If we’re going to fight for women’s rights, let’s fight for all women’s rights, not just the ones with white skin and blonde hair. While what happened to Sarah Everard was tragic, she is not the only woman to have gone missing under questionable circumstances. Let’s remember: Bibaa Henry, Nicole Smallman, Wenjing Xu, Geetika Goyal and Blessing Olusegun, all women of colour. Most of whose names you probably will be unfamiliar with sadly.
Unlike Sarah Everard, these women’s disappearances received little to none coverage in the mainstream media, the reason being: institutional racism at the very core of the British mainstream media. The uncomfortable truth is that the media and those that listen to its lies like scripture only care about white people and their tragedies, even in cases of violence against women. This generates an era of fake feminism, meaning a movement that only serves to protect the already more privileged members of society.
While media outlets like the BBC continue to sugarcoat their racist ways through continuous diversity hires or using people of colour for PR stunts, the truth is they just don’t seem to care. The only time they show concern for the struggles faced by people of colour is when they receive severe backlash on social media.
Blessing Olusegun is a name you will now find across mainstream media websites, even though her body was discovered in September of last year. The police simply classified her death as unexplained and brushed it under the carpet, and the media reported nothing. Only now after thousands of women have called out on social media to bring justice to all women. However, even in the reports produced about Blessing Olusegun, large portions of articles are dedicated to the tragedy of Sarah Everard, deflecting the focus away from the victim of the story simply due to the colour of her skin and how uncomfortable it makes the white corporate billionaires that own our media.
According to a damning survey by the City University London, 55% of the British journalism sector is male, reflecting the lack of representation for women in the media. The report also states that a staggering 94% of the sector is white, strongly reinforcing the stagnant lack of representation faced by women of colour.
In the wake of what happened to Sarah Everard came the one year anniversary of the murder of Breonna Taylor, a black woman from the US who was shot by the police in her own home. A year down the line and still no justice, institutional racism has no geographical limit.
“Just because feminism aims to create an inclusive society, doesn’t mean it is an inclusive movement.” Unfortunately, the mainstream media has a severe impact on our society and often tends to subconsciously infect the minds of the public. This means that the fake feminism movement that the media is promoting repeatedly makes its way into our society, advancing inequality as you read.
Fake feminism also relates to the idea of only fighting for women’s rights when the rest of society deems it fit. Almost as if feminism was the next best social media trend, the moment the media post about an instance of violence against women, there is a swarm of men and women making sure they’ve made a social media post about what has happened. And then for the rest of the year, they fail to acknowledge the struggles women are facing every day in third world countries, or they ignore the blatant abusive behaviour of those around them. Pretending to care just because everyone else is doing so is detrimental to feminism as a movement. This goes for all fake and performative activism.
It’s almost nonsensical to expect the mainstream media to reform, as racism is embedded into its very structure. But to prevent the further spread of fake feminism and to bring justice to all women not just white women, we as a society can educate ourselves on the true nature of feminism and acknowledge that it has been whitewashed. And progressively moving on to the study of womanism, a newly developed form of feminism that celebrates all women equally regardless of skin colour.
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