White women, we have a very, very serious problem

White privilege is a strange and pernicious thing. It can both make some voices really loud and create astonishing silence. We white folks need to learn how to use that loudness, but about the kinds of things that get silenced in this country. We can feed on the progress narrative that has comforted us and proclaim our individual selves as “not racist,” but that leaves the monstrous truth untouched. The truth is that white settlers founded this country with a fundamental belief in the supremacy of white European civilization over Native Americans and enslaved Africans. That belief built our economy, our land grant universities, our halls of government and battalions of armed forces, and even our museums and parks. Despite a tangle of denials, meek apologies, and resisted reforms, we remain haunted by the inherited and perpetuated beliefs of that founding. Not until we white Americans disavow, relinquish, dismantle, and divest from white supremacy at an individual and institutional level will the systemic violence and terror wrought by a white supremacist society stop.

In an interview with Toni Morrison in 1988, Charlie Rose asked what can be done about racism in America. With her quintessential wit and wisdom, she turned the question back to her white questioner. The pressing question is not what people of color should do to end racism — Black Americans, indigenous people and Native tribes, and people of color have always and will continue to resist and stand up for their lives and well-being despite the unrelenting hostilities of society. The pressing question, rather the problem, is what will white people do to end racism. Morrison said, “If you can only be tall because somebody’s on their knees, then you have a serious problem. My feeling is that white people have a very, very serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they can do about it.”

I hear Morrison’s words as I witness the most recent events to enter the archive of American racial terror. The evidence of that racial terror once again is captured by a brave bystander, allowing us to witness the knee of a Minneapolis police officer on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. I ask myself to look at that footage and answer “What are we going to do about it?” What are white women going to do about the pandemic of racial violence that guns down Breonna Taylor in her home, that murders Ahmaud Arbery while on a run, that disregards the humanity of trans women and trans men of color like Tony McDade, that incarcerates survivors of domestic and sexual violence for defending themselves, cages migrants and asylum-seekers in detention, or denies Native tribal communities the jurisdiction to enact their sovereign right to seek justice for Indigenous women and girls who are survivors, have gone missing, or are murdered on their land? White America, we have a problem, and what are we going to do about it?

Morrison was not suggesting white folks need to be more empathetic or guilty, but to see themselves as the problem. But seeing white Americans as the problem goes far beyond changing the minds and behavior of individual people, though that also is important. As a white woman I have to ask, What have I inherited from a society in which white femininity is like a yeast for white supremacy? Sure, I cringe at “Central Park Karen” and can “like” every Twitter post that admonishes Amy Cooper for essentially giving Christian Cooper a death threat by calling the police, but that is not enough and never will be. As a white woman, I benefit from white supremacy just like her — in a white supremacist society, Karen and I get the same privileges of whiteness even if I’ve never called the cops on a person of color. It is the same as in the segregated south under Jim Crow when white women had their own bathrooms. Even if some white women abhorred segregation, they all went through the same bathroom door marked “Ladies.” We can hold righteous personal beliefs, but that won’t undo the privilege we get all the same. And it’s not just the privilege granted us, but the forms of violence that feed off that privilege, like the systematic violence we continue to see against people of color including the state violence mobilized in the name of “protecting” or upholding white gender normative femininity. Having disdain for racism, or for anti-Blackness, cannot undo white supremacy. Having an opinion does not change structures. What matters is what we do and how we live. What should white women do? How do we face the racial terror of the past and present in which white normative femininity plays such a crucial role? If we do not contend with what we inherit, we cannot be agents for change in the present.

Again, I think Morrison gives us the first mental shift needed — we need to see ourselves as inside rather than outside of the problem. Going further, white women need a radical mental shift that dislocates the common belief that women and “women’s rights” are ever anything but intersectional. The term intersectionality was coined by Black feminist legal theorist, lawyer, and civil rights advocate Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw. Through her scholarship and advocacy, Crenshaw paved the way for academics, lawyers, and activists to amplify the unique positionalities of people inhabiting multiple margins, especially for women of color. She exposed the legal bias against women of color, for example in cases of violence against women, because the law refused to see race and sex intersecting. Intersectionality, thus, challenges single-dimension thinking about social justice.

White women are often stuck inside single-dimension thinking. It happens all the time when the 19th Amendment is described as granting all women the right to vote — which it did not. The Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade did not give all women access to abortion, most notably because the Hyde Amendment made it nearly inaccessible for people who could not afford it. We need to use intersectionality to dismantle white supremacy. Intersectionality challenges white feminists in particular to distrust the still common claim that “women” are in fact a homogenous category. When white feminists say a policy or law or politician is “bad for women,” we usually mean that it is primarily bad for white women. By revealing the utterly incomplete politics of what “women” confers, intersectionality demands that we educate ourselves about the lives and experiences of people outside of and beyond the universalized experience we often presume we inhabit (which also means not homogenizing the experiences and identities of folks who are nonwhite). We need to challenge ourselves to read books and watch movies or shows written and directed by nonwhite creatives, to learn about, support, and show up for organizations created and led by marginalized groups, and to teach the children in our lives about white supremacy from an early age.

Living and thinking in these ways radically changes one’s orientation to the world. I see the problem of racism and anti-Blackness as more complex than pointing fingers at other people who have bad opinions, but as something that is carried forward in our daily lives and ways of seeing the world. Intersectional thinking has altered how I see the police, prisons, and the fundamental failure of a carceral response to gender violence. The alliance that many feminists and queer groups have made with the police and criminal justice apparatus is evidence not just of “strange bedfellows” but of being complicit in overpolicing and the racism and violence of mass incarceration. We need to hold each other accountable and call each other out, for sure. But I also need to see the work of dismantling white supremacy as my responsibility as a white woman, to see that work a constant struggle and not a “not racist” litmus test. We need to do this because we are the problem.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has spurred widespread consciousness about human mortality as people fear for their lives and those of their loved ones. We are in harrowing times, no doubt. Yet, inside this pandemic (which is disproportionately impacting communities of color and marginalized groups), racial terror is still, as ever, on the loose. There is no stay-in-place order that can protect Black folks from white supremacy. That means that white folks cannot stay home, stay silent, and simply be bystanders to the dismantling of racist policing and systemic racialized violence.