In August of 1897, a feminist writer and suffragist, Rebecca Felton, urged the Georgia State Agricultural Society to address, preemptively if necessary, reports of widespread sexual assaults of white women by Black men.

“If it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand times a week if necessary.”

A year later, the Raleigh News and Observer reprinted Felton’s remarks as part of the Democrats’ campaign to gin up support for their plot to violently overthrow a democratically elected, biracial, governing coalition between Republicans, many of them Black, and white Populists. The coalition, known as the Fusionists, captured every statewide office between the 1894 and 1896 ballots on the strength of policies that redistributed wealth from the state’s creditors to its commonwealth, in the form of debt relief, increased funding for schools, road construction and farm subsidies.

Unable to defeat the Fusionists at the polls, North Carolina’s Democrats planned a coup d’etat that turned on persuading white men in North Carolina to defend the white damsel’s honor from the bestial Black rapist who did not, of course, exist. But this Birth of a Nation prequel, aided and abetted by a series of newspaper cartoons depicting the imaginary Black predator as a vampiric figure redolent of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that was published in 1897, won hearts and minds, and on November 10, 1898, a mob of armed white men set fire to Wilmington’s only African American newspaper before turning their attention to the town’s Black citizenry. Some historians believe that as many as 300 African Americans were killed in the violence.

One hundred and twenty-five years later, another white feminist, Gloria Steinem, signed a letter published in the periodical that she founded, Ms. Magazine, denouncing rape as a weapon of war, and calling for “a thorough, skillful, and unbiased investigation by international human rights investigators of acts of rape and sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas and other terrorist groups against Israeli women and girls on and after October 7^th.”

Continuing, the letter called “for perpetrators of war crimes to be held accountable by all relevant authorities including the International Criminal Court.”

The similarities between the letter signed by Steinem and remarks made by Felton are impossible to ignore. Both emboldened a genocide against people of color; both aided and abetted the settler colonial project of dispossession; both gave white men cover by falsely accusing African American and Arab men of crimes that have been systematically committed by the European colonizer against women, men and children dating back more than 400 years; both appealed to lynch mobs to mete out justice with all but one of the International Criminal Court’s first 11 investigations targeting countries on the African continent.

And perhaps most importantly, both Felton and Steinem were, as stated, avowed feminists.

Steinem’s death last week at the age of 92 has rekindled debates across social media about the relationship between Western feminism and class struggle, and whether Steinem was a freedom fighter or a terrorist who led what was, in effect, the women’s league for a global white supremacist movement similar to the Daughters of the Confederacy.

Writing in the Times of Israel, Susie Hess seemed to subscribe to the former view:

“Steinem’s work helped transform how the United States understands violence against women. In December 2023, while too many feminist voices remained silent, she joined women’s-rights leaders in condemning the sexual violence perpetrated during the October 7 massacre. Their statement affirmed the right of every woman and girl, regardless of nationality, religion, or community, to live free from rape and sexual assault.

Steinem’s response reflected a principle that should be foundational to feminism: condemning sexual violence cannot depend on the identity of the woman harmed or the political implications of believing her. Remembering her legacy should involve more than celebrating the progress she helped achieve. It should require us to ask whether today’s feminist institutions apply those principles universally.”

But many critics and women of color note that the New York Times article describing a series of sexual assaults by Hamas on October 7, 2023 has been largely debunked as a hoax, and yet Ms. Magazine has only doubled down on the accusations while never addressing the hardships experienced by Palestinian women and girls in the siege of Gaza that is now approaching its third anniversary. Wrote one African American woman on social media referring at once to Sojourner Truth’s stirring (though possibly apocryphal) address to an 1851 women’s rights convention and to the 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was found in a car that Israeli Defense Forces had riddled with 335 bullets:

“What about Hind Rajab? Wasn’t she a woman…or at least going to be?”

To be sure, Steinem was a force to be reckoned with in American politics. Photogenic, stylish, and articulate, she was able to appeal to a broad swath of women and men in ways that Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug could not. On the other hand, her Zionism, staunch anti-communism, time on the CIA payroll, support for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign against the socialist U.S. Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, and her complicated relationship with the Black community, contextualized her in the eyes of many as a bourgeois feminist, in the tradition of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eleanor Roosevelt or Margaret Mead, rather than a revolutionary one such as Assata Shakur, Winnie Mandela, Leila Khaled, or Bernardine Dohrn.

Gloria Steinem first came across my radar in 1985 as a 20-year-old sophomore at Florida A&M University. Steinem featured Alice Walker’s work in Ms. Magazine and was one of the fiercest defenders of the director Steven Spielberg’s screen adaptation of Walker’s novel, The Color Purple. Recalling the controversy for the online publication Slate, Nadira Goffe wrote in June of this year:

“Upon its release, The Color Purple was lambasted, protested, and cast off by many Black men. Organizations such as the Coalition Against Black Exploitation and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People decried the film for what they believed was an uncharacteristic and harmful one-note depiction of Black men as needlessly and endlessly violent, as embodied above all by Danny Glover’s character Mister. Columnist and television host Tony Brown went on The Phil Donahue Show and called the film ‘the most racist depiction of Black men since The Birth of a Nation and the most anti-Black family film of the modern film era.’ Spike Lee declared that all of the Black men in the film were ‘just one-dimensional animals,’ stating: ‘Within recent years, the quickest way for a Black playwright, novelist, or poet to get published has been to say that Black men are shit.’ Walker’s work was raked over the coals by many, including poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, who had a long-standing feud with Walker and other members of what he defined to the New Yorker as Gloria Steinem’s ‘Black feminist auxiliary.’ During a televised debate, Reed said of the film: ‘When I saw The Color Purple advertised as ‘Come join a celebration,’ I thought I was being invited to a lynching,’ adding, ‘and I was.’

Walker would go on to resign from the magazine in 1986, expressing her frustration with its lack of diversity in her resignation letter, writing: “In real life, people of color occur with much more frequency,” and, “I do not feel welcome in the world you are projecting.”

Steinem’s championing of The Color Purple seems a blueprint, in retrospect, for bourgeois feminism’s efforts to hijack the radical Black Power movement by splintering solidarity between African American men and women.

In a 2016 interview, the former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver said of white feminists:

“When our Black Panther movement began in the mid-60s … the women’s liberation movement in the white community began and they were assuming that our pattern was their pattern … that they had domination by powerful men and that women have to be liberated in this little context … we didn’t have that context. What we needed to be liberated from was racism.”

In an interview with National Public Radio, however, the scholar and former Black Panther, Angela Davis, eulogized Steinem by recalling her 1970 arrest for murder.

“I suppose I would focus on the fact that I will remain eternally grateful to Gloria for the work she did for me while I was in jail. She was actually the national treasurer of the Angela Davis Defense Fund and did a great deal to help raise money for my case. It was significant that she took the step to become publicly associated with me at a time when I was being demonized.

Of course, at that time, I was a member of the Communist Party, and to be associated with someone who was a communist was anathema to so many people. There were other public figures who were asked to associate themselves with that campaign, and they refused. She helped to raise an enormous amount of money for my legal defense to pay the lawyers.

And, of course, at that time, I had absolutely nothing. I don’t think I had $10 in the bank at that time. So without that fundraising effort, without that effort to publicize racism and the repression that were involved in my case, I don’t know whether I would be talking to you today.”

Davis’ eulogy may have inadvertently identified the source of Steinem’s ability to influence Black feminists. With her deep connections to intelligence agencies, publishing houses, Hollywood and financiers, Steinem could monetize feminist scholars and activists who were willing to shift at least some of the blame from the oppressor to the oppressed.

Many of Steinem’s critics noted the remarks made by UCLA law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who is considered a pioneer in intersectionality studies. She told reporters following the announcement of Steinem’s death:

“She was clear from the very beginning, and never swayed from her conviction, that her feminism was taught to her by Black women. And I think it’s one of the reasons why so many of us considered ourselves to have been advanced by her, but also as interlocutors with her, and friends with her, and now people who are mourning her.”

But others say it was the other way around with Steinem reshaping some Black feminists’ thought. As one example, many point to Crenshaw’s advocacy for Kamala Harris’ White House campaign in 2024 despite her support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a stance wholly inconsistent with the radical Black Power movement in the 1960s and 70s especially.

In a 2019 paper entitled “How White Feminists Oppress Black Women: When Feminism Functions as White Supremacy,” Monnica T. Williams, a clinical psychologist wrote:

“True feminism has the power to transform society, but too often what is advanced as feminism is actually White supremacy in disguise – a counterfeit we sometimes call White Feminism. White Feminism exists to promote the comfort and safety of middle-class and affluent White women. At its core, it is a racist ideology that claims to speak for all women while ignoring the needs of women of color and suppressing our voices when our agendas and priorities don’t align. It recognizes the voice of women of color only to further its own aims and appear inclusive (Ortega, 2006). Its organizational representations fail to properly address racial and economic intersectionality in experiences of sexism. It rejects the idea that women can oppress others who are disempowered and, in doing so, replicates the harmful unacknowledged social dynamic of the primacy of well-educated White voices.”