When Help Feels Like Control

White Feminism and the Violence of Support

There’s a certain kind of “help” that doesn’t look like harm.

It arrives with kind words, tidy sentences, and the appearance of generosity. It asks for your expertise, your labour, your care, but always on its terms.

This help is never fully desperate. It comes from people whose lives have been buffered from the edges of survival. They have resources, networks, and safety nets. They’ve learned to wield politeness like a shield, a way to keep the upper hand while claiming they’re simply “trying to get along.”

It is, most often, white, middle-class, and steeped in a politics that imagines itself progressive while still centering whiteness, something that many of us name within the realm of white feminism. The kind of feminism that will campaign for equal pay for white women in corporate boardrooms while ignoring the women of colour cleaning those boardrooms for minimum wage. The kind that believes “empowerment” comes from rescuing others into a way of life shaped by colonial capitalism, rather than dismantling the structures that produce inequality in the first place.

White feminism thrives on the charity model of care:

• help is conditional,

• boundaries are negotiable (but only theirs),

• and your work is seen less as a livelihood than as a moral duty you should be grateful to perform.

Abolition teaches us to notice these softer violences. They’re the quiet policies of social interaction that extract labour from those already navigating structural harm. They disguise themselves as collaboration but are built on hierarchy, the helper decides what’s needed, when it’s needed, and how it should be done.

This is not care.

It’s the colonial, carceral logic of management dressed up in civility.

White feminism has always been comfortable with this arrangement. Historically, it fought for suffrage for white women while actively campaigning against voting rights for Black and Indigenous women. It has long folded itself into the state, using “care” as a way to justify surveillance, control, and the imposition of middle-class white norms. From the missionary “rescue” homes for Indigenous, Brown and Black girls to the charity boards that decide who is “deserving” of aid, the pattern is the same: care as governance.

True care refuses to reproduce those hierarchies. It starts from mutuality, not management. It understands that people who live at the intersections of oppression don’t owe our time, our skills, or our stories to anyone — especially not to those who already hold more power than we do.

Abolition calls us to imagine something different. A care that is not a transaction, not a performance, and not a subtle form of domination, but a shared commitment to each other’s survival and liberation.