Equality is a fallacy with Marcie Bianco

A Q&A with the author of Breaking Free: The Lie of Equality and the Feminist Fight for Freedom

Marcie Bianco, PhD, is a writer, editor, lecturer, cultural critic, and author of Breaking Free: The Lie of Equality and the Feminist Fight for Freedom. Currently, she serves as the print editor at Stanford Social Innovation Review, shaping conversations that connect global journalists to critical cross-sector and philanthropic ventures. She also leads SSIR’s on belonging, dignity, justice, and joy (BDJJ), topics that are at the heart of her work.

With a pen that cuts through cultural and gender norms, Bianco’s work has been featured everywhere from Vanity Fair and CNN to independent platforms like DAME and The Advocate. Her feminist and cultural critiques have sparked conversations across mainstream and independent media alike, challenging the status quo and uplifting voices that need to be heard. Clips can be found at marciebianco.com.

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What inspired you to write Breaking Free, and how did your journey lead you to challenge the traditional notion of equality in feminism?

The kernel of inspiration for Breaking Free was my lived experience growing up the grandchild of Italian immigrants in South Jersey and being a competitive athlete and besting most if not all the boys who I played with in my youth.

Even from my earliest memories I can recall observing the material realities of the world around me: No one is equal. As I write in my book, “We are not born equal or with equal advantages. We do not experience life equally. And while we all eventually die, we do not encounter death on equal terms. We each come from different backgrounds, possess different qualities and talents, cultivate different knowledges and expertise, accrue unique experiences, have distinct desires and needs, and have been systematically advantaged or disadvantaged based on the social identities we have either willingly chosen or had imposed upon us by others. It is not simply that we are not equal because we are different. Rather, we are not equal because our differences have been manipulated by a society intent on justifying and preserving its traditions and norms.”

So, I never understood, and could not rationalize, the adult mandate that, for instance, I had to play on girls’ teams, or that, around the age of 9, I had to wear a shirt outside, while my two younger brothers and the boys in my neighborhood were allowed to run around, unencumbered by uncomfortable synthetic tops. At the same time, I also never wanted to be the “same” as boys — since I knew I was better than them, in sports and in school. (Can you tell that I am a Double Leo?) The desire for equality felt inherently limiting to me. Why were boys (and, now, men) the benchmark of my dreams, desires, and aspirations?

You argue that the concept of equality is a fallacy. Can you explain what you mean by that, and how it has historically contributed to women’s oppression?

Equality is not a natural occurrence; it is not organic. Rather, it is an artifice constructed as either law or policy that is then implemented in institutions. So, equality in theory can never be fully or faithfully realized — why? Because in the form of law or policy, equality is executed in our existing institutions which are supremacist and capitalist, created by white men and for white men. And this is by design, as Ijeoma Oluo has told us — the systems are not flawed, they are working by design.

The late writer and activist Urvashi Vaid referred to this difference, between equality in theory and equality in practice, as “virtual equality.” In my book, I regard this fact as not a bug but a feature of equality. Take the 19th Amendment as case-in-point: Upon its ratification, which women were allowed to vote? Which women were given access to the vote? The same is true generally: We are led to believe that all US citizens have the right to vote, but who is given access to this vote? Who is eligible, who can vote easily, without fear of threat from armed vigilantes patrolling polling sites? Without their votes being maligned structurally, through gerrymandering, purged from voter registration rolls, and other antidemocratic efforts?

Just from this one example, and despite multiple federal amendments, the equal right to vote is a fallacy, because we are not all permitted to exercise that right equally. And the power of a right is not in its formal existence but in its practice.

The performative feature of equality — people pointing to its formal existence to claim that it exists in reality (such as what Clarence Thomas did in his decision in the SCOTUS case to end affirmative action) — demonstrates how equality perpetuates oppression.

The pursuit of equality has led to a kind of entrapment that will continue to confine us to the restraints of the white supremacist patriarchal institutions in which we live and constrain us into making reactionary choices along a spectrum from complicity to resistance, based on an outdated gender binary.

(The gender binary which my late mentor, Barbara Johnson, observed, makes men the center of feminism by structurally opposing men.) The fact is that everyone lives within these systems. As bell hooks postulated: “Since men are not equals in the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal class structure, which men do women want to be equal to?”

In my estimation, equality feminism by another name is white feminism. Whose equality, and what is the definition of equality that we are pursuing? And are we satisfied with the fruits of the pursuit thus far? And who has received those rights and advantages? True to its existence as an artifice, the pursuit of equality has yielded the most lucrative and measurable gains, literally, within modalities of capitalism: from credit-card access to representation in positions of power. But, are we satisfied with the existing capitalist system — in America, racist, extractive, and exploitative by design? Beyond the stress of not being able to pay my rent on time and to think about this globally: Money is a value system; budgets are moral documents. So, why are our tax dollars going to fund genocide? Why hasn’t our government endeavored to create a federal budget designed for our care?

Since everyone who is not a cisgender white man is still fighting for basic bodily autonomy in 2024, I would argue that equality isn’t getting the job done.

You propose that freedom, rather than equality, is essential for the feminist movement. What does this freedom look like, and how can women begin to reclaim it in their lives?

Equality will not free us. The attacks on our daily lives — on our bodies, our relationships, our movement, and our civil liberties to create meaningful, self-determined lives — are not matters of equality but matters of freedom, from abortion care to gender-affirming care, which is just health care (or simply, care), to the freedom of movement to cross state lines for healthcare, to play sports and be active members of society, to being able to go to the supermarket or school and not be terrorized by the possibility of gun violence, to the freedom to read. I also think that privacy—a type of freedom crucial to our self-sovereignty and sanctity — will become increasing jeopardized not just in the courts (abortion, contraception, non-procreative sex) but also in our public and social lives, since we increasingly live our lives online and our data is sold to the highest bidder.

Instead, feminists must center freedom as the ideal and the tool we need to revitalize feminism and cultivate more dignified, caring, and joyful lives. Only freedom can usher us beyond visibility, representation, false equivalences, and the harmful expansion and replication of systems of oppression.

I offer a three-step process: claiming it personally, reclaiming it politically (from the ideological right), and practicing it daily — the intention is to show that the power of feminism is in the doing.

The first step I outline in my vision for freedom is claiming it. Unlike with equality, we do not need to wait for men or their patriarchal institutions to patronizingly bestow us with freedom (and then send out dozens of press releases celebrating their beneficence). Freedom is not given. It is claimed. We have the power to choose it. We are not subject to men’s impulses, nor do we have to petition them to lay claim to it. But to be clear, freedom is not a thing that is claimed like a material possession. Rather, when I say we must claim our freedom, I mean we must affirm it. Whereas equality is imposed externally by institutions, freedom is a felt and shared experience created through our active doing. Because we can feel free, we can claim it, and by that I mean not possess it but activate that feeling in the doing. (I don’t believe anyone has ever woken up in the morning and said, “I feel equal today!” Again, to invoke hooks, equal to whom, equal to what?) We can express our freedom daily in how we choose to live our lives and by engaging with the world in a way that acknowledges and respects the dignity and freedom of all people.

The second step is to reclaim freedom from the white supremacist patriarchy, who has defined and controlled the predominant understanding of freedom in America: the free license to do whatever one wants, whenever one wants, sans accountability. (Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tyler Stovall have called this “white freedom.”)

We can begin this effort by learning from and building upon the decades of Black, radical, lesbian, and freedom-centered feminists whose ideas and activism have shown us that freedom is not realized through the domination and oppression of others but through mutual relationships. Collective freedom depends on our mutual freedom, this because freedom is both relational and conditional; or, to paraphrase several Black women freedom fighters, I am not free until you are free.

To quote Audre Lorde directly, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”

That my freedom is inextricable from your freedom, and vice versa, means that to become free I must want the freedom of other people. Freedom, as Simone de Beauvoir said, is always situated, which is why our freedoms are never equal, or we are never born equally, live equally, or die equally. We are not born with the same amount of freedom or equal resources to cultivate it. Rather, she contended, our lives are “situated” by our personal histories and socioeconomic conditions, and it is from this unique “situatedness” that our freedom work begins. Beauvoir asserted that through our encounters and relationships we can surpass the limits of our freedom. We need other people to be free. In various writings, she explained that freedom is only possible when we understand it as a collective endeavor, not an individual enterprise.

The third and eternal step: practice, practice, practice. Freedom is expressed and experienced in action. Only through practice can we engender a culture that affirms a feminist understanding of freedom. The collective impact of this daily practice can produce societal change through rewriting the scripts about freedom and American values. A feminist politics can emerge that is not based on identities or the gender binary but in efforts to realize freedom for all—to secure and respect everyone’s human dignity, to provide care specific to need, and to advocate for justice for all, no matter identity, no matter citizenship status. Crucial to this practice is inverting our understanding of space related to movement—something I derive from the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Elizabeth Grosz: Our movement makes space, and how we move, the intention with which we move, creates the meaning of space. The freedom to move is about more than just individual mobility and access; it’s about the ability to create movements: deliberate, constructive actions that catalyze and generate new relationships, alliances, collaborations, and coalitions that can do the work of changing our institutions and changing our society through centering the freedom ethics of care and accountability. In understanding that our freedoms are interdependent and interconnected, it means that we do not live as bystanders in the face of oppression and injustice.

You wrote an article for MSNBC about the disparity between Americans being more willing to ban books instead of guns. How does that idea apply to the fight for freedom?

This discrepancy highlights the radical difference between white freedom and the feminist freedom that I am proposing, and it demonstrates the deep cultural work that we need to do to reclaim and redefine freedom as a collective endeavor.

Books are the gateway to freedom, and guns foreclose freedom. As I write in my book, “Guns are weapons that kill or maim. Books are published to educate and enlighten. One is a barrier between the self and the world, representing aggression, intimidation, and violence misconstrued as ‘protection.’ The other is a conduit between the self and the world, connecting the reader to people unlike themselves and fostering critical thinking and a self-awareness born from empathic connection. Yet US legislators and a vocal minority of the public would rather a teacher be armed with a gun than teach a book that has a gay character.

That guns — and not books — are cherished as an emblem of American freedom tell us everything about the meaning of freedom in this country.” 

What message do you hope readers take away from Breaking Free, and how can they apply your ideas to their own lives and communities?

I hope readers begin to consider and reflect on why and how equality has served as a strategy and endgame, not just for the feminist movement but for many people in our daily lives. Equality functions by erasing or eliminating difference — for it to operate, albeit poorly, in our systems and structures, all of our differences, our richness, must be ignored. In short, equality’s functioning depends on dignity violations.

The first practice I describe in my book is liberating our minds of this “equality mindset” through the cultivation of a critical consciousness, a liberatory tool of self-reflection and self-awareness that enables us to understand why and how our language and our actions matter, and that, therefore, we are accountable for our language and actions.

I want to emphasize that breaking free of the long-entrenched equality mindset is not easy work. The main challenges are internal ones: of having integrity by practicing the values of freedom, by understanding that freedom is relational and conditional. I think the biggest challenge is relinquishing the comforts of capitalism and, especially for white women, the comforts provided through an alliance with their oppressors.

There is an urgency to this work, as I have written: The lie of equality is that it is a progressive value when, in fact, it is the lynchpin of mounting conservative efforts to maintain the societal status quo. The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has proved an adept cudgel for conservatives, bringing them recent court victories in ending affirmative action, federal aid to racially marginalized farmers, and COVID-relief funding that prioritized applications from racially marginalized, female, and veteran restaurant owners. Similarly, conservatives have framed their talking point that “equality begins in the womb” to advocate for “fetal personhood” — an oxymoronic notion that is like my referring to living persons as “undead corpses.” (Again, equality operates by eliminating difference; here, the differences in material and legal life determined by time.)

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To connect with Marcie, visit her website, or follow her on Instagram.