From One White Woman to Another: Speak Less, Listen More

               

               This post has been a long time coming after I read an article about how women of colour can feel underrepresented in their University curriculums. I started thinking about this myself, as a Literature student, how many female authors I had studied throughout my academic career in comparison to male authors, and out of all the authors I had studied how many of them had been authors of colour: in a class that covered 13 authors, only two of them were not white. I thought to myself, if as a white woman I resented the lack of diversity in the curriculum, I can barely imagine how the women of colour in my course must feel. It's not like there aren't great writers of colour from all decades - it's just that mainstream academia doesn't seem to consider their contributions worthy enough. Reading the article deepened my need to understand how women of colour are underrepresented in society - has mainstream history erased their plight so deeply that we have become immune to those whose struggles are different from ours?

                Feminism has aimed to fight for women for decades, and for the most part it has been successful. Women have been afforded a lot of rights due to the work that those who came before us have been doing, but the roots of feminism  aren't perfect - Susan B. Anthony, a pioneer in the fight for women's right was a racist. You can check my statement via this and this article. Feminism was and still is important - don't get me wrong. But human beings evolve and therefore the movements they set in motion need to evolve with them. I found myself facing the reality that feminism, has we have always thought of it, is warped. For a long time, it failed to include women of colour, transgender women, queer women... Unfortunately, the list goes on. It feels like "white feminism" has become the norm and it shouldn't. Sure, white women face discrimination daily based on gender - and that is wrong and needs to be addressed - but women of colour of queer women face discrimination based on their sexuality and ethnicity or skin colour. In the United States, a white woman makes 79 cents of a white man's dollar. African American women make 60 cents. Hispanic women make 55 cents. You can read more about it here. It felt to me that the plights and struggles of women of colour have been ignored and swept under the rug throughout history, to make space for the struggles of white women and their objectives. It's made me wonder how deep has been the contribution of women of colour to the world as we know it, but without us knowing it.

                Especially in this day and age, as we see hateful, racist, xenophobic, sexist, islamophobic, homophobic discourse becoming increasingly popular, we need to come together and be there for each other. As white women, we don't need to give women of colour a voice. They already have strong, confident voices. They are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves. If you want to help break this cycle, you just need to be an ally in making sure their voices are being heard - not your voice on their behalf, but their voices, loud and proud, being the bearers of their own stories, of their own fights and of their own victories. Use your platform, use your privilege to make sure their voices will not be erased by mainstream media and academia. You are not a woman of colour, therefore it is not your right to speak for them, but it is your duty as a fellow human to make sure everyone's voices are being heard. 

          Often times, people believe that they need to travel and leave the place they reside in to discover the world, to develop a different way to see what surrounds them, gain new experiences, but if you pay attention to your peers, to your fellow women, regardless of skin colour or sexual orientation, you will find that your vision of the world will be broadened by listening to their experiences. By listening to their experiences and becoming aware of how unfairly they have been treated you will start to question institutions, systems that have been in place for dozens of years and you will find that you don't need a mind altering experience to change the way you see the world - you just need to speak less and listen more.