Rafia Zakaria > Quotes

“Relatability is subjectivity dressed up as objectivity.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“White women wanted parity with white men at any cost, including by avidly taking on the domination of Black and Brown people. As white feminists have progressed within their societies, and began to occupy increasingly important positions, they're constructing a feminism that uses the lives of Black and Brown people as arenas in which they can prove their credentials to white men.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“When we consider the world from an asexual lens rather than from the position of any particular sexual identity, we can better apprehend how heterosexuality and, to a far lesser extent, LGBTQI identities have been co-opted as the basis of markets of goods that must be consumed. Consumption of particular products becomes the basis of being considered sexual or sexy.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“White and western women are seen as participants in complex modern societies. Their problems cannot be solved with a single, neat gift. Women of color are imagined as existing in a much simpler world, held back from success by very basic issues that have very basic solutions.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism

“Notably, there was no mention of investing in Afghan women’s political participation, perhaps because if Afghan women had political freedom they would prioritize ending the American occupation over anything else.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“Comparisons of women and Blacks continue throughout the book, but they never meet in, say, the category of “black woman.” In one section, de Beauvoir compares anti-Black racism to anti-feminism, saying that antifeminists offer “separate but equal” status to women in the same way that Jim Crow subjects Blacks to extreme forms of discrimination. There are, she says, “deep analogies” between women and Blacks; both must be liberated from the same paternalism and master class that wants to keep them in their place. In every comparison that de Beauvoir makes between women and Blacks, however, the Blacks are assumed to be American and male and the women are assumed to be white. In”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“Heroines of American journalism, writing in publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and reporting for major television networks, have all played a similar role of legitimizing America's new imperial project in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Middle East at large, promoting a narrative that violent military incursions are designed to liberate women and deliver better societies. Thus they also underscore their own superior status as white feminists, with their values of rebellion over resilience, risk over caution, and speed over endurance as the ultimate feminist values. Afghan women emerge as no more than prototypes whose wishes always align with what white feminists think they should want, rather than as people with independent political positions and perspectives.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“The man was a liar, and all of us his victims. The bottom floor was for a new wife,”
― Rafia Zakaria, The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan

“When one has been as near to the reality of Life (which after all is Death) as I have been dearest, one only remembers the beautiful and tender moments and all the rest becomes a half veiled mist of unrealities. Try and remember me beloved as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread upon . . . . Darling I love you—I love you—and had I loved you just a little less I might have remained with you—only after one has created a very beautiful blossom one does not drag it through the mire. The higher you set your ideal the lower it falls. I have loved you my darling as it is given to few men to be loved. I only beseech you that the tragedy which commenced in love should also end with it. . . .

Ruttie Jinnah's last letter to Jinnah”
― Rafia Zakaria, The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan

“One particularly distressing example of the high cost to feminist progress exacted by the war is what happened in Pakistan after the capture of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. In the run-up to his capture, the CIA and the U.S. military allegedly worked with the charity Save the Children in hiring Dr. Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani physician, to run a fake Hepatitis B vaccination program as a front for their surveillance operations.15 Per CIA instructions, Dr. Afridi and a female healthcare worker visited the bin Laden compound under the guise of administering vaccinations and managed to gain access, although they did not see bin Laden. In 2012, all foreign Save the Children staff were expelled from Pakistan, and in 2015, the entire organization there was required to shut its doors, despite having denied (and continuing to deny) that it was involved in this effort. The CIA managed to get their guy, but when the Pakistanis, irate at not having been told about the raid, expelled U.S. military trainers from Islamabad, they were immediately threatened with a cut of the $800 million aid package that the U.S. had promised, thus exposing yet again the coercive power that aid wields. The loss of aid money was not, however, the worst impact of the tragedy. As the British medical journal The Lancet reported, the unintended victims of the tragedy were the millions of Pakistani children whose parents now refused to have them vaccinated amidst rising rates of polio, a disease that vaccination had essentially extinguished in Western countries by the mid-twentieth century.16 In their view, if the CIA could hire a doctor to run a fake vaccine program, then the whole premise of vaccinations became untrustworthy. Within a few years of the raid, Pakistan had 60 percent of all the world’s confirmed polio cases.17”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“Both sex-positive feminism and choice feminism minimize and sideline the concerns of women of color and poor women who need the status quo to change. In this crucial sense, then, choice feminism prioritizes the needs and beliefs of white feminists based on individual choice because constructing a collective and engaging in the very political processes of consensus-building and contestation of various claims is not suitable for their purposes. Ironically, “choice” feminism actually ensures that those who are not benefiting from the status quo—from the untrammeled exercise of power and individuality that comes with white privilege—will never have choices beyond those they have at the present moment. In this crucial sense, then, choice feminism is white feminism”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“I vehemently supported sexual liberation and sexual expression, but I did not understand why this had to be the most important or even the most visible thing about me.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“Trickle-down feminism, where a solution is developed at the top (by those with the most privilege), is not intersectional feminism; it is dictatorial feminism.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism

“Times may have changed, but the commitment of whiteness to extracting value wherever it can – and dominating the narrative to frame this extraction as benevolence – persists.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism

“Late capitalism’s individualist reading of success is very much a part of the American dream of self-improvement through hard work—promoting the illusion that the system is fair and rewards effort in a linear and consistent way, rather than driving productivity to the disproportionate profit of already-wealthy white men.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“If white women’s sexual liberation is something to be celebrated, Black women’s sexual liberation is a danger to the system, something to be tamed and brought within the bounds of white-defined decency.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“this is how white supremacy operates within feminism, with upper-middle-class white women at the top ensuring that the credentials that upper-middle-class white women have remain the most valued criteria within feminism itself.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“It is so easy to be unconcerned with domination, silencing and oppression when they are perpetrated on those you barely see.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism

“Any honest analysis of honor crimes would need to consider the social and material circumstances that foster intimate violence against women—in hundreds of thousands of cases of male-partner violence in the United States and United Kingdom, as well as in foreign lands.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“Women now could choose among multiple brands of laundry detergent but deferred or neglected opportunities to organize politically to demand free childcare for all women.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“There is a division within feminism that is not spoken of but that has remained seething beneath the surface for years. It is the division between the women who write and speak feminism and the women who live it, the women who have voice versus the women who have experience, the ones who make the theories and policies and the ones who bear scars and sutures from the fight.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“...the group had made a point to include veiled women in their program to underscore that the issue of veiling or not veiling was not the basis of true progressivism and that political freedom was at the center of their leftist populism.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“It signified that even with a commitment to racial and gender justice, it is most often easier to inhabit the systems that we find ourselves in than to dismantle them because of their inequity.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“But American journalists, female journalists in particular, created a narrative for the war on terror that reaffirmed it as one fought by a feminist America, against anti-feminist, primitive, patriarchial and pre-modern countries that were too apathetic or too weak or too traitorous to fight terror in their homelands themselves.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“In another, she comments that “the history of woman in the East in India and China has been in effect that of a long and unchanging slavery.”11 Was she not aware that two years prior to her book’s publication Indian women had managed to overthrow the British Empire and win the franchise?”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“sensuality”; the Orient itself is “separate, eccentric, backward, silently indifferent, femininely penetrable”; and the narrative of human progress unfolds in the West “against the timeless culturally static oriental who never quite rises to the occasion of human freedom and history.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“Honor and ego, no one seems to have noticed, are iterations of the same forces of patriarchal dominance. Honor makes sense to those in a collectivist society. Ego, to those who live in an individualist one.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“Late capitalism’s individualist reading of success is very much a part of the American dream of self-improvement through hard work promoting the illusion that the system is fair and rewards effort in a linear and consistent way. In reality, all of it is a ploy to drive productivity so that the white men at the top of the pyramid continue to get ever-wealthier.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“No texts by Muslim feminists were assigned reading for the course, no Women and Gender in Islam by Leila Ahmed, and no Qur’an and Woman by Amina Wadud—texts that would have highlighted how feminism within Islam confronted patriarchy”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“If feminists are not to withdraw from political life altogether, they must acknowledge the difficulty of engaging in politics. Political claims are partial; but it is in their partiality that they present the possibility of transformation.”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption