#whysodapper

In my opinion, fourth wave feminism is about recognizing your privilege, and literally learning how to learn, via listening to the experiences of those who are entitled to speak about various kinds of oppression, rather than reading one article about transphobia and then speaking over those affected individuals, or trying to speak for an entire marginalized community. It’s about realizing that it’s not about white women being referred to as “women” and everyone else being referred to as “everyone else”. It’s not “women get paid 78 cents to the man’s dollar” when “women” is only referring to white able-bodied women and “man” is only referring to white able-bodied men. It’s more like “white women make 78 cents to the white man’s dollar, but that’s a rather erasive statistic, because white women make even more than black men! Who make even more than black women, who make even more than Latina and Hispanic women, who make much much more than people with disabilities who are of any gender, because they’re allowed to be paid below minimum wage legally!” (And of course even this sentence is excluding millions of others)

Fourth wave feminism, to me, is about white women not being the “default”. Like, it’s not about us non-black women “including” black women in the women’s rights movement, because it’s not “our” movement to include them in. It’s about realizing that this movement is meant for everyone, not white straight cisgender able-bodied upper middle class women followed by everyone else. Fourth wave feminism is about realizing that feminism and oppression are not black and white, straight and narrow concepts. You can’t divide things into “POC rights” and “women’s rights” and “queer rights” and “trans rights” without forcing someone who is a black, queer, trans woman to just ignore core parts of their identity in the name of one particular movement, because it’s not that simple and easy to divide up. Revolutionary movements of oppressed people cannot be spliced up like that except in Venn diagrams on paper. The real world doesn’t work like that. Intersectionality is absolutely crucial to feminism. There’s no “baby feminism” kit where first you learn about slut shaming and then you learn about bio-reductionism and then you learn about Islamophobia and then you learn about lower-class oppression and then you learn about transphobia and then you learn about transmisogyny and then you learn about transmisogynoir, because all of those things are connected to each other, and many people are affected by all of those at once.

Fourth wave feminism is about liberation and education. It is about acknowledging that you have been racist at points in your life, doing all that you can to unlearn your internalized racism, and participating in anti-racist acts, rather than simply labeling yourself an “ally” without doing shit for anyone. It’s about prioritizing not actually being racist over not seeming racist. It’s about knowing that feminism is not just about “equality”, that it’s not nearly as simple and trivial as that. It’s about having the hard conversations where you realize you’ve been doing something incredibly offensive, and then admitting to that and working to fix it, even if the offended party does not forgive you. It’s about realizing when it simply isn’t your place to speak on an issue, despite how much you might care about it. It’s about changing your opinions as you gather new information, rather than becoming so sure of your ideals that you never listen to another person’s perspective ever again.