Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Ainee Fatima

By Andrea Plaid

Some folks choose online names–be it a blog title, a Twitter handle, a Tumblr URL–of an attribute they want to aspire to. Then there are those whose monikers fit exactly what they are. Ainee Fatima’s Tumblr name fits her perfectly–she is, indeed, a Badass Muslim Girl.

Ainee Fatima. Photo: courtesy of the interviewee.

She’s an award-winning spoken-word poet, a woman who makes her Muslim community her priority, and a cartoonist with a scathing wit–and she’s folded of these into her 21-year-old life-in-progress. We caught up with each other between her classes, where we chatted about femme feminism, Gloria Steinem, and “smelling white feminism.” 1) OK, Ainee, that comic of your smelling white feminism had me on the floor screaming in laughter! What inspired that? And are you planning to continue the comics? Thank you! Well, earlier that day in my Race and Ethics class, we were categorizing traits or groups of people who were considered the Majority and Minority groups in America. We ended up with the Majority containing Race: White, Gender: Male, Sexual Orientation: Cis Heterosexual, Religion: Christian, Class: Middle-High Class. Then, my teacher proceeded to ask which of these categories are the most prevalent in Western society. One of the boys kept insisting that gender was the hot topic, another girl was saying that race was the most prevalent issue.

But the thing is, we can’t really discuss race without discussing class or gender and that’s what intersectional feminism is all about–fighting more than one cause at a time because it’s more than just women’s rights. The thing is, the stigma attached to being white in general is a privilege, which doesn’t really make it a stigma at all. Once you delve deeper into feminist theory, you’ll encounter resistance to whiteness. I mean, try having a Black president only to have people call him the n-word, mention his Arabic middle name and wish for his assassination, or any of the other daily microaggressions that people of color face.

Spark Summit published an article talking about how race is a feminist issue, but not only race–sexism, homophobia, and any other type of discrimination. It’s something that is often forgotten early feminist movements actually excluded women of color just to gain a wider audience, as the article says.

I think that a great way to make the idea of intersectional feminism even more prevalent is with the comics I made: it’s humorous and light-hearted but always packs a punch in the message–and yes, I do plan on making more!

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