Rafia Zakaria QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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: Notes on Disruption

3 " 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

4 " Trickle-down feminism, everyone assumed, would miraculously fast forward the realization of a gender-equal, free market world created in the self image of America. "

― Rafia Zakaria , Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " Capitalist forces have looked to depoliticize as many spheres as possible. To create a feminist politics of solidarity, women have to recognize the forces that push them apart and push them into meaningless competition, by keeping them from collective understanding and engagement. Individuality within the capitalist framework is an antidote to politics and solidarity. "

― Rafia Zakaria , Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

8 " Relatability is subjectivity dressed up as objectivity. "

― Rafia Zakaria , Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " 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

19 " 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

20 " The many hundreds of exhibits from crafts to paintings to household devices revealed the universe of white American women as they saw themselves. "

― Rafia Zakaria , Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption