I figured out I was actually the white moderate

December 12, 2018 6:42 AM

When does prioritizing our own #selfcare mean we’re failing to adequately prioritize making the world more tolerable for everybody else? More to the point: When are [the author, activist and former mommy blogger Glennon] Doyle’s followers supposed to take her advice about telling their own stories, speaking up, empowering themselves — and when are they supposed to take her advice about shutting up, listening, and letting women of color lead the way? (SL Buzzfeed News)

Doyle’s efforts come at a time when the specter of white women has loomed large in the national progressive consciousness. Since a slight majority of them helped Donald Trump ascend to the presidency two years ago, it’s never been more clear that white women — stratified by everything from class to education to religion to marital status — have little in common with one another beyond shared racial privilege, and that includes their political values. Many white women are still voting Republican — though slowly, that’s starting to change.

...“I thought the worst-case scenario was, ‘I fucked this up really bad. And I can fix it.’ But I think it’s actually a worse-case scenario than that!” She laughed. “Because I was like, ‘Oh, what went wrong, let me tidy it up and make it better next time,’ and now I’m like, ‘Oh no no no no! One of the privileges you’re going to have to give up, Glennon, is the privilege to be adored all the time. So you’re going to do it again.’ ... what’s really important to me is that I’m not the white woman who got criticized and just took her ball and went home.”

posted by devrim (24 comments total)

...“I thought the worst-case scenario was, ‘I fucked this up really bad. And I can fix it.’ But I think it’s actually a worse-case scenario than that!” She laughed. “Because I was like, ‘Oh, what went wrong, let me tidy it up and make it better next time,’ and now I’m like, ‘Oh no no no no! One of the privileges you’re going to have to give up, Glennon, is the privilege to be adored all the time. So you’re going to do it again.’ ... what’s really important to me is that I’m not the white woman who got criticized and just took her ball and went home.”

Oh boy do I feel this. One of the things that has been really, embarassingly difficult for me, as a white woman working hard to support racial justice, is just accepting that sometimes I'm going to be uncomfortable and I will just have to live with that. I really, really want to fix things, to make them okay and make everyone like me and, like, nope, Not Going to Happen. I've had to give up the privilege not only of prioritizing my own comfort but of believing that good, well-meaning people can always resolve a situation to everyone's satisfaction, something that previously was not happening but, because I was comfortable, I could assume everyone else was too. Recognizing that in a fucked-up system discomfort is inevitable and sometimes I am going to have to be the uncomfortable one and there is just not really anything I can do to lessen that has been very hard and very shitty and very important, and I think a lot more of us (white women) need to learn to be comfortable with discomfort.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 6:49 AM on December 12, 2018 [39 favorites]

I can't help thinking that a few more of those 6,500+ words about how white women should focus on the issues of women of colour would have been better spent on the voices of women of colour.
posted by humuhumu at 7:10 AM on December 12, 2018 [18 favorites]

I am glad to see this here, even though it raises a lot of questions for which there are no good answers.

For me, one of the things I am trying to learn is to be okay with conflict. I've been negotiating a lot of conflict around writing a letter to an editor saying "your depiction of our department was not okay because you totally minimized X huge topic to focus on the positive" which was circulated for graduate students to sign. And there are an awful fucking lot of people I have been dealing with who just... did not like aspects of what was written in that letter: it was too harsh, or it came off as whiny, or [$INSERT TONE ARGUMENT HERE] or or or--

so I very, very much get the frustration of Doyle's critics on a very visceral level right now.

Sometimes there is just going to be conflict, because the overall situation is crappy and everyone is hurting and everyone is frustrated. And in those cases, well, the most accessible and easy-to-tell person tends to get the brunt of that frustration. (I have been on both the receiving end and the giving end of it, too.)

At the same time, I think she is doing work that is incredibly necessary and I applaud her for doing it, even when she is uncomfortable--and I applaud her for listening to her criticism and trying to do better by folks who need that work. We need people in that position to speak to more conservative women and translate to them; to take on their discomfort and hold their hands through the thought process.

So. No good answers, aside from everyone trying to make things happen the best they can.
posted by sciatrix at 7:13 AM on December 12, 2018 [9 favorites]

The Tina Fey sheetcaking thing is all I can think of.
posted by knownassociate at 7:51 AM on December 12, 2018

I had a terrible person as a teacher in theatre school, but the thing he said to us at the beginning of each class stays with me. It was some version of, "think about where you are in the room and where you are in relation to the other people in it." He meant physically for the most part, but it can translate. This is what I use to determine whether I speak up or step back. Am I in a strong position in the room overall? Let me step back so others can speak. Am I an ignored voice here? I'm going to talk. It's not an exact science, but it helps.

My current challenge is calling others out, which I'm a bit of a fraidy-cat about, but I have got to get on this path.
posted by wellred at 8:14 AM on December 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

Maybe it's a good sign that white people are starting to recognize our bad choices? I've realized I don't want to build an audience or lead or take up space when a person of color, a woman, an LGBTQ person, etc. could take up that room. If I can use my privilege to speak up for others in places where I might be listened to more (city council, etc), I'll do that sparingly, but I want to as much as possible take on a support role. And sometimes that means I'm supporting something I don't believe in 100%, or it's led by someone I don't entirely trust, or I'm otherwise uncomfortable. And I'm learning to be okay with that. But I constantly feel guilty that I'm not doing enough. Am I not doing enough? Or am I staying out of places I'm not wanted? Or is that just an excuse? I don't want to be a white guy savior, but I don't want to feel like I'm on the sidelines doing nothing. Is it just my whiteness telling me I'm doing nothing because I'm not leading?

Whiteness presents us with nothing but bad choices. But the special thing about whiteness is how it also trains us to think that those bad choices are good choices. So just learning to recognize and live in the constant badness is a victory of a sort, though it FEELS like failure. It's also a challenge for white people to figure out how much of this processing to do in public spaces, where we might help bring other white people along, and how much to do in private, where we don't risk making people of color face-palm themselves into concussions.
posted by rikschell at 8:18 AM on December 12, 2018 [5 favorites]

Whiteness presents us with nothing but bad choices.

I think that's a cop out. We can choose to use the privilege we might have to help others.
posted by wellred at 8:44 AM on December 12, 2018 [9 favorites]

#selfcare is something I'm just beginning to learn the importance of.

I'm a straight white male, but I don't think it matters what your orientation, race, or gender is - I think self care is important for everyone. Myopic-ly - it's most important for me. It's been an incredibly hard process for me to break through in therapy to the idea that I'm lovable and deserving of love. I'm still in the early stages of even being able to grasp that concept, having grown up in an unsafe house where I was told otherwise in so many ways from my infancy.

All of my unhealthy behaviors and coping mechanisms and anger (and health problems and even accidents) are apparently scientifically proven to be linked to the trauma I experienced as a child and the resulting PTSD. I've done some hard work in the past years to begin to process my past in healthy ways that help me be a more healthy person today. These are very hard things to say publicly - I'm admitting that I'm a broken person and that a lot of the time I don't think I deserve love. But apparently I might.

And...FFS, as a SWM, I probably can't even comprehend the trauma others have suffered their whole lives. Every one of us deserves to be loved, and that starts with loving themselves, as hard as that may be. Because how can you show up as a partner or a parent and sufficiently love those around you if you don't think you merit that love yourself? I know I sure can't.

I'm very glad to see people promoting this. Self care is a GOOD THING. It's OK not to be OK.
posted by allkindsoftime at 8:58 AM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

I think one of the hard things about *gestures around* is that there's segments of the population that are at a starting block so many miles back behind the pack that it SHOULD BE the work of their leaders to move them forward. It should not be the job of women of color to go get those white ladies. White ladies have to go get them, be the conduit, deal with the most basic of 101ing, especially when the first step of 101 is to be taught the new vocabulary using in part the old language.

I feel like Doyle is doing that. It's not heroic work, it's just work that needs to be done, and she had the power and audience AND all the resources and assistance that being part of the Oprah System provides. It would have been appalling if she hadn't.

Part of that whole process is going to be articles like this one, to spread the word via the traditional channels (ish, magazines used to be that channel and this is what we have now) to women who woudn't even know there was a starting block otherwise but will recognize Doyle's name and have a reaction in a very pinteresty way of "oh, is everyone else doing this now? should I do this now?"

It sucks for everyone else to watch. The whole thing seems ridiculous and eyerolly and OH COME ON but how else do we literally tell people to notice a thing they have been trained to ignore all their lives and probably feel safer continuing to ignore? There has to be a hook, and in the beginning the hook has to look like all the other aspirational hooks in their lives - that hairstyle and tiny blonde lady, that spotlit stage that might be your megachurch pulpit or your MLM/motivational speaker performance - or it's too dangerous to bite.

A lot of previous generations' social change began in the places where women gathered unobserved: book clubs, quilting circles, hair salons, the breakroom/smoking area at work. And it was largely white women passing the first principles along to each other.

If it looked like Doyle wasn't intending to route this group of people along to the point of listening to the real authorities, this would be really alarming, but I honestly think she's providing exactly the pathway she should/has the power to create to get people ready to hear it. They have to start somewhere.
posted by Lyn Never at 9:05 AM on December 12, 2018 [40 favorites]

And, I should add, like...

This is traditionally women's work. This kind of "uh, fuck, marginalized people are saying things, we should listen and our best to help" is...

Put it this way. The "oh but I'm not sure" pushback I was getting on my letter was all coming from women. But also, the responses from male graduate students, with one exception who is a (non white) ally of Herculean proportions? They were fucking crickets.

It's very easy to see the first stumbling steps of white women trying and be frustrated and impatient. But at the same time, comparing white women to white men in similar class and cultural strata tends to... highlight a certain... disparity in effort, shall we say. Which is not what you might think, given the typical responses to each.
posted by sciatrix at 9:14 AM on December 12, 2018 [29 favorites]

Ah yes, but there’s always a way a woman can do it wrong, even when she’s doing the thing that people have been asking people like her to do for ages.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:19 AM on December 12, 2018 [22 favorites]

I'm with Lyn Never. "Collect your people" is a frequent refrain in the social justice world, asking people of privilege to engage with a person of privilege who is acting like a horse's ass so that the less privileged don't have to. Doyle is collecting her people. This is how it starts.
posted by Anonymous at 10:56 AM on December 12, 2018

The operative word here is white.

Are white women not born of a white man's seed? Do white women not eat at their father's table? Is every white man not born of the body of a white woman?

White men wouldn't even exist if not for white women (and the reverse is also true.)

White women and white men are inextricable. "But but but white men are worse..." Who? Your husband, your father, your uncles, your brothers, your grandfather, your sons?

Shifting blame and having it still land inside of your own house looks a lot like making excuses to outsiders.

All this talk of allies. There is no alliance.
posted by yonega at 10:58 AM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

On the relatively minor #selfcare sidebar, I'll just quote the article:

The concept of self-care, after being repopularized in the ’70s and ’80s by queer people of color, most famously Audre Lorde, has more recently become yet another element of pop feminism to be packaged and sold. And “the irony of the grand online #selfcare-as-politics movement” that bloomed online after Trump’s ascendance to the presidency, notes Jordan Kisner in the New Yorker, “was that it was powered by straight, affluent white women, who, although apparently feeling a new vulnerability in the wake of the election, are not traditionally the segment of American society in the greatest need of affirmation.”

Good: Taking back emotional labor that other people do for you. Seeking appropriate help. Claiming time to do health and safety things for your own long-term wellbeing. Recognizing the signs of burnout and setting appropriate boundaries. Not letting other people's demands for emotional labor become a opening for them taking advantage of you. Doing your own social-justice homework rather than depending on others to give you the 101.

Bad: Consumerist "treat yourself," often involving the unacknowledged labor of other people. Monopolizing resources. Using "selfcare" as an excuse for political disengagement.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 11:43 AM on December 12, 2018 [6 favorites]

You're not seriously arguing that white women have the same level of privilege as white men, are you? The whole reason this onus has been put on white women is because of the fact that white women aren't as privileged as white men and we're supposed to have some goddamn empathy for other less-privileged groups based on that fact. Now, there is some discussion to be had at the ways misogyny has played into this--the fact that white men have been removed from this conversation entirely and we've what, given up on them to do any work?--is fucked up. But can we say that acknowledging that white women lack some privilege does not mean we're exonerating them from doing anti-racist work?

Bad: Consumerist "treat yourself," often involving the unacknowledged labor of other people. Monopolizing resources. Using "selfcare" as an excuse for political disengagement.

The whole point of the article is that Doyle is trying to get people to not do this . . .
posted by Anonymous at 12:02 PM on December 12, 2018

The operative word here is white.

Are white women not born of a white man's seed? Do white women not eat at their father's table? Is every white man not born of the body of a white woman?

White men wouldn't even exist if not for white women (and the reverse is also true.)

White women and white men are inextricable. "But but but white men are worse..." Who? Your husband, your father, your uncles, your brothers, your grandfather, your sons?

Shifting blame and having it still land inside of your own house looks a lot like making excuses to outsiders.

All this talk of allies. There is no alliance.

I think this underlines why it's so important for white women to strengthen their alliances with all women, rather than wishing harder that white men could be good allies.
posted by reseeded at 12:04 PM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

In my view, intersectionality isn’t (shouldn’t be?) a free pass to direct one’s misogyny at the most unpopular women in the room.
posted by Barack Spinoza at 12:06 PM on December 12, 2018 [13 favorites]

Mod note: Folks, it feels like we're heading for an unproductive general "what axis of oppression is most significant" fight, which is a great way to generate bad feelings and a sense of alienation for just about everybody in the room. Let's bring it back to the actual specific article.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:10 PM on December 12, 2018 [18 favorites]

I think this underlines why it's so important for white women to strengthen their alliances with all women, rather than wishing harder that white men could be good allies.

where is the evidence in this thread that white women either in the aggregate or in the specific case of Doyle are doing the latter?
posted by sciatrix at 12:24 PM on December 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

I was responding to a comment that said: White women and white men are inextricable. "But but but white men are worse..."

I guess that blaming white women for the actions (or lack of action) of white men, which I perceived in that comment, is different from implying that white women/Doyle herself are prioritizing men as allies, so... my bad?
posted by reseeded at 1:00 PM on December 12, 2018

schroedinger: I'm not arguing that white women have the same level of privilege as white men, and I don't think the linked article or passage I quoted is either. I'm supporting the statement that the concept of self-care originated from a feminist QTIPOC critique about who benefits from caring labor and the resulting impact on health and mortality, and that has been largely co-opted to sell luxury products and services.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 1:16 PM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

I can't help thinking that a few more of those 6,500+ words about how white women should focus on the issues of women of colour would have been better spent on the voices of women of colour.

There aren't actually a limited amount of words. There is, generally speaking, a limited amount of attention, and Doyle is trying to redirect at least some of that attention away from herself and toward WOC.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:56 PM on December 12, 2018

At the risk of irony overdose since I am a white woman (ugh), TFA is, in large part, about the strategies of "come get your own" vs. "shut up and sit down."

Would it be best if they actually listened to POCs? Yes. Realistically, are they likely to do so right now? Well... some, yes, but many are more likely to go "lalala I can't hear you I'm a good person I'm not racist lalala" unless you effing candy coat it for them.

Being baby-stepped into perspective is coddling, yeah, but it seems to work (I've seen it work, at least one baby step*), and it's work that can be laid fairly onto other members of the privileged community.

* the Trumpista inlaws are cool with the one out LGBT couple they know because one member of the couple is in the military. The cognitive dissonance of Support the Troops vs. Gays Are Evil resolved in favor of the former. Next time, if they meet an out person who is not a consummate red-meat badass, maybe that baby step will get them one step further. And so on. And so on. It's so frustrating that grown-ass adults react this way, but... they do.
posted by cage and aquarium at 7:31 AM on December 13, 2018 [6 favorites]

I think there is a big difference between individual conversations between people who know each other and mass communication.

White people should step up in conversations with other white people they know, instead of expecting black people to be the obligatory educators/instigators of change.

But in mass communication, white people need to look to, and point to, the diverse and copious amount of material from POC speakers, writers, and educators, instead of reinforcing the racist tendency of white people to have a greater interest in what white people say about everything (including race) then what POC people say.

Doyle gets at least one thing right, which is that making a choice about being comfortable and well liked is part of systemic privilege. Everyone wants to be comfortable, but when people are comfortable with discrimination, their lack of action reinforces the status quo. The goal of remaining comfortable also plays a large part, in my view, in conversations about respectability politics and the "right" way for people to protest injustice.
posted by gryftir at 4:43 PM on December 13, 2018 [1 favorite]