revolutions looming in the future thank you very much [Applause]