When do white folks learn they’re white? And how do they start to understand the scope of benefits that whiteness affords them? For Jessie Daniels, these uncomfortable questions are only the beginning.
When do white folks learn they’re white? And how do they start to understand the scope of benefits that whiteness affords them? For Jessie Daniels, these uncomfortable questions are only the beginning.
Jessie Daniels is a Faculty Associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, and a professor of Sociology, Critical Social Psychology, and Africana Studies at Hunter College and The Graduate Center at CUNY. She is a world-renowned expert on Internet manifestations of racism, and her latest book Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It is available now from Seal Press.
I imagine there are people who are going to read this book and throw it against the wall. And that's okay. But I would just encourage you to pick it up again, after you've thrown it against the wall the first time, and keep reading and sit with the discomfort and also ask yourself, why are you uncomfortable? I would argue that, to the extent that white people are uncomfortable hearing what I have to say, and white women in particular, is because we're holding on to whiteness in some way. We want that to not be a problem. We want that to mean that we're innocent, that we’re beautiful, that we're better than other people. And it just doesn't mean that. Let's let go of that idea of whiteness.
—Jessie Daniels, author, Nice White Ladies
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Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara discusses how white women hold onto whiteness in the workplace, and the hidden meaning in terms like “professionalism,” "culture fit,” and "niceness.” For more on reckoning with whiteness in your workplace, head on over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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Jessie Daniels 0:00 I think for me, one of the things that was most important in my own transformation was beginning to see myself as having a race. And I think for so many white women, that's the place to begin.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher 0:14 Hey everyone, welcome to Strong Feelings, the podcast all about the messy world of being a human at work. I'm your host, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and today I'm talking with Jessie Daniels, who's a sociologist and a researcher I've been following for a few years now first, because Jessie is an expert on online racism and far-right movements, and now because she's the author of a brand new book that I hope a lot of you read: Nice White Ladies. It's all about how white women like me, and like a lot of you listening I'd bet, perpetuate white supremacy. Yeah. And I think for a lot of liberal or progressive white women, this has been really easy to brush off, like the white women voted for Trump thing: "Well, I didn't vote for Trump. So I'm not one of those white women."
1:11 But you know, my whiteness has absolutely insulated me from a whole bunch of things and has allowed me access to spaces that Black and brown women are not afforded. And I know that my whiteness has influenced how I see the world in ways I'm still working on understanding, in ways I don't have any idea about yet. So I think I'm going to be reckoning with that my whole life. And so I'm thankful for folks like Jessie because not only does she offer a really clear-eyed look at how fellow white women can do some of that reckoning, but she also opens up about her own experience realizing she was white, and what that really meant. So let's listen.
SWB 1:49 Jessie Daniels is a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, and a professor of sociology, critical social psychology, and Africana studies at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at CUNY. I first heard about her through her research on online racism and white supremacy, and I'm so excited to have her here today to talk about her latest book: Nice White Ladies, which is out now from Seal Press. Jessie, welcome to Strong Feelings.
JD 2:17 It's great to be here.
SWB 2:18 So let's start out with Nice White Ladies. What led you to write this particular book in this particular moment?
JD 2:24 Great question. I've been thinking about these ideas for a long time, probably going back to when I was in graduate school in the late 1980s, early '90s. You know, it was early days of thinking about intersectionality, a sort of a term that gets thrown around a lot today. But that was the new frontier when I was in graduate school. And because of that early work on intersectionality, done by mostly Black feminist scholars and other women of color, I came upon the historical document of Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, who wrote The Red Record, about lynchings. And she had personal experience with that; she had seen a friend go down to white mob violence, and the lie that was often told about that racial terrorism was that this was in defense of white women's innocence. And that really struck me when I first read about it, because I felt like there was such a way in which we weren't talking about that in my other classes. And the the way that I at that time was discovering feminism, I just felt like that wasn't being talked about. And so that really stuck with me. And so I've been thinking about white women and sort of our role in racial inequality, systemic racism for a long time.
3:38 And then time moved forward, I ended up doing my research on white supremacy online, as you mentioned in the opening, and through part of that I did spend some time at Stormfront which at one time was the largest white supremacist portal online. And within Stormfront, there was a place called Ladies-Only Forum where I spent far too much time. But that ended up being a chapter in an earlier book. And what I discovered there was that these white women who were committed to the ideology of white supremacy also saw themselves as feminism. And the kind of things that they talked about online were pretty consistent with what, you know, sort of liberal white feminists were talking about. So that was fascinating to me. And then, fast forward several years later, I started a blog with Joe Feagin called Racism Review. And, you know, as anyone who has blogged knows, there comes a point where you're just...it's the beast in the basement that you have to feed with content. And partly to create content for that, I started a series called The Trouble with White Women and White Feminism. And that series, I did that for about a year and a half. And that all told, ended up being about 35,000 words and I thought, "Oh, this could be a book." So I've been paying attention to sort of how white women are represented in popular culture and the way that we feed into these mythologies about white womanhood and how destructive that is. So I've been paying attention to that for a long time. And yeah, and it just seemed like now's a good time to write the book.
SWB 5:13 Yeah, I mean, a few 100 years ago could have been a good time as well, absolutely something we need. You know, I was thinking about that Stormfront example. I remember highlighting it in the book, and you have this quote in there about it where you say, you know, "Without an explicit challenge to racism, this kind of feminism becomes a useful device for furthering white supremacists goals." And I'm wondering, because so much of what you then talk about in the book, right, all these other aspects of white feminism, kind of comes back to this. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that, like, how did you see specifically in Stormfront, these white women using their brand of feminism to further white supremacy?
JD 5:48 Yeah, it's a great question and it often shocks people when I say that, but part of what I found was that the women at Stormfront were saying things like, you know, "equal pay for equal work," you know, they didn't believe that women should be paid less for a job. You know, they thought men were a little silly and useless in this particular kind of feminist way. And they would share jokes, you know, about old fashioned, old-timey kinds of sexism like, you know, what women we were supposed to wear at a certain point in time, you know. And it just sounded so much like the feminism that I had heard before, but because that feminism looked at gender only, and that's the term that I ended up using in the Nice White Ladies book is a gender-only feminism. What that does is it obscures our vision about the way that race plays into the way that we as white women experience gender.
6:44 So there are tons of examples that I could talk about, but I mean, the one that I want people to understand is this is not just about the far-right. You know, it's not just about women at Stormfront; it's also about those of us who went to the Women's March, you know, and knitted pink hats, and put those on. And there are ways in which that version of feminism where women are marching around and behind this banner of "women united" ignores race, and we saw this come out in the Women's March as well, you know, where a lot of Black women especially but other women of color were sort of skewering white women for for not being at Black Lives Matter protests, you know, that had just been going on for the last several months, you know. So there's a way in which that gender-only feminism leads to lots of, I think, unintended consequences for most people, and certainly for most women. But there's a deeper truth underneath that which is that the kind of gender story that is appealing to people who subscribe to this gender-only feminism which is a kind of "Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus" kind of idea about gender, you know, like that notion that men are just sort of silly and useless, but we need them, you know, because they earn more, we're not sure why we need them exactly.
8:04 But that kind of gender-only feminism always ignores race, and because it ignores race, it leads us down lots of terrible paths. And I'll tell you another connection that I make following the work of Alison Phipps, a wonderful writer and scholar in the UK, is you know, you've heard this whole controversy about TERFs, the trans exclusionary radical feminists, and this is much bigger in the UK, right now than it is in the US, but we're seeing it over here as well. This notion of sort of excluding trans women from "our" feminism, you know, is very much tied to old notion about white supremacy that carries with it these rigid and binary gender norms. So this notion that men are this way, and women are this way, and they need to stay in those binary boxes and behave a certain way, it's very consistent with in fact, some argue it's really part of and endemic to white supremacy, right? So the whole idea of gender roles in this way, like "men are the breadwinners, and women are staying home" or whatever is really baked into white supremacy. And so that's part of the deeper story that's going on there.
SWB 9:20 Yeah. It made me think a lot about taking women's studies classes in the early 2000s, and I would describe the intro to women's studies class I took as being a pretty second wave feminist class where we heard over and over again, about how, you know, earlier women's rights movements were very much about benefiting all women. And I think you share some details that very much throw a wrench in that idea. Like, I remember in the book, you talk about how one of the ways that women gained economic power was by gaining the legal right to own property, but not just any property, enslaved people. And so you know, I'm curious when you think about the legacy of that kind of white women's freedom at the expense of Black and brown women, how the roots of that play out now.
JD 10:04 Yeah, it's really disturbing when we go back and look at the way that white women during slavery were complicit, and not just complicit bystanders, but enthusiastic administrators of slavery. And in a way, because white women were still less powerful in society compared to white men, there was a way in which white women felt the need to demonstrate their cruelty in owning other people so that they could be seen as capable slave owners. It's really quite a stomach turning set of history. And of course, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers has done the marvelous work and really difficult work of uncovering this in her book, They Were Her Property. But I think that part of what I learned, going back to those women's studies classes, I mean, that was really obscured for me when I was learning about slavery and that system of racial capitalism.
11:06 And the other thing that I wanted to say about those women's studies classes was that when it came to issues of race, you know, it was in a separate section. That was a different set of readings that we did, and rightly so the assignments that we read were by women of color, which shaped me and I'm grateful for, but at the same time, that approach of sort of saying "race belongs to these people, these women of color, and those scholars," sort of lets the rest of us off the hook as if we white women are not racialized, as if we don't have a stake in the system of white supremacy when we very much do. And it was that sort of uncovering that was so important to me.
11:49 And then drawing it forward, you know, I think there are all kinds of ways that we don't yet understand about the way that that system has infected us and affected us today. And I think that part of the way that I see white women's freedom continue to operate today from those days of enslavement are in things like, when I go to work at Hunter College, I often go down Lexington Avenue, and there's a bus that goes down Lexington Avenue, and it goes through one of the richest neighborhoods in the nation. It's the Upper East Side, it's very, very wealthy, very exclusive neighborhood. And when I take the bus to Lexington Avenue, it's often the case that some of the young children who are from that neighborhood, get on the bus with their caretakers, right, their nannies or au pairs. And these are often women of color, Black women, often Caribbean, immigrants who are charged with taking care of these young children. And I have heard several times on that bus ride in those young white children as young as four years old, turning to their Black caretaker and saying, "I will get you fired if you don't do what I say." And so to me, those kinds of interactions, like on a day-to-day basis, in the city where I live, are a present-day continuation of the kind of power over others that was endemic to slavery.
13:18 And I think there are lots of other ways that that legacy comes to us. In the book, I talk about a very personal story for me, which is that my mother was abused, really, by her mother. And that kind of sadomasochist...my grandmother beat my mother when she was a child until she bled and just a really horrible story. And I, you know, of course have thought a lot about where that came from and what that was about. And I think not the whole answer, but a part of the answer is really this is what has been handed down to us in white families. You know, we think of owning children, and certainly where I grew up, you know, children were to be seen and not heard. And if we misbehave, then there was a swat or a hit, you know, and I think that that kind of violence enacted on children who were seen as possessions is a direct legacy from the system of racial capitalism. And the cruelty that goes with that, I think is absolutely what we're trained to believe is our right to do as people who are raised to believe that we're white.
SWB 14:23 Oof, yeah, I mean, one of the big throughlines I saw from that historical system to today was also in the chapter where you talk about "Lean In" and talk about the message that it sends. And a big piece of that is kind of like this individualistic message, right? Like, "The only thing standing in your way is you," which, we can dig into that as well. But there's another piece to it that you came to, which is this whole idea of women's leadership movements often taking a very uncritical view of women in power. Just like women amassing power by owning enslaved humans. It's like "Oh, women amassing power by doing other forms of evil and harm and we're somehow supposed to applaud that?"
15:01 I was reading this chapter, and it made me think of this moment, this absurd moment years ago now; I was talking to a colleague who was telling me that as a feminist, I needed to be excited about Sarah Palin being the vice presidential candidate. I looked at her just like, "What in God's name? Are you talking about? Sarah Palin is not good for women." But she was so insistent that any woman in power was something that I should take as a good thing as a feminist. And I think that that's, I mean, that was a ridiculous example, perhaps, but I think you can see that in things like Sheryl Sandberg, right? Where it's like, oh, well, you have this woman in a huge, huge, huge position of power at Facebook, while Facebook is doing...well, a boatload of harms that we would never end this episode if we tried to talk all the way through. And I, you know, I've been thinking a lot about that, and I'm curious, how do we stop assuming that having women in power is inherently a good thing or start to, like, tease that part of it in our lives?
JD 15:58 Yeah. I mean, to your example, about Sarah Palin, I mean, I'm old enough to remember Margaret Thatcher. So I'm always like, "What are you talking about, ‘women in power is a good thing’?" So yeah, I mean, I think that that kind of impulse to sort of say we should applaud all women in power, it really goes back to that idea of the gender-only feminism, right? That there's something inherent in women, and if they simply ascend to places of power, then that will be a great thing for everyone. And I think that, you know, we have ample evidence now that that's simply not the case, that there is not a way in which all women are for things that will liberate other women, it's just simply not the case. So I think that Sheryl Sandberg is a really interesting example, right, of a kind of corporate feminism is sort of what I refer to it as, and I think that there's a way in which certainly, she's relying on a kind of individual, inspirational, and aspirational model of women who are climbing a corporate ladder to success. And, you know, I mean, to give credit where credit is due, there's certainly something about what she's arguing that there is a way in which when you're in all-male spaces, and certainly all-white-male spaces, there's a way in which you kind of need sharp elbows to get heard and to get attention. But that kind of individual response within a corporate setting is not exactly what the rest of us are talking about when we're talking about liberation, you know? It's a really different project.
17:32 There's a section I have in the book, at the very beginning of it, where I have a section called "Isn't This Divisive?" And that's often the first response that people have to me when they hear this work initially. It's like, "Isn't it divisive just to single out white women? Isn't that sort of dividing women?" And I really think that it's not divisive, that it's a way to lead us all to a better future. And that's really what I'm trying to do in the book. And I think that, instead of seeing it as divisive, what we need to do is start focusing on power, and who has power in society? And how do those of us who have less power in society join together for the liberation of all of us, right? How do we do that? And just focusing on women who ascend to high places in corporate structures or in government is not going to lead us down that path, I don't think.
SWB 18:25 So, I was thinking about that in the Karen chapter as well. So you talk about Karens, and one of the things that you talk about is the way that the Karen meme has actually been perceived as misogynistic by some people and kind of push back against the Karen meme, which I think goes with this question of divisiveness. Like, "Why would you do something that's anti-woman like that?" And I'm curious, if we can talk a little bit about Karens, about sort of how they show up in pop culture, and what do they actually do? And what does that mean for you know, the Black and brown people who are often on the other side of a Karen?
JD 19:00 Yeah, I have a whole chapter in the book about Karens and I, of course, get asked about this a lot because of what's been happening in the popular culture. So just for people who may have not been paying attention to popular culture recently, "Karens" refers to white women who feel entitled to call 911 on Black people who are just going about their daily business, right? And part of what's happened with the Karen memes, right, is that now because most of us carry cell phones that have cameras and video cameras and are connected to social media, those actions which I would contend have been going on for a long time, are suddenly captured by people who object to those actions and then shared widely on social media.
19:45 And so there's a kind of thing that happens where some people refer to it as "public shaming," but I think of it as a kind of accountability where people who call 911 for no good reason are getting called out on that. And it's actually part of the Genesis story of this book, part of what I was saying earlier about the series I did at the blog, the trouble with white women and white feminism really started with the Justine Sacco issue. If you remember from a few years ago, I think this was in 2014, I'd have to double check the date, but she was a white woman, a PR executive, and she was traveling from the US to South Africa. And as many of us do, she was on her phone while she's waiting to board the plane. And she made an offhand remark, but she put it on Twitter. And the remark was, "I'm going to Africa, I hope I don't get AIDS, oh, what am I saying? I'm white." And she clicked, you know, tweet, and then she got on the plane. And by the time that she landed in South Africa, Twitter had gone off on her. She had lost her job. And she really got held to account for that awful remark.
20:56 And in some ways, the response to her was, you know, in fact, there was an actual book that came out that took that as the inciting incident, and it was all about public shaming, and how terrible social media is. And I just thought at the time, "People are asking all the wrong questions about this incident. This is really about why this white woman felt entitled to make that remark and thought in her mind, when she clicked tweet, 'I'm going to get on this plane, and there will be no consequences for me for this remark.'" I'm sure it never even occurred to her, right? And that, to me, speaks to a kind of entitlement: I can do what I want, say what I want, and there will be no consequences for me, right? Because all of this is mine, right? This world, my viewpoint, I shall not be challenged on it. And that's really a mentality of a settler colonialist, right, someone who comes to a new place and says, "This place from sea to shining sea shall be mine." And I think that that Karen meme is really highlighting that. In some ways, the people who are sharing those Karen memes are pushing back against that kind of entitlement that we as white women have had access to for centuries now. And people who are sharing those memes are saying, "No, you don't. This ends here. You can't do that anymore without being checked, without some kind of accountability."
22:22 That said, there's a kind of shading over into misogyny that I've watched happen with the Karen memes. And it's almost always, not exclusively, but almost always when white men start sharing the Karen meme, and start harshing on white women. So there are a couple of examples of this. One, there was a comedian who did a stand up routine on Saturday Night Live in October of 2020. And at first, he's sort of doing a similar critique to what I do in the book, you know, pointing out white woman's privilege and sort of pointing out how white women have enjoyed the privileges of their association with white men. And then, near the end of it, and I was, you know, laughing along with this monologue when I saw it, then near the end of it, he sort of turns, and the turn is he says, you know, he addresses then directly white women and says, "Now sit down and shut up."
SWB 23:19 Woof.
JD 23:20 And I was just like, "Nope."I am enough of a feminist, that I can give a big middle finger salute to any white man who is telling me to sit down and shut up. The other place I've seen this come through is last year around Halloween was the first time that there's an artist, also a white man in Los Angeles, who created Karen masks, you know. And they have this kind of haircut that's been associated with some of these women, this sort of blonde bob. And then there's one that's a COVID Karen, and she has sort of sores all over her face. And I just think that there's a way in which context matters about who is talking about Karens and what their intention is that matters. So I think that it's possible that these kinds of memes can can bleed over into misogyny, but I still think that the critique of our role, we as white women, is a valid one and an important one, in fact, a crucial one that we've got to make at this particular moment.
24:23 You know, one other thing that I'll say about this is while I was writing the book in May of 2020, you know, the very same day that George Floyd was murdered, and, you know, we all watched in horror, either in real time or the video recording of it afterward. And it was the exact same day that Amy Cooper right here in Central Park a few blocks from me, was in the Ramble, a section of the park, walking her dog off-leash, and a Black man, Christian Cooper, no relation, asked her to leash your dog. You know, it's just...asked her to follow the rules, rules of the park. It wasn't legal to have the dog off-leash at that time at that particular place. And instead of just complying with the rules and sort of saying, "Oh, sorry about that," what she did was she started yelling at him and called the police. Didn't just threaten to call the police, but called the police, you know, and then he's recording her in that interaction. And that call where you can hear her throw her voice about half an octave to indicate that she's in danger is so clearly a false claim, you know, that we watch happen. And I was just struck by the juxtaposition of these two things: in Central Park, Amy Cooper is threatening the life of this man who has asked her to follow the rules, and 1000 miles away in Minnesota, a Black man is dying on the street at the hands of police. You know, what Amy Cooper was threatening to do was what happened to George Floyd. You know, so I think it's so important that we as white women acknowledge and take responsibility for our role in what we're seeing happen in our country.
SWB 26:08 Yeah, I think you made a point earlier about how this is a new thing to be captured on video. But it is not a "new thing." And I think a lot about that, about how often I've seen these stories kind of get reduced down to I don't know, cancel culture, like "Why are we ruining people's lives over these missteps?" And I look at that, and I think, "Gosh, I don't know, you could get upset about people's actions having consequences. Or perhaps you could try to live your life to never have somebody make a video of you doing something racist.
JD 26:38 Right. Exactly.
SWB 26:39 I don't know, just the thought.
JD 26:41 Yeah. I mean, the other thing that the pushback has been as women with the name "Karen," who are offended. You know, and there have been several television spots where they've gotten a clump of women together, who are all named Karen, and they talk about how offended they are that this has become a meme. And it's like, "Wow." I just sort of can't take in the shallowness of that response. People are dying in the streets under the knee of cops, and what you took away from all of this is that your feelings are hurt because somebody used your name in a meme? I really just can't get over that. So yes, I think it's important that we have a discussion about what we as white women are doing in the society.
SWB 27:22 I mean, it goes right back to what we've been talking about, right? Individualistic behavior amongst white women. Because is your name being used really more important than these issues? And if you take a very individualistic view, I guess the answer is yes. Of course, I do know, Karens, who have looked at the Karen meme and said, "Yeah, that's fair." I think that that's the appropriate response, and you move on with your life. Because if it's not about you, you can let it go.
JD 27:48 Right. Some of my best friends are named Karen, and they're okay with the meme. You know, they get it. And they're like, "Yeah, I'm not the center of this issue."
SWB 27:56 I want to ask you, you know, you're a white lady, and I'm a white lady, and this show has a lot of white lady listeners. And in the book, you say, you know, "as white women, we need to tell the truth about ourselves, and we need transformation." What is the transformation that you're most hoping for for us?
JD 28:13 Yeah, that's such a great question. I mean, there's so much transformation that we need, it's hard to pick a place to start. But I think for me, one of the things that was most important in my own transformation was beginning to see myself as having a race. And I think for so many white women, that's the place to begin because I can't tell you the number of times I've heard some version of this conversation. I'll just tell you one example. One time I was in a writing workshop, which is often a predominantly white women sort of space, and we were in a session on writing about trauma. There was one African American woman in the workshop, and she raised her hand and asked a question about writing about racial trauma. And the white women on the panel all got visibly uncomfortable. One woman crossed her arms across her chest and said, "Oh, well, I can't talk about that. I'm a white woman." I was just floored, you know?
29:12 And there have been so many examples like that that I've heard where white women are just like, "Oh, we're going to talk about race now. I'm going to leave," you know, they start backing out of the room. And I really want those of us who are raised to be white to sit in the room and sort of take into account how our race affects interactions. You know, I mean, one of the things I say in the last chapter of the book is all about steps we can take, and one of the first places I encourage people to start is to take an inventory. Start paying attention to where you spend your time, where you spend your energy, where you spend your money. What do those spaces look like? Where are you giving your one precious life to? Are those places where they're all white institutions? Day-to-day, are you looking around at all white people? Are you giving your energy only to all white people? Are you giving your money only to all white institutions? And I think that that's a really important place to start.
30:16 And then once we start there, we can start to divest. I use that language of "divestiture" really intentionally. My first political memory—my family wasn't overtly political growing up. My parents didn't even vote. So when I first started graduate school in mid 1980s, at UT Austin, the move against apartheid in South Africa was really big on campus. And I remember going to my first protest there. And for those people who weren't there then or don't remember it, haven't read about it, one of the big and very effective pushes in the move to end the apartheid regime in South Africa was divestiture, you know? And so there was a lot of pressure on corporations, on celebrities, on individuals to just not go to South Africa: don't travel there, don't spend your money there, don't spend your energy there until this stops. And it was such an effective movement that I've wondered, you know, is there a way that we can use that here in the United States because there are so many ways that we're living with apartheid right here, right now in the United States. And we who are white, are benefiting from that system.
31:28 So how do we, one stop benefiting from it? But how do we divest from it? How do we take our energy, our time, our money away from it, and once we start to do that, you know, it's like putting a fire out by depriving it of oxygen: we just stop giving it our energy, and I think it will make a real difference. I mean, one of the most radical things I think I say in the book is, you know, that goes down to families as well. I mean, we live with a lot of mythology about families in this country. And one of the things, you know, including the whole "family first" thing, which I think is a terrible ethos, actually, because it turns us inward, it makes us more insular. So one of the most radical things I encourage people to do is, you know, if you have enough money, where's your money going after you die? Are you passing that on to your children? Have you created an all-white family? And are you gonna pass that wealth on to your white children? That's part of the problem if you're going to do that. So I'm really trying to encourage white people to rethink where their money goes. Don't pass your wealth on. Right? Like that's part of what gives us what gets called the wealth gap. But it's really a aspect of apartheid that we live with and we just assume is natural, like a law of gravity. And it's not.
SWB 32:47 Yeah, oh, gosh, okay, Jessie, I could talk to you about Nice White Ladies all day. Nice White Ladies is on sale now. You can get it everywhere. And Jessie, if people want to connect with you, where can they reach you?
JD 32:56 Only friendly people can reach me on Twitter. @JessieNYC.
SWB 33:06 Okay, you hear that? No assholes.
JD 33:08 Yeah. No mean people.
SWB 33:19 Okay, so Jessie, we've talked a lot about the book. And we've touched just a little bit on some of your own kind of personal relationships to the topic. And I want to dig a little bit more now into that. You know, you talked there about how reckoning with and understanding your own racial identity and understanding whiteness is a big piece of how we can start dismantling or divesting from it. So what has been your process of understanding your relationship to whiteness? And where has that taken you?
JD 33:46 I appreciate the question. And I just want to say that I really try to put a lot of myself in my own story in this book, but not in a way, I hope, that's too obnoxious. Because I think it's important to tell the truth about where we've come from, and that's kind of the spirit of how I'm sharing my personal story. An early reader of the book called "A gentle double-dare," and I just love that language so much. That really captures how I feel about it. So it's sort of like, "I'm gonna go first and you go next."
34:15 So part of what happened with me, it's kind of a funny story in a certain way. I think part of why I've been able to think about this in the particular way that I have is that I like to say that I came to my whiteness late in life. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. So I grew up believing, I swear to God, that I was a Cherokee princess. And I believed this because this was the story that my father told and that my mother also believed. So I tell the story of when I was born. You know, and of course, I don't remember this, but this was the apocryphal family story about when I was born. This was back in the day when you know, women just went into the hospital and then were delivered of a child and woke up and the child came to them, you know, from the nurse, and my mother had me in that very late '50s, early '60s kind of way. And when the nurse brought me to her, the first thing that she said was, "That's not my baby. Where's my little Indian baby?" Which is hilarious because my father also believed that he was Cherokee. He was not, but he had dark hair and sort of skin that tanned easily. And so my mother when she saw me with my strawberry blonde hair and pink skin, was just kind of horrified.
35:28 And growing up, I really believed that. You know, my father told me about the story of the Trail of Tears as if our family was on it, you know, and these are just all terribly embarrassing stories. But when Cher's song "Halfbreed" was popular, my mother would turn it up and say, "Here's your song." Yeah, so it's deep. But by the time I started getting to be a teenager and a young adult, and then you know, I sort of began to doubt this family mythology for various different reasons. And by the time I got to graduate school, and my advisor at the time handed me a copy of this book called Custer Died for Your Sins. It's written by a Native American gentleman named Vine Deloria, Jr., wonderful scholar, and he had worked at the Bureau of Indian Affairs for a while. And he told the story of working in that office, he said, "I don't go a week, that there's not some white person that comes in and tells me about their Cherokee grandmother." And I just sort of dissolved into humiliation, realizing that I, my life, was a cliche. And it was about that time, you know, that I read the Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, you know, The Red Record. And so it was kind of like, "Oh, not only am I not Cherokee, I'm a white woman." Like, what does that mean?
36:40 So there was a kind of shift in my own racial identity in that way. But I think that also gave me a kind of distance from whiteness, you know, like, I didn't grow up, like identifying with whiteness. I didn't feel the need to defend it or defend myself as a white person. So that was a useful fiction that I had grown up with in certain ways, right? And then the other thing that happened to me, also when I was in graduate school, was the first job I had, working for my advisor was Joe Feagin, was transcribing. So this is before there was AI enabled anything, and to transcribe a qualitative research interview, you had to sit with headphones on, and there was a little pedal connected to the tape recorder, and you'd mash with your foot pedal to, like, stop it and start it. And I would listen and then type every single word. It was a really formative experience for me because the project that I was on was the in-depth interviews with middle class Black Americans, and their experiences of racism.
37:41 And this eventually became a book called Living With Racism that Joe Feagin and Melvin Sikes published about '94, I think. Fabulous book, but when I sat down at the beginning of that project, you know, I had moved away a little bit from my parents, I was probably what today I would consider kind of a standard liberal. You know, I wasn't overtly racist like my parents had been, but I really thought, you know, if people are talking about racism and discrimination today, in the 1980s, or '90s, like, "that happenened centuries ago, and they're probably reading too much into it complaining, you know, they're probably ne'er-do-wells, right, that are not doing well and so they're finding an excuse." That was what I thought when I sat down, and it didn't take long going through those interviews and typing every word because it put me into listen-only mode. I couldn't argue with people, right? I couldn't say, "But what about..." you know? And what I found was that to a person, they started out those interviews saying that they didn't experience much racism or discrimination. They really were downplaying it themselves.
38:50 And then when I got into the interviews and listening to them, every time something would happen that might be discrimination, they would say, "Well, it might not have been because..." and they would try to find excuses for the people who were discriminating against them.
SWB 39:05 Wow.
JD 39:05 And about 10 interviews in I was like, arguing against them: "No, that was discrimination!" At the end of, I don't know, 200 or 300 of those interviews, I was really a different person. I was transformed because I had listened to those stories, and I saw racism and discrimination as an everyday battle that people had to fight against. And I knew that it was people like people in my family who might have done some of these things to them. The other thing I'll say about that experience that transformed me was you know, I had soaked in the racism, the ambient racism of the Texas that I grew up in. And I believed, I think, that Black people didn't care about education in the way that white people did. I think what I learned was about the white mediocrity of my own family. I was the first one to finish college, to go into graduate school. No one else in my family had done that. But every single person in these interviews had multiple degrees, they had gone to college, they had several master's degrees, many had PhDs. And I was just struck by their excellence and goodwill toward other people. It was totally against everything that I had been raised to believe about Black people. And I'm just, I'm so grateful that I got to have that experience and listen to those people's stories. So that was crucial for me. And I've often wondered what would it take to get other white people to have a listen-only approach to, you know, learning about racism, at least at the beginning, you know?
SWB 40:43 Yeah, I think this idea of like, really deep listening over and over again, we don't always make space for that. And it made me think of something that you talk about in the book around wellness culture and sort of the push for white women to tune inward and kind of tune all of that out, perhaps, while you know, doing yoga or being mindful. And you pose this question: "what if self care for white women looked like processing guilt and shame and learning to metabolize the shame of white supremacy?" So instead of tuning inward being a way to shut all that out, but tuning inward becoming a way to reckon with that within yourself. And I'm wondering, where does that begin? Like, what's the place where that can start?
JD 41:26 Yeah, it's such a challenging question right now, right? Because there aren't a lot of opportunities right now for that. There are some, and I mentioned some of the people who are doing this work in the book. There are a couple of women here in New York who run a shame and resilience workshop for white people. There's Natasha Stovall, who's doing great work around psychotherapists and sort of working with them to help white patients who are struggling with these issues. But it's still early days, you know, for that kind of work. I think that part of where this can begin for a lot of white women is to just acknowledge that part of what's happening with wellness culture is it's offering us a way to escape those realities of race, and racism, and inequality. And I think that instead of running to spaces that insulate us further from what's happening, that we need to seek out those spaces where white people are gathering with each other. I don't think we need to burden our friends and people that we love who are people of color with this. I think this is really work for white people to do with each other. And when those spaces don't exist where we are, I think we have to start to learn how to create them.
42:45 There are so many occupations that are predominantly white women, like for example, librarians. I talk about librarians a little bit in the book. Again, some of my best friends are librarians, and I love librarians. But that's a profession that's like, I don't know, 85, 90% white women. And I just think there's such opportunities for librarians to find ways to lead in this space, you know? Are there ways that libraries could be places where we start excavating, you know, what our family did in this history of building white supremacy in this country? Like, going back and finding deed restrictions on the property that we grew up in, right? That sort of thing.
43:29 So I think there are lots of different ways. I mean, I think the other thing to acknowledge is, you know, part of what I talk about in the book is that in the process of doing this work, when I was in graduate school, I discovered that my grandfather had been in the Klan. And I had also known my whole life, that this was also the man that had molested me when I was a child. And I just want to sort of draw attention to the fact that there are so many resources out there, and I'm grateful for them, for people who are survivors of sexual abuse. But there are so few resources for those of us who had members of our family that were in the Klan. And I would argue that that's a kind of child abuse as well. And there just aren't that many resources out there yet. I think they're coming. But there aren't that many resources yet for people who are trying to process that kind of shame and guilt.
44:19 So this one workshop that I attended on shame and resilience for white people is just marvelous. And I'll share the link on my Twitter if people want to find it there. But that was like the first place that I ever spent time in a workshop with mental health professionals talking about, "No, let's talk about your Klan granddaddy, you know, and what does that do to you? What does it do to you when, you know, you can feel your mother's hand on your back saying, 'No, give him a hug,' and it's like, he doesn't feel like a safe person to me." But when I grew up, we didn't have the idea that you don't push children into the arms of terrible people. You know, it was just, "Go be nice to your elders." And that too is a kind of child abuse that we haven't reckoned with yet, and I think it's time.
SWB 45:06 Yes, I think it's absolutely time. It's something that shows up in my own family as well. I mean, I have a German grandfather, and you can guess where he fought. And I think it's one of those things that's become, you know, it's talked about in my family to some extent, but it's also one of those things that is not really reckoned with. And there's not really a discussion of like, "Where do those threads show up now?" You know, "What did that mean for the family? What does that mean today? What do you do with that?" And those are hard questions. And I think a lot of this is, you know, it's all hard questions. And so my last question for you: if somebody's listening to this, and this is all feeling a little bit uncomfortable, kind of hitting them in a spot they weren't prepared for, what's something you would suggest that they can do right now to start to maybe lean into that discomfort?
JD 46:00 Yeah, I imagine this is going to be uncomfortable news for a lot of people, but I really just want to encourage people to sit with the discomfort just a little bit. And it may be something where people have to build up a kind of tolerance. I imagine there are people who are going to read this book and throw it against the wall. And that's okay. But I would just encourage you to pick it up again, after you've thrown it against the wall the first time, and keep reading and sit with the discomfort and also ask yourself, why are you uncomfortable? I would argue that, to the extent that white people are uncomfortable hearing what I have to say, and white women in particular, is because we're holding on to whiteness in some way. Like, we want that to not be a problem. We want that to mean that we're innocent, that we’re beautiful, that we're better than other people. And it just doesn't mean that, you know, just let's let go of that idea of whiteness. It doesn't mean that we can change our race. There's a chapter about that in the book. But it does mean that we can be white without taking up all the space. It's very similar, you know, to the way that women have talked about how do we end rape? You know, we've got to stop men thinking that they can rape women. That's how you stop it. And it's the same way that we're going to stop white supremacy, we have to stop people thinking that because they're white, they're better, they're smarter, they're entitled to everything. That's the place to start. Sit with the discomfort, and think about what's making you uncomfortable about it.
SWB 47:34 Jessie, thank you again for being here.
JD 47:36 My great pleasure. Thanks so much, it was great to talk to you.
SWB 47:42 Okay, it's time for this week's You've Got This: the segment where we take a concept from the interview and apply it to our lives. And today, what I want to focus on is this idea of holding on to whiteness, specifically holding on to whiteness in the workplace. Now, this is absolutely aimed most squarely at fellow white folks out there, but I'll mention that anyone can hold on to whiteness, because so much of Western culture has conditioned us all to center whiteness. Now, that said, I'm mostly talking to white listeners right now because I don't think I'm the right person to speak to people of color about internalized white supremacy.
48:16 So anyway, let's get to it. Where are you holding on to whiteness at work? One of the biggest ways I see white women hold on to whiteness in tech and design spaces is through standards of professionalism, or "professionalism." That is, what it looks like, or what it sounds like to be professional. There are some really obvious examples like assuming that "professional hair" means hair that's been straightened or blown out, or that you have to wear a suit, like a Western style of dress to be professional. But there are a lot of other ways that "professionalism" is coded as white in the US. And I think one of those is niceness, the idea that to be a professional means to always be polite. And that means avoiding some topics because those are impolite to bring up, namely topics like harm and justice. And I think this is a really big one for white women. I mean, it's in the title of Jessie's book, because we are very much trained that being nice is a virtue. And not kind, but nice, which is to say, surface level, keeping anything that's uncomfortable or "ugly" swept under the rug. So that is one big place to look.
49:25 Another is the concept of culture fit, which I think we hear about a lot still in tech, where there is a dominant culture that is very, very white, and often very male. And we will hear people say, "Well, we really want somebody who's a good culture fit for the team." And what that translates to is, "We want more people who look, and sound, and act like the people who are already here," AKA white people. And then a third way I see us holding on to whiteness at work really common and again, in design and tech spaces, is the concept of objectivity. Particularly I think this is a big one in UX. I was actually just listening to a talk the other day at this great conference called UX Y'all, that was by a woman named Jasmine Stammes, and it was called "The 'Subjective' Researcher." I'll link to it in the show notes. So Jasmine argues that instead of trying to label user research as "objective," which is, by the way, what colonialist anthropologists used to do, as they were studying people from other cultures that they were colonizing. Instead of that, we need to look at what she calls our own positionality. That is, acknowledging our personal views, and our identities, and our context. So instead of trying to pretend that those things don't impact our work, or we can somehow keep them separate from our work, instead of that, looking at how they show up in our work, and how they can be helpful and how they can be harmful.
50:45 There's a lot more, there are so many ways that whiteness can absolutely show up in our workplaces, and that we can hold on to it. And I'm going to put some more resources that I didn't mention here at https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast. But as you think about these things, I encourage you to ask yourself: Where do you feel resistance to these concepts? Where do you find yourself wanting to justify your belief about say, niceness or professionalism? Because odds are good that those are the spots where you're holding on to something. So dig into those and ask yourself: Where is that resistance coming from? If I let go of this idea of "professionalism," or "niceness," or "objectivity," what am I afraid I'll lose? And what does that say about how my whiteness has benefited or insulated me? There is a lot to unpack here, and I am absolutely still working on it. I hope you join me.
51:39 That's it for this week's episode of Strong Feelings. I'm your host, Sara Wachter-Boettcher and strong feelings is a production of Active Voice. Check us out at https://www.activevoicehq.com/ and get all the past episodes, show notes, and full transcript for every episode at https://strongfeelings.co/. This episode was recorded in South Philadelphia and produced by Emily Duncan. Our theme music is "Deprogrammed" by Philly's own Blowdryer. Check them out at https://blowdryer.bandcamp.com/. Huge thanks to the brilliant Jessie Daniels for being our guest today and thank you so much for listening. If you like our show, please go ahead and give us a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. See you next time.