Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk

by Kathleen Hanna

I realized that day that many BIPOC women were as disappointed in white punk feminists as I’d been by white male punks. I thought of all the times I’d dealt with men telling me it wasn’t fair to blame them for sexism and then I had created a workshop where white women blabbed on and on about how they had nothing to do with racism. So many clubs I’d walked into felt like they had invisible “White Men Only” signs on them, and now I’d asked BIPOC women to walk through a similar doorway—only this invisible sign said “White Grrrls Only.” I couldn’t imagine how devastating it would be to enter a supposedly safe space and be stabbed in the back like this. And that was the problem—I hadn’t imagined it. I hadn’t seen how so much of our punk feminism was really just white feminism. How could the WOC who showed up ever trust white female punks again? All the talk about intersectionality and the “isms” being connected was just lip service. At that point, I had numbed out so many bad things that had happened to me, from my dad to Darren, that I was a professional at suppressing abuse. What I didn’t realize was that I was also numbing out the ways in which I hurt others through neglect and denial.