There are two true crime stories that are popular right now, “Tell Them You Love Me,” and “The Perfect Wife,” and both feature white women. I’m going to discuss both of these with loads of spoilers, so if you haven’t seen them and don’t want to know the endings, then please skip on by this post.
For context, there is an entire genre of crime stories, both fiction and non-fiction, that trade on our assumptions about the inherent benevolence of whiteness, while disguising what it truly is.
If you think about shows like, “Breaking Bad,” “Weeds,” and “Ozark,” they each tell the same basic story: what happens when a character is unexpectedly caught up in some aspect of the drug trade. The hook that makes these shows work is the “unexpected” angle, and that’s about whiteness. In “Breaking Bad,” Mr. White (Bryan Cranston) who is a high school chemistry teacher turns to manufacturing and selling meth in order to pay for medical bills. Similarly, the lead character in “Weeds,” Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), a white suburban mom, begins selling pot when she finds herself struggling to pay her mortgage after her husband, and the main breadwinner in the family, dies. And, in “Ozark,” Marty Byrde (Justin Bateman) flees his life as an accountant in Chicago for the mountains outside Branson, Missouri after a money laundering scheme for a Mexican drug cartel goes wrong. Eventually, he stays in the business, his wife Wendy (Laura Linney) joins him in the family business, (as Skyler White [Anna Gunn] does in “Breaking Bad”) and together, they make the most of their situation. I’ve called these kinds of shows white crime family drama.
What these shows miss is the fact that the drug trade is never anyone’s first choice as a career. Underneath this assumption, most evident in “Weeds,” is that it’s somehow natural and inevitable for Black people to be involved in the drug trade, that they haven’t had the kind of setbacks Nancy Botwin’s suffered, and that they don’t need to pay their mortgage just like she does. And, each of these shows relies on subverting ― while never entirely abandoning ― the intended audience’s expectations about the inherent goodness of white families. There’s a related (sub)genre of true crime shows like “Inventing Anna,” “Bad Vegan,” and “The Dropout,” each one centered around the bad deeds of a blonde, white woman. These tales trade on our deep, cultural belief in white women’s innocence. We are shocked, shocked, I say! about white women grifters.
The latest of these documentaries about actual true crimes is, “The Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini” (another reminder, spoilers follow). From the jump on this series, it is hard to imagine anyone except for a white woman, being described as “the perfect wife.” The things that qualify the person as “perfect,” include being a stay-at-home mom to two kids and lots of social media photos to solidify the perfection of her suburban life in Redding, California. It’s a wild tale that involves Sherri’s disappearance for 22 days, a return home, and a six-year investigation that initially had her husband, Keith, in the investigator’s cross-hairs. Keith is cleared when he passes a polygraph but questions remain about what actually happened to Sherri. In the third and final episode, it’s revealed that Sherri called an ex-boyfriend, James Reyes, to pick her up (which he does, in a rented car) and she stayed with him for the 22 days she was “missing.” All of the bruises and wounds on her body when she re-emerges from the 22 days are self-inflicted. Sherri spends a very short time in prison, just 18 months, and declined to speak to the filmmakers.
In another recent release, “Tell Them You Love Me,” we meet Anna Stubblefield, a professor at Rutgers-Newark, who becomes involved in a relationship with Derrick Johnson, a non-verbal man with cerebral palsy. Anna, who is a white woman, says she helped Derrick, who is Black, unlock his mind from his body by teaching him to communicate using a keyboard, using a discredited technique called, “facilitated communication.” Stubblefield also served a very short time in prison, 2 years out of a 12-year sentence that was overturned on appeal. Stubblefield is a participant in the film, as is the Johnson family, including Derrick, his brother John, and their mother, Daisy.
Little explored in either of these recent films is the way both Sherri’s and Anna’s racism, as well as that of those around them, including several institutions and police investigators, facilitates their crimes. In Sherri’s case, she had a history of racism toward the Hispanic and Mexican American community. When she reappeared after going missing, Sherri claimed she’d been abducted by two Hispanic women who frequently played Mariachi music. Instead of questioning this obvious and preposterous lie, the local police combing the region for two women—one older and one younger—fitting Sherri’s racist description. In Anna’s case, she traffics in both racism and ableism to take advantage of Derrick, who has the mental capacity of a four-year-old, as she makes up conversations in which he supposedly converses with her about literature, history and ultimately proclaims his love for her. This is the impossible reality that Anna still clings to. We’re left to wonder what story Sherri tells herself about the 22 days.
What Sherri and Anna have in common is the very particular narcissism of white women who are high on their own supply.
What Sherri and Anna have in common is the very particular narcissism of white women who are high on their own supply. There is a widely held belief among vaguely liberal, educated, upwardly mobile white people that they have somehow transcended racism. As a result, many of us who are white-raised do not think of ourselves as white, nor as having any sense of superiority about their whiteness. However, as lots of writers have pointed out, white racial superiority and the disavowal of a white racial identity are both forms of pathological narcissism. Without getting too much into the psychoanalytic weeds, the basic dynamic is this: white racial superiority, white privilege, and white identity rely on a racialized oedipal splitting in which whiteness comes to represent all idealized forms of love and lust while blackness comes to represent the devalued forms.
In a piece that I return to again and again (from 2019), Natasha Stovall writes eloquently about the overlap between the presenting issues in her office as a therapist and whiteness:
The couch in my therapy office is occupied mostly by white people. Anxious white people and depressed white people. Obsessive white people and compulsive white people. White people who hurt people and white people who hurt themselves. White people who eat too much, drink too much, work too much, shop too much. White people who are bored, envious, guilty, numb. Racist white people and antiracist white people. White people who look across the room and see a white therapist listening. We talk about everything. Except being white.
An old saw about therapy is that the thing you don’t talk about is the thing. The therapist and patient together avoid this thing, this shameful and threatening thing. The thing is unconscious — sometimes partially, other times totally. You only know it by the silence and illogic that surrounds it, and the extremes to which the patient will go to erase any sign of it in their own mind, and in their therapist’s, too. The first step towards unpacking the thing is finding a way to talk about it. Just talk about it, moving step by careful step into a psychic place so raw that even acknowledging this unconscious thing is a threat to safety and sanity. Freud called this process “making the unconscious conscious” and it has defined psychotherapy ever since.
What if whiteness is the thing?
I think whiteness is the most important thing in these recent shows.
Sherri and Anna, like so many of us raised-white and femme, are more extreme versions of what we white women do: cling tightly to notions of our own goodness even as we destroy those around us. We, too, will be undone by this if we don’t learn to let go of this fantasy.
Spot on. Unfortunately this perspective hasn’t pierced establishment media in any form. This analysis also brings to mind the award winning “Orange is the New Black”.
I immediately thought of you (and your work) when I watched “Tell Me You Loved Me” !