When It's Happening to You

Conscience doth make cowards of us all

Dear Nice White Ladies, this one is for you.

If you’re not white or a lady (or nice), you may still find something relatable herein. But I am especially writing this post for white ladies to read… because I am a white lady. I have the expertise and qualifications required. Sometimes I’m even nice.

I don’t imagine my take on recent events will be particularly popular. I thought about not writing it, just stuffing all these words down down down. But I spent years of my life being silent about important things and all it ever did was suffocate me. And when so much is at stake for so many, silence is cowardly.

So here we go.

Three white feminists.

The day after Trump became President in January of 2017, I marched in the streets of Washington DC with my six-year-old daughter. We wore our pink pussy hats and waved our homemade signs of resistance and thronged the streets with 500,000 other women.

The Women’s March was not my first protest—that was an anti-war demonstration in San Francisco back in 2001. But this one in DC was by far the largest—and most polite—crowd I’d ever been a part of. I felt like I was participating in something big and important and necessary. Hope flared high, in spite of what had just gone down in our nation’s electorate.

Later in the afternoon when I was struggling through the crush toward the metro station, I saw a black man sitting casually on a stone wall watching the spectacle. He too held a handmade cardboard protest sign. His said: I’ll see you nice white ladies at the next Black Lives Matter march, right?

I blinked. Oof. Read his sign three or four more times. Felt a tightening in my gut because I knew I wouldn’t be there, knew I was too scared to show up at a BLM march. Those things were dangerous. Weren’t they?

It took me three more years to put my body on the line for a Black Lives Matter cause. Not that I didn’t sympathize or support it. Not that I didn’t drop donations in a GoFundMe bucket somewhere. Not that I didn’t care. But I cared quietly. Behind closed doors. I cared where it didn’t really matter that I cared.

I cared in a way that said “I’m totally your ally, ok? And I, like, feel bad for what’s happening to ya’ll and stuff? But I can’t get too close to it because it’s not really my fight. It’s happening to you. Over there. And I’m me. Over here. So I’m just gonna stay over here where I feel safe and comfy and just, like send you good vibes.”

Writer Roxane Gay said a few years ago that she no longer believed in allyship because calling yourself an ally allows you to separate yourself from the problems of others. That separation causes you to believe you have safety, even though you don’t.

Collective liberation, meanwhile, is the understanding that all our struggles are interconnected. Collective liberation says: I’m not safe if you’re not safe. I’m not free if you’re not free. Your fight is my fight.

“Allyship means you don’t see yourself struggling with me and collective liberation means we all struggle together. It also means that we all get free together.” -Alana Hadid

We white feminists love to be allies. We want to be seen as the good ones. On the right side of history and all that. But we also like to center ourselves in the eye of whatever storm is raging around us.

Our experiences, our stories, our struggles, these are the things we truly value. We stand tall on the wall of our Western privilege and wail about all the ways in which we are oppressed and mistreated while all around us, particularly in the Global South, other women grapple with colonial legacies, racial and gender-based discrimination, economic exploitation, lack of health care, sexual violence, poverty, starvation, occupation, even genocide.

But most of us don’t get activated by the struggles of these women. We don’t see ourselves in their fight and so we might care, distantly, we might pop a sad emoji on that Instagram story about bombs decimating Beirut—if we even pay any sort of attention. We’re pretty comfortable and we prefer to stay that way, mucking about with our own concerns, picking up our mobile Starbucks orders and shopping for the latest Stanley cups at Target.

We say we’re not political because we don’t want to ruffle each other’s feathers. “Why can’t we just agree to disagree?” we say, not realizing that our politeness upholds the very systems that oppress us.

It’s only when we feel the pinch on our own skin that we rise up. Only when we identify a threat looming over our own precious personhood that we get loud.

On November 6 my social feeds were overrun with a weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth the likes of which I hadn’t seen since November 9, 2016. You know who were the loudest people, the Most Upset of All Time?

Nice White Ladies.

Listen. I get it. I understand the seriousness of what’s coming. I recognize the very legitimate fears of all manner of vulnerable people as they ready themselves for another onslaught. Trump v2.0 will be awful. I am not minimizing that truth.

But I saw something this time around that felt very different from 2016. So many of the white ladies keening their anguish to the skies and social media weren’t just upset that their team lost. They weren’t just angry that there will likely be no female President of the United States in our lifetimes. They were shocked and dismayed and sickened because they could not believe, yet again, that “this is who America really is.”

Along with that shock and rage came a withdrawal. One blog I saw referred to this mass disengagement as “cockroach mode”—like let’s all just hunker down and survive by whatever means necessary. The blogger wrote: Be selfish. Be angry. Buy yourself things. Stop shaving. Eat a doughnut on the toilet. Scream in to the void. Stay hydrated. Take up yoga. Give up yoga. Watch videos of animals who are up for adoption. Go adopt all of those animals. …you are completely entitled to scream ‘FUCK EVERYTHING,’ to throw your hands up in sheer exasperation because how the fuck are we here again, but worse. …It absolutely sucks. Get angry. Be miserable. Roam around under a dumpster. Disappear into the floorboards when someone turns on a light. Maybe try Pilates.

“This will be four years of zero fucks,” wrote another nice white lady in my virtual sphere, her profile photo set to a laughing image of Kamala Harris. “Average citizens, putting pressure on our congressman to do the right thing… emailing, protesting, marching. Myself and people I’ve spoken to have no plans to continue that this round. It’s not our mess, not our choice.”

The “Fuck Everything” because “we didn’t make this mess” mentality was rampant among nice white ladies. It wasn’t just one or two people saying this. It was hordes.

On November 7th I read this on an entertainment blog: In 2016 it felt like we were bravely forming a resistance to hold Trump to account. 2024 is different. There will be no resistance, and Kamala, Hillary, Joe and Barack are not coming to save anyone. No one is being saved because the majority of the electorate signed up for this. Trump even said this would be the last election, and he would fix it so people never have to vote again. That’s what people wanted, so here they go.

This is how we uphold white supremacy, white ladies. This is how it happens—with the audacity of self-centered privilege. With a stubborn insistence on gazing at our own soft navels as we throw up our hands and say, “Whatever, bitches. I’m out.”

We make the fight all about us and when shit gets too hard, too uncomfortable, too dark, we take our toys and we leave. We pull on our Aritzia Sweatfleece pants and crawl into bed with our gingerbread lattes and call it our Cockroach Era.

Fuck everybody else, right? I didn’t get mine, so I don’t give a rat’s ass about yours.

In his brilliant new book The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
“The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, ‘This is not America.’ But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.”

My awakening to the reality of the American empire happened slowly and then all at once. In 2016 I was only beginning to see the bullshit behind the American dream—or that an empire of white supremacy is the American dream. Back then I was still a good white feminist. I was still polite and palatable, even in my pink pussy hat. I marched and waved my little sign, yeah, but I wasn’t agitating too hard. I wasn’t any kind of dangerous. I still clung to the comfortable illusion of democracy. I hadn’t yet seen all the way behind the wizard’s curtain.

Many of us white ladies never do. We are force-fed and coddled by an individualistic society where everything is Me and Mine and Now and Neat. No wonder we focus only on the issues that will make our lives harder. Put on our cute knit hats and march for our own personal rights to equal pay and bodily autonomy. Join hashtag movements that call out ways in which we are habitually objectified and brutalized and push our stories to the forefront, raise our fists in a gesture of solidarity. But our activism is thin as thread. We can only be counted on to show up when it’s convenient, claim that we’re an ally, wave a Pride flag, tie a blue bracelet on our wrist and call it done.

These movements and rights and reckonings are true and valid, yes. We do deserve equal pay. We do deserve reproductive freedom. But those rights and freedoms are not ours alone. All women deserve safety and autonomy and respect and opportunity. Including women in Darfur. Including women in Gaza.

What many of us don’t like to examine too deeply is the system of white supremacy that underpins the very foundations of our country. The American system—voting, legislative, judicial, etcetera—isn’t broken, as the common lament would have us believe. No, our system was designed by and for slaveowners, and it’s working exactly as intended. We have grown up benefitting from it at every turn.

We don’t notice it because we don’t have to. Because this system generally works for us. Like blonde blindness but for imperialism. As long as we are comfortable we don’t really care to look too hard at anything difficult or sad. As long as whatever terrible thing happening over there isn’t happening to us.

“People are afraid to be pried loose from their ignorance,” poet Maya Angelou said way back in 1983. “Because they know their ignorance so well, they know it better than their body odors. And if you say ‘Come on, give up your ignorance!’ they get into that terrible position, terrifying position, which Shakespeare talks about at the end of the Hamlet soliloquy. They’d rather bear the ills they have than fly to others that they know not of. ‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.’”

The thing is, us nice white ladies seem to no longer even want to bear the ills we have.

“This isn’t mine!” we cry. “I didn’t make this happen! It’s not my fault! Why should I give a good goddamn?!”

I know we’re tired. I know we’re scared. I know times are hard and outlooks are bleak and we really love our Handmaid’s Tale cosplay, but it’s time we liberal white women stop making such a self-pitying ruckus and listen to women who’ve had it far worse for far longer and have never, not ever given up. This isn’t all about us. It’s time we lift our gaze outward and recognize the ways in which we are connected to the rest of humanity. And how that connection can be the thing that saves us all.

I used to be a nice white lady. I used to be a good white feminist. I used to believe that the fight was about my rights, about my safety, about my daughter’s. For a long time I was so afraid for myself and my voice was so loud in my own ears that I couldn’t hear anyone else’s. I couldn’t see beyond my own face.

Palestinian-American writer and poet Hala Alyan said: “Power (aka white supremacy) has nothing to teach us about liberatory practices, save what they threaten to dislodge. It will always be the most vulnerable, the most persecuted, the most silenced, that have the clearest vantage point.

“Endurance doesn’t preclude breaking points. So collapse. Grieve. I’d go as far as saying: protect the part that collapses and rages and despairs, because that part hopes for something different. All futures begin as something imagined.”

The question we must ask ourselves in our distress is this: Is our soft white grief a breaking point that leads us to imagining—and building toward—a better world in which all our stories are connected? Or is our despair just an excuse to lay down our arms and peace out of the ring because this mess isn’t ours?

“Instead of taking our ball and going home, let’s actually look at how we can protect each other moving forward. Because I can promise you that isolationism is not the answer.”
—activist Afeni RJ.

We always have choices. And right now we can choose to hunker down with our pints of Fudge Ripple and whimper that simply surviving the next four years is the best we can do. We can scuttle off into our Cockroach Era. OR we can alchemize our fears into radical change. We can fashion our faltering hope into something sharp and formidable.

On November 8 while white ladies updated their Facebook statuses and prepared to leave the disaster relief to someone else, Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour was outside in NYC at a rally to protect immigrants from deportation. “I promised you that regardless of who became the next president, I was going to be outside,” she said. “Because our fights don’t end or start with Democrats or Republicans. Our fights are until freedom.”

True freedom is not to each her own. It is all of us fighting for one another.

I don’t intend to hold myself up as any kind of example of How To Get It Right. I wish my own awakening had started years earlier. I get things wrong all the time. And when I do, I have to force myself to sit with that discomfort, to pull it apart and see what’s hidden at the core. To examine a myth I once held dear and ask: “Who does this benefit?”

It’s messy. Exhausting. Painful, sometimes. But worth it. Always worth it.

Maybe it seems hypocritical to talk about staying in the fight when I took myself bodily out of the United States of America more than three years ago—like in so doing I took my ball and tapped out of the game. But I never benched myself.

I might live across the ocean, but I’m still part of this thing. I don’t need to pledge allegiance to the American empire to fight for liberation.

When you leave the USA one of the things that happens to you, if you let it, is that you lose the blinders. It’s easier to see a wider view of the world once you’re outside that fog of American exceptionalism, easier to understand with gut-wrenching clarity just exactly how abominably your homeland behaves in that wider world.

This clearer view helps you realize that what happens “over there” and what happens “at home” are directly connected.

"Whatever is happening in the United States is a reflection of what it is doing abroad,” says human rights lawyer and professor Noura Erakat. “In order to understand, for example, U.S. police violence and its militarization—you have to understand the U.S. in the Philippines and the U.S. in Puerto Rico and the U.S. in Vietnam and the U.S. in Korea. You’re not going to understand white supremacy and violence here if you don’t understand what’s happening in Palestine.”

Last week a New Zealand parliament session went viral when Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, MP for Hauraki Waikato, ripped up a copy of the controversial Treaty Principles Bill which undermines Māori sovereignty and seeks to reinterpret the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi that established the relationship between the British Crown and indigenous Māori tribes. Hana-Rawhiti tore that bill in two and performed a fierce Māori haka as fellow Māori rose to their feet and joined in.

Their protest was inspiring. Chills raced up and down my arms as I watched. No less heartening to me was the speech given that same day by Green Party leader Chlöe Swarbrick (a nice white lady) who said: The system of power and secrets which enabled at least a quarter of a million mōrehu, pēpē, tamariki, and rangatahi to be abused through decades was brought to this land and established through colonisation and oppression. That is how this State was established. This abuse was not an accident. It was not a byproduct. It is woven into the fabric of the system. It is woven into power structures that ignore the cries of children. If we want to end abuse and the culture of silence that surrounds and supports it, the way that that harm compounds and grows, we have to uproot the way that power works in this country…”

If we want to uproot the way that power works at home and abroad, we white ladies have to get out of our cockroach holes and get to work. We also have to be a lot less nice. I’ve found it much easier to pull that polite mask from my face when I allow myself to get uncomfortable. When I lift up my head, open my eyes, unstop my ears, and expose myself to the realities of women who—on the surface at least—are not like me.

I have long believed that sharing our stories is the way we begin to change the world. If we want to upend these age-old systems of power that harm us all, we first have to see and hear each other.

Here is a list of some of the women I read, listen to, and follow. Their stories have provoked and enlightened me over the years. Maybe they’ll spark something for you, too…

Ijeoma Oluo: author, speaker, activist
Hala Alyan: writer, professor, clinical psychologist
Aleah Black: educator, artist
Rebecca Nagle: writer and journalist
Michelle MiJung Kim: speaker, writer, activist
Ericka Hart: racial, social, gender justice educator
Katherine Wela Bogen: PhD student, activist
Bisan Owda: storyteller, filmmaker
Noor Harazeen: journalist
Sarah Aziza: writer
Quannah Chasinghorse: model
Cole Arthur Riley: writer
Rupa Marya: phsyician, activist
Autumn Peltier: indigenous rights activist
Hana Rawhiti: Hauraki-Waikato Kaitiaki MP
Simone Zimmerman: speaker, activist
Noura Erakat: author, professor, human rights attorney

Whatever happens, I’m staying in this fight. I hope I see you out there.

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