Narrator: A six-year-old girl steps out of a beauty shop, her hair freshly done, only to be met with the sudden crack of gunfire. As two men exchange shots on the street, her grandfather reacts in an instant, yanking her by the hair and pulling her to the ground just as a bullet sings past, grazing her bangs. This is not a scene from a movie; it was a real moment in the childhood of Mikki Kendall. For her, and for countless others, the threat of violence, hunger, and instability isn't a distant political concept—it's the texture of daily life. Yet, these are rarely the topics that dominate mainstream feminist conversations. In her powerful collection of essays, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot, Mikki Kendall challenges this disconnect, forcing a necessary and uncomfortable reckoning with who the feminist movement has been leaving behind.

Narrator: Mikki Kendall argues that modern, mainstream feminism has a critical blind spot: it overwhelmingly centers the concerns of privileged, white, middle-class women. The discourse often revolves around issues like shattering the glass ceiling, debating whether to take a husband's last name, or increasing representation in corporate boardrooms. While these are valid concerns for some, they are a world away from the life-or-death struggles faced by the majority of women.

For women in marginalized communities, the primary concerns are not about climbing a corporate ladder but about fundamental survival. Can they feed their children? Is their neighborhood safe? Do they have stable housing? Will they survive a routine childbirth? Kendall points out that when mainstream feminism calls for "solidarity," it often means expecting women of color to support the goals of white women, while their own urgent needs are ignored.

This is starkly illustrated by the often-quoted statistic that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. Kendall dismantles this, revealing that it’s white women who make 77 cents. Black women, Latinx women, and Indigenous women make significantly less. By failing to disaggregate this data, mainstream feminism erases the unique intersection of racism and sexism that women of color face, rendering them invisible. This erasure led to the creation of the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, a direct response to the movement’s failure to show up for women who aren't white and privileged. Kendall’s work is a powerful argument that until feminism addresses basic human needs as its foundation, it will remain a movement for the few, not the many.

Narrator: If feminism is about the liberation and safety of all women, Kendall contends, then it must confront the issues that threaten them most directly. She re-frames gun violence not as a political side-issue, but as a core feminist crisis. She shares her own harrowing childhood memory of being pulled from the path of a bullet, illustrating that for many, gun violence is an ever-present reality. The statistics are grim: the presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed. Black women, in particular, experience the highest rates of gun homicide. When a child can't focus in school because the streets aren't safe, Kendall asks, how is that not a feminist issue?

Similarly, she identifies hunger as a devastating, and often invisible, feminist problem. Drawing from her own experience as a young, divorced single mother relying on food stamps and public housing, she paints a vivid picture of the fear and desperation that accompany poverty. She remembers crying because she couldn't afford a Christmas tree and the constant, gnawing fear that she would lose her child because she couldn't provide.

Kendall critiques a society that treats hunger as a moral failing rather than a systemic one. She challenges the feminist ideal of "leaning in," pointing out that you can't lean in when you can't earn a living wage to feed your family. For feminism to be meaningful, it must fight as hard for food security and safe neighborhoods as it does for abortion rights or equal pay.

Narrator: Kendall explores the intense and often damaging ways society polices the bodies and behaviors of marginalized women, particularly Black women. She deconstructs the term "fast-tailed girl," a label used within Black communities to warn young girls against perceived sexual precocity. While often intended as a protective measure rooted in respectability politics, the label becomes a tool of oppression. It shames girls for their developing bodies and blames them for unwanted male attention, creating a culture where victims are held responsible for their own abuse. This is tragically underscored by data showing that as many as 60 percent of Black girls are sexually abused before the age of eighteen—and are then often retroactively labeled "fast" as a way for the community to rationalize the trauma.

This policing extends to beauty standards. Kendall critiques the backhanded compliment "pretty for a Black girl," which reinforces a racist hierarchy where beauty is measured by its proximity to whiteness. This internal and external pressure has tangible consequences, contributing to issues that are often stereotyped as exclusively white problems, such as eating disorders. Kendall shares her own struggle with an eating disorder in high school, an experience that went completely unrecognized because, as the harmful myth goes, "Black girls don't have eating disorders." She argues that for a community whose bodies are constantly criminalized and devalued, controlling food intake can become a desperate attempt to reclaim a sense of power.

Narrator: The individual struggles Kendall outlines are symptoms of much larger, systemic failures. She fiercely attacks the school-to-prison pipeline, a system where zero-tolerance policies and an over-reliance on police in schools criminalize children rather than support them. This disproportionately harms Black and Latinx students and students with disabilities. She tells the story of a childhood friend, Deon, a smart kid who struggled with reading and lacked support at home. The school system failed him, and the streets offered him a sense of belonging and income that education couldn't. Deon was killed before he turned thirty, a casualty of a system that offered him no other viable choices.

This lack of a safety net extends to housing. Kendall argues that stable housing is foundational to success, yet it is increasingly out of reach. She details her aunt's experience in a gentrifying Chicago neighborhood, where new, white residents constantly pressure her to sell the home she's lived in for over two decades, even mistaking her for the hired help. This story illustrates how gentrification displaces long-term residents and erodes community ties.

These issues are compounded by political disenfranchisement. Kendall argues that mainstream feminism has failed to prioritize the fight against voter suppression, which systematically targets the marginalized communities it claims to represent. When people can't vote, they can't advocate for better schools, affordable housing, or safer communities, creating a vicious cycle of neglect.

Narrator: Faced with these deep-seated problems, Kendall issues a powerful call to action, demanding a shift from passive "allyship" to active "accomplice-ship." An ally might agree that a problem exists, but an accomplice takes risks to fix it. She shares a personal revelation about her own allyship. For years, she supported trans rights but didn't see the fight for gender-neutral bathrooms as a major issue. It wasn't until a friend explained that being unable to use a public restroom effectively exiles trans people from public life that she understood. Her passive support wasn't enough; she needed to become an active accomplice.

Kendall argues that would-be allies, particularly white feminists, often become defensive when challenged, listing their past good deeds instead of listening to the present concern. This defensiveness, she states, is a function of privilege. An accomplice, by contrast, listens to the needs of the marginalized community and uses their privilege to amplify those voices and take on risk. They don't just talk about bigotry; they actively challenge racist people, policies, and institutions. They understand that anger is a valid and necessary response to injustice, and that demanding politeness from the oppressed is a tool of control. Accomplice-ship is where the real work of feminism gets done.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Hood Feminism is that for feminism to have any meaning, it must be a movement built from the ground up, not one that lets equality trickle down. It must prioritize the fundamental needs of the most vulnerable: food, shelter, education, and physical safety. A feminism that doesn't fight for these things is, in Kendall's view, little more than a hobby for the privileged.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge, particularly for those who hold privilege. It asks us to look beyond our own comfort and to question who our feminism truly serves. The ultimate test is not whether we call ourselves an ally, but whether we are willing to become an accomplice—to take risks, to cede the floor, and to fight for a world where every woman, not just the ones who already have a seat at the table, is finally free.