"And, by the way, 'woke' just means you give a damn about other people."
Jane Fonda, Grand Dame of Well-Intentioned White Feminist Glory, electrified millions with her recent speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Millions of white liberals- white liberal women, specifically- that is.
Black folks, who originated the term “woke”, on the other hand, were… underwhelmed with what felt to be another performative gesture to distract us as we teeter towards the apocalypse.
“Woke” is nearly one hundred years old. It originated as a word of caution articulated by Black folks, to Black folks who had no choice but to navigate white spaces.
Like sundown towns.
“Stay woke” literally meant “Be smart. Stay alert. Stay alive.”
Not that generic, sanitized Social Justice Barbarella shit Ms. Fonda, bless her heart, was talking about.
Minimal effort, maximum entertainment. That’s white liberal activism.
Sourdough boule and Cirque du Soleil.
The whitefangirling over Ms. Fonda reminds me of when, eight long and tiresome years ago, a Huffpost essay, titled, “I Don’t Know How to Explain to You That You Should Care About Other People” went viral. It was shared with abandon by people who, like the author, Kayla Chadwick, were white liberal women who felt compelled to call out their white colleagues on the right for their overt callousness. My Facebook newsfeed was full of reposts of the essay from my “friends”- white liberal women who I was acquainted with as a result of my engagement with nonprofit and left-leaning spaces.
White liberal women who drove hybrid cars, knitted their own pink pussy hats, and never forgot their reusable bags when going to their local co-op.
White liberal women who convened in secret Facebook groups with titles like “Smart Liberal Women”, where they called each other “brave” for quietly suffering through holiday meals with their right wing relatives.
Secret, progressive Facebook groups that were about as white as said holiday meals.
White liberal women who would joke about coming up with innovative ways of posting “MEN ARE TRASH” to avoid getting flagged for hate speech.
I was in such a group at the time- I was invited by a moderator after the group conceded that more racial diversity was needed. And, in a group of several hundred “smart liberal women”, I was one of five melanated women. One of my first posts was:
White women are trash.
The fallout was immediate.
I was introduced to the concept of “white tears” as a number of white liberal women accused my post- and me- of being divisive. Hateful.
The reason Trump got elected…
The first Trump administration was eye-opening for me- not because of the surge of overt racist vitriol from the Right because I was well-acquainted with that. In fact, I’m biracial, and my white mother was fast and loose with the n-word throughout my childhood, so it’s in my DNA.
But because of my growing awareness- and personal experience of- of the covert racism of the left. A racism that was embedded in every single white liberal woman I knew.
White liberal women who insisted on “helping” me and other Black people to fight Trump’s racist agenda with the unspoken expectation that we endure their “nice” racism.
Indeed, Black folks were expected to be grateful for this allyship, for this softer side of racism, because they decided for us that a death by a thousand paper cuts was a better fate than one by shotgun.
I chose to run for Iowa state legislature during this time and was immediately met with dismissals and resistance- from Democratic leadership, from assimilated BIPOC who publicly attacked me to prove their fealty (“She can’t campaign her way out of a paper bag,” was the Iowa Democratic Party’s affirmative action chair’s reaction to my run for office), and, of course, from white liberals of all genders.
But it was the fallout from white liberal women that hurt the most. It culminated with the chair of the Des Moines Civil and Human Rights Commission endorsing my primary opponent, a white liberal woman, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of all days. Her social media endorsement post included an MLK photo and quote.
Weeks later, that same commission board chair would resign from Iowa Women for Progressive Change, an organization that she co-founded, when they endorsed me over my primary opponent.
As is the case with most white liberal women, she carefully cultivated an image of “progressive”, including all the accoutrements- like a starting lineup of “Black friends”, for instance.
Including several that I had considered to be my own friends.
“Friends” who silently “sat there and ate their food”, so to speak, instead of holding her accountable.
One such “friend”, who was running for secretary of state at the time, contributed $25 to my campaign under an assumed name so that her white liberal friends wouldn’t know. This, after I’d organized a fundraiser for her campaign.
White supremacy, no matter who assists in its manifestation, is traumatizing.
White liberal racism, as well as the dearth of validation that accompanies it, is cr*zy-making.
It was during this time that Robin Diangelo’s book, White Fragility, began enjoying bestseller-level sales, ultimately selling over five million copies, thanks, in large part, to white liberal women, who were eager, as usual, to “help” Black people deal with racism- and to, once again, position themselves as superior over their white conservative counterparts.
The SUPREME white people...
I joined other Black people in experiencing frustration about this for two reasons: that Diangelo, a white woman, was financially benefitting from regurgitating what we had been articulating regarding racism for decades.
And, secondly, that the vast majority of people who were purchasing the book, white liberal women, were missing a crucial point of the book- it was written in reference to them, too. Diangelo, who recognized this disconnect, wrote a follow-up to White Fragility called Nice Racism.
It was a flop that effectively ended her celebrity.
Anyhow, a year before Nice Racism was published, George Floyd was murdered.
That incident, coupled with the onset of the pandemic, had effectively disarmed white liberal women in the nonprofit and left-leaning political spaces they dominated. This was unprecedented for what has arguably proven to be the most covertly high-control demographic in the history of the US and it created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for those who had been held back by white liberal women for so long to step forward and lead without having to fight them for the mic.
Statements of solidarity with the Black community proliferated.
White liberals eagerly sought out books written by Black people and sold at Black-owned bookstores on racism.
They committed to prioritizing dismantling systems of oppression over merely working to make the current oppressive system more diverse, more equitable, and more inclusive.
And, as a result, Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
Democrats flipped Georgia, which elected not one, but TWO blue senators.
Democrats regained control of the senate.
The stage was set.
“We’re going to root out systemic racism,” promised President-elect Biden.
Thank you, Black women.
The Biden Administration announced its priorities: racial equity, immigration, climate change, and COVID 19.
I was appointed as the Administration’s Commissioner for the Administration on Disabilities.
First Black woman.
Black women, across the board, were elevated to leadership positions never before filled by the demographic throughout the US.
And then white liberal people of all genders- particularly those working in the Biden Administration- went to brunch.
One year later, I was unemployed.
Blacklisted for my attempts to hold white people accountable for the promises they made to the Black community in 2020.
I was the first appointee to resign from the Biden Administration because, in addition to being hazed by career staff, I did not support the Administration’s hypocritical initial actions pertaining to immigrants at the southern border, which included dispatching untrained white collar career staff from HHS to work directly with detainees. A week after I resigned, one such volunteer, a Black woman, died on site.
Not long after, I accepted an executive director role with the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL), a national-level disability-led organization.
First Black person.
Seven board members- six white, one Latine- resigned in protest.
I was harassed by federal attorneys, who insinuated that, despite the fact that NCIL did not contract with the federal government, accepting my new job was a “conflict of interest”.
My ex supervisor in the administration used her position to get a seven million dollar partnership between my organization and the CDC effectively nullified.
She selected a friend- another white liberal woman and one of the seven individuals who resigned from the NCIL board after I was hired- to replace me as Commissioner for the Administration on Disabilities.
Stakeholders at NCIL, including several staff members, undermined my every effort. Committee chairs refused to communicate with me, which derailed the day-to-day operations of the organization.
My partner’s job was threatened.
My six-year-old daughter was witness to white women screaming at me in virtual meetings, day after day.
(One of the first words she learned to write was “Karen”.)
All because I simply was trying to support the organization to uphold the 2020 commitment it made to evolve from an organization that was superficially diverse to truly intersectional.
I quit.
Indeed, I was one of countless Black women that had been elevated to leadership in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, only to be unceremoniously displaced from our jobs and/or careers in the years after.
NCIL would go on to hire a Black man to be executive director who was a “closer cultural fit”, a person who has relished in opportunities to both malign my name and revert the organization’s focus from intersectionality back to DEI- DEIA, specifically, which allows the organization to prioritize the “A”- accessibility- above the other letters.
The white woman who replaced me in the Biden Administration as Commissioner for the Administration on Disabilities left that position to assume the role of executive director of the National Association of Developmental Disabilities Councils- an entity that receives several million dollars of federal funding from the Administration on Disabilities.
No problem. No conflict of interest. Nothing to see here.
Before she left, she earmarked my spouse’s disability organization- one of the few of its kind led by a racially marginalized person in existence- for defunding.
The Biden Administration’s commitment to “rooting out systemic racism” devolved to an interest in DEI. Towards the end of the Biden years, the majority of federal funding earmarked for DEI/DEIA was disproportionately either distributed to organizations led by white people and/or for marginalized white people.
People with disabilities, for instance.
And, by Election Day, 2024, despite a change in Democratic candidate from President Biden to VP Harris, the Administration had completely abandoned its commitment, not only to racial equity, but to climate change, as well.
And immigration: 2024 was the highest deportation year for the US since 2014.
And COVID 19, which “evolved” from a pandemic to an endemic and Long COVID disabled between 10-35% of those who contracted the virus.
In fact, the biggest effort Democrats seemed to undertake in 2024 was to line up well-resourced status quo primary opponents for Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush.
We can always count on Hillary Clinton to bring colored people to heel, can't we?
Republicans, in turn, won everything on Election Day- including the senate.
White liberals, meanwhile, have returned to, in the words of Jane Fonda, “giv(ing) a damn”- immediately after the election, white liberal women took to wearing blue bead bracelets to show “solidarity”. They dusted off their pink pussy hats, rebranded their “Women’s March” as the “People’s March”, and now lament the evils that potentially befall them.
As the same evils befall the Black community.
Right now.
In this moment.
That said, white liberal women to show, but never tell, that they “don’t give a damn” enough to receive feedback about their harmful actions. In spite of the dire times we are living in, they are generally dismissive of any proposed efforts to do real soul-searching with regard to how their failure to follow through with the commitments they made in 2020 led to their catastrophic failure on Election Day, 2024. Amy Klobuchar, the US senator notorious for throwing binders at staff, summed up this sentiment recently when she said “I can’t spend my time looking backwards,” and alluded to a lack of interest from her peers in doing the same.
Why should they? White liberal women take for granted that they’ll be able, like prodigal daughters, to run home and seek the protection of their white supremacist patriarchs when it’s time for oppressed people to be oppressed.
Daddy’s lil resisters…
___________________
White liberal women, I don’t know how to explain to you that you should stop pretending to give a damn about other people:
You think your willingness to pay taxes to fund public schools is laudable, yet you overlook the fact that public schools are a key component in the preschool to prison pipeline.
You celebrate yourself for your belief in healthcare for all, yet fail to acknowledge that systemic racism drives health disparities- not just regarding access, but in reduced life expectancy rates for Black and Brown folks, as well.
Serena Williams was nearly a Black maternal mortality statistic, after all.
You insist you have empathy for Black people, yet you work to destroy the careers of those who beg to differ.
I cannot have political debates with you without permanently impacting my mental health. My attempts to do so led to the destruction of my career and vicious attacks on my family.
I can’t debate you into “giving a damn” about Black people in a way that doesn’t resemble a nurse with Munchausen’s by proxy who “gives a damn” about her patients.
I know that you won’t change.
So I did.
I adapted.
With the exception of the nonprofit I cofounded with my spouse (we do not accept federal or state funding), I have completely divested from political, nonprofit, and all other spaces where white liberal women dominate.
Because, although these spaces are not overt “sundown towns”, they are covert “sunken places”, indeed.
Because, like the author of “I Don’t Know How to Explain to You That You Should Care About Other People” wrote nearly eight long and tiresome years ago in reference to conservatives, I concur- but in reference to you, white liberal women:
“I do know I’m done trying to convince these hordes of selfish, cruel people to look beyond themselves.”
White liberal women, although I’ve grown weary of bearing witness to you constantly falling to your knees as you cry your white tears to divert attention away from your oxymoronic and devious ways, I see you now as you cling to the hem of the garment of your white supremacist patriarchs.
It has shown me that you have no real power whatsoever.
Not just over yourself.
But over me, more importantly.
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