Good read.
White Feminists Wanted to Invade
Afghan women never asked for US air strikes.
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The belief that white women knew what’s best for Afghan women goes deeper than Hollywood and political posturing. The hundreds of millions in development aid that the United States poured into its savior-industrial complex relied on second-wave feminists’ assumption that women’s liberation was the automatic consequence of women’s participation in a capitalist economy. One of the most expensive development programs that Americans brought to Afghanistan was PROMOTE, which cost $418 million and was intended to provide 75,000 Afghan women with training, internships, and jobs. When the program was audited in 2016, it was almost impossible to trace where all the money had gone. The influx of cash wasn’t just wasted; it helped kill Indigenous feminisms that might have worked to achieve more culturally relevant goals. The aid economy meant that Afghan women activists abandoned their own programs and rushed to American ones.
White feminism’s refusal to disaggregate whiteness—and its colonialist and oppressive associations—from feminism meant that the blueprint for empowerment was acting, by and large, like white women. The result was that those opposing the US presence saw authenticity in rejecting all that came via white feminism, which helped discredit all feminist ideas.
White feminism is a trickle-down feminism, and Afghan women are not the only ones it condescends to; Black women, Latina women, Asian women, and other women of color have trouble gaining entry into policy-making circles because their experiences of being a feminist, surviving as a single mother, working on a factory floor, or enduring years of racial discrimination are considered irrelevant. Those roles go to elite white women who have climbed the ladder, nudging out the very women they allegedly wish to help.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/white-feminists-wanted-to-invade/