A reflection on the quiet violence of being unseen, even in spaces built for liberation.
A white woman approached me at a conference last week and said,
“I’m sure you’re not the right person to ask, but could you speak to someone about turning up the temperature in here? It’s awfully cold.”
She smiled — that polite, practiced smile that says she expects help anyway.
In my most polite, pretend-not-annoyed voice, I told her she was correct — I was not the right person to ask.
Then I sat there, trying to focus on the panel, while my mind kept circling back to her. Because she was right — and still, I knew she didn’t just mean that.
I was one of the few Black women there. Maybe one of the few people of colour, period. So when she made her comment — and later, when another woman asked if my watch was real, and another still dismissed me with the kind of ease that comes from never needing to remember a Black face — I started to wonder:
Was it my skin?
Was it my tone?
Or just something about me that made it easy for them not to recognise me as equal?
What makes it worse is that I work mostly in feminist spaces.
You’d think that if you understand what it means to be a woman — to navigate structures not built for you — you might understand, at least in part, the weight of other margins. Especially the women who carry more than one.
But that’s not how it works.
History tells on us.
Black women have always been the backbone — in movement and in politics. We turned out for Harris by 85 points, the widest margin of any racial or gender group. Two Black women will sit in the Senate together for the first time in history.
Meanwhile, fifty-two percent of white women voted for Trump in 2016. Sixty-one percent of white women without college degrees did the same.
The same man who said women who seek abortions should be punished.
So when white women ask why feminism feels fractured, maybe the answer lies in who they still see when they say we.
That’s the trick of racism.
It’s slippery. Subtle. Deniable.
It hides behind small talk and smiles, behind “I didn’t mean it that way” and “you’re being too sensitive.”
And because it’s hard to prove, it keeps you questioning yourself instead of the system.
Toni Morrison said the serious function of racism is distraction — it keeps you from doing your work, from being fully present in your purpose.
Instead of thinking about the ideas you came to share, you’re thinking about whether you imagined the slight.
Instead of preparing your contribution, you’re calculating your tone.
Instead of doing your work, you’re doing emotional math — trying to figure out if you’re safe, if you’re seen, or if you’re about to be the problem.
That’s what it does.
It hijacks your focus.
It replaces clarity with self-doubt, confidence with calculation.
Even if it isn’t racism that time, the fact that you have to ask the question — when it would never cross most white people’s minds — is already the point.
Because by then, you’ve already been interrupted.
That’s the quiet violence of it — the way it redirects your energy from creation to defence, from thinking to surviving.
Until all that’s left is that burning feeling rising in your chest when someone says,
“Excuse me, do you work here?”
For the millionth time.
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