On Feb 28 2020 Lace posted: 

Really consider your feelings, your clench, and your internal resistance as I offer this:

White women feel themselves equal to women of color who out earn, out achieve, and out perform them, but feel themselves better than their actual peers of color. 

Process and discuss.

All of my feelings and clenches in response to this add up to resistance. So I am going to examine some resistance here. If you’re not interested, go straight to the end. Knowing my steps of resistance, I am going to accept Lace’s post because it is a generalization that she can make, and that I cannot contradict. 

Here is my mental conversation on this topic.

My first stage of resistance: Do I know any Black women who out-earn/out-achieve me? Personally? No I don’t. Who would such a woman be? Michelle Obama. Claudia Rankine. Octavia Butler. Toni Morrison. Ijeoma Oluo. I am nowhere near their equal.* And I don’t have any trouble admitting that. So. I can declare myself off the hook on that dimension. Right? 

No. 

Claire. Don’t be an asshole.  Do I honestly think it’s a coincidence that I do not personally know any Black women who surpass me on achievement or level of education? 

* I’m not including sports champions, musicians, actresses, movie stars. I don’t live in the same world as women in those categories. Of course they out-earn/out-achieve me. My particular delusion is that I live in the same world Michelle Obama lives in. My white lady delusion is that I am a writer, and if I had wanted to I’d have been a poet or science fiction writer or literary figure or social critic. Same world. See? 

Delusion. Unhelpful resistance.

My second stage of resistance: My genuine peers of color. . . Where might they be? 

It’s presumptuous, but I see myself as nearly Lace’s intellectual peer. At first I would not have staked that claim. I read her writing, and absorbed her wisdom, and was slightly awestruck, and grateful, at her kind candor. I made assumptions, as all of us do. I was very impressed and believed she must be a professor someplace. I learned more about her reality – not a reality that I imagined but the genuine reality of her education, her life circumstances, her employment, and her true work. I have a set of academic diplomas to document my intellect (and my opportunity, my life chances, my socio-economic status). Lace does not have a matching set, although we all know that, given different circumstances, she could easily have collected an impressive pile of academic paperwork, and more. Intellect, of course is not the issue in this hierarchy. 

I was a Lace on Race reader almost from the start. When Lace posted her very first ask, I read it. It made sense to me, even though I hadn’t considered financial engagement before. I knew damn well that I am sitting on more money than Lace sits on, despite my fixed retired-professor income, despite Lace’s home ownership. I know I out-earned Lace over my lifetime. The real pot of gold, though, is inheritance. I inherited money. My husband inherited money. My husband’s children inherited money, which is not that different from me inheriting money. Because their educations, cars, first houses, start in life, are covered. Our grandparents were not wealthy. It was our fathers who got VA education benefits, had jobs, bought and sold property and houses, engaged with financial planners. Within the social world of the US, inherited wealth is not random. It is conditioned on race. Period. Lace and I are not economic equals for one reason and one reason only. . . I reaped the benefits of white supremacy and Lace did not. 

I have extra money. I have Medicare. I have a roof. I have a sewing machine. How can I live with my financial advantage? I give an amount equal to what I spend on myself, every month and every year. And this is the calculation I recommend to white women who think they can’t figure out how to respond financially to systemic injustice. 

So Lace and I are potentially intellectual equals. I have no resistance to that. We are not experiential equals and we are not economic equals, by the design of the US social, political, and economic system. I suspect, and brazenly like to think, that Lace and I might be equals on other measures we haven’t discovered yet. I have a sizable ego, plus there are loads of things I either do not understand or am completely unaware of (sigh, the trashing of millennials, for example). I am as scornful as the next person when someone acts like hateful bigot. I have no patience with many of my fellow citizens. I see myself as better than they are in some airy, vague way. 

But I know Lace by now. I am not better than she is. 

Yay! I’m off the hook now, right? 

No. Why do I have to know details of a person’s life to qualify her as my equal? What kind of measure is that for living in the world we have? Extremely un-useful white response, resting on my white supremacy. 

Where else could I look for peers among women of color? What opportunities did my career as a professor offer for finding peers? Here we go.

One year I made myself very unpopular among some of my white colleagues by voting in favor of hiring a Black woman. And by refusing to change my vote, repeatedly. The other candidate was a white man who was a friend of many of them. Yes. They were loyal to their friend. Yes, he was, on paper, qualified. But not quite as qualified as the other candidate. She had a doctorate. He didn’t. But he was known. And he probably would have been a suitable “fit.” 

My argument? I said that we had to do it. Hiring a Black woman was important. It was an opportunity we had to take. I did not want to sign a committee report that documented that we interviewed a Black woman but preferred to hire a white man. No. Nothing could justify not offering her the job. Nothing. Period. We offered. She accepted.

Wow. I must be totally off the hook, right? 

No. I’m an asshole, deluded again. . .  after all is said and done, she is hired, she is there. But it is not possible to gloss over our joint association with a huge public institution, to ignore how deeply, as a group and as individuals, we were nested down inside this institution. I acted as an individual, yes. But also as part of a department, a group. And also as part of the graduate faculty, and the division of social sciences. We were very white, majority white. So our actions were carefully scrutinized b/c Black faculty were scarce, and as inhumane as it is to name it, they are a precious commodity. 

The institution, and by extension, each of us, was publicly committed to increasing what was called “diversity.” The “pipe-line problem” – the scarcity of “UC eligible” non-white/non-Asian high school students, and the corresponding scarcity of UC-qualified non-white/non-Asian potential faculty – might have been statistically genuine. But it could no longer be a justification for white hire after white hire. I will say that my department was the “most diverse” department on our very large campus. We sincerely and actively took diversity as our mission, as a teaching faculty, as a researching faculty, as a grad student admitting faculty, and as a hiring faculty. We were still, of course, almost hopelessly compromised by our embeddedness in a white supremacist institution. It’s worth saying that the institution itself sported the non-white-diversity-camouflage provided by the huge proportion of Asian students. Proportion of Asian students? 50%. Proportion of Black students? Less than 2% and that includes graduate students from Africa.  

Am I off the hook now? Can I be excused? 

No. I’m not off the hook. How is the power distributed? Is my relatively limited access to power insignificant? Was our new colleague my peer? 

Despite our collegiality, faculty members have to locate ourselves in several hierarchies. 

Inside the academy walls: 

the peculiar academic hierarchy of US post-secondary institutions

the freakish hierarchy of the University of California – so many Nobel laureates w/their parking privileges – what the hell was wrong with the rest of us slackers? 

the levels of advancement and promotion upwards through the viper pit, including the moving target of tenure

the within-departmental hierarchies of senior and not-senior people, big-money-grant awardees and tiny-money-grant awardees. 

Outside the academy walls? 

our racist history

our power

our white-supremacist society

our conditioning to believe in a meritocracy that does not exist

our power

Did I have a particularly sophisticated analysis of my workplace? Not really. But I had evidence that white able-bodied men were over-represented everywhere in academia. So were white able-bodied women. I made a decision to state my position on that vote. Was I performing anti-racism? Yes. To a degree I was. I acted in concert with my beliefs and with my commitment to anti-racism. I performed b/c I needed to know who believed as I did, when push came to shove. 

Was my performance of anti-racism insincere? No. But I was aware that it was performance. At a faculty meeting at a university every single move is performative, let’s face it. In fact, much of our interaction with others is in part a performance. That still doesn’t let me off the hook. Or trivialize what I did.

Was the outcome of the vote an anti-racist outcome? Yes. For that moment, and for a period of time. (When I retired that colleague was still on the faculty. Since then, I am told, she got a position elsewhere and moved on.)

The power and economic differentials between women of color and white women are not a secret. I can see them. So can you. If you have left your house to go to school or to work or to buy groceries you have seen them. To return to Lace’s comment, and to sum up, I have no reason to take her comment as anything but truth. As Lace said, the aggregate trumps anecdotes. My point here is to lay out the stages of resistance that came to mind on my first pass through the post. And to think through my stages of resistance. They are real. I know them well. They do not construct my complete identity, yet neither can I reject them. I continue to work. Still, I am not ready to bray aloud that generalizations about white women are in the same category as racist stereotypes about Black people or Brown people. 

Think for a minute about where generalizations come from and why we make them. They categorize and filter the world for us, they save time in conversation, they save space in print, sometimes they provide a shorthand way to tell about something. If we wanted to, we could analyze every noun in English into a set of generalizations. Because generalizations come from experience. Repeated, consistent experience. Depending on where I am positioned, a general statement can ring true, or it can feel false. Or it can be somewhere in between. That in between is the place I go to lay out my thinking, disagreement, agreement, resistance. 

It is thoughtless to pretend that generalizations are the same as stereotypes. They aren’t. And they do not have to become stereotypes. But if I stop and use my imagination to picture the experiences of Black women in a world built for and by white women, surrounded by us, needing to learn about us in order to survive, Lace’s comment makes a lot of sense. If I think through my experiences – and honestly admit where I have absolutely no experience – I can see where I have been complicit and where I have aimed to break away from complicity. But that doesn’t matter in the least. When a Black woman makes a statement based upon her life experience, it is arrogant to dismiss it b/c it feels like a generalization. 

We can all do better than that. 

It is time to go deep into our white woman resistance and name its parts.