‘White Women: Do Better’ invites you to get to know your racism
Women attending the new “Salons at Stowe” series at Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford need to admit one thing first: As progressive as you are, as much as you wish white people treated people of color better, you are racist, too.
“White people created white supremacy. The feigned ignorance white people employ around the very thing they created, that they all benefited from, is foundational to upholding white supremacy,” said Saira Rao, co-author with Regina Jackson of the bestselling book “White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How To Do Better.”
“White Women: Do Better” is a four-part talk by Rao, Jackson and Lisa Bond. It challenges white women to acknowledge how they have benefited from and internalized white supremacy and to do more than just virtue-signal to combat racism.
It is part of “Salons at Stowe,” an ongoing series of talks about race, class and gender. “White Women: Do Better” is four virtual sessions of 90 minutes each on Thursdays: April 13, May 11, June 8 and July 6. All sessions start at 7 p.m. Admission is free.
Rao and Jackson suggest reading their book before the event. It can be bought at the Stowe bookstore or one of many Black-owned bookshops such as Key Bookstore in Hartford.
If that isn’t possible, before the series watch the documentary “Deconstructing Karen” ($9.99 to buy, $3.99 to rent on Vimeo) and read the book as the series goes along.
Rao is a former candidate for Congress from Colorado, who ran on a platform of anti-racism. Jackson worked for her campaign. The women became friends. They began a nationwide series of dinner parties, “Race 2 Dinner,” to discuss racism with white women. They decided to write the book to reach more people than they could at the dinner parties.
Bond, who is white, hosted one of the dinners in Illinois, to promote anti-racism. During dinner, she had an epiphany.
“I realized I’m not any different than these other white women,” Bond said. “All the questions they had, all things they asked, were the same things coming into my head. I had just learned to not say them out loud.”
So she joined Rao and Jackson’s campaign, to both help them get the message out and to improve her own understanding. Bond will conduct the first of the four Stowe House seminars. Rao and Jackson will do the other three.
In interviews, Rao, Jackson and Bond discuss why all people have internalized racism and why it’s so hard to dismantle.
The book is ‘White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better.’ What do white women already know about their own racism?
Jackson: James Baldwin said this years ago. “Every white person in this country … knows one thing. They know that they would not like to be Black here.” If they know that, they know everything. White people know what’s going on. They know they wouldn’t want it for themselves. So why are they OK with it for other people?
Rao: People feign ignorance, because if you don’t know, you can’t be guilty of anything.
Bond: For us white women, it’s acknowledging we are part and parcel of an entire system of white supremacy. In order to move beyond it we have to acknowledge that fact.
In your book, you take on the “culture of niceness.” Why is the “culture of niceness” not good?
Jackson: White women are socialized to be nice. That prevents you from talking about hard things. It prevents you from confronting Uncle Bob on his racist comments or homophobic comments.
Rao: The opposite of nice is rude. It’s considered rude to call out racism when it happens. White racists can do whatever they want and no one says anything about it. That’s how you uphold it. It’s like the old adage, if there is one Nazi at the table and 10 people at the table letting him talk, there are 11 Nazis at the table.
Are nonwhite women not socialized to be nice?
Jackson: No. When you’re always in a position defending who you are, your right to exist and your right to have the same things white women have, you don’t have time to be nice.
Have you yourselves internalized wrong ideas about race?
Rao: Of course. I am Asian, the “model minority.” My parents are immigrants. I was taught to assimilate, to aspire to be white. I grew up deeply self-loathing, as most people of color are in this country and globally. I was raised to hate myself and to hate Black people, that I am better than Black people. I will be unlearning my entire life.
Jackson: I think for most Black women it’s around our hair. I grew up with my mom straightening my hair with a comb on the stove. I accepted that. That’s who I had to be in a white world, I had to have straight hair. Today, there are so many places trying to police Black women’s hair and Black men’s hair.
Both white and nonwhite people have to unlearn?
Rao: Yes. We have to unlearn everything. It’s a practice. It is a way of life, that needs to be in everything we do. … Posting a black square on Instagram or writing a check to organizations, absolutely do those things, but also you have to be dedicated every single second of every single day.
Jackson: White people have got to do the inner work, to look at themselves first, to recognize your own anti-Blackness and racism and work on dismantling that. You see so many people unwilling to do that. People work really hard on their careers, but they don’t want to do the inner work because it’s painful. But there is no change without pain.
Bond: Everything we have been taught, every experience is lived through our whiteness. If you close your eyes and say “think about an everyday American,” you’re going to think of a white person. All of the standards are based on white people and our ideas.
One lecture is “Deflecting, Gaslighting and Exceptionalizing.” What do these mean in context of the subject?
Jackson: A good example of gaslighting is when somebody says something that as a Black person I know to be racist. I can be with another white person and they’ll say, oh well they didn’t really mean it like that. What the hell? That’s gaslighting. … Deflecting is when you’re trying to have a racially honest conversation and people change the subject because they don’t want to talk about that.
Rao: The feeling that you’re the exceptional white person. “Not all white people, not me.” Here’s a good example. White women love to share the viral video of (“Central Park Karen”) Amy Cooper and say ‘Oh my god look at her she’s horrible.’ You try to say how not like her you are, but you should ask how you ARE like her.
Bond: When I was organizing the dinner, I thought, I’m not going to be that white woman. I’m better than that. But I had the dinner for all the wrong reasons. I brought a Black woman and a brown woman so that they could be the bad guys and I could sit in the corner with the halo being the nice white lady while they told all the women in the town how racist they were. All of that was my whiteness, my exceptionalizing, my tokenizing.
Another chapter is “Whiteness, Whitesplaining and Colorism.” What is the gist of that talk?
Rao: Whitesplaining is the idea that you know it all. But you don’t know more about racism than we do. You don’t get to decide what is and is not racism, just like men don’t get to tell women what is sexist. Women do. Take a seat, listen and learn.
Jackson: If you go around the world, the indigenous people are all Black people. In those countries, including my own community, Black people’s value is based on the color of your skin. The closer you are to white the more you are valued. … When I was a kid, they used to say, if you’re white, all right, if you’re brown, stick around, if you’re Black, get back. That’s colorism.
The final talk is “Spiritual Bypassing and Toxic Positivity.” What do those concepts mean?
Jackson: Love hasn’t gotten rid of racism yet. And toxic positivity is if I were to say to you, I had this racist experience, and you say, oh don’t worry about it, it’s going to all be OK, it’ll all be fine.
Rao: In a nutshell it means love trumps hate. But does love bring back Trayvon Martin? Does love bring back George Floyd or Sandra Bland? The idea that love is going to fix everything, be kind, be nice. No. You have to attack white supremacy and dismantle it. You can’t love your way out of white supremacy.
Susan Dunne can be reached at sdunne@courant.com.
