White Women, White Women, What Do You See?
My daughter’s favorite book is Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? This classic children’s book features rhyme, repetition, and a blue horse! How silly!
This week’s post is not going to be silly. I just like catchy titles.
I’ve mentioned it before, and I’ll likely mention it again - Layla F. Saad’s book Me and White Supremacy should be required reading for all white people everywhere. It has drastically increased my understanding of white supremacy and how it has insidiously permeated every aspect of our society and our psyches. It has impacted the way I see the world. It has altered how I think about pretty much everything and is slowly and surely changing the way I behave.
Here’s the thing about this “work” though - antiracism, dismantling white supremacy, divesting from whiteness, decolonizing, redistributing, abolishing.
I think it scares people.
Listen, this is just my humble observation. I’m not casting stones here. I just notice that people, mainly white people, seem frightened to really dig in and learn about what all those aforementioned terms mean. People on the left and the right and in between. People like you and people like me.
I think we’re afraid of losing our privilege - not necessarily always in a “racist” way, but in a very human nature/creature of habit/ why must we change sort of way? We’re afraid of losing things joyful and dear to us - like July 4th and The Olympics and Dr. Seuss. I’m not talking about confederate statues (though clearly there are people who don’t want to lose those either). I’m talking about things that seem to be embedded in our society as being universally worthy of celebration, except when you look into them a bit - uh oh - racism & white supremacy abounds! We’re afraid of seeing ourselves in the “villains” of history. We’re afraid of the unknown. And that’s all ok. Fear is part of the human experience. It’s not, however, an excuse to NOT do the work.
My decision to use “we” in the above paragraph was inspired by a chapter in Saad’s book, titled “You and White Exceptionalism.” In this chapter I learned about another reason why so many of us don’t do this work. We think we don’t have to because we are good, kind, fair people. The problem with this is that good, kind, fair people can and do knowingly and unknowingly benefit from and uphold white supremacy. We can also knowingly and unknowingly harm Black people, simply because of our white privilege.
As Danielle S of Mamademics states in her article hyperlinked above, “White women’s ability to make themselves the victim in any situation is why they’re so dangerous. It’s why a white woman manager can call the police on Black men at Starbucks and those men end up being arrested. It’s why a white mom can call the police on two Native American teenagers during a college tour and have them removed from the tour and questioned by police. It’s why a white teacher can assault her Black student and the community fights for her to not resign from her position.
The most dangerous person in America is the white woman because the cult of true womanhood positions her on the top of a ladder when it comes to who must be protected.
The most dangerous person in America is the white woman because she’s mastered using her privilege to uphold white supremacy and patriarchy while pretending to fight for everyone.
The most dangerous person in America is the white woman because we’ve all been complicit by failing to call her to the carpet for her misdeeds.”
Below is a list of just some of the white women (most real, some fictional) who exemplify this vile behavioral pattern. I’ve linked articles to each of the names for anyone who is not afraid of doing the work. And for anyone wondering how this particular posts ties to mental health as nearly all of my posts do, I will leave you with this closing thought. In the most recent viral video that captured a white woman absolutely losing her damn mind on the floor of a Victoria’s Secret (please see the link below if you haven’t seen the video or don’t know the story), there was some discussion as to whether or not the woman might be mentally ill. Mental illness or no mental illness, the white woman was essentially “allowed” to scream, shout, convulse, writhe, and flail without ANY intervention whatsoever. I don’t think I need to convince anyone that had this woman been Black and behaved in the same way - well - I shudder at the thought of what might have happened to her.
So if you take the time to read up on the history of white women weaponizing their tears - I ask you: “white women, white women, what do you see?”
If the answer is not - MYSELF, then I strongly encourage you to answer the follow-up question: are you afraid or do you find yourself exceptional?
One or both must be true, because the reality is that every one of us white women has the potential to willingly or unwillingly wield our power in such a way. We must see that first, so we can collectively change for the betterment of humankind.