End White Silence? How?
I may have followers who are BIPOC (POC, moving forward) and/or LBGTQIA+ (Q, moving forward). I respectfully acknowledge that my posts are written by a white person about a white person navigating my own white privilege and fragility. I am hoping and intending for these messages to reach my white peers who are also just starting the journey to understanding the role of white progressives in today’s white supremacy culture. I recognize that POC/Q energy should not be directed toward cis, white feelings at this time or at any time without consent.
I also note that I am not a scholar of this content. I am learning new facts, understanding the world in different ways, making mistakes, and practicing holding space for two things to exist at the same time:
I am racist. I am an anti-racist.
I am in pain. I am privileged.
I am worthy of love and joy. I am fragile and toxic.
Black Lives Matter. I also matter.
All of these things are. And they might not seem like they’re possible to be both light and dark, but we’re talking about the universe and sometimes it just is.
Does the white woman have anything to say right now?
There are two tweets that crossed my feed on the same day that sum up the reason I’m writing about, talking about, speaking about my experience as a white woman in today’s America.
My first fuck up
I’ll start with a story. I’ve been writing a book before and during the pandemic and need a group of first-time “beta” readers to help me edit it so the publishers can give me advice on whether it’s worth printing.
So, with thinking about finding progressive white people to read this, I sent it to a women’s entrepreneur group I am a part of. There are POC in that group. I totally, in my privileged universe, didn’t think through what it might feel like for a POC to read my email about my fragile white feelings asking for her time to read my memoirs.
And she wrote back to me asking me to remove her from the list.
And I apologized and feel fucking terrible and gross and like I haven’t learned a Goddamn thing about anything.
But, I could use that shame that I don’t know anything. Because I don’t. And also know that I do know some shit.
I am racist. I am anti-racist.
I tell that story because it will happen and has happened and will continue to happen for as long as I am white. The difference is that I won’t let that fear of my own fuckups and shame to stop me from speaking and learning. I have very little to lose except irrelevance, bruises to my ego, and the experience of shame. I can handle those.
Did you write the great pandemic novel?
Nope. This book is part of a seminar I signed up for in October to “write your first manuscript” without any clue what I was going to write about.
After enrolling, I promptly forgot that I’d signed up as my dad fell ill and, after nearly two months in and out of the hospital, died on January 18, 2020.
On January 19, the professor sent a welcome email: "Hey book writers! We start on February 1."
I replied to withdraw from the course, delay until spring.
He said, "Hang in there. Just listen in on the lectures. We won't actually write anything until March 1."
So I did. And by April 1, I had vomited out 10,000 words about my journey through loss, divorce, death, and love. By May 1, I was up to 17,000 words, exploring my role in feminism, in capitalism, and new role as a single parent - barfed out like a half-journal, half-blog, half-memoir, half-diatribe, half-business advice - full fledged 5-half piece of shit.
And then George Floyd was murdered at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, and my city and my nation erupted in outrage. During a pandemic. With Donald Trump as president.
I immediately wanted to give up on my writing. It is white female privilege incarnate.
Instead, I plowed through another 10,000 words and turned it all in, ready for beta read and editing into chapters.
So, should I stop? Should I stay silent? Should I ask for attention?
Instead of stopping, I leaned harder on myself. Many white female memoirists have been criticized for “stopping short” of really addressing their privilege in a way that is meaningful. Most recently, Untamed by Glennon Doyle - a woman who I have loved since her very first book - was called out by a Seattle Times book reviewer for this exact thing.
I thought maybe I could explore that. Is it so hard to do both?
So I tried.
Not knowing where to start or what to say has been a common barrier for me, and for many white people as we strive to bust through the glass of our privilege.
"I don't want to sound racist," I told myself.
"I don't want my voice or feelings to drown out those of black and brown people who need their voices heard and amplified," I say as a progressive, equal-rights-loving, anti-racist white lady.
"What if my business as an independent marketing consultant, a fragile existence in the gig-economy, is jeopardized by my radical transparency about who I am and what I value as a human being?" I wondered.
This is another way of saying, "What if a white man or a company with implicit or explicit white supremacy biases won't hire me because of what I've posted on Instagram on my professional page?"
This is another way of saying, "How can I keep my access to white supremacy power structures and the money that comes with them AND be an anti-racist."
I just don’t know. Can I?
And then, do I want to? Do I really NEED to? Where does my money come from? Can I survive financially - even with diminished resources - in an economy where I only do business with people invested in the same values that I have?
Fuck, that’s scary. Scary. Scary. I have bills to pay and mouths to feed and health insurance premiums and divorce lawyers and obligations.
Well, fuck it. I will try.
A love story to my younger self
In my effort to #endwhitesilence, I’m speaking to myself at 20 years old. A white girl from an all-white, rural Oregon community in one of the whitest places in America.
I never heard the n-word among my classmates. In fact, we hardly ever talked about black people outside of the horrors of slavery, the victories of the Civil Rights movement, and teen “outrage” when O.J. Simpson was acquitted.
There is plenty of white suffering in this country, too. It’s hard to tell a really poor white classmate that she has privilege, especially if the POC in that same community “have it good.”
The re-education of our children is so critical.
Now I know that my education was written by white people to be consumed by white students to get us through the churn of secondary education so we could have a basic grasp of “historical events.” And the same is true for my white classmates. Their parents. Their parents before them. Their parents before them.
If you disagree, think about when black Americans were even allowed to learn to read, much less write and contribute to the institutionalized process that produces “American History 101 for 15-year-olds.”
And in that education, my white classmates, poor and middle class and wealthy, all heard that we could be president someday and we can live the American Dream. Our poverty can be overcome with hard work and a college education.
But as time passes, this is revealing itself as false hope. White children are asked to believe in the American Dream and POC children get it, but don’t bother believing because they know the truth already.
So we’re stuck with two groups of powerless, divided.
What I am learning is that many of my teachers, fellow classmates, and even textbook writers, as white people, are largely unaware that this larger force of white-dominated history was shaping our day-to-day lives, beliefs, values, context, and paths forward.
In short: American culture, taught in most contexts across America from schools to churches to offices to parks to entertainment, has a white supremacy bias because of how America grew as a nation. That is true and in the past and said without judgement.
But now we know, what do we do to change it?
How to fuck the patriarchy, face corporate feminism, and harness our power as white women to truly fight for racial equity and justice
I'm not talking about my feelings right now. I'm talking about my power. White women have unprecedented access to white supremacy power structures. We understand and navigate and manipulate them every single minute of our lives.
Some use that power like Amy Cooper did, some like "Karen," some without even knowing it by just being a white woman in a white supremacist culture and never taking the time to truly examine it.
The truth is, white female power is a large part of what got Donald Trump elected to the presidency.
White female power is directly tied to reinforcing white supremacist culture, whether we like it or not. And white supremacist culture exists as a force that many (most?) progressive, white, self-identified “not racist” Americans don’t really examine because it’s shitty and hard and painful.
We’d rather tweet #blacklivesmatter or donate to the ACLU or march in a protest or vote for progressive candidates and leave it right there. But it’s not enough, and I’m here to try and shed light on how I realized that, and what we can do every day? Where can we look when we feel activated to help?
The writing I have been doing is an exploration of so many subjects - white supremacy, American history, white fragility, racism, police brutality, segregation - all within my own life in context of being traumatized, going through a midlife crisis, having a cancer scare and losing my two closest relatives and my marriage all inside of two years - and seeking help, coaching, therapy, and support.
Suffering with poor health, anxiety and depression, being a woman in general, being a mom and a business owner, being single at 40, facing the world of climate change and college tuition have a collective vice grip on the attention of many white women in our society. That’s absolutely true. We are in pain, suffering, afraid for ourselves and our children, and wondering how the generation that was supposed to “have it all” has record-levels of anxiety and depression instead.
But you know what? We’re still the second most powerful group of people in America.
We can do both. We can do more.
We are powerful, “untamed,” badass lady bosses who are learning to be vulnerable and open and follow our hearts to our higher joy. If we can do that hard work on ourselves - and fuck that is hard work - then I know we are able to also do more than just navel gazing.
We aren’t too busy, too stressed, too insignificant, or too anything to address our role in white supremacist culture and open our eyes to our power and how to wield it.
I'm opening up my eyes to the power I have and doing my own work on how to channel that to fuck the patriarchy, promote the values of a matriarchal-value-aligned economy, AND ALSO assess how to be an active, unafraid, loud, anti-racist. #stopwhitesilence #fuckkaren #fuckthepatriarchy #blacklivesmatter
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