Internet pap smear: A random sampling of blogs on race and feminism

http://dearwhitefeminists.wordpress.com/

http://shadowscrescent.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/the-default-feminism-is-white-privilege/

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/22/957012/-White-Privilege-Diary-Series-1-White-Feminist-Privilege-in-Organizations

http://feministwhitenoise.wordpress.com/

http://www.eurweb.com/2012/03/white-feminists-dont-care-about-black-women/

http://femonomics.blogspot.com/2010/04/on-race-and-feminism-primer-on-feminist.html

http://www.feminist-reprise.org/docs/fw2.htm

http://radicallyqueer.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/white-feminists-its-time-to-put-up-or-shut-up-on-race/

http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2012/07/03/the-pathology-of-white-privilege/

Women of Color and White Girls...investigating the uneasy relationship between white privilege and global feminism

The title of this blog, "The White Man's Daughter", is a play on the "The White Man's Burden", the title of economist William Easterly's 2006 book exploring the failure of Western foreign aid to improve rampant poverty in the developing world. 

In a review of the book, Population Council's Geoffrey MciNoll writes...

"The main theme is the one implied by the book’s provocative title, taken from Kipling in full imperial flight: that there is a parallel between the colonial enterprise of the former Western powers and the de facto relationship of today’s donor countries (mostly those same powers—collectively “the West” in Easterly’s usage) with aid recipients (“the Rest”). The similarities, Easterly maintains, lie both in the

colonial and postcolonial West’s self-regarding defense of their actions as bringing a beneficent order to backward peoples and, pace Kipling, in the typical reality of their doing nothing of the sort—indeed, in the sheer bungling of the endeavor."

I find parallels between Easterly's argument about the relationship between western donors and developing countries, and the relationship of white feminists and feminists of color in both the developed, and developing world. 

I assert that suppressed white guilt and unexplored white privilege lead white feminists to ignore, deny and  minimize the struggles of women of color in both the developed and developing worlds. White guilt leads white feminists to believe that they need to intervene on behalf of women of color who have suffered at the hands of white, western men/colonial powers, while white privilege leads white women to assume that they are the best qualified to undertake this task. As a result, in a desperate attempt to be included in a global feminist movement and feel solidarity with the "women of the world" white feminists are blindly and carelessly plunging into issues and areas they know nothing about and have no claim to, causing deep and lasting damage. 

As a white feminist, I want to look at the relationship that white feminists have to national and international feminist movements, and explore what it means to be the daughter of the white man... a force that has oppressed women and many other groups throughout recent history. 

What does it mean to have a "blood relation" to the oppressor, and as white feminists, how do we engage with this?