Abstract
The title of Jessie Daniels’s new book, Nice White Ladies, deliberately contrasts with her primary argument, which is that White women have been key players in the perpetuation of and violence of White supremacy, historically and currently. This idea challenges the long-standing cultural perception of White women as nurturing and deserving of special protections. From historical examples of White women’s role in the lynching of Black men to the formation of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and their role in keeping a distorted Confederate memory alive in the public consciousness, to current examples of entitled White women (“Karens”) calling 911 on Black people who are simply living their lives, to White women like Rachel Dolezal who pretend to be Black (“blackfishing”), to their role in the hoarding of wealth and educational resources for White children, Daniels argues, the enforcement of whiteness is gendered; white women have a specific and insidious role in justifying and enacting intergenerational white dominance . . . White families are the underlying technology that enables white supremacy to reproduce itself from one generation to the next, and white women are crucial to enacting and sugar-coating this process. (p. 169)
Instead of focusing on the ways White women differ from one another, Daniels explains, “to move forward, we have to begin by acknowledging our whiteness in whatever flavor it comes” (p. 7). In this spirit, her second chapter is directed at White feminists, women like me; women who see themselves as progressive and seek to distance themselves from White women like Carolyn Bryant, Emmett Till’s accuser. The violence of White womanhood is epitomized in Bryant’s accusation that Till whistled at her which resulted in his lynching in 1955. Interrogating the whiteness of the #metoo movement, the Vagina Monologues, and the 2017 Women’s March, Daniels forces us to recognize our gender-only feminism lacks a necessary racial analysis. In fact, “feminism without an understanding of critical race theory easily maps onto white supremacy” (p. 88). White women’s protection and empowerment, she argues, too often comes about through the “marginalization and endangerment of people of color” (p. 72). In addition, Daniels interrogates the whiteness of the wellness industry, from mindfulness to clean eating to yoga, claiming that, while seemingly innocuous, the industry actually causes immense damage: White women’s narcissism causes them to use their privilege and resources to turn inward and focus on their own bodies and delude themselves into thinking their self-care is an act of political warfare . . . As white women obsess about clean eating, the people of Flint, Michigan, haven’t had clean drinking water since 2014. (pp. 101–102)
One of the strengths of this work is Daniels’s commitment to self-reflexivity, citing her mentor Patricia Hill Collins’s emphasis on positionality, which refers to acknowledging one’s relationship to what one is studying and how one’s “personal history and social position are connected to the research, analysis, and writing process” (p. 233). As a White woman, Daniels turns the investigative lens back on not only herself but also on the nice White ladies who raised her. In the process, she bravely shares personal and familial hardships, such as her mother, Shirley’s, suicide. She places her mother’s suicide within the archetype of the depressed, suicidal, suburban housewife, from Sylvia Plath to Betty Draper of Mad Men, arguing that we should understand these actions as stories of women who have come to the end of the rewards of the white woman ideal and have found the promised prize to be empty, isolating, and unfulfilling. I’ve come to see the end of Shirley’s life as collateral damage from whiteness as much as gender. (p. 208)
Likely the parallels my life holds to Daniels’s contribute to my deep resonance with this book: We are both White women of a certain age, sociologists who study race, and have complicated relationships with our mothers, who both happened to be named Shirley. At times, this familiarity made me cringe. For instance, she shared a story of a comment a relative directed at her when she was misbehaving as a child: “When you’re free, white, and twenty-one, you can do whatever you want, but now you’re going to do what I say” (p. 4). Such comments were part of my experience growing up as a White child as well; ones that I have spent decades distancing myself from. Yet, Daniels demands that instead of turning away from our whiteness, we look directly at it; that we be self-reflexive about our positionality as White women, as a way of reckoning with the damage we have caused as White women (p. 17).
One might be forgiven for assuming that the audience for this book is exclusively White women. Daniels argues this book is “meant to be read by everyone” (p. 3), and indeed, there is much to learn. While its primary audience is White women, I would not hesitate to use this book in class as an exemplar of intersectionality. Her focus on the ways race and gender intersect, shaping the experiences of White women and specifically making whiteness visible, when our culture too often leaves whiteness unspoken, is powerful. She concludes the book with a list of eight things White women can do, from divesting from White spaces and institutions to working to repair the harm that has been done, operating on the assumption that White supremacy can be dismantled, that it is not “an unchangeable law of nature, like gravity” (p. 234). Dismantling White supremacy, and particularly the destructiveness caused by White women, involves reckoning with our compulsion to be nice at all costs and learn to experience the full range of human emotions, including empathetic pain, anger, and mourning when another Black person is killed by the police or when the pandemic decimates tribal communities. And we need to go beyond “feeling bad” about these events as we might a natural disaster and step into taking action. We who are raised white have been trained to distance ourselves from the pain of others. To begin healing, we will have to open ourselves to what activist-scholar Ann Russo calls “broken heartedness” as a way of acknowledging the harm of white supremacy. (p. 247)