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Feminism is supposed to be the fight for the freedom and equality of women. And in the past 200 years it has made incredible gains: paving the way for women to advance economically, handing them back control of their own bodies, and advocating for their needs and their experiences. 

But according to human rights lawyer Rafia Zakaria, mainstream feminism has always catered to a particular group of women: middle class, cis-gendered, Western, and above all, white. And the exclusion of everyone outside this narrow category is not merely an oversight. It is baked into the way feminism works. In November 2020, Zakaria came to Intelligence Squared to draw on the themes of her new book Against White Feminism and argued that feminism and white supremacy have been intertwined from the earliest stirrings of the women’s suffrage movement to the ‘fourth wave’ we see today. Zakaria put forward a counter-manifesto to what she believes is white feminism’s global, long-standing affinity with colonial, patriarchal and white supremacist ideals and call for a new feminism that will lead to emancipation for all.