A review by ravenofoctober
Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism by Daisy Hernández, Bushra Rehman
4.0
I think this collection of essays is an excellent read for someone like me--a feminist looking to better understand the intersection of racism, classism, homophobia, and other factors with feminism. There is a wide representation of women of color experiences in these essays.
This book was a hard read at times, because it is unapologetic in its criticisms of feminism, which in general still tends to focus on issues of white middle class women rather than the broader spectrum that includes women of color and their experiences with racism, classism, etc., altogether. I LIKED that it was unapologetic, because it was a good wake-up call to me. The rather narrow view of general feminism was something I understood at an academic level before reading this book, but this collection moved that understanding to a more practical level—how that general focus of feminism ostracizes a wide swath of women, and how it has affected the lives of the women who wrote these essays. The book manages to extrapolate the individual experiences described in the book simply because of the fact that each essay had an instance where the writer had been shunned from a feminist space by white feminists. So it manages to give personal accounts that piece together a larger picture when read together.
I do think feminism has made some strides to rectify this since this book was published in 2002, but it's not my place, as a white woman, to try and say how much improvement on this front feminism has made, because I do not experience the ostracism myself.
Each essay offered a different type of experience by a women of color (some queer, some not. Some grew up poor, some didn't. Etc.); it doesn't cover ALL possible experiences, but I think the editors did a great job of trying to cover as many as possible. This is a book I think white feminists should read to help educate themselves and better understand what women of color go through, but it definitely requires that we get over our knee-jerk reactions of criticisms of feminism.
This book was a hard read at times, because it is unapologetic in its criticisms of feminism, which in general still tends to focus on issues of white middle class women rather than the broader spectrum that includes women of color and their experiences with racism, classism, etc., altogether. I LIKED that it was unapologetic, because it was a good wake-up call to me. The rather narrow view of general feminism was something I understood at an academic level before reading this book, but this collection moved that understanding to a more practical level—how that general focus of feminism ostracizes a wide swath of women, and how it has affected the lives of the women who wrote these essays. The book manages to extrapolate the individual experiences described in the book simply because of the fact that each essay had an instance where the writer had been shunned from a feminist space by white feminists. So it manages to give personal accounts that piece together a larger picture when read together.
I do think feminism has made some strides to rectify this since this book was published in 2002, but it's not my place, as a white woman, to try and say how much improvement on this front feminism has made, because I do not experience the ostracism myself.
Each essay offered a different type of experience by a women of color (some queer, some not. Some grew up poor, some didn't. Etc.); it doesn't cover ALL possible experiences, but I think the editors did a great job of trying to cover as many as possible. This is a book I think white feminists should read to help educate themselves and better understand what women of color go through, but it definitely requires that we get over our knee-jerk reactions of criticisms of feminism.