Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Against White Feminism with Rafia Zakaria

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Feminism means different things to different people. If you listened to our episode earlier this year, Feminism for the 99 percent, we took a deep dive into this, unpacking how women’s issues intersect with class and race, what trickle-down feminism is, who’s included and precluded from certain forms of mainstream, American feminism, and why it’s important for feminism to be truly intersectional and inclusive. In this Conversation, we take a deep dive into how the ideology of whiteness permeates mainstream, Western feminism, and how those on the peripheries are often left out — and even exploited by — feminism and certain feminists. Rafia Zakaria is a columnist for Dawn in Pakistan and author, most recently, of Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption, published by Norton and Company. Against White Feminism has made quite a splash since its publication in August, with a lot of positive reception, but also drawing the ire of many of those who it seeks to critique — namely, a certain cadre of feminists, often upper-middle class and white, who hold onto their very specific ideas about what feminism is, what it’s not, and perhaps most importantly — who gets to define it. We explore how a certain liberal form of white-supremacy permeates much of mainstream feminism, how the white feminist savior complex and imperial feminism have been deployed throughout history — and well into our present times, such as in Afghanistan — to marginalize women of color and impose the “correct” form of feminism in non-consensual and harmful ways, what trickle-down or #girlboss feminism are, and more. Thank you to The Raincoats for the intermission music in this episode.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. Thank you. I didn't write a book because I wanted to be divisive. I wanted to write a book making almost like a last-ditch effort to make feminism relevant to brown and black and Asian and Muslim women who have by and large sort of signed off on feminism because of the resistance of women like Hillary Clinton and many others who have written all sorts of violent and abusive op-eds against the book, because what they are trying to ban or forbid is the very idea that whiteness within feminism needs to be accountable. You are listening to upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Dela Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Feminism means different things to different people. If you listened to our episode earlier this year, feminism for the 99%, you heard us take a deep dive into this subject, unpacking how women's issues intersect with class and race,

explaining what trickle-down feminism is, showing who's included and who's excluded from certain forms of American mainstream feminism, and an articulation of why it's important for feminism to be truly intersectional and inclusive. In this conversation, we explore how the ideology of whiteness permeates mainstream Western feminism and how those in the peripheries are often left out and even exploited by feminism and certain

feminists. Rhaffi Zakaria is a columnist for dawn in Pakistan and author most recently of against white feminism notes on disruption, published by Norton and Company. Against white feminism has made quite a splash since its publication in August with a lot of positive reception But also drawing the eye of many of those who seek to critique it namely a certain cadre of feminists often upper middle class and white who Hold on to very specific ideas about what feminism is what it's not and perhaps most importantly who gets to define it. In this conversation with Rhafiyah, we hear how a certain liberal form of white supremacy

permeates much of mainstream feminism. How the white feminist savior complex and imperial feminism have been deployed throughout history, as well as into our present times such as in Afghanistan today. To marginalize women of color and impose the, quote unquote, correct form of feminism in non-consensual and harmful ways. We also look at what trickle down or girl-boss feminism is, and more. I'll let Robert take it from here. Thank you so much for coming on, Rafia. It's great to have you on upstream. Thank you so much for having me. I'm wondering to start if you could introduce yourself for our listeners and talk a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing. My name is Rafia Zakaria and I'm the author of against white feminism which is a critique of

whiteness or whitesopromacy within feminism or the feminist movement. So yeah, I mean I, or the feminist movement. So yeah, I mean, I, by training, I'm a lawyer, and I practiced immigration and civil rights law before going back to grad school to study political philosophy. I've been writing all along, but I started to write more and more, quite honestly parallel to my activism. So, you know, as one grew the other grew as well, I worked for a time at domestic violence shelter, helping Muslim and South Asian women facing abuse, domestic abuse. And then of course, I worked as a director for Amnesty International, I was on their board for six years. And I think all of those experiences kind of come together in my writing. You know, this is my third book individually. And I'm excited to talk to you about it. I'm really excited too.

And yeah, thank you so much for that introduction. And yeah, let's dive into your latest book. It's titled Against White Feminism. Maybe you'd be helpful to start with just some basic, like, table setting. So what is white feminism? So white feminism, as I define it in the book is not really a racial category. So I'm not saying that all white women who are feminists are white feminists. So I'm referring very particularly to whiteness as an ideology, right? So I'm referring to women who are unwilling

to examine the role that white racial privilege has played historically within the feminist movement and continues to play today. And, you know, like I said, you don't have to be white to be a white feminist, you can be brown, you could even be black, but you do have to ascribe to the idea that whiteness within feminism doesn't have to be questioned or examined, or that the role that white women play, the agenda setting role that white women play within the movement, is not driven by white racial privilege. In the book you write, quote, a white feminist is someone who refuses to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privileged

attached to it have played and continue to play in universalizing white feminist concerns, agendas, and beliefs as being those of all feminism and all feminists. And yeah, so I'm wondering how does this concept of whiteness and white supremacy manifest within mainstream feminism? And sort of what does that gatekeeping look like? And importantly, what kinds of experiences are excluded from that? Yeah, it's a great question. I think that what I was trying to get at, first of all,

racism as it exists today in the white and western world is no longer sort of the explicit ray. I mean, there is explicit racism still, but its formations, particularly on the left, are far more insidious, right? So there is essentially, in movements like feminism, there's a belief that what we're representing, so say equal pay, something like that, right? It's considered that that is a representation of the concerns of all feminists, regardless of race.

And what I'm arguing is that those are the concerns in particular of white and western feminists around whom the history of feminism is centered. Essentially, I'm drawing attention to the racial inequalities or the difference in power that results from various people, various feminists having different kinds of power or into their racial identity. So is an exchange between a white feminist and a black feminist about an agenda that they want to set? Is that really an equal exchange? So those are the questions that the book tries to get into.

There is, of course, an assumption, my assumption, that in 2021, we can have within feminism, feminists can have questions and conversations about race and hold white women and white structures accountable for the inequalities that are kind of elided over in the effort to present feminism as a single movement that speaks with a single voice. So this is a critique of that. I mean, I think that white feminists particularly of us, you know, there are, there is kind of a generational divide that I'm talking about here. But in terms of some older white feminists, this very discussion discussion about race is no can do. So this is definitely a book that pushes

against that and argues that it is in fact conversations about race that need to be had for the movement to be stronger and have more political relevance. Can you talk about what you refer to in the book as the white feminist savior complex? Maybe tracing its genealogy from these Zinnena visits of the 18th and 19th centuries, and it's interesting when I was reading your book, I was reminded of having to read this book called Guests of the Shake as an anthropology student in the late 2000s. And it really sort of I didn't make that connection of sort of what you were referring to in the book.

I was looking at these sort of anthropological excursions from a critical lens. But yeah, I'm wondering if you can talk about how just sort of tracing that genealogy of the white feminist savior complex. Yeah, I mean, honestly, like your association with guests of the shake is, you know, very, very apt example to bring on in terms of the white gaze and how it has understood and defined. I mean, not just brown and black women, but also brown and black men in general. But yeah, the Zanana visits that I talk about in the book, Zanana is essentially a Persian word that means women's quarters. And one of the projects that I do have in this book was to connect practices that were common and familiar

in colonial times to their sort of contemporary iterations, to note how those power differentials have kind of carried over despite the passage of time. So in this case, Zanana visits were something that during the colonial era British women who would go to India or to Persia or the Middle East in general would it's almost like I Don't want to say as a as a sort of tourist attraction Because I don't think they were from the other end of the women in the Zanana,

but these white women who now had the power of empire behind them, right, so that they were, you know, the white women of empire who essentially in terms of status were above even the brown and black men that were present in these colonized lands. And so they would sort of angle for an invitation from a local aristocrat who had women's quarters in their home, an angle for an invitation so that essentially they could go into these intimate spaces and quote-unquote meet and greet the women who were in them. But the idea of these quarters, the harem, in general, mysterious and you know an oppressive environment inhabited by women was essentially obviously a western and white frame to put on women who otherwise

lived very whole lives. They were segregated lives but you know women in the Zanana were many were literate and educated, they read, they had discussions, they had invited women from other families over and into this network entirely feminine network that existed. But what has remained sadly is that even now, say for instance, when a white woman, a white American journalist, say, covering a place like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, when she ventures out to these places, it's the same kind of, you know, rhetoric of exodisization and fetishization that is repeated again and again. And, you know, the ironic thing is that within that society, the women have, you know,

they're segregated, but they continue to be powerful. But it is actually, you know, the white gaze, in this case, you know, the gaze of the New York Times or Reuters or whatever, applied onto these women that renders them anonymous. So, for instance, you know, in the book, I recount the example of Lindsay Adario, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, who's worked, focused mainly on Afghanistan during the occupation. So you know, one of the sort of stints that she does and that she describes in her bestselling book is of her going into a secret Taliban school, you know, and photographing the women inside the secret school. Now, you know, she has to smuggle the camera into the secret school because obviously they're trying to keep it secret from the Taliban. But you know, Lindsay Adariya goes in there,

smuggles her camera, and takes pictures of the women that are in the school, and doesn't take their consent. Obviously, she's hiding. Doesn't bother to ask what their names are or any of it. And then those pictures are published in The New York Times and not a single person considers for a second that this is a secret school and that giving away the identity of these women puts their lives not to mention the school at risk. But of course, that, you know, that is the progressive dehumanization of brown women and also black women that allow such things

to happen. Their consent is considered completely irrelevant. And in that way, they are made forever anonymous, even as their image is used to burnish the credentials of this allegedly intrepid white woman journalist who went in there, went into Talban control of Ghanistan and got the story out and can tell this story. So there you have it, right? You have like something that you want to say happened hundreds of years ago in terms of this sort of zoo-like gazing at brown women who are within the Zanana. And now, this similarly zoo-like gaping at Afghan women, both of them without the consent of the women that are involved. And so this book tries to excavate and reveal

that, you know, brown and black women have voices too. And this idea that the face of empowerment, this sort of, you know, unquestioned idea that white women's interests, that what they think is important, you know, in terms of agenda-setting policy as being the archetype of the feminists for the whole world is quite simply wrong. One part of the book that I found really, well I found a lot of the book really interesting, but one little piece of history that I didn't know about that I was kind of shocked about was you talk about how white feminism manifested in India with British colonial rule, and specifically how the leading suffragettes in the West at the time were actually not very interested in the question

of decolonization when they were sort of over there helping, you know, quote, helping British women in terms of, you know, the right to vote. Can you just kind of talk about how that played out? You're essentially asking why feminists in India were not interested in the suffragist movement or in importing it from Britain to India. So, you know, to take you guys back, so, to take you guys back. So, and the British suffragist movement has obviously always in very white terms been iconized as like this very brave and noble struggle, you know, at the time for women to get the vote. And, you know, that's all very well. And, you know. It's great that British women won the vote when they did. But the way it happened was that after they won the vote, a number of British feminists were interested in sort of exporting their struggle to India. So, you know, they met with Indian feminists and women's activists and said,

you know, you two should have a movement like ours that helps you get the vote in India, helps women get the vote in India. You know, and they pressed and pressed and they weren't getting any traction to the extent that they founded the organization that would advocate for separation all by themselves. Eventually they got some Indian women to sign on, I guess. But the mainstream Indian feminist essentially said, look, we don't want equality with the brown men because the brown men like me the brown woman in colonial India is living under the yoke of your colonial oppression. What we want is to drive the British away from India gain independence and then have the vote the second we are an independent nation.

You know, she quoted Gandhi who famously said that India cannot be free until Indian women are free, and Indian women cannot be free until India is free. So you know, there was this very direct and pointed critique at the suffragist movement, but another reason I kind of like your question is because it also illustrates what the world considers heroic, right? So here you have this much iconized and lauded and have this much iconized and lauded and struggle of these white suffragist women who want to be equal to white men. And that is presented as the central women's right struggle in the world at the time. When here you have brown women, millions and millions of them

agitating against empire, against the British empire, which was happening exactly at the same time. And yet that movement and the very, very central role that Indian women, brown women, played in it is always sort of relegated to the margins of history, so that struggles against empire somehow are, and the entire brunt of British oppression are somehow not considered to be a feminist struggle that's worthy of iconization or even recounted at all in feminist history.

And so you have, you know, the erasure of the struggles that black and brown women have fought from the story of feminism as a whole, even today. And that is the kind of genealogy that the book attacks, because it points out that when you do that, when you present white feminism and white women as the archetype of what a strong woman is, you're essentially also asking black and brown women to discard their racial identity when they come into the umbrella

of feminism so that if I want to be a feminist I have to put my brownness away and essentially ape the white gestures of empowerment that feminism has centered. You talk a lot about whiteness and the white gaze. And you also talk quite a bit about, what could be characterized as maybe class or the bourgeois gaze, perhaps. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about sort of the intersection with feminism and white feminism

and sort of what you call trickle-down feminism and sort of how it's deployed in what you call the white savior industrial complex. Yeah, I mean, so like this is marching ahead, right? We've marched ahead now from the liberal perhaps to the neoliberal era. And I talk about a concept which I think is very important to note when the hallmark of, I'd say, neoliberalism is when man was essentially reduced to homoeconomicus, right? So that the worth, often individual,

became their economic output or their economic value. And you know, this change was taking place over the 80s and 90s. And it was taking place at a time when brown feminists very intentionally were organizing against capitalism. So much so that the word empowerment is a term that round feminists used and defined as essentially the struggle to transform social, political, and economic structures and resist capitalism and whiteness, right? But the neoliberal essentially saw this differently. They saw that in this kind of post-colonial moment, a way with which the white and western world

could retain its tentacles in these post-colonial societies by now fashioning their interventions into those countries as development initiatives. So, you know, you have sort of the proliferation of just hundreds of development initiatives at the hands of these large transnational organizations like the UN that came out of the postwar era. And the idea was that instead of empowerment being this political and social struggle, that among other things resisted capitalism, there was the conversion of empowerment from this buzzword to what I call a fuzzword, where everybody could see what they wanted in empowerment, which means that obviously that it meant nothing. But it was also a way to essentially take the political fangs out of the post-colonial presence of the

white and western world in the global south, right? So to present it as a depolitical or apolitical sort of presence, this idea of empowerment as a purely economic idea, women's empowerment as an economic concept was popularized. And it gained tremendous amounts of traction. So you have things like micro loans, whether argument is a okvel, we'll give this woman $50 and she'll be able to buy some basic things and she'll be able to set up her little shop in her neighborhood in Nairobi or in Karachi or wherever else. And then she'll have a little business going and then she'll make some more money and then before you

know it, she'll be an entrepreneur and once she's an entrepreneur, she'll have economic power and then therefore she'll also then have economic decision-making power and then that will translate to power in society. So it was definitely this idea of trickle-down feminism where these white women sitting in offices in Geneva or New York or wherever else were coming out that these empowerment programs that you know essentially reduced empowerment to this technocratic concept and it sounds sort of ridiculous, you know, when I recount it or we're talking about it here, but quite literally, hundreds, hundreds of millions of dollars went to these sorts of ideas, right? Like I give the example of Bill Gates who wanted to empower the world as women using chickens and he said you know he had this what he called a

billion-dollar solution, billion-dollar idea where he was just gonna give women chickens and he imagined them becoming know, chicken farmers and able to essentially lift their families out of poverty and become empowered. And the result, of course, was exactly what you would expect, which is that, yeah, in the short run, they had a chicken, so they see some short-term advantages of having this chicken that's given to them. And then, you know, within a few months, those advantages are gone. And, you know, in a year, the chicken is gone too, and they're back exactly to where they are. So, yeah, so I mean, I'm interested in critiquing these ideas that you would think would be screened and critiqued before they're put into operation,

but not only are they not critiqued, you can see just how little debate goes on, and how little diversity there is on the governing boards and the policy boards of these organizations where nobody for instance comes up with the brilliant idea that oh maybe we should ask women what they want, women on the ground, what they want. So it's very similar to this idea of oh Indian women should want suffrage because in that case too despite the fact that Indian women said that they weren't interested white women went ahead in trying to have a set up a suffrage movement in India and get Indian women the vote, which ultimately was

an idea that ended up being voted down by their own parliament, you know, the British parliament. And it's the same in these cases, right, where you have hundreds of millions of dollars that are supposedly being spent to empower brown and black women, but really are in, because you know, the first time that something like this happens and there's a development debacle, you would say, oh, you know, maybe, you know, they just didn't do the right research, they didn't talk to the people on the ground, et cetera, et cetera.

But in my research for this book, I found quite literally example after example, after example, to the point where you come to realize that the purpose of this money is not producing any kind of actual change for these women. It's for these donor agencies to feel good about themselves and keep the cycle going. So it's not that, oh, the women will actually be empowered. Let me tell you what will actually work. It's this, what I say, the white, savior, industrial complex, or the white feminist,

industrial complex, where the multi-millionaires daughter in Texas wants to feel good. And so she wants to set up this empowerment project. And of course, like building girls' schools for instance sounds a lot better than sanitation for the community. And so you know, so you build these schools even though what the community actually wants in needs is sanitation. And you have that repeated on a scale of billions of dollars.

You're listening to an upstream conversation with Rhauffy Azkarya, author of Against White Feminism. We'll be right back. I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance.

I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance. I'm going to dance. I don't know, I don't know That's what you are, I don't know The times I put on, but never for now I don't know, but I'm close, I'm too late But you don't shine But I'm not the right star You can go home

Don't be hurry, I'm sure It's fine, I'm fine But you're a baby here But don't worry, I need don't worry This is just a fairytale I'm burning in the sun by my hands The sun is on my back Don't you have your guts? You've got a century power, I go

I hear your kind my creature You don't say it's your guts That was Fairy Tale in the Supermarket by The Rain Coats. Just a quick reminder, upstream is a labor of love. We rely on financial support from our listeners and fans, from you, to keep this podcast going. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. It really helps keep these episodes free and this whole project sustainable. Thank you. And now back to our conversation with

Rhaffi Zakaria, author of Against White Feminism. I think I want to jump into talking a little bit about Afghanistan. You talk about feminized imperialism, which, you know, itself has a very long history intertwined with colonialism, of course. And I think a lot of the ideas that you're talking about play out in terms of the military invasion of Afghanistan, how it was sold and how it continues to be sold even as we have withdrawn our formal troops in 2021. It sort of has this same sort of veneer of weird there to protect women from the Taliban. And I'm wondering if you can unpack that.

Yeah, definitely. I think, as I say in the book, I think that the war in Afghanistan was the first, I would call it the first feminist war, because it represented at least the first time within Western feminism and US feminism, that feminism allied itself with an invading power. Rather than functioning as a check on the state, I mean, in decades previous to that, prominent American feminists, such as, say, Gloria Steinem, were interested in,

and were actively protesting the war in Vietnam, right? And that was sort of the alignment. But then, you know, and this starts late in the 90s, feminist majority comes up to this campaign called Engender Aparted in Afghanistan, right? From the majority is one of the main big feminist organizations in the US and they say okay we're gonna have this program and nobody pays attention to this program till Jay Leno's wife somehow hears about it and then she takes it up and obviously when she takes it up the celebrity industrial complex is there to support her. So she has this huge fundraiser at her house,

inviting all sorts of stars like Marl Street, and the big Hollywood celebrities. And so this campaign kind of takes off. Now, then, in 2001, 9-11 happens, right? And obviously within days of 9-11, the US is on the war path. Because obviously such a tragic and horrific attack has happened, and there's tremendous amounts of political pressure on the Bush administration to sort of have an immediate act of retaliation or revenge.

Now, Afghanistan was not at all involved in the 9-11 attacks. They can't invade Saudi Arabia because obviously they don't want to endanger the US oil supply. And so they come upon Afghanistan, which is where the leaders of Al Qaeda were allegedly given refuge by the Taliban. Now, so this is, you know, a strategic effort, a strategic interest. Obviously, the US wants to bomb this organization, although all the attackers are Saudi, but nevertheless, a bombing has to happen. And so it is in the run up to this bombing that the Bush administration up to this bombing that the Bush administration essentially learns of this program that the feminist majority has been running. They immediately start talking to and invite leaders of the feminist majority over to the

White House and the State Department to the extent that when Colin Powell announces the invasion of Afghanistan, the leaders of the feminist majority are present at that event. And within, you know, a month or two of that in November 2001, Laura Bush uses all the vocabulary of feminism, the liberation of God, women, they're being oppressed. This is a war of liberation in her radio address in her infamous radio address to the United States. Good morning. I'm Laura Bush, and I'm delivering this week's radio address to kick off a worldwide effort

to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban. That regime is now in retreat across much of the country, and the people of Afghanistan especially women are rejoicing. Afghan women know through hard experience what the rest of the world is discovering. The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorist. And so, you know, you have the deployment of feminist concepts and ideas by a hegemonic power that's invading a small, landlocked country that really doesn't even have a standing military. And that is presented as a huge victory for feminism itself.

And that alignment continues. Well, first of all, it has the buy-in of a lot of feminists, right? They sign out feminist majority signs, a letter supporting the invasion, which they've since taken off their website, since I cited it in my book. But even more than that, I mean, you know, feminists like Gloria Steinem say things like, well, we support the efforts of the United to bring democracy to this country, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, you have this war of strategic interests and goals that is essentially packaged in the vocabulary of feminism.

And here again, you have trickle-down feminism, right, where the idea of the idea of the vocabulary of feminism. And here again, you have trickle-down feminism, right? Where the idea is that we're going to take glorious, stymian feminism, feminism of like the New Jersey suburban mom, and we're going to export it wholesale to Afghanistan and to Afghan women. And everybody buys on to this idea, to the extent that Hillary Clinton, Madeline,

Albright all sign on to this hawkish idea of invading a country. Nobody, nobody, brings up, for instance, the problem that you are bombing these villages, you are raiding the homes of these women, you are carrying off their husbands, their brothers, and their sons for indefinite detention at Bagram Air Base. You are doing all of these things and then you're saying well you know what we're also gonna build a school. We're building school for Afghan girls and

they're gonna get educated and we're gonna bring feminism to Afghanistan and yet this happened not just for one or two years. This happened for 20 years. And nobody looked, for instance, at the problem with this completely ridiculous story. To the extent that after 20 years were over and were withdrawing from Afghanistan, right? A couple of months ago, the rhetoric is exactly the same. The same Congresswoman who wore the burka on the floor of the house doing this theatrical display of how oppressive it is. The restrictions on women's freedoms in Afghanistan are unfathomable to most Americans. Women and girls cannot venture outside without a burka, which they are forced to wear.

It's an expensive, heavy cumbersome garment, which covers the entire body. And it includes a mesh panel covering the eyes. The veil is so thick that it's difficult to breathe. The little mesh opening for the eyes makes it extremely difficult to even cross the road. Carolyn Maloney then wears this workout to the mat-gall and Clarissa Ward blest her soul like she's this blonde woman, white woman

who's roaming around the streets of Kabul, you know, idea that Afghan women wearing the burqa means they are oppressed and then when they take it off, they are not oppressed anymore and we allow them to take it off. So we were the good guys and now the Taliban are going to make the merit again. You know, I have a whole book called Wheel about, you know, the complex meanings of the Wheel. And you would think that after 20 years, the US would have learned something about this country that they had occupied. But zero, nothing, nothing was learned. And you know, now two months after it happened, it's all said and done, and nobody is talking about Afghanistan at all, and you more, or of gun women. Yeah, we do have the memory of, you know, actually I heard recently that it's not true that goldfish have a bad memory necessarily, but that's certainly the case.

The metaphor rings true for sure when it comes to the many wars that we engage in and. Right. Right. I mean, it's, it's this alignment of the feminist as a fighter in the war on terror that I'm pointing to that is dangerous, right? Because it essentially says that you have to have this particular state-sponsored state-aligned the line belief in order to be a feminist. And yet that is the operative definition in DC today. Another story that you told in the section of the book where you look at Afghanistan sort of and the Middle East and South Asia and sort of white feminism and imperialism. You talk about how, maybe if you could actually just make the connection.

What's the connection between Osama bin Laden, vaccines, and polio, and Deepakistan, lady health workers program? How are those all related? Yes. and the Lady Health Workers Program. How are those all related? Yes, so thank you for asking about that story because it's not one that I get to talk about very much. And it's such a marvel how the story has been hidden because a couple of years ago, I was invited to speak at the hundredth anniversary of Save the Children, the big

organization Save the Children in London. And I told the story there. And the room was full of, you know, Save the Children in Louise. And they didn't know this story. And the story is really basically that the CIA set up a fake vaccination program using the front of Save the Children. They deny it, but it was reported, if you look at the immediate reports following the raid, they mentioned it being a Save the Children Office. Anyway, so they set up this fake save the children office with this Pakistani doctor and

other health workers, right? And the idea is that the save the children program is really there to collect DNA so that the CIA can find out where Osama bin Laden is. So this is what they're doing and they're successful, right? They go to the compound and at the pretext of providing hep-sew vaccinations, I think, or polio vaccinations to the children in the compound they're able to get the DNA of these kids that they then identify as being related to bin Laden and the whole raid, you know, in 2011 happens. So, you know, the Americans achieve their objective, there's all these sort of, you know of pictures of of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the situation room watching the live

read and all the rest of it. But of course the problem that nobody cares about that they leave Pakistan with is that now a vaccination program has been outed as a CIA front, right? So, this, of course, popularizes this idea that all the vaccination programs in Pakistan are friends for the CIA. And obviously, this notion proliferates like wildfire and as you can see in America I mean just a little bit of misinformation can destroy vaccination programs and that's precisely what happened in Pakistan. So the lady health workers are actually you know I would call them one of the best examples of frontline feminism that exists in the world today. So these are women that are employed by the government of Pakistan.

They're not paid much, right? A little bit over subsistence, but these are educated women, and they're given basic health and hygiene training for a couple of years. And then these women, they're called the lady health workers, essentially go into homes, into the, you know, women's parts of homes and provide basic healthcare to Pakistani women. So they work from very, very congested urban areas to very, very far-flung places out in the Himalayas. You know, this network of women works to provide basic health care. And this is the only health care that millions and millions of Pakistani women and children get at all. And one of the things that lady health workers do is provide basic vaccinations, right?

And this has continued, it continues to this day. After the Osama bin Laden raid happens. These lady health workers become targets for the Taliban, for Al-Qaeda, for any and every terrorist group that now wants to underscore that vaccination programs essentially controlled by the CIA meant to make women infertile and make, you know, children infertile, I guess, like from a young age through these vaccinations. And that idea proliferates and it's responsible quite literally for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Pakistan. Polio, for instance, had been completely eradicated from Pakistan. There were no cases of polio in the years leading up to 2011. And of course, since 2011, we have hundreds and hundreds of cases of children getting polio and becoming disabled because of it. And the damage that's been done in terms of vaccinations in general,

it still continues to this day. People are very wary of government health workers they don't want to give them access to their children or take the vaccinations that they're being provided. So fucked up. Yeah, when I read that, I was just like completely floored. I really appreciate you bringing that into the conversation. And I presented this in London at this meeting of Save the Children and what my presentation

was is that Save the Children had an ad that they were running that showed an Iraqi boy and girl, right? And they show our, you know, a woman who's the mom who's like getting these kids ready for school and then the kids climb down from the apartment and they're on their way to school and then this suddenly show a bombing happen. And this bombing just, you know, the kids barely escape. And then, you know, it's a save the children commercial. And from a commercial like that, you would think, wow, this organization is saving children,

in these war-torn places. And then you have this example from Pakistan, where they're complicit in the depths of thousands of children, but that's of course, you know, the story of brown people dying and brown lady workers being targeted and killed in many cases. And so it never makes it into the record book of feminist heroics. Yeah. record book of feminist heroics. Yeah, so I think we would be remiss. Well, I think you actually have brought Hillary Clinton up already, but I would be remiss if I didn't ask you a question about Hillary Clinton specifically since we are talking about white feminism. And yeah, so recently the Guardians Politics Weekly podcast with Jonathan Friedland mentioned

your book. And I'm wondering, maybe if you could outline your thoughts on the sort of, I guess, Hillary Clinton style of feminism, this idea that feminism is primarily about, you know, women being entitled to equal rights and opportunities to men in every aspect of society, but while at the same time overlooking a lot of what that kind of very focused particular form of feminism ignores, I guess. And one of the things that, and I think about when I think about Hillary Clinton's style of feminism, it's sort of this like girl boss or lean in feminism that the likes of Hillary Clinton or Cheryl Sandberg, for example, that they advocate for that feminism should be really focused on just replacing

the faces of men with those of women in positions of power. And it doesn't question the positions of power in the first place. It doesn't question the fact that all women can't positions of power. And it doesn't question the positions of power in the first place, it doesn't question the fact that all women can't be in power. It's a very privileged sort of feminism. And it reminds me of the quote from the feminist journalist and author Susan Folludi, quote, you can't change the world for women by simply

inserting female faces at the top of an unchanged system of social and economic power. And yeah, so I'm wondering maybe if you could, if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, Hillary Clinton, when asked about this, did what she is very good at doing, which is just dithering dismissed and saying, well, this is not a problem, but the facts are the facts. And the facts are that Hillary Clinton voted to invade Afghanistan even at a time when the indigenous of L'Anvaman's organizations on the ground were absolutely imploring the US government and asking for peace.

And, you know, she oversaw the continued bombings and dronings of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan women. So, to me, of course, she is delegitimized on, you know, on that front. But one of the problems with her argument is also, you know, when she was asked in response, she said, oh, we have to worry about Texas. We can't be fighting amongst ourselves. And I recount her response because it's a classic white feminist response, right? Because it imputes that, look, I'm in charge, and if you're not willing to tow the line, you are in it with the patriarchy, which is an absolutely ridiculous idea, because it is essentially forbidding black and brown women

and Asian women from demanding that white women and men be accountable for their actions and the impact of those actions on feminism, right? You're shutting me down before you, I can even say, a word. And this is a very popular retort. And the problem is, is that it doesn't, in my view, recognize the reality of the status quo. I mean, the status quo at the moment is one in which white feminism largely exists to benefit white women and to make them feel good about themselves and to win, you know, their victories against white men. I didn't write a book because I wanted to be divisive.

I wanted to write a book making almost like a last-ditch effort to make feminism relevant to brown and black and Asian and Muslim women who have by and large sort of signed off on feminism because of the resistance of women like Hillary Clinton and many others who have written all sorts of violent and abusive op-eds against the book because what they are trying to ban or forbid is the very idea that whiteness within feminism needs to be accountable, just as whiteness within all the other systemic structures that continue to promote white ideas, white culture, and heroicized white people.

I think that they are very reluctant to question those structures because those structures have really served them well. And they like the model where if I want to be a successful feminist, I essentially have to cow-tow to my white overlord mistresses and they're going to tell me, you know, with song to sing. So, yeah, I mean, there are many, many women, brown women among them who sing that song,

you know, and are willing to dance to the tune of Hillary Clinton or whoever else, but I'm not willing to do that. And so the book is blunt and bold in that respect and that I'm not afraid to call this out. And my hope is that I can take the punches for the next generation and so that the next second time someone starts talking about accountability and the white supremacy within the movement, then you know they have a precedent on which to draw for. Thank you to the Rain Coats for the Intermission Music in today's episode. Upstream The Music was composed by Robert. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans.

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