Audre Lorde points to how whiteness put feminism as a social good reachable only by white women by means of how white women's access to the theoretical spaces of feminism, the places where "real" feminism was done, was predicated on the domestic labor of women of color. That's how whiteness orients.

Like, If I say something is "white-adjacent," for example, this is because the thing is positioned as "closer to" whiteness by white supremacy itself. It has no bearing on the ontological status, the essence of the things. Rather, it is proximal to whiteness BECAUSE whiteness deems it valuable.