Koa Beck Quotes

With many high-earning, public women espousing operating as individuals, "feminism" was reduced to a self-empowerment strategy. A way to get things. A way to get more of the things you thought you deserved. A way to consume. But it also performed something far more sinister: "feminism" became automatically imbued with agency and autonomy, starting popular feminist discourse with a lack of class literacy. Centering popular feminism there meant that the women and other marginalized genders who didn't have the necessary means to secure independence or power—in broader culture, in their families, in their communities, in their workplaces—were not a part of this conversation about becoming an optimized agent of self.

Discomfort, for more privileged sects, can be the threshold into increased awareness. It's the moments in which you shrink from that discomfort, that you don't walk through it, that you don't interrogate why you have such a corporal reaction to the demands of others, that those biases maintain their place.

Regardless of how many times they can say “feminist!” in a product or ad, it’s the allegiance to money that has hindered progress.

A hallmark of many grassroots movements shunned by white feminism, across multiple and intersecting identities, is that they put forward collective rights before an individual’s progress.

But in creating a hierarchy of acceptable bodies versus unacceptable ones, fat stigma also pulled considerably from racist, classist, and sexist ideologies. Not-thin bodies were interpreted as not as controlled, not as “civilized,” and therefore indicative of savagery. Dr. Farrell observes of this history, “Fatness, then, served as yet another attribute demarcating the divide between civilization and primitive cultures, whiteness and blackness, good and bad.

Behaving like men or obtaining what men have or achieving parity with men was (and still is) not only shortsighted, it was deemed innately oppressive and therefore not in line with Black feminism. After all, the machinations that make what men have and how they historically operate—patriarchy—possible relies on the exploitation of others. The oversight of economic interests as the fundamental guiding principles of how our society has been constructed has had devastating historical consequences.

In a time of alleged heightened "feminism" women of color and poor women are being left behind, and yet the trappings that uniquely target us, like poverty, incarceration, police brutality, and immigration, aren't often quantified as "feminist issues". The reason there is so much dissidence between what a female CEO says you can do and the lived reality of what you can feasibly do is that this type feminism wasn't made for us. We need a movement that addresses the reality of women's lives rather than the aspiration of what they hope to be.

For Zuk and the other woman boycotters, this endeavor was not about escaping the confines of being working class, but about protecting the rights of the working class. What this strategy innately relies on is the foremost recognition that poor and working-class people have and deserve rights in the first place—and aren’t plagues on society who are lazy, unwilling to apply themselves, or should, through some elaborate matrix and suspension of systemic blockades, simply not be working class. Existing in this socioeconomic bracket with these intrinsic financial realities was a legitimate life, across their families as well as their neighbors. And this communal approach to understanding their needs and successes was anchored deeply in protecting food prices for everyone rather than reverse engineering their individual lives to accommodate the price hike.

Women’s work is a natural resource that we don’t think we need to account for. Because we assume it will always be there. It’s considered invisible, indelible infrastructure.”10And because changing diapers, grocery shopping, doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, and cooking dinner are all coded as “a natural resource,” this labor doesn’t require maintenance, upkeep, replenishing, or even materials as far as traditional economics is concerned.

Without taking into account the ways in which money has motivated oppression, we are missing an essential layer as to why so many powerful and influential entities, business owners, entrepreneurs, and moguls refuse to take on social justice: it’s just not cost effective to do so. And this legacy has continued and even adapted as some businesses have feigned a more populist message regarding representation of women. Regardless of how many times they can say “feminist!” in a product or ad, it’s the allegiance to money that has hindered progress.

With the absence of subsidized childcare, paid federal parental leave, and rampant pregnancy discrimination, young women who have had a healthy amount of class advantages are left to ask themselves if they want to effectively lose them—because that’s what parenthood in the United States will ultimately entail: If they want to partake in a different kind of labor that will offer them fewer legal protections, limited pay, increased hours, increased personal financial burdens, and with zero support from the institutions to which they have dedicated expanding days and increased workloads. In

It was common knowledge at one prominent women’s brand I worked for that the reason they didn’t have more women of color, specifically Black women, on their legacy magazine covers was because they didn’t sell as well. For a business enterprise, and a financially struggling one at that, the editorial strategy to routinely flood the covers with normatively sized straight white women was presented as necessary business, and not a deeply racist lens. But this is where I’ve encountered capitalism to be at its most damaging: it provides an all-encompassing language to code racism, heterosexism, and classism as something else—to establish distance between these deeply coursing prejudices and the unavoidable realities of running a business. This distance insulates. It establishes an alternative reality in which testimonials, diversity reports, investigations, and data analysis on representation don’t resonate because making money is the ultimate objective above all else. But that’s all the more reason why the impetus to drive profits also needs to be aligned and analyzed in endeavors against oppression. Because the drive to make money, more money, more money than your competitors, more money than you made last year, more money than projected for the following year is an enduring vehicle for suppression.

Denouncing white supremacy means that I will no longer be supreme. Fostering diversity in my workplace means I will talk less as the dominant power in the room. Being pro-LGBTQ doesn’t entitle me to explain to my lesbian colleague that her relationships are “easier.” A

The activist bell hooks famously noted that the absence of structural critique was very revealing: Sandberg’s definition of feminism begins and ends with the notion that it’s all about gender equality within the existing social system. From this perspective, the structures of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy need not be challenged.… No matter their standpoint, anyone who advocates feminist politics needs to understand the work does not end with the fight for equality of opportunity within the existing patriarchal structure. We must understand that challenging and dismantling patriarchy is at the core of contemporary feminist struggle—this is essential and necessary if women and men are to be truly liberated from outmoded sexist thinking and actions.20

But to them, I say that we have green fields and lovely flowers and our arms stretched out.

Sandberg’s definition of feminism begins and ends with the notion that it’s all about gender equality within the existing social system. From this perspective, the structures of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy need not be challenged.… No matter their standpoint, anyone who advocates feminist politics needs to understand the work does not end with the fight for equality of opportunity within the existing patriarchal structure. We must understand that challenging and dismantling patriarchy is at the core of contemporary feminist struggle—

With the absence of subsidized childcare, paid federal parental leave, and rampant pregnancy discrimination, young women who have had a healthy amount of class advantages are left to ask themselves if they want to effectively lose them—because that’s what parenthood in the United States will ultimately entail: If they want to partake in a different kind of labor that will offer them fewer legal protections, limited pay, increased hours, increased personal financial burdens, and with zero support from the institutions to which they have dedicated expanding days and increased workloads. In this increasing neoliberal cultural terrain, where everyone is encouraged to optimize themselves for the best employment, the strongest partnerships, the most successful path, what strategically middle-class, somewhat self-aware woman wants to do more work for less money? If it wasn’t parenthood we were talking about but a white-collar job, Sheryl Sandberg would tell these young women to lean out. The pragmatics of having a baby are fundamentally incompatible with the dominant cultural messages surrounding economic security, class ascension, and performance aimed at women of these particular socioeconomic backgrounds. This is the tension that underlies many of these waffling motherhood essays and, I think, what young, professional, child-curious people are looking to reconcile when they click on these “Should I, a Middle-Class Woman Who Went to NYU, Have a Baby and Fuck Up This Good Thing?” headlines. But what often awaits them is a contemplation of “choice” and very seldom an expanded structural critique. They are placated into the numbing mantra that having children is “a personal choice,” encouraging increased individual reflection on what is actually a raging systemic failure that relies on women’s free labor. But structuring the conversation of having children around personal autonomy and lone circumstances also successfully eclipses the identification of parenthood as labor in the first place.

What I ultimately learned, though, is that these weren't slips or blunders-a simple lack of awareness. White feminism is an ideology; it has completely different priorities, goals, and strategies for achieving gender equality: personalized autonomy, individual wealth, perpetual self-optimization, and supremacy. It's a practice and a way of seeing gender equality that has it's own ideals and principles, much like racism or hetero sexism or patriarchy.

Maybe if women of color weren't relegated to sweeping floors, caring for children, and doing laundry for little to no money for centuries, we could have been recognized as chemists, essayists, doctors, and artists.