As Valentine’s Day approaches (a day that often inspires much activism from women), the White Noise Collective took an opportunity in our February dialogue to reflect on white feminism: What issues are white feminists largely drawn to, how are those issues expressed, in what way is white privilege showing up, and what patterns are helpful to explore?

What better place to start this inquiry than with One Billion Rising, founded by white feminist Vagina Monologues writer and founder of V-Day Eve Ensler?  In 2013, One Billion Rising claimed to be the biggest mass rising in human history, and 2014 aims to exceed that record.

Numerous powerful analyses exist exposing the ways in which One Billion Rising overlooks the root causes of gendered violence, reinforces police-state and prison-state responses to gendered violence, and recreates colonial paternalism and the white female savior complex by giving a “voice to the voiceless” and centering a white women in the global movement against gendered violence.

Natalie Gyte, in Why I Won’t Support One Billion Rising, draws attention to the fact that “In asking women to dance in order to overcome violence and rape, focus is displaced and root causes are overlooked, it completely diverts the world’s attention away from the real issue of gender based violence and rape with a pleasing-to-the-eye coordinated dance.”  She goes on: “The focus for white, western feminists should be on gender equality at home, where there are enough problems for a lifetime of activism. But, if the white saviour complex were to endure, that the best form of action would be to lobby their own governments to stop their patriarchal, neo-colonial influence in so-called ‘developing countries’.”

In the article One Billion Rising, Eve Ensler, and the Contradictions of Carceral Feminism at the Prison Culture blog, the author points out that “Ensler has positioned herself at the center of global anti-violence organizing where she gets to ‘learn’ from indigenous women through world traveling,” and “It’s instructive that Ensler chose to be inspired by Congolese women’s dancing rather than their years of painstaking and dangerous community and political organizing against violence and for economic justice.”  Furthermore, the author adds that “Ensler and her collaborators were either unaware or didn’t care that the state itself is a major purveyor of gender violence…For years now, women of color activists, organizers, and scholars around the world have been making the case that state & structural violence are constitutive of violence against women and girls.”

At Rippdemup blog, Eve Ensler’s White Feminist Low Blow, the author notes that “Ensler’s language basically masks a Western Liberal project of “giving voice” to the oppressed. But as Arundhati Roy has said, ‘We know of course there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.’ ”

Despite growing press coverage and airtime promoting One Billion Rising, Eve Ensler has yet to be called out or challenged on these points.  In the spirit of Black Girl Dangerous’s Ngọc Loan Trần, we’d like to call Eve Ensler in instead of calling her out.  We call her in to a dialogue and in to a community accountability process with us as fellow white women committed to ending racial discrimination and gendered violence.  In doing so, we’d like to distinguish between calling out the movement and calling in Eve Ensler.  As Sarah Milstein says in 5 Ways White Feminists Can Address Our Own Racism, “We cannot credibly or successfully seek societal change when we ourselves create the same injustices we rail against. In other words, the problems we face as women are often the problems we create as white people.”

This is an invitation to Ensler to better align this chosen action with her expressed intentions.  We honor that the movement One Billion Rising can be coming from a place of genuine intention to end gendered violence.  It speaks to many victims of gendered violence, as evidenced by the comments in Natalie Gyte’s Huffington Post article.  It involves extensive and meaningful participation from women of color both domestically and internationally.  Kimberlé Crenshaw is on the V-Day Board and has written about the connection between One Billion Rising for Justice and the opportunity the event presents to expose the intersections of gendered violence and classism, incarceration, militarism, colonialism, and environmental degradation.

As Crenshaw herself says, “As the energy and excitement continues to build, it becomes ever more clear that global movements are not, at the end of the day, top down affairs. No one can create, own, or direct a movement that spans 179+ countries and thousands of demonstrations. For an uprising of this magnitude to even be thinkable, the situation has to be ripe and the key stakeholders already in motion to connect the local into the global.”

But what is lost or compromised when the local is absorbed by the global?  Lauren Chief Elk of the Save Wiyabi Project, in An Open Letter to Eve Ensler, offers a reflection on Eve Ensler’s previous V-Day work in addition to One Billion Rising: “You asked me what would it mean to be a good ally. It would have meant stepping back, giving up the V-Day platform, and attending the marches and vigils [organized by Indigenous women activists in Canada]. It would have meant putting aside the One Billion Rising privilege and participating in what the Indigenous women felt was important.”

Ours is not a critique of Eve Ensler as a person.  However, we believe in holding Eve Ensler accountable to the ways that this chosen action, and her positionality within it, can actually perpetuate the systems that reinforce gendered violence.  We hope calling Eve in might give her a chance to revisit how to act against gendered violence.

One Billion Rising is big.  People around the world are tuning in.  Perhaps because of One Billion Rising, people are thinking about gendered violence in a new way.  This is true, and also, One Billion Rising is not promoting a racially just, anti-colonial, and truly liberatory movement to end gender-based violence.

The brilliant Andrea Smith proposes a series of questions asking us to move Beyond Eve Ensler and envision what a “justice based movement to end gender violence could and should actually look like.”

We’d like to call Eve in, and ask her those same questions, among them:

• How does One Billion Rising reinforce and reify the gender binary?
• How does One Billion Rising rely on the state to rectify violence?  Does One Billion Rising recognize the state as the primary perpetrator of gendered violence?
• How does One Billion Rising fail to recognize the role of western imperialism in promoting gender-based violence?
• How can these things be changed?

On Valentine’s Day 2012, Eve was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now about One Billion Rising.   And again on Valentine’s Day 2013.  Ensler and Crenshaw were both interviewed on Democracy Now on February, 3 2014, sharing equal time in their discussion of the One Billion Rising for Justice 2014.

Democracy Now has a legacy of racial justice investigative journalism.  The show regularly interviews representatives of front-line communities.  We’re willing to bet that Friday, 2/14/2014, Eve Ensler (and perhaps Kimberlé Crenshaw) will appear on Democracy Now again.  Contact Amy Goodman and the Democracy Now team and ask Amy to call Eve in.  Ask Amy to question Eve on the colonialism, paternalism, and centering of whiteness we see in One Billion Rising.  We call on you to call Eve in.

The Democracy Now production team can be reached at +1 (212) 431-9090, or via this link.