Cimorene

No, I agree - I don't cease to call myself a feminist, but I've also lost some of my faith in the dictionary definition, if that makes sense. Because if there are women struggling for women's rights who don't have the luxury of ignoring the history of the movement, then no one should ignore it.

That history's been ugly, a lot of times, and it's disingenuous to say, as I've heard and maybe said in the past, that the voices of white feminism which speak up to silence POCs aren't the voice of feminism, but merely the voices of people who happen to also work for feminism. No one can speak for a movement, but the pattern of its members' actions can speak for itself. And the pattern of supporting white priviledge has gone on a long time, and continues right up to the white feminists jumping to the defense of white feminism in the wake of those ugly statements about Barack Obama a few weeks ago. It's viscerally real to me, now, that those actions of white feminists do form a pattern of systematically oppressing POCs, that they can't meaningfully be taken in isolation from their identities as feminist; that any meaningful discussion of feminism has to deal with the reality, present and past, of the feminist movement and what it's actually done, and not with the dictionary definition. In other words, I now see that it's possible for someone to passionately believe in struggling to end the systematic societal oppression of women, and yet for that person's principles/goals not to align with feminism's, while the political presence of feminism is controlled by white feminists.