Instead, she favors the adoption of intersectionality as an underpinning principle for the feminist movement. One of the criticisms leveled by Kendall at white feminism is that it prioritizes gender to the detriment of issues of race, implicitly assuming that patriarchalism benefits all men in the same ways, essentially segregating the fight for women’s rights by isolating Black women. In a word, Kendall understands that “everything that affects women is a feminist issue.” These are portrayed as issues that determine not only questions of equality and equity but of sheer survival.

Each essay serves a twofold purpose: 1) to characterize white feminists as a device whereby white women fight for the preservation of their privilege, all while remaining entirely oblivious to how their actions help sustain white supremacy (in truth, the author even asks whether white women regard women of color “as human beings at all”) and 2) to defend that feminism should encompass a number of issues that might initially seem unrelated to gender, but that are nonetheless central in the lives of Black women: affordable housing, access to high-quality basic education, disarmament, among others.

Kendall regards these topics as some of the overarching questions that should guide the feminist movement, and, in her examination of each, she particularly emphasizes how it impacts the lives of marginalized women. The book is not conventionally organized indeed, it produces many overlaps as it addresses a constellation of issues that inform and encroach upon the lives of women of color: solidarity, poverty, racism, the patriarchy, violence, fear, public health, education, allyship. The book frames feminism as a movement that needs to incorporate the highly contextualized issues that affect different kinds of women rather than limit itself to the demands and hardships of a particular community. ” Across eighteen different essays, she tackles a plethora of issues often overlooked by white feminists and argues that white feminism, by advancing the claims of white women alone, adds to the oppression of other marginalized groups, such as women of color, Indigenous populations, and LGBTQIA+ individuals. Kendall declares her own feminism to be “rooted in an awareness of how race and gender and class all affected ability to be educated, receive medical care, gain and keep employment, as well as how those things can sway authority figures in their treatment of. In Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot, author Mikki Kendall calls for practice-oriented feminism: one that moves beyond academic theories and manifests amidst the struggle for survival that characterizes the lives of various groups. Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot

Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall