White Feminism and White Tears as Bad Objects

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

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. …

In this thesis I examine the contemporary nexus between White women and the raced and classed institution of White womanhood. More specifically, I focus on White Australian women who are middle class, rich in cultural capital, and generally consider themselves to be progressive; that is race privileged women but women who are not usually associated with overt racism. My analysis unfolds White Australian women in the discursive context of the ideologies of feminism and feminist-influenced anti-racist politics, as well as the ideologies of femininity. The thesis shows how this nexus is enacted through a vision of White women as Good as expressed in the political commitments, mentalities, relationships, narratives and corporeality of such women. The research problem that I identified and worked through in the thesis is as follows: for middle class White women, (who can be seen and see themselves as generic 'women'), Whiteness has been seen and played out as Goodness. Further, in the playing out of this Goodness White women accumulate and defend the prestige and privileges of Whiteness. Specifically, I argue that Whiteness is reproduced in some of the discourses and practices of White feminism, by the progressive White women involved in anti-racist politics, and in the femininity industry and the ways it is taken up. The nub of the problem I identify is that White women's involvement in the structures and narratives that support Whiteness is often grounded in the very qualities of character and conduct that emerge from the colonial and class-constructed ideal of White womanhood and which have historically distinguished them from denigrated others. These qualities- notably virtue, innocence and self-restraint- whilst differently nuanced in other contexts are an ongoing expression of the uses made of White womanhood as the visible sign of race and class superiority. The work examines four key periods: the Australian colony of PNG during the decolonising 1960's and 1970's; the high years of 1970's and 1980's feminism; the race debates of the 1990's; and the bodily practices of present day White women gripped by fears of fat and aging. I explore the ways in which White women's Whiteness is played out in benevolent Black/White relationships, the over-reach of difference feminism, particular kinds of anti-racist identities and activism, and body-improvement practices. In all these cultural sites, White women's Whiteness is often represented as a kind of moral being and deployed as moral authority in ways that are consonant with the raced and classed construction of White women as moral texts. My research approach was determined by the research problem I identified. Given my argument that White women mis-recognise Whiteness as Goodness in a race-structured society, then the collecting of data through interviews or surveys would have yielded material subject to this blindness. Instead, I explored sites and material where moral claims were being pressed, and case studies where 'women' were enacting themselves or being represented or interpellated as moral texts. My selection of primary source material ranges from feminist newsletters, women's and other magazines, literature, film, event programs and flyers, radio and television broadcasts, newspapers and websites, as well as reflections on my own experiences. Secondary source material includes feminist theoretical texts as well as texts drawn from a range of other disciplines, and other historical background materials. I lay out and support my arguments using a technique not dissimilar to collage, aiming to construct a picture that is compelling in its detail as well as coherent in its overall effect. This thesis is a contribution to the de-naturalisation of Whiteness. Navigating a course between the opposing hazards of essentialising Whiteness and understating its effects in contemporary Australian society, I have brought into clearer view some of the strategies which maintain the authority of Whiteness.

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

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...

In this introduction, we reconsider how we can tell the stories of Black feminist thought and institutional feminist study through uncertainty and incommensurability rather than clear reproducibility of good and bad objects. We then consider the speculative place of reproductive history, metaphor, and technology vis-à-vis intersectionality as a foundational object of worry for and in feminist thought. Taking seriously the sustained focus on white women and white feminism as the quintessential bad objects and actors in the present of US feminism, we engage how the reproductive in Black feminism has been both an occluding and elucidating genre to refract Black women as subjects of a “white” field of feminism and the academy at large. We pay particular attention to the social reproduction of race in analyses of gestation, birth, and motherhood and the opportunities these sites represent for disorienting intersectional analysis rather than shoring up its contours. By challenging feminism's critical attachments to self-evidently ethical objects, this introduction, and this issue, offer a way forward in feminist study that imagines uncertainty as a core method and value of feminist inquiry.

BackgroundApproximately 80,000 primary brain tumors are diagnosed annually. Social media provides a source of information and support for patients diagnosed with brain tumors; however, use of this forum for dissemination of information about brain tumors has not been evaluated. The objective of this study was to evaluate social media utilization and content related to brain tumors with an emphasis on patients’ trends in usage.MethodsSocial media platforms were systematically evaluated using two search methods: systematic manual inquiry and a keyword-based social media tracker. The search terms included brain tumor, glioblastoma, glioma, and glioblastoma multiforme. Social media content (which includes Facebook pages and groups, YouTube videos, and Twitter or Instagram accounts) and posts were assessed for activity (as quantified by views of posts) and analyzed using a categorization framework.ResultsThe manual and keyword searches identified 946 sources of social media content, with a total count of 7,184,846 points of engagement. Social media platforms had significant variations in content type. YouTube was the largest social media platform for sharing content related to brain tumors overall, with an emphasis on surgical videos and documented patient experiences. Facebook accounted for the majority of patient-to-patient support, and Twitter was the most common platform for scientific dissemination. Overall social media content was mostly focused on treatment overviews and patient experience. When evaluated by search term, most social media posts by the “brain tumor” community shared illness narratives, and searches specific to “glioma” and “glioblastoma” demonstrated a higher proportion of educational and treatment posts.ConclusionsThis study presents novel observations of the characteristics of social media utilization for the online brain tumor community. A robust patient community exists online, with an emphasis on sharing personal narratives, treatment information, patient-to-patient support, treatment options, and fundraising events. This study provides a window to the role of social media utilization by patients, their families, and health professionals. These findings demonstrate the different roles of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter in the rapidly changing era of social media and its relationship with neurosurgery and neuro-oncology.

“White feminism” circulates as a colloquialism within digital cultures to indicate a feminism that centers whiteness, though the phrase captures a greater formation of feminist discourse and action that reify systems of oppression. While feminist critics such as bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw have theorized white women’s tendency to universalize whiteness, there has been very little work in feminist rhetorical studies that defines the rhetorical characteristics of white feminist discourses that advocate against sexual and gendered oppression while also reaffirming white supremacy. Generic Forms of White Feminism: A Study on the Circulation of White Feminism in Digital Cultures addresses the formal rhetorical and symbolic characteristics of white feminist discourses and argues that white feminism circulates as a rhetorical genre. Specifically, by drawing on rhetorical genre studies, feminist criticism, and digital media studies, Generic Forms of White Feminism situates white feminism as an evolving genre that involves recurring generic forms while producing social action that undermines the possibility for radical feminist intervention. Each chapter utilizes a case study to illustrate a specific generic form of white feminism--reprimanding, forgetting, gatekeeping, or co-opting-- within digital cultures. Chapter III: “White Feminists and the Policing of Public Mourning in Response to the Death of Kobe Bryant” examines how white women mobilized the generic form of the emotional reprimand against those who mourned Bryant’s death on Twitter, which policed public mourning and centered white women’s feelings in the larger conversation about Bryant’s memory. Chapter IV: “The Digital Archivization of Margaret Sanger: Public Forgetting, Trauma, and the White Feminist Movement” questions how aspects of Sanger’s biography have been publicly forgotten in service of advancing a (white) feminist agenda. Chapter V: “Confrontations of Feminist and Feminine Belonging: Border Rhetorics, Feminist Gatekeeping, and Epideictic Assemblages” argues that epideictic assemblages allow trans exclusionary radical feminists to gatekeep womanhood and feminism itself, resulting in a feminism that reasserts whiteness and patriarchal dominance. Chapter VI: “Co-Opting Emancipatory Rhetoric and The Beguiled” outlines how Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled co-opts emancipatory rhetorics to evade an acknowledgement of white women’s complicity in systems of oppression.

The Trouble Between Us looks at the question why a radical interracial women's movement did not develop in the 1960s and 1970s. It consideres white and black women's experiences in the civil rights movement, the Black Arts and Black Power movements, including the Black Panther Party, Boston socialist feminism - particularly Bread and Roses, an early white socialist feminist organization, and the Combahee River Collective, a black socialist feminist organization, and Boston feminists' efforts to develop cross- racial political projects in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The accepted interpretation of this period's feminism has been that African American wmen did not join the women's movement because it was racist. But while radical white women were often unconciously or abstractly racist, they were passionately anti-racist in their political objectives and worked hard to develop an interracial movement. At the same time, most radical black women were influenced by the Black Power movement and as a result many were not interested in joining the early white women's liberation movement. Young activists had begun with ideals of togetherness and found themselves divided and estranged, struggling to retain a hopeful image of interracial community. Race came between young white and black radical feminists. Movement women, particularly whites, were forced to relinquish idealistic and universalist images in order to recognise their own social benefits. In their different ways, whether because white women were priviledged and unable to understand subtle versions of racism, white and black men were sexist, or because white women's feminism did not clearly include a place for balck women, they all had to let go of preconceived images and hopes. Only then were they able to construct relationships based on who they were and not on who they wanted to be or wanted others to be. This book argues that white feminists and feminists of colour were pioneers in America's understanding of white racism and in anti-racism practices and consciousness.

Black Liberation Theology and the Lynching of Jesus

The accusation of “white feminism” can serve as a kind of ghosting too, in the social media sense. The act of “ghosting” someone—cutting off all contact and almost deleting them—stops the potential for accord and conversation. The discourse of “white feminism” often disenables more substantive and substantiated analysis of racism. White feminist defensiveness and resentment when challenged is a real problem that not only impedes feminist organizing but effectively re-centers white women when their hurt feelings become the very topic of conversation. White women's fears and tears can and have caused real damage and defensive whining about “mean” Black women is both wrong on the face of it and frustrates alliances across race. The more recent history of feminism, while clearly more aware of racial injustice, was riddled with blind spots, exclusions, presumptions, and outright racism.

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.

This chapter offers clarification as to how white nationalist women code whiteness into the epistemological foundations of digitally mediated communication protocols and communities which reify oppression through digital systems. Through an intersectional analysis of white nationalist women’s webspaces, this chapter elucidates as to how white nationalist women perpetuate “contained agency” through white feminism within white nationalist digital design (classifications and architecture) to clarify the architecture of gated digital communities. In response to concerns by scholars like Anna Zacejik, this chapter engages critical race theory to challenge how neoliberal, class-situated, white feminism reifies rather than engages multidimensional systems of oppression. Due to a lack of intersectional engagement, white women contain their empowerment through a narrow conception of “antagonists,” limiting political and structural implications for revolutionary change.

Thinking Problems

As a theoretical construct, feminism presently has more raps than Queen Latifah and a plethora of additives to preserve its freshness. Yet, prior to contemporary scholars' efforts to identify variations in women's lives, feminist theory suffered from what Adrienne Rich (1978) describes as white solipsism-to think, imagine and speak as if whiteness described the world (p. 299). Considering the history of racial tensions in the United States, it is not surprising that it was African American women who engendered the initial challenge to petty-bourgeois feminism by refusing to sacrifice their community needs to the demands of racist, elite, White women. Throughout the nation's history, African American women have struggled with White women on many political fronts. For example, in 1921, at the National Women's Party Convention, Alice Paul received Black delegates' complaints over disfranchisement with indifference. On another occasion, in 1970, White feminists' reluctance to aggressively organize against the political persecution of Angela Davis continued this legacy of White women rejecting and alienating Black women. These experiences and countless others spurred Black women to shape feminist theory and praxis to include issues unique to them. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) locates four major themes in the construction of Black feminist thought, all of which are generated from a Black woman's standpoint (Collins, 1989).' First, Black women empower themselves by creating self-definitions and self-