"But I marched for you!"
On the limits of white liberalism
My white liberal friends are in a tizzy. The world, according to some, is about to end because a slim majority voted for the ugly, orange sociopath. I get it.
I mean, there are ridiculous, unserious people being put forward to dismantle entire federal departments and terrible, regressive policies that are about to be attempted, but none of this is a sure thing, a fait accompli. But something is ending, it’s just not the entire world.
What’s ending is white liberalism.
What’s ending is white liberalism. We’ve come to the end of the white liberalism that embraces colorblindness and supposedly neutral principles of universalism. White liberal folks are those who embrace integration, who believe in the general ideas of civil rights and say things like: "color makes no difference," "people are people," and "there should be one human race." These are the white-bodied folks who, as Sharon Holland describes in her book, The Erotic Life of Racism, will say to Black people who appear to be ungrateful for their liberalism, “But I marched for you!”
White liberalism is rooted in a desire to be seen as a “good white person.” If you’ve seen the Blue Bracelet trend that’s popping off among white women, who want to signal their solidarity with Black women who voted for Harris through their beaded jewelry choices. It’s so little, so late, and so performative but it tells us something about white liberalism. The desire to be SEEN to be a good white person carries within it a recognition that whiteness is problematic. If I wear a blue bracelet, then I’m hoping that you will see me as different from those other white people, the BAD white racists.
I have had this conversation countless times, often with fellow academics (a bastion of white liberalism) who object to my critique in Nice White Ladies as not cordoning off the Bad white women from the Good. This misses the point, really, because the central idea is that the subject position, the identity created by whiteness and femininity, is a trap that can make us all (who are raised-white and gendered-femme) into a monstrous “nice white lady.” It’s that subject position that leads us to double-down on entitlement and obscures the way our liberation is inextricably linked to the struggles of other people.
It’s white liberalism that makes it so difficult for people like the actor Julianna Margulies to call out Black and LGBTQ communities’ “lack of support” the state of Israel, and suggesting (in 2023) that people backing Palestine were “brainwashed.”
I’ll be diving into the limits of white liberalism, the feminist version, in a new, 5-part series, “The Trouble with White Feminism,” launching next Monday, December 2, as part of the Unpacking Zionism podcast. If you want, you can listen to a teaser for that series here. I hope you’ll add this to your listening queue so I can talk in your ear while you clean, walk your dog, commute to work, or whenever you do your podcast listening.
The death of white liberalism might just be a good thing if — and I know that it’s a BIG if — we can expand our vision of liberation and let go of our desire to be seen as “good” white folks and learn to see our own shadows. We’re also going to have to learn to talk to one another about the things that matter and do deeper, better organizing.
None of that is possible if we give in to the despair that the world is ending. Chin up, buttercup. We’ve got work to do.