Are White Women Better Now?
We had to correct her, and we knew how to do it by now. We would not sit quietly in our white-bodied privilege, nor would our corrections be given apologetically or packaged with niceties. There I was, one of about 30 people attending a four-day-long Zoom seminar called “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” hosted by the group Education for Racial Equity.
An older white woman whom I’ll call Stacy had confessed to the group that she was ashamed of being white, and that she hoped in her next life she wouldn’t be white anymore. This provided us with a major learning moment. One participant began by amping herself up, intoning the concepts we’d been taught over the past two days: “Grounding, rooting, removing Bubble Wrap.” Then she got into it. “What I heard you say about wanting to come back as a dark-skinned person in your next life was racist, because as white people we don’t have the luxury of trying on aspects of people of color.”
“Notice how challenging that was,” our facilitator, Carlin Quinn, said. “That’s what getting your reps in looks like.”
Another woman went next, explaining that Stacy seemed to see people of color as better or more desirable, that her statement was “an othering.” Quinn prompted her to sum it up in one sentence: “When you said that you wish you would come back in your next life as a dark-skinned person, I experienced that as racist because …”
“That was racist because it exoticized Black people.”
“Great,” Quinn said. She pushed for more from everyone, and more came. Stacy’s statement was romanticizing. It was extractive. It was erasing. Stacy sat very still. Eventually we finished. Stacy thanked everyone, her voice thin.
The seminar would culminate with a talk from Robin DiAngelo, the most prominent anti-racist educator working in America. I had signed up because I was curious about her teachings, which had suddenly become so popular. DiAngelo’s 2018 book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, had been a best seller for years by the time I joined the toxic whiteness group in May 2021. But during the heat of the Black Lives Matter protests, her influence boomed. She was brought in to advise Democratic members of the House of Representatives. Coca-Cola, Disney, and Lockheed Martin sent their employees through DiAngelo-inspired diversity trainings; even the defense company Raytheon launched an anti-racism DEI program.
In the DiAngelo doctrine, the issue was not individual racists doing singular bad acts. All white people are racist, because racism is structural. To fix one’s inherent racism requires constant work, and it requires white people to talk about their whiteness. Seminars like hers exploded as anti-racism was shifted from a project of changing laws and fighting systems into a more psychological movement: something you did within yourself. It was therapeutic. It wasn’t about elevating others so much as about deconstructing yourself in hopes of eventually deconstructing the systems around you.
[Read: Abolish DEI statements]
Anti-racism courses are less popular today. This may in part be because more people have become willing to question the efficacy of corporate DEI programs, but it’s surely also because their lessons now show up everywhere. In March at UCLA Medical School, during a required course, a guest speaker had the first-year medical students kneel and pray to “Mama Earth” before saying that medicine was “white science,” as first reported by The Washington Free Beacon. The course I took was just a preview of what’s come to be expected in workplaces and schools all over the country.
DiAngelo and her fellow thinkers are right in many ways. The economic fallout of structural racism persists in this country—fallout from rules, for example, about where Black people could buy property, laws that for generations have influenced who is rich and who is poor. The laws may be gone, but plenty of racists are left. And the modern anti-racist movement is right that we all probably do have some racism and xenophobia in us. The battle of modernity and liberalism is fighting against our tribal natures and animal selves.
I went into the workshop skeptical that contemporary anti-racist ideology was helpful in that fight. I left exhausted and emotional and, honestly, moved. I left as the teachers would want me to leave: thinking a lot about race and my whiteness, the weight of my skin. But telling white people to think about how deeply white they are, telling them that their sense of objectivity and individualism are white, that they need to stop trying to change the world and focus more on changing themselves … well, I’m not sure that has the psychological impact the teachers are hoping it will, let alone that it will lead to any tangible improvement in the lives of people who aren’t white.
Much of what I learned in “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness” concerned language. We are “white bodies,” Quinn explained, but everyone else is a “body of culture.” This is because white bodies don’t know a lot about themselves, whereas “bodies of culture know their history. Black bodies know.”
The course began with easy questions (names, what we do, what we love), and an icebreaker: What are you struggling with or grappling with related to your whiteness? We were told that our answers should be “as close to the bone as possible, as naked, as emotionally revealing.” We needed to feel uncomfortable.
One woman loved gardening. Another loved the sea. People said they felt exhausted by constantly trying to fight their white supremacy. A woman with a biracial child said she was scared that her whiteness could harm her child. Some expressed frustration. It was hard, one participant said, that after fighting the patriarchy for so long, white women were now “sort of being told to step aside.” She wanted to know how to do that without feeling resentment. The woman who loved gardening was afraid of “being a middle-aged white woman and being called a Karen.”
A woman who worked in nonprofits admitted that she was struggling to overcome her own skepticism. Quinn picked up on that: How did that skepticism show up? “Wanting to say, ‘Prove it.’ Are we sure that racism is the explanation for everything?”
[John McWhorter: The dehumanizing condescension of White Fragility]
She was nervous, and that was good, Quinn said: “It’s really an important gauge, an edginess of honesty and vulnerability—like where it kind of makes you want to throw up.”
One participant was a diversity, equity, and inclusion manager at a consulting firm, and she was struggling with how to help people of color while not taking up space as a white person. It was hard to center and decenter whiteness at the same time.
A woman from San Francisco had started crying before she even began speaking. “I’m here because I’m a racist. I’m here because my body has a trauma response to my own whiteness and other people’s whiteness.” A woman who loved her cats was struggling with “how to understand all the atrocities of being a white body.” Knowing that her very existence perpetuated whiteness made her feel like a drag on society. “The darkest place I go is thinking it would be better if I weren’t here. It would at least be one less person perpetuating these things.”
The next day we heard from DiAngelo herself. Quinn introduced her as “transformative for white-bodied people across the world.” DiAngelo is quite pretty, and wore a mock turtleneck and black rectangular glasses. She started by telling us that she would use the term people of color, but also that some people of color found the term upsetting. She would therefore vary the terms she used, rotating through imperfect language. Sometimes people of color, other times racialized, to indicate that race is not innate and rather is something that has been done to someone. Sometimes she would use the acronym BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color), but she would then make a conscious grammatical mistake: “If I say ‘BIPOC,’ I find that’s a kind of harsh acronym. I usually add people at the end to humanize it a bit, even though grammatically that’s not correct,” she said.
Language is a tricky thing for the movement. The idea is that you should be open and raw when you speak, but you can get so much wrong. It’s no wonder that even Robin DiAngelo herself is worried. (At one point she recommended a book by Reni Eddo-Lodge—“a Black Brit,” DiAngelo said. For a moment she looked scared. “I hope that’s not an offensive term.” Quinn chimed in to say she thought it was okay, but DiAngelo looked introspective. “It sounds harsh. The Brit part sounded harsh.”)
DiAngelo wanted to remind us that she is white. She emphasized the wh—, giving the word a lushness and intensity. “I’m very clear today that I am white, that I have a white worldview. I have a white frame of reference. I move through the world with a white experience.”
She introduced some challenges. First was white people’s “lack of humility”: “If you are white and you have not devoted years, years—not that you read some books last summer—to sustained study, struggle, and work and practice and mistake making and relationship building, your opinions while you have them are necessarily uninformed and superficial.”
“Challenge No. 2 is the precious ideology of individualism, the idea that every one of us is unique and special.”
She prepared us for what would come next: “I will be generalizing about white people.” She was sharing her screen and showed us an image of middle-aged white women: “This is the classic board of a nonprofit.” She threw up a picture of high-school students in a local paper with the headline “Outstanding Freshmen Join Innovative Teacher-Education Program.” Almost all the teenagers were white. “This education program was not and could not have been innovative. Our educational system is probably one of the most efficient, effective mechanisms for the reproduction of racial inequality.” Lingering on the picture, she asked, “Do you feel the weight of that whiteness?”
[From the September 2021 issue: Robin DiAngelo and the problem with anti-racist self-help]
Another image. It was a white man. “I don’t know who that is,” she said. “I just Googled white guy, but most white people live segregated lives.”
When someone calls a white person out as racist, she told us, the white person will typically deny it. “Denying, arguing, withdrawing, crying. ‘I don’t understand.’ Seeking forgiveness. ‘I feel so bad, I feel so bad. Tell me you still love me.’” She paused. “Emotions are political. We need to build our stamina to endure some shame, some guilt,” she said. Quinn broke in to say that intentions are the province of the privileged. But consequences are the province of the subjugated.
Someone who has integrated an anti-racist perspective, DiAngelo told us, should be able to say: “I hold awareness of my whiteness in all settings, and it guides how I engage. I raise issues about racism over and over, both in public and in private … You want to go watch a movie with me? You’re going to get my analysis of how racism played in that movie. I have personal relationships and know the private lives of a range of people of color, including Black people. And there are also people of color in my life who I specifically ask to coach me, and I pay them for their time.”
I was surprised by this idea that I should pay Black friends and acquaintances by the hour to tutor me—it sounded a little offensive. But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldn’t mind being Venmoed afterward.
When DiAngelo was done, Quinn asked if we had questions. Very few people did, and that was disappointing—the fact that white bodies had nothing to say about a profound presentation. Silence and self-consciousness were part of the problem. “People’s lives are on the line. This is life or death for bodies of culture.” We needed to work on handling criticism. If it made you shake, that was good.
One of the few men in the group said he felt uncomfortable being told to identify as a racist. Here he’d just been talking with all of his friends about not being racist. Now he was going to “say that I might have been wrong here.” He noticed he felt “resistance to saying ‘I’m racist.’”
Quinn understood; that was normal. He just needed to try again, say “I am a racist” and believe it. The man said: “I am racist.” What did he feel? He said he was trying not to fight it. Say it again. “I am racist.”
“Do you feel sadness or grief?”
“Sadness and grief feel true,” he said.
“That’s beautiful,” Quinn said.
Some members of the group were having a breakthrough. Stacy said she was “seeing them finally … Like, wow, are there moments when this white body chooses to see a body of culture when it isn’t dangerous for them?” One woman realized she was “a walking, talking node of white supremacy.” Another finally saw how vast whiteness was: “So vast and so, so big.”
For a while, a dinner series called Race to Dinner for white women to talk about their racism was very popular, though now it seems a little try-hard. The hosts—Saira Rao and Regina Jackson—encourage women who have paid up to $625 a head to abandon any notion that they are not racist. At one point Rao, who is Indian American, and Jackson, who is Black, publicized the dinners with a simple message: “Dear white women: You cause immeasurable pain and damage to Black, Indigenous and brown women. We are here to sit down with you to candidly discuss how *exactly* you cause this pain and damage.”
One could also attend a workshop called “What’s Up With White Women? Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege Over Lunch,” hosted by the authors of What’s Up With White Women? Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege in Pursuit of Racial Justice (the authors are two white women). Or you could go to “Finding Freedom: White Women Taking On Our Own White Supremacy,” hosted by We Are Finding Freedom (a for-profit run by two white women). The National Association of Social Workers’ New York City chapter advertised a workshop called “Building White Women’s Capacity to Do Anti-racism Work” (hosted by the founder of U Power Change, who is a white woman).
So many of the workshops have been run by and aimed at white women. White women specifically seem very interested in these courses, perhaps because self-flagellation is seen as a classic female virtue. The hated archetype of the anti-racist movement is the Karen. No real equivalent exists for men. Maybe the heavily armed prepper comes close, but he’s not quite the same, in that a Karen is someone you’ll run into in a coffee shop, and a Karen is also someone who is disgusted with herself. Where another generation of white women worked to hate their bodies, my generation hates its “whiteness” (and I don’t mean skin color, necessarily, as this can also be your internalized whiteness). People are always demanding that women apologize for something and women seem to love doing it. Women will pay for the opportunity. We’ll thank you for it.
[Tyler Austin Harper: I’m a black professor. You don’t need to bring that up.]
After DiAngelo, I went to another course, “Foundations in Somatic Abolitionism.” That one was more about what my white flesh itself means and how to physically manifest anti-racism—“embodying anti-racism.” Those sessions were co-led by Resmaa Menakem, a therapist and the author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.
Menakem stressed how important it was not to do his exercises with people of color, because it would wound them: “Do not have bodies of culture in a group of white bodies. White bodies with white bodies and bodies of culture with bodies of culture.”
The harm caused by processing your whiteness with a person of color had also been stressed in the previous course—the book DiAngelo had recommended by Reni Eddo-Lodge was called Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. But at the same time, Quinn had said that we should talk with people of different races about our journey and let them guide us. It all seemed a bit contradictory.
One participant had a question for Menakem about community building. She was concerned because she had a mixed-race group of friends, and she wanted to be sure she wasn’t harming her Black friends by talking about this work.
“There’s no way you’re going to be able to keep Black women safe,” Menakem said. “If you’re talking about race, if race is part of the discussion, those Black women are going to get injured in the process.”
“That’s my worry,” she said. The problem was that she and her friends were actually already in “like, an anti-racism study group.” Menakem was definitive: “Don’t do that,” he said. “I don’t want white folks gazing at that process.”
A few years have passed since I was in these workshops, and I wonder if the other participants are “better” white people now. What would that even mean, exactly? Getting outside their ethnic tribe—or the opposite?
At one point Menakem intoned, “All white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture. Everybody say it. ‘All white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture.’” We said it, over and over again. I collapsed into it, thinking: I am careless; I am selfish; I do cause harm. The more we said it, the more it started to feel like a release. It felt so sad. But it also—and this seemed like a problem—felt good.
What if fighting for justice could just be a years-long confessional process and didn’t require doing anything tangible at all? What if I could defeat white supremacy from my lovely living room, over tea, with other white people? Personally I don’t think that’s how it works. I’m not sold. But maybe my whiteness has blinded me. The course wrapped up, and Menakem invited us all to an upcoming two-day workshop.
This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.