Feminist interventions framed as saving the victim keep racial hierarchies intact

Evidence

As I have written elsewhere, strategies to confront violence against women, of the kind Fadime Sahindal died from, fail if they mostly work to instal the colour line between modern white subjects and pre-modern non-white subjects, between those who help and those who require assistance. Strategies born of such evangelical impulses seldom undermine the structures and practices that both give rise to and sustain violence against women for the simple reason that such structures are not even acknowledged. If the violence Sahindal experienced is thought to come out of her culture, pure and simple, then there is little chance to confront the multiplicity of factors that have produced and sustained it. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 338

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that evangelical ‘helping’ strategies fail precisely because they refuse to acknowledge the structures producing the violence undermines a whole genre of advocacy — dense and reversible thinking.
• XREF: Echoes the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ essay’s point that moral panics are vehicles for class/identity signaling rather than honest responses. — connects to: Defensive interventions diverted black women from building black-centered feminist scholarship — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 223