On Not Making Nice

Why White Women Have to Hold Each Other Accountable Now and For All Time

The Chicks, Not Ready To Make Nice

It’s been an interesting six days since the inauguration of Joe Biden— not all of it great. While I’ve been excited about the prospect of rapid change, and hopeful about what we can accomplish, I’ve also watched with disdain as some of my white women friends talk about “going back to normal.”

I’ve also heard from Black activists who worked themselves to the bone in the general and then in Georgia lament the seemingly instant abandonment by white women as soon as Biden was sworn in.

I’ve read some great threads, including this one by the ever-brilliant Michael Harriot, on why white people always have to say “not this white person,” and how the privilege of individuality is synonymous with white privilege.

And just this morning, I read this thread on how the lack of “real talk” at home and at work harms Black people, and how white women making nice is a part of the enforcement of white supremacy.

What I keep coming back to, over and over again, is how much work we have to do. So much work, generations of work, and white women in particular are so very long overdue in confronting our role in perpetrating harm, holding ourselves accountable to our complicity, and getting the work done.

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It’s not a secret that a big chunk of the audience for my daily broadcast is white women who were compelled to activism after Trump’s election. After being called on the carpet for my own blindspots several times a few years ago, I’ve done a lot of self-educating (and paid education) on issues of racial justice and white supremacy, and an awful lot of community and alliance building with Black women activists and organizers. I’ve endeavored to share that journey with followers and viewers, and to hold others to account in public and private ways, some of which have really not been pretty.

Yesterday, I spent some time on my daily broadcast explaining the emoluments case dismissed yesterday morning by the Supreme Court. I made a point of saying repeatedly that emoluments matter less than unraveling white supremacy and fighting for racial justice right now. What surprised me was how much push-back I got, even after explaining the benign grounds on which the case was dismissed, especially vis-a-vis where our attention really needs to be directed right now. 

I stepped away from the computer for a few hours to work, and when I checked in again on the broadcast comments there was one that just leapt out at me.

It said this: “Why do you yell at us?”

I paused when I saw this comment. I went looking for it on the site and found it had been quickly deleted by the author, but it stuck with me.

Then, I reviewed the broadcast, and confirmed what I already knew: I wasn’t yelling at any point in the broadcast, just simply leaning into the fact that white supremacy is the biggest gaping wound in our society, and that it underlies so much of where we are and we must not get distracted.

Which brought me to this question: why is the idea that we need to focus on ending white supremacy and on racial justice in every aspect of our society, particularly because of all the unredressed harm it has caused and continues to cause, particularly because white supremacy is what brought Trump to power, so threatening that it is perceived as a verbal assault on white women, merely for being raised?

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read a lot on white fragility. I get it.

And also: why do we continue to think, after all this time and all that we’ve witnessed, that our feelings as white women are more important than justice for Black, brown and indigenous people?

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Over the weekend, I read this phenomenal article in Vox about white women, QAnon, and white supremacy. This leapt off the page, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since:

Before the Civil War, white women had little economic or political power, with one big exception: They could buy and sell enslaved people. And they did so, using enslaved people as a way of building up wealth that would not simply be transferred to a husband in marriage.

Slavery gave white women “freedom, autonomy, and agency that they could not exercise in their lives without it, so they deeply invested in it,” Jones-Rogers said.

Until I read this, I did not know that, while white women weren’t allowed to own property for centuries, or even open their own bank account until the 70s, white women were allowed to own enslaved people.

History and education are so whitewashed in this country that this critical detail had escaped my knowledge despite literal decades of work on women’s issues.

White women’s financial and cultural empowerment was built on the backs of enslaved people. And we’ve seen how this legacy pervades through to current times. Suffragettes forced their Black compatriots to walk at the back of protests for voting rights. The right of white women to vote was won by trading away the rights of Black women to vote. Hell, the pink pussy hat has long disturbed me, because not all pussies are pink, and not all women have pussies.

However patriarchy and white supremacy have intersected to make us enforcers of white supremacy rather than co-conspirators for racial justice, the moment has come for that intersection to end.

We as white women have been tasked with eliding over challenges to white supremacy by being peacekeepers and gate-makers at the expense of our BlPOC sisters, and we are the ones who must end that.

WE are the ones who must do that work.

So here’s a question for you, white women: if you are making nice with your friends and neighbors and family members who voted for Trump or who excuse systemic and interpersonal racism, who are you helping?

Because in the bigger picture, you are helping white supremacy.

If you are not speaking up about why white supremacy must end and its harms be redressed, if you are not understanding that uplifting and supporting Black women uplifts us all and doing everything you can to do that, what are you doing? Seriously, what are you doing?!

If I am perceived as yelling when I say focus on white supremacy and racial justice NOW, FIRST, ALWAYS, so be it. If I am slammed for saying, say, that Pennsylvania needs a candidate of color for Pat Toomey’s old seat, not another white straight man, so be it. If I am blocked or muted or derided for that, WHO CARES?

It’s time to get ourselves in order, to quit making nice and to stop caving to our pre-designated, white-supremacy-demanded role as enablers of white power.

Nothing matters more than ending white supremacy in every aspect of our society right now-- because ending it is just, right, and long overdue, because freedom and equity matter, because lives are on the line every day that it continues in this nation, because if we don’t, Trump will just be a warmup for the next, more polished white supremacist fascist candidate in America.

Quit making nice, and quit demanding that other white women to do the same.

There’s nothing nice about white supremacy. And our role in it, past and present, requires us to be vigilant and hold one another accountable for all time, and work to undermine white supremacy wherever it lives in us and in our nation, until every single person is free.

Let’s get to work.