Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot (by Mikki Kendall)

This is a highly regarded book of essays about intersectional feminism that I might just not be the target audience for. I know I fall into white feminist blind spots so I went into this ready to hear about them, but her examples are like "actually Lena Dunham is a bad feminist!"and "Pocahontas costumes are racist!" and.. I think we all know that at this point? At some points, she builds a strawman of a white feminist who doesn’t really exist. (Like "feminists" who supported Brett Kavanaugh. Again, I think we know these are not real feminists.)

Kendall also enmenrates other issues that are feminist issues but often presented (or dismissed) as racial issues, but she's not arguing for anything outside of general liberal progressive politics at this point. I already agree with her about defunding the police, Black maternal health, and housing as a basic human right, and so do most of the white feminists I know. We're probably failing on a lot of counts, but not those.

What resonated with me the most strongly were the sections on respectability politics, the "Mommy wars" (wherein the idealized standards of motherhood are based on women with resources and money), and the idea that white feminists want to "pass the buck" to white men instead of owning their own failures (god knows that's usually my first instinct). The writing itself is a bit scattershot though and I would have appreciated more hard data, more focused arguments, and stronger calls to action.

I came away feeling it is flawed but there is a lot of important food for thought here, and I wholeheartedly agree about this: if your feminism isn't intersectional, you're doing it wrong.