The White Feminist Mirage: How Alignments Undermine Black Liberation and the Black Family
In 2024, history repeated itself.
Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to win a major party nomination for president, stood at the crossroads of a nation in turmoil. The stakes could not have been higher. A return to Donald Trump’s America promised further erosion of civil rights, increased violence against marginalized communities, and the dismantling of even the barest protections for the vulnerable. And yet, when the votes were counted, it wasn’t just white men who kept Harris from shattering the ultimate glass ceiling. Once again, white women—those who often claim the mantle of feminism—voted overwhelmingly for Trump, turning their backs on one of their own.
This loss wasn’t just political; it was revelatory. It forced us to ask hard questions about the alliances we’ve forged and the strategies we’ve embraced. For Black women especially, the question is urgent: What does it mean to align with a feminism that so often aligns itself against us? What does it mean to invest in movements that promise empowerment while ultimately reinforcing the systems that oppress us all?
The hard truth is this: White feminism has never been about dismantling patriarchy or white supremacy. It has been about rearranging the pieces, carving out a place for white women within the existing structure of power. And when given the choice between solidarity with women of color and maintaining their racial privilege, white women have consistently chosen the latter.
The Bargain of White Feminism
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s writings offer a window into this dynamic. Gilman, a celebrated feminist of the early 20th century, was blunt about her priorities. In her landmark work Women and Economics, she argued that women’s liberation was necessary—not to dismantle systems of oppression, but to ensure white civilization flourished. “The female of genus homo is economically dependent on the male,” Gilman wrote. Her solution wasn’t to destroy patriarchy but to align white women with white men, to build a stronger foundation for their sons and their race. This was not a feminism of solidarity; it was a feminism of strategy, designed to preserve white supremacy while offering white women a greater share of its spoils.
The 2024 election is a case study in how this strategy continues to play out. The same white women who marched with pink hats in 2017, declaring their resistance to Trump, quietly returned to the polls to cast their votes for him again. They did so not out of ignorance but out of calculation. White women have long understood that their liberation is tied not to the destruction of patriarchy, but to their proximity to white male power. When faced with the choice between Kamala Harris—a woman of color whose leadership represented a shift in power—and Donald Trump, they chose the latter. This wasn’t a failure of feminism; it was the success of a feminism designed to protect white patriarchy.
The Problem of Black Feminist Alignments
For Black women, the implications are stark. Too often, in the fight for gender equality, Black women have aligned themselves with white feminists, adopting strategies that serve white supremacy rather than Black liberation. This alignment has not been benign. It has, in many cases, contributed to the erosion of Black families and the division of Black communities.
Consider the legacy of thinkers like bell hooks, whose critiques of patriarchy often centered Black men as complicit in the oppression of Black women. While hooks’s work offered essential insights into the intersections of race and gender, it sometimes failed to account for the unique vulnerabilities of Black men under white supremacy. As Dr. Tommy J. Curryargues in The Man-Not, these critiques risk turning Black men into scapegoats, pathologizing them as patriarchs in a system that has never afforded them the tools of patriarchal power.
The result has been a distortion: a feminism that encourages Black women to see themselves in competition with Black men rather than in partnership. This distortion mirrors the strategies of white feminism, which has always sought to dominate rather than dismantle. But unlike white women, Black women cannot count on the preservation of white supremacy to buoy their sons and husbands. Aligning with white feminist goals often leaves Black families fractured and vulnerable, with no seat at the table and no path to power.
Kamala Harris and the Mirage of Progress
The failure of Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign should serve as a wake-up call. Her candidacy, like Hillary Clinton’s before her, revealed the limits of representation. For all the talk of breaking glass ceilings, Harris’s presence on the ballot was not enough to shift the structures of power. And while white feminists cheered her historic run, their solidarity ended at the ballot box. When it came time to choose, they chose their men.
For Black women, the lesson is clear: white feminism cannot be the blueprint for liberation. It cannot be trusted to center Black voices, to prioritize Black families, or to dismantle the systems that oppress us. Instead, it offers a mirage—a promise of empowerment that often requires stepping over Black men and abandoning the very communities that sustain us.
The Path Forward
The strength of the Black community has always been its resilience, its ability to thrive in the face of systems designed to destroy it. But resilience is not enough. To truly liberate ourselves, we must reject the tools of division handed to us by white supremacy. This means rejecting the alliances that promise empowerment at the cost of unity. It means building a movement that centers the Black family—not as a relic of patriarchy, but as a foundation of resistance.
Black men and women must recognize that their fates are intertwined. The liberation of Black women and the empowerment of Black men are not opposing goals; they are one and the same. To move forward, we must see that the divisions between us are not natural but manufactured, designed to keep us from confronting the systems that oppress us all.
As Malcolm X reminded us, “We can never win freedom and justice and equality until we are doing something for ourselves!” That something begins with rebuilding the bonds that white supremacy seeks to break. It begins with rejecting the mirage of white feminism and embracing a vision of liberation rooted in partnership, solidarity, and love.
In the end, Kamala Harris’s loss is not just a story of white feminist betrayal. It is a call to action for Black men and women to reclaim their power, to rebuild their families, and to fight—not against each other, but together—for the future we deserve.
Sources and Citations
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898).
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981).
Dr. Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (2017).
Malcolm X, Speech at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1962).
Exit Poll Data: Pew Research Center.
