At this year's Oscars, Patricia Arquette made a call to action to fight against the gender wage gap. While she was widely applauded for her speech, she also inadvertently summed up 'white feminism' perfectly. A privileged white woman implores 'everybody else' to help women get equal pay because, as she said, "It's time for all the women in America, and all the men who love women, and all the gay people and people of colour we've all fought for, to fight for us now."

Arquette used the oft-repeated statistic that women earn only 77 cents for every dollar men make, a statistic that overlooks the 64 cents Black women earn for every dollar a white man makes and the 53 cents Latino women earn.

Arquette's entitlement smacks women of colour in the face with her erasure of those who face more than just gender bias, especially when assuming that they should work for white women to close the wage gap. What makes this brief outburst especially harmful is the pervasiveness of her platform and the lack of recognition of the harm done. Millions of women witnessed her short manifesto and Meryl Streep's ensuing fist pump. But the dissenting voices of womanists - Black women who reject the moniker "feminist" for its historically erasing properties - and other WoC are lucky to get even a fraction of the visibility when they try to publicly respond.

There are some exceptions. After #yesallwomen trended on Twitter in 2014 - sharing stories of misogyny and sexual harassment - intersectional feminist and Black woman Mikki Kendall created the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen, pointing out how whitewashed mainstream feminism marginalizes women of colour. In the space of a morning, it became the most popular hashtag in the U.S.. The hashtag was a pointed response to tweets by a particularly odious self-ascribed male 'feminist,' but soon morphed into an awareness campaign of white feminism's current and historical exclusion of women of colour. For some, this hashtag was their first exposure to the rarely-recognized privilege inherent in the increasingly in-vogue white, middle-class feminism. For many others, the hashtag was their first visible platform.

Encouragingly, intersectional feminism is slowly gaining popularity and visibility, and critiques of white feminism are growing more influential. Orange is the New Black boasts a massive following, but so does Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist, a New York Times bestseller, which addresses the problematic white feminism in the show. Gay notes that while the series increases the visibility of minority women simply by their presence, the entire plot (excluding flashbacks) derives from protagonist Piper Chapman's white, upper-middle class perspective. Gay argues that the adaptation of Piper Kerman's novel, instead of a jail memoir written by a woman of colour, allows privileged, white viewers to approach the racial and socioeconomic issues in the show from a 'relatable' point of view. The show's enormous popularity with white, middle-class America, in that sense, becomes just as problematic as the content itself. The sole redeeming quality of Orange is the New Black, according to Gay, is its casting of Laverne Cox, a trans woman, to play Sophia Burset.

White feminists need to take a backseat and allow women of colour the space to discuss their own experiences. In response to Patricia Arquette, Kendall wrote on her blog, hoodfeminism: Life at the Intersection: "If your calls for solidarity aren't informed, inclusive, and intentional in focusing on ending inequality for everyone then all you're doing is demanding that you be supported in your quest to be an equal oppressor." Or rather, as Flavia Dzodan of Tiger Beatdown put it, "My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit."