Michelle Tandler + "Ladylike Reformers"

White Women and the (Deadly) Urge to "Clean Up" Urban Spaces

I, a nice white lady, live in East Harlem. Part of this neighborhood sometimes gets called “convict alley,” because there are many people who return from jail or prison to live with their families in this section of Manhattan. Sometimes, I see people on the street near my apartment who may be drug users, or who may live unhoused. I don’t want any of my neighbors to be arrested or killed or face the death penalty. In fact, when I began to see people who might be overdosing, I decided to take the NYS opioid prevention training and now I carrying a first aid kit with naloxone, which can reverse an overdose. I did this, not out of any saintly orientation, but because I see all the people who live nearby as neighbors with their own struggles just as I have mine. And, I see the neighborhood of East Harlem as so much more than merely “convict alley,” but a place with a rich, storied history that includes the uprising of the Young Lords in the 1960s, and many contemporary poets, writers, artists, and activists.

I start here, with my own story, as an invitation to Michelle Tandler to think differently about these issues.

I hope that Michelle Tandler reads this and learns something. She lit up the Internet on that dying bird app recently with a controversial thread about what it’s like for her to live in San Francisco among unhoused drug users who have the gall to exist near her apartment. Tandler is, according to her LinkedIn profile, CEO of a tech firm called Growth Path, and has an MBA from Harvard.

What they probably didn’t cover in her classes for an MBA at Harvard is how her comments put her within a long tradition of white women who have seen themselves as in charge of “social housekeeping,” often with deadly consequences. First, the thread, which started here on Easter Sunday (I guess she had time):

Tandler also wondered why the “men of San Francisco” are not “rallying together to protect” San Francisco’s “women” and “elderly.”

We could speculate on the race of the “men” presumably doing the protecting here, as well as the race of “our city’s” women and elderly, but it seems kind of obvious that her idea of who deserves protection here are women (and the elderly) who look like her.

Tandler goes on to speculate — “just asking questions” —- about public hangings as a way to introduce the topic of the death penalty as a deterrent for “drug-related crimes.”

Tandler doesn’t seem aware that this has been tried. What she’s suggesting here is has already been implemented by the dictator Rodridgo Duterte in the Philippines, whose license to kill approach to drug use resulted in the deaths of at least 7,000 people.

Catholic nuns hold placards as they protest against drug-related extrajudicial killings, on International Human Rights Day in Manila, Philippines, December 10, 2016. © 2016 Ezra Acayan/Reuters

Duterte’s policy, which sounds very similar to what Tandler is calling for, has been widely condemned as a massive human rights violation by Amnesty International and other international organizations. These deaths are basically lynchings - extrajudicial killings - that have been sanctioned by the government and carried out by ordinary citizens, something Duterte has admitted to.

I don’t understand why Tandler would willingly float the idea of hey, let’s do human rights violations in a thread unless there was some compelling reason underneath it. Part of it is fear, I think. At one point in her thread, Tandler mentions her fear and the way that shows up in her body:

I believe her when she says she’s afraid. And, I believe that this has a somatic result in elevated levels of cortisol and adrenaline. The question is: what is she entitled to do with and about those feelings?

I suspect there’s something else, in addition to the fear. Setha Low writes about gated communities in the US, and how they are constructed out of a combination of fear of the Other, and an aesthetic desire for “niceness.” Here’s Low (from 2009):

This addition of the concept of niceness to an understanding of how gated communities work as racist and exclusionary places begins the unraveling of how “nice” people, who say “nice” things, and have “nice” or liberal values, participate in maintaining whiteness in the built environment.

I’m sure Tandler would enjoy a gated community. Returning to her thread, a tweet later she asks, “Am I a wimp? A ‘Karen’?”

Listen, if you have to ask the question, the answer is probably YES. To be fair, it’s the wrong question. As white women, we’re invited to be Karens multiple times every day. It’s built in, that’s why they call it structural. The point is to resist the many, many opportunities available to us to be Karens.

What makes someone a Karen? In my definition, it’s when a white woman uses the available technology to summon State power on Black and Brown people. Sometimes it’s 911, sometimes it’s a Twitter thread. The point is any white woman, whether me or Michelle Tandler or some other nice white lady, is believed and taken seriously when lodging complaints with state authorities who have the power to end peoples’ lives.

I’m guessing the mere mention of the “Karens” meme will make Tandler even more uncomfortable. In fact, Tandler’s just-asking-questions-rant is part of a long history of progressive white women who see it as their mission to “clean up” the urban landscape. In the progressive era, roughly 1896-1919, there was a whole class of educated white women who saw it as their mission to take the values of the domestic sphere to the task of civic reform. These women were part of the national (and racially segregated) women’s club movement, they established settlement houses, and they were muckraking journalists. These were the women who led the temperance movement, which gave us the failed social policy known as prohibition.

Julia Lathrop, Jane Addams, and Mary McDowell in Washington, 1913. | Photo credit: Wikipedia

These “ladylike reformers” fought for suffrage (for other white women) because they saw voting connected to the causes they cared about. They believed that once white women got the vote, then they would clean up the public sphere by voting out corrupt politicians and voting in alcohol prohibition and a host of other reforms. I’ve written about how schemes meant to improve health and promote wellness often do the work of whiteness in less overtly racialized ways, and it was no different with prohibition. “Demon alcohol” was the ostensible focus of their ire, but the temperance movement was fundamentally a project about whiteness and reinforcing certain types of behavior associated with white people.

This approach to civic engagement is rooted in the imperial, missionary impulse that gave rise to the genocidal project known as residential schools, intended to wipe out indigenous cultures and people. Indeed, the progressive era ladylike reformers are the forebears of modern-day public health, social work, and nursing, all so-called helping professions dominated by white women. When Michelle Tandler started her tweet thread she was just the latest iteration of a ladylike reformer, this time as a San Francisco tech-CEO version, and the deadly power that goes with this kind of reform is evident in her easy pivot to discussions of public hangings and the death penalty. Just asking questions, don’t ya know.

Following some intense blowback online, she now claims she’s been accused of a thought crime. This is a common refrain among white women who get called out and refuse to be called in: elevate the resistance, dial up the persecuting complex, and deny, deny, deny.

The reality is, it’s Michelle Tandler’s neighbors who will suffer the most here, if the kinds of policies she’s just asking questions about get implemented. If only someone at Harvard business school had taught her that her neighbors are human beings that deserve better than what she imagines for them. What I hope for is that Michelle Tandler will begin to see the people who live near her as neighbors, and people with their own struggles just as she has hers.