WRC supports and stands alongside the VAWG sector Anti-Racism Working Group.

Racism is endemic across the women’s sector and manifests in many ways such as predatory competitive bidding for established specialist organisations work, uneven distribution of resources, silencing of racialized women, ignoring their experiences and enacting daily actions of discrimination. We have no doubt that our societies institutionalised racism permeates all aspects of our sector. WRC are engaging in externally facilitated anti-racism practice workshops and we implore other organisations in the sector to do the same.

Today we are calling on white women across the sector to step up. We cannot call ourselves defenders of women’s human rights or warriors for social justice if we persistently fail to work to firstly acknowledge and then end racism.

As white women in a white supremacist society we are individually and collectively responsible for addressing this, to end the defensive responses to the voices of women experiencing racism daily and acknowledge that however we may wish to think we are not racist that we are. We have not somehow been magically removed from the socialisation of racism simply by calling ourselves ‘feminists’ or ‘intersectional feminists’

Growing in our society as white women bestows significant advantages upon us that we take for granted, advantages our sisters from Black and minoritised communities are denied. It also ingrains within us belief systems which have become normalised; and left unpicked and unexamined result in active and or collusive behaviour which maintains the structural racism within our sector and wider society.

If we do not address this now, when will we?

And if we don’t then let’s stop calling ourselves feminists.

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16th July 2021