connections with their feminist colleagues around the world. Some women of color in the United States
identified themselves as “third world women” in order to highlight the experience and perspective they
shared with women in the global south. Other women, of all races and ethnicities, worked with global
partners in shared feminist projects, such as the education of girls and women or the use of microlending
to help female entrepreneurs begin businesses. Others participated in United Nations–sponsored
conferences that brought together women leaders and activists from around the world, including the 1995
Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, at which then–First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton
famously proclaimed, “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human
rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.” The introduction of new
Internet technologies—such as e-mail and various forms of social media—made it increasingly possible
for activists to work together online, just as the greater availability and cheaper cost of international
travel made it easier for them to work together in person. An ongoing area of debate—and, at times, even
tension—within this global movement was how to work toward shared political goals that would help to
advance gender justice and sexual equality while also retaining a respect for differences, whether of
religion, culture, or even definitions of feminism.
Demographic shifts within the United States have also made their mark on contemporary feminism.
Generation Xers and Millennials experienced a United States with more racial, ethnic, and national
diversity than did previous generations of feminists. In 1970, white, non-Hispanic Americans accounted
for approximately 83 percent of the total U.S. population; by 2010, that number had decreased almost 25
percent, with whites accounting for 64 percent of the U.S. population. While the number of African
Americans in the United States stayed relatively consistent during that forty-year period, constituting
roughly 12 percent of the total population, there was a dramatic increase in the number of Asians and
Latinos, because of immigration and changes in the birthrates of various populations: in 1970 Asian
Americans accounted for just under 1 percent of the total U.S. population, whereas in 2010 they accounted
for 5 percent, and between 1970 and 2010 the number of Latino Americans increased from 4.5 percent of
the population to just over 16 percent. In addition, the number of people who identify as biracial or
multiracial—people like Rebecca Walker, for example—also increased. This was formally recognized in
2000 when the U.S. Census for the first time allowed respondents to identify as “two or more races,” a
group that accounted for roughly 3 percent of the total population in 2010. For many younger Americans
of all races and ethnicities, these demographic shifts, along with the political and societal changes brought
by the civil rights movement, have profoundly influenced their attitudes about race, racism, and white
privilege in the United States—as well as their attitudes about interracial friendships and romantic
relationships.
The effect of these changes can also been seen within the contemporary feminist movement, which has
itself become much more racially and ethnically diverse and has seemingly not been divided along racial
lines in the same ways that feminists were in the late 1960s and 1970s. This is not to say that the feminist
movement has fully addressed its own racism, white privilege, or economic elitism. However, the
activists and writers discussed here have grown up in a multiracial, multiethnic United States in which
discussions of race—as well as whiteness and white privilege—have often been a part of their everyday
lives, including in their women’s and gender studies classes.
Living in a Half-Changed World
Perhaps the most important defining feature of the post-1990 period is that feminism is both “everywhere