Review: Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History, by Kevin M. Schultz

While a long history of Black feminist thought grapples with the relationship between gender and racial oppression, both historical and present-day examples showcase how white feminists often struggle to make this connection. In this study, we examine the relationship between white Americans' feminist identification and perceiving discrimination toward other groups. Specifically, we investigate how identifying in feminist terms, together with the clarity of cues regarding racial bias in decision-making, influence white Americans' ability to see gender and racial discrimination as interconnected phenomena and react accordingly. Results of both correlational and experimental analyses suggest that white respondents who identify strongly as feminists are more likely than their non- and weak feminist counterparts to perceive racial discrimination both when racial bias is a clearly defined factor in decision-making as well as in cases where the influence of race is more ambiguous. These findings suggest that adopting subgroup identities may, in some cases, heighten awareness about the discrimination faced by racial and ethnic minorities among racially advantaged group members. Recognizing discrimination is a necessary precursor to forming broad, diverse coalitions around racial injustice and inequality. Our results suggest that some white feminists may be well-suited to join the coalition.

Reviewed by: Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics by Anthony J. Badger Daniel K. Williams Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics. By Anthony J. Badger. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2022. Pp. x, 242. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-674-24234-0.) For much of the mid-twentieth century, white liberal politicians in the South appeared to have a chance. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas and Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee won U.S. Senate races in the 1950s with campaigns that advocated strongly for social welfare spending, and Jimmy Carter of Georgia and Bill Clinton of Arkansas won gubernatorial elections in the 1970s thanks to a biracial coalition that favored increased aid to education. But today there are almost no white southern liberals in Congress or statehouses. States such as Tennessee that were once represented in the Senate by moderate liberals now have all-Republican Senate delegations that are strongly supportive of Donald Trump’s brand of politics. What happened to white southern liberalism? Why did white southern liberals fail to change the political culture of their region—and ultimately fail to [End Page 393] win elections? One might think that the answer is race—and Anthony J. Badger agrees. But it is not merely the case, he argues, that white voters rejected liberal politicians because the liberal politicians were too racially progressive for regional norms. Rather, he says, white liberals were too moderate on race to offer a convincing alternative to conservatism in the South. In the 1930s and 1940s, all white southern liberals—even the most ardent supporters of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal—were segregationists. Some wanted to increase economic aid to the African American community, but none wanted the federal government to intervene on matters of race relations. But southern white liberals’ hopes of transforming their region economically without addressing racial discrimination were dashed when the U.S. Supreme Court made desegregation a national issue with Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—a move that prompted a southern backlash that endangered southern white liberalism. The African American civil rights movement also caught white southern liberals off guard, and they gave it almost no support. Despite this failure of the first generation of postwar southern white liberals, a new generation of moderately progressive southern Democrats, including Carter and Clinton, were elected in the 1970s on the promise of economic uplift through education spending and partnerships with business. Yet even though these new southern moderates were more supportive of civil rights, they made the same mistake as their predecessors, believing that they could promote economic uplift without challenging structural racism. For a while, white southerners who enjoyed the benefits of postwar federal and corporate economic investment in their region were sympathetic to this vision, but in the mid-1990s, as globalization and deindustrialization left the rural South impoverished, white southerners turned against these moderate liberals. Their opposition to liberalism has only increased in the intervening decades. White southern liberals staked their political future on the premise that liberal economic policies could deliver economic uplift to their region without challenging the white racist power structure. When that promise failed, white voters turned against them, and Black voters (who had never appreciated white liberals’ refusal to confront the problem of systemic racism) decided that they could find better advocates elsewhere. But Badger is not optimistic that today’s Black liberals can win many statewide elections in the South either; white opposition is too strong. Badger does not offer much political advice for the future, and he does not suggest that a different strategy could have necessarily led to a better outcome. He is critical of white southern liberals’ attempts to avoid addressing racial issues, but he is also mindful of the challenging situation they faced. Perhaps this book’s refusal to settle for easy answers is one of its key strengths. Badger’s analysis, which he supports with numerous historical examples drawn from his half-century of studying twentieth-century southern politics, is nuanced and thoughtful. Readers will probably find the book’s conclusions compelling, albeit unsettling. [End Page 394] Daniel K. Williams University of West Georgia Copyright © 2023 Southern...

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

This chapter focuses on feminist whiteness, a concept it introduces and defines as the product of a process of political subjectivation as a white feminist. The concept captures the various repertoires that white feminists elaborate to talk about—or rather actively ignore—race relations of power and their own privileged positions in this racial order. The chapter traces how white feminists are constituted as political subjects through their relationship to nonwhite feminists, and to those whom they perceive and label as “bad” feminist subjects. It shows that debates on Islamic veiling have operated a shift in feminist whiteness, from feminist whiteness as ignorance to feminist whiteness as an active participation in national identity and femonationalist discourses. It also shows that feminist whiteness is multiple and varies across contexts. In France and Quebec, white feminists use different repertoires to address race issues. Some work around or evade race, while others recognize its political salience. These different forms of feminist whiteness are articulated with specific moral dispositions and emotions.

Reviewed by: The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement Karen Anderson The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. By Winifred Breines. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Winifred Breines relates a difficult and contested history in The Trouble between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. She begins by asking why there was no interracial feminist movement, and in the end, illuminates key issues in American social relations and political activism. Breines focuses on key groups and issues, revisiting the politics of gender and sexuality in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Power Movement and using two Boston organizations, Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective, to examine white and black socialist feminisms. She illuminates the deep appeal of identity politics to white and black feminists at a pivotal moment in United States history. White women and people of color formed the social movements of the 1960s and beyond not only to rectify deep injustices in American society, but also to claim the right to speak with authority about their own lives. When activists tried to work together across differences in race, class, gender, and sexuality, they found that their differences in experiences, resources, and perceptions created almost insurmountable barriers to cooperation. Identity politics evolved in response to those dilemmas, even as the political mobilization of identities created ongoing problems. White feminists organized consciousness raising groups that profoundly shaped their personal lives and political commitments. Their belief in an ostensibly universal gender system alienated black women, whose challenges were deepened by racism and whose lives did not mirror those of white women in gender socialization or material circumstances. Breines, for example, concludes that white feminism's critique of patriarchal family relations was "cold" and did not acknowledge the importance of black families as sites of resistance in a racist society. More importantly, black women understood racial justice to be their most pressing political priority. In response, some black women formed autonomous feminist organizations. According to Breines, this separatism created a highly contentious path to a sometimes workable politics of alliance between black women and white socialist feminists in Boston. Citing the Coalition for Women's Safety, Breines concludes that when white feminists allowed black women to lead while they provided pragmatic organizational support, issues of race were defused. That arrangement did not translate well in other settings. Feminist workshops devised to address racism in the feminist movement often ended in anger, recriminations, and guilt. Though she understands that black women's rage carried with it their anger at their treatment in the society at large, Breines understates the level of dysfunction that sometimes characterized interactions between white feminists and women of color. She rightly concludes that black feminists developed significant analyses of race and gender in their organizations and publications and that white feminists lost the possibilities presented by interracial communication and organization. She fails, however, to explore the closures entailed when black feminists distanced themselves so fully from white feminists. Nonetheless, this is a courageous and insightful book. [End Page 242] Karen Anderson University of Arizona Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Staying with the White Trouble of Recent Feminist Westerns Krista Comer (bio) In the turbulent summer of 2020—amidst an uncontrolled pandemic and massive protests against police brutality on US streets—op-ed writers reported a "great white awakening on racism," an assault on white innocence without the typical hem and haw, the fragility or defenses of white guilt (Thornton). Springing up in geographies not on anyone's antiracist map of America, the first draft of a new history of race relations in this country seemed to be in process. Older white people stood with signs on unlikely suburban street corners. Throngs of multiracial young folks were getting in front of tear gas, putting their bodies on the line. Terms like "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" circulated in public discourse with new legitimacy and ubiquity while the white studies scholar Robin DiAngelo made the rounds on cable TV, astounded her 2018 book White Fragility was sold out. The election of 2020 reveals the roughness of this first draft of a new history of race relations, how potent white supremacy remains as a political force, and how divided the US West is between red and blue states, urban and rural political culture. Now that the results are in, and Donald Trump defeated, the tens of millions who signed on for another term of white nationalist rule will not go away. Indeed, the affective discourse of white grievance that brought Trump to power is stronger. The famous "suburban white woman's" vote showed her to be less tired of Trumpism than predicted. Whatever racial reckoning was happening among white progressives about white women's politics has, however, been eclipsed by the January 6 insurrection of white nationalist patriarchs at the US Capitol. While horrifying, the action was also familiar to US West [End Page 101] researchers tracking extremism in the region. NPR's Kirk Siegler, in the "Roots of U.S. Capitol Insurrectionists Run Through American West," reports on extremist street activities, since 2014, of the People's Rights movement led by Ammon Bundy. Bundy has called his followers to live and die as "free men" as they stormed federal buildings and threatened officials, in effect providing a "Western ethos" playbook for Trump loyalists like the Proud Boys (Siegler). Escalated white violence makes understanding grievance politics all the more urgent. Do white progressives have anything to offer those who occupy this aggressive injured standpoint other than critique, superiority, or condemnation? Can feminists who are white (by descriptive definition, white feminists) not flinch at the term "white feminist," perhaps use it to engage the trope of "white feminism" that women of color feminisms continue to invoke as meaningful to them? Such questions about whiteness, the social geographies of the nation, and to what feminist politics are accountable are among the most pressing for feminism and for critical regional theory and action. The pervasive suspicion of feminism as "white feminism" (unless it is otherwise named, i.e., black feminism) fundamentally structures feminist alliances. This relational strain, so familiar to feminist histories and persistent, is white women's problem to fix. To do so, white feminists need to understand the problem of whiteness for white women so much better. I begin through recent political events to keep the stakes of whiteness at the top of the ticket, so to speak, at the forefront of critical concerns. Certainly, the fact of racial hierarchies in histories of conquest has been one center for the field of western American literary and cultural studies over the last thirty years and including, in the last ten years, a transformative turn to frameworks from Indigenous studies and settler theory. This essay continues that trajectory as well as builds on work over the last several years to theorize the political and aesthetic concerns an explicitly feminist critical regionalism can help critics analyze. If the advent of more "critical" regional frameworks in the field of western literary and cultural studies substantiated and gave name to a problem that too often had no name, the problem of whiteness, I will be [End Page 102] concerned here with whiteness not from the more familiar vantage point of critique or disavowal but rather from the perspective...

Research into social or spatial injustice, such as in the racial field, must inevitably lead to the study of capitalism itself. Geographers interested in policy, however, have looked only at more superficial manifestations at a smaller scale. Their work has strongly reflected the interests of the government or other bodies which have funded their research. Government itself has been prompted to encourage research into situations which it sees as threatening to its own stability. To this extent one can see the 'race relations industry' merely as part of a diversionary tactic. When research is directed at a macro scale, to look at the structure of society, it comes into conflict with the existing order. If our aim is to effect changes in society, we will be frustrated by the impotence of research directed to the establishment. CAN we understand the position of minorities without understanding society itself? Does the failure of the 'white liberals', now partially recognized by themselves,1 reflect the failure of the liberal conception of social, economic, political and psychological interactions, and a desire to remove race relations, like other integral parts of the system, to a separate sphere of investigation and specialism, as much as a changing situation? There has been a tendency for the observer to consider only causes-and cures-within the aegis of his own specialism; the historian might recall the experience of slavery and the attitudes it engenders, and so might the psychologist, but each defines it in a way that discourages and renders irrelevant debate between the disciplines. For geographers, the temptation to cast inequality in terms of spatial inequality rather than structural relationships in society, is part of a desire to define feasible problems within the legitimate scope of the discipline rather than the demands of the subject matter. Succumbing to this, we have geographers writing: Great advances have been made in Britain during the present century in the attempt to equalize opportunities and conditions between different socio-economic classes. Poverty and inequality still exist, to a degree that varies according to the definitions employed. But the undoubted achievements of the welfare state in demolishing the principal bastions of inequality have exposed more vividly than ever before other causes for equalitarian public concern, amongst which are several characterized by their spatial as much as by their social nature.2 What are these causes for concern? Chisholm and Manners also claim public appreciation that 'the dilemma of the two nations has shifted from being a class to being to an important degree a spatial problem, and a recognition that zones of urban blight are as much a technological and urban planning dilemma as they are a social and racial problem ..'.3 Thus they believe that there are 'new problems' in achieving the 'total welfare of society'.4 Problems defined in this way thus fall squarely within the realm of geography, through investigations of 'the way spatial structure relates to the wider structure of society and reflects aspects of that wider society'.5 There can be little doubt that 'what is received publicly depends very much on location relative to such spatial artifacts of a political system as job opportunities, schools, freeways, and the boundaries of different municipalities and of school catchment areas',6 but many research workers seem to shy away from laying the cause at the door of the 'so-called free play of market forces (which) gives rise to differently valued areas and the differences in land use related to economic forces'.7 Nor would Chisholm and Manners, for example, be eager to accept that income inequality and distribution are the major factors in social ills, even if some are 'due simply to the way resources are allocated in specific localities'.8 * The views in this paper are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the S.S.R.C.

Problem with Loving Whiteness: A Response to S. Sullivan's Good White People: Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-RacismShannon Sullivan's work on racialization and habits, and on relationality and transaction, has been important to my philosophical work on race, racism, habits, and much more. Good White People: Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism has, in quite a short time, been extensively engaged and taken up as a useful and important intervention in thinking about whiteness in the U.S. American context. I attempt here to offer some constructive disagreement on matters of mutual care and concern: in general, the abolition of white supremacy and, in particular, white people's potential contribution for racial justice movements. I focus on the key question of whether it is appropriate to love whiteness. Along the way I express worry about Good White People's orientation toward middle-class liberals, its approach to history, its politics of citation, and its focus on a Black/white binary in the continental United States.Sullivan begins the book by quoting a critic I hadn't heard of before reading this book, Lerone Bennett, who wrote The white liberal and the white supremacist share the same root postulates. They are different in degree, not kind (Sullivan 2014: 1). Sullivan says that she is addressing the bulk of white people in the post-Jim Crow United States and other similar white-dominated nations who consider themselves to be non- or anti-racist. These are the white liberals of which Lerone Bennett speaks, the'good' white people whose goodness is marked by their difference from the 'bad' white people who are considered responsible for any lingering racism in a progressive, liberal society (3). I agree absolutely with the view that white liberals are not going to bring about revolutionary transformation in the racial order of this world. But precisely for this reason, I am not sure that the white liberal is the correct subject through which we should to organize our thinking about race. I also do not think that white liberals are the main engine of racial oppression.Further, I am curious about the category of similar white-dominated nations; although I have only deeply engaged racial politics in two nation-states, Canada and the US, it is clear to me that while there are certain commonalities in the way race is lived and governed, there are also vital differences. Perhaps the most striking is the difference between an assumed Black/white binary grounded in historical chattel slavery as the central logic for thinking about race, common in US race thinking, versus an overt formation in Canada (and other places) that centers far more on indigeneity, borders, migration, and the management of multiple racialized others. Working through these differences has convinced me of the necessity of understanding and thinking about whiteness as operative outside the US American context, beyond a Black/white binary, and in a way that accounts for the founding and ongoing violences of capitalism and colonialism. While chattel slavery has informed many parts of the world, and while anti-Black racism has been necessary to the ways slavery was organized and manifests itself in contemporary racism, I question this book's tight focus on the US and on Black/ white racial dynamics.Whiteness, in my view, operates in complex and shifting ways anywhere racialization is happening, and so perhaps it's a good place to start in thinking about the question of whether we ought to love whiteness. In this book, Sullivan does not spend a lot of time defining whiteness. When she does, it is in expansive ways that raise the question of what it means to love whiteness so defined. She argues that there is to being white that being Irish or Italian alone does not capture, and that something is a pattern of domination, exploitation, and oppression (Sullivan 2014: 16). This understanding of whiteness as collective-as constituted by domination, exploitation, and oppression-reminds us that whiteness is not something, on Sullivan's view, that we individually control the effects or the meaning of. …

Black Liberation Theology and the Lynching of Jesus

O'Brien Hallstein, D. Lynn. White Feminists and Contemporary Maternity. Purging Matrophobia. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 192 pp. $80.00 (hardcover). ISBN-10:0230 60 8639. White feminism has recently come under fire from within and outside of the academy. While our past certainly bears critique, so too does it provide a foundation from which contemporary feminism can still draw strength. From this premise emerges D. Lynn O'Brien Hallstein's White Feminists and Contemporary Maternity: Purging Matrophobia. O'Brien Hallstein analyzes White feminism and contemporary feminism with fresh eyes, critically following the development and impact of matrophobia in the field. Through a series of complicated yet ultimately convincing arguments, O'Brien Hallstein reveals how the underlying matrophobia in so much of feminist thinking divides women from one another and from themselves, forcing the potentially liberating critical subject position of into the shadows and structuring feminist works around an either/or binary analysis that focuses only on one side. Deeply grounded in feminist literature, this book makes important strides for rethinking the ways in which feminists handle the institution of motherhood, the empowering potential of mothering, and the complicated subject position of mother. To begin, O'Brien Hallstein highlights the definition of matrophobia as the fear of becoming one's mother. She then links the history of matrophobia in feminism to the metaphor, the sister metaphor, and the (mis)appropriation of Adrienne Rich's ideas in her influential book, Of Woman Born. Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Finally, O'Brien Hallstein contends that silence about prevents feminism from moving beyond matrophobia. O'Brien Hallstein's historical outline of how matrophobia developed is one of the great strengths of this book. She begins by explaining how feminists in the 1960s identified with suffragists of the late 1800s/early 1900s for political strength and legitimacy and then disidentified themselves from their own feminist mothers because the suffragists didn't go far enough or were placated by the vote. Their initial self-positioning as a second wave of the feminist movement was promoted as new, real, and ultimately better version of feminism (p. 29). At the same time, feminists developed the sister metaphor, seeking to solidify the image of women working together as connected equals. While the metaphor intended to position all women as equals, the Sister System worked to reject mothers and as a theoretical and political location of critique. Because the Sister System promoted a clear and consistent differentiation and separation from first feminism, it was inherently matrophobic. Thus as the Sister System gained momentum, mothers and as a specific critical position were rejected. At a time when women's institutionalized roles as mothers began to undergo critique, the silencing and rejection of mother as a political location of critique within feminism increased. In 1976, Rich's Of Woman Born made the landmark distinction between as the oppressive institution and mothering as the potentially empowering act of women. While acknowledging and admiring the power of Rich's distinction, O'Brien Hallstein claims that this distinction created an either/or binary in feminist work; we either focus on the oppressive institution of motherhood or the empowering experience of mothering, and few works successfully focus on both. When we focus on only one side of a binary, we effectively silence the other. In this way, appropriations of Of Woman Born worked to deepen matrophobia in feminism. While this text might talk to anyone who criticizes feminism as antimotherhood or scholars interested in mothering, the sophisticated and intricate nature of the arguments are for readers with some knowledge of the history of feminist theory. …

White feminists active in the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s have often been accused of being blind to the needs of ethnic minority women and thus ‘racist’. While there is significant truth to these accusations, this article argues that such critiques have often been rather simplistic. In this article I explore the many ways in which white feminists of this era did engage with issues of ‘race’, however clumsily. Many white feminists in the early days of the WLM drew inspiration from the Black movement, and later on in the late 1970s and 1980s significant numbers of white feminists were involved in anti‐racist activity in groups such as Women against Racism and Fascism and Women against Imperialism, and smaller anti‐racist consciousness‐raising groups. I explore the nature of these groups, whilst nevertheless maintaining a critical stance on the ways in which these groups could often – albeit inadvertently – reinscribe white power. I argue that rather than being simply racist, one of the interesting contradictions within the WLM lay in the gap between the awareness of many white feminists of the issue surrounding race, and their inability to translate this awareness into action. I end by suggesting the larger issues that a focus on race in the WLM raises for historians of feminism, both in terms of chronology – such a focus highlights the extent of feminist activity in the 1980s – and regarding the conceptual sensitivity needed when using the term ‘racism’, given the differing ways this term was used within the WLM.

The specter of racism has haunted white feminists since the inception of the U.S. women’s movement. Historical research has shown that early suffragists used racist tactics to win the vote for white women at the expense of black women.2 In more recent years, feminists of color have written extensively on their alienation and exclusion from second wave feminist agendas. Early attempts at racial inclusion in the second wave movement failed, often boiling down to little more than “add color and stir,” rather than facilitating an understanding of how different oppressions often work together. These attempts failed in part because many white feminists saw racism as secondary to the “real enemy,” which was sexism. The inability to address how a white feminist political agenda reflected race and class interests made the formation of racially inclusive feminist coalitions difficult. While white feminists in the 1980s made greater attempts at incorporating women of color’s experience, bell hooks argues that most of the discussion was simply “lip service” to the idea of diversity and did not lead to sustainable strategies of communication that were not exclusionary or racist. 3The emergence of new waves of feminist action in the late 1980s and early 1990s offered a chance for young feminists to learn from pastgenerations and make a feminist community that incorporated and addressed the racial critiques of second wave feminism. Riot Grrrl was one such emergent feminist group. Positioned between “postfeminism” and what some labeled third wave feminism, women and girls involved in Riot Grrrl challenged the stereotype of young women being apathetic to feminism, and attempted to bring the idea of sisterhood and connection between women back into focus with some new twists.4

White women's racism has been the topic of many critiques, discussions and conflicts within British feminist theory and politics over the last fifty years, driven by women of colour's insistence that white feminists must take on board the significance of race in order to stop perpetuating racism. Yet still today, feminist academia and activism in Britain continues to be white-dominated and to participate in the reproduction of racism and whiteness. This article examines the role of dominant historical narratives of feminism in enabling this reproduction, arguing that there is a direct correlation between how the feminist past is constructed in relation to race and racism and how feminist theory and politics are articulated in the present. Focussing on three contemporary feminist texts that address feminism itself as a subject, it highlights three techniques used in these texts that, it is argued, are commonly employed in the narrative reproduction of white feminist racism. These are: (1) the erasure of the work of British feminists of colour; (2) white feminist co-option of work by feminists of colour; and (3) the narration of feminist theory and politics as having ‘moved on’ from racism. These techniques lead to evasion of the topic of white feminist racism, both historically and in the present. They also reinforce the construction of British feminism as a story that belongs to white women. The article argues that in order to work towards ending white supremacy, white feminists must relinquish control of the feminist narrative and stop moving on from the topic of white feminist racism.

ABSTRACTThis article offers a feminist environmental response to ‘the breathless sea’. Through a close reading of [Christina Sharpe’s. 2016. The Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press]; Adrienne Rich’s. 1973. “Diving into the Wreck.” In Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972. New York: WW Norton; and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’. 2018. M Archive: After the End of the World. Durham: Duke University Press], it explores the increasingly vulnerable ocean both as a site of environmental damage, and as a speculative meeting place between black feminist poetics and white feminism. A series of interconnected arguments unfold: (1) learning from Sharpe, the weather is understood as not only climatological but also in terms of the ‘total climate’ that is antiblackness; (2) the ocean is not immune from weather; the weather underwater comprises anthropogenic harm to oceans (including increasing levels of oxygen depletion), but also the legacy of antiblackness; (3) from an environmental humanities perspective, the ‘wreck’ of Rich’s poem is not only a ‘wrecked’ gender order, but also the ecological damage of the undersea; white feminism, however, struggles to notice that this ‘wreck’ is also antiblackness. This article concludes by staging an encounter between Rich and Gumbs at the bottom of the sea. Here, as part of a project of building refuge, Gumbs invites white feminism to welcome its own partial dissolution.

Since the mid-2000s, a maelstrom of think pieces, journalistic articles, speeches, YouTube videos, and social media posts have introduced the term “white feminism” into the popular American lexicon. Simultaneously, the notions of white tears, and particularly white women’s tears, have gained traction. Suzanne Leonard explores the relationship between white feminism and white tears, a confluence that has myriad problematic implications. After teasing out the ways in which these understandings alternate between serving as progressive interventions and anti-feminist rejoinders, she suggests a formulation for how we might foster a more inclusive, collaborative theory – and practice – of emotional expression. Ultimately, she advocates for a futurity of a feminist politic of emotion that does not ignore the racialized contexts of feelings.