White Supremacy and White Women: In Response To Glennon Doyle

Image via @ms_peoples on IG

Written by Lisa Betty

Recently on former Democratic Presidential candidate Pete Buttiteg’s podcast, Glennon Doyle spoke on a revelation about white women’s role in systemic oppression. She describes the epiphany as occurring in the last few months in the midst of national crises including — Black Lives Matter protests against state-sanctioned violence and a global pandemic. In these few months, Doyle contends that she came to an understanding that:

“There is some kind of deal with the devil that white women make, early on, and it’s not conscious…Somewhere along the line we learn that we will accept our proximity to power and all of the comfort and safety and belonging that that will get us. But in exchange, we will never ask for any real power. We will stay quiet, grateful and accommodating. We will accept the protection and safety that the police offer us, but we will never look over there and ask, what the police are doing to them. We will go into our kid elementary schools and demand nine iPads for everyone of our kids but we will not turn our heads and ask why the school down the road doesn’t have clean water. We will over and over again accept our relative comfort and safety, and the cost of that will be our full humanity. And we will just become less and less human. And I think that is what my Black activist friends are trying to get at. It’s the idea of “don’t come here to save us. You people need to save yourselves. You have lost your humanity. White supremacy has cost you, your souls.”

This video clip has been widely circulated on social media. Many have commended Doyle for her candid assertions, while some — specifically a certain segment of white women supporters of her work — were dismayed and lashed out accusing Doyle of being “divisive”. The conversations have focused on white women’s immoral “deal with the devil” to uphold white supremacy in which they only gain proximal power through ignorance and complacency — and if Doyle is either “wrong” or “right”.

When I first listened to the circulated snippet, I was not impressed by the specific statement. Of course, Doyle is asserting a truth that white women and white people do not want to contend with — complacency and white silence on systemic oppression have high moral costs. But in conveying her epiphany, Doyle moved into heavily recycled narratives about systemic oppression and white women investment that fed the ego, centered white women as victims, and “unconscious” collaborators in systemic oppression.

I was not impressed because these are the same epiphanies white women “allies” had in 1790, 1848, 1955. The narratives of morality and white women being complacent in systems of oppression, erase a canon of academic literature, oral histories, historic and everyday experiences of and by Black women and femmes that move our understanding of white supremacy and white women beyond this trope.

Here are three reasons why this commendable statement is problematic:

1) white supremacy as a mythical “deal with the devil” — It is very real and very systemic.

2) white women’s participation in white supremacy (patriarchy, racism, etc) as “unconscious” — It is very conscious.

3) white women as powerless, having only “proximity” to power, not power itself — This is not true.

Let’s talk about it.

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Originally published on Medium.

Lisa Betty is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and Course Instructor at Fordham University.