There was a young girl, maybe 17, wearing sequined-covered, Converse high-top sneakers at the performance of “SUFFS” I saw last week. She was there with an older woman, maybe her grandmother, and the sequins suggested a special night out.
It is no small undertaking to produce a show on Broadway. I admire the ambition of it. The incredible talent on display. The technical feats of set design, lighting, music, and actors all perfectly in sync. I am grateful to live in New York where I can, occasionally, afford to see shows, and even more grateful to have friends who work on Broadway. I am amazed by the stamina required to put on eight (8!) shows a week. The whole thing is a marvel of human creativity and, on a good night, of transcendence.
But lots of productions fall by the wayside and disappear after brief runs in small theaters off-Broadway. So it is puzzling that a thoroughly mediocre production like “SUFFS” got funded (reportedly over $19 million) to make the move to Broadway.
That is, until one understands more about the context from which it has emerged and the cultural and educational work it is trying to do. On the website for the show, there is a tab for “education” with text, timeline and a downloadable document, presumably for K-12 schoolteachers (it is not clear to me how it would be used in a college classroom except to commit malpractice).
The night I attended, there were clear signs of bulk ticket sales: buses lined up out front dropping off theater-goers, and at curtain time, a center row in the orchestra level that sat entirely empty. The show started about fifteen minutes late to allow for the arrival of those ticket-holders who arrived as a group. This is what I mean by the cultural work that “SUFFS” aspires to do. The ambition is to educate as much as it is to entertain. But why this musical and why now?
Do you remember March of 2020? It wasn’t that long ago but it seems to exist in the hazy past of the Before Time.
I’d just moved in with my girlfriend and we were wondering what the new world of “lockdown” in New York City was going to bring. At 7pm on most nights we would open the window and bang a pot with a wooden spoon to show our appreciation for healthcare workers who were doing the heroic work of dealing with the pandemic, holding iPads up to dying patients to say their goodbyes to loved ones.
It was just two months after that, in May, that something happened in Central Park. A woman named Amy Cooper had her dog off leash. When a birdwatcher, Christian Cooper (no relation), asked her to put the dog on its leash (required by law), she started shouting at the man, who is Black, then threw her voice up half an octave when she called the police to say she was “in danger.” The video of her went viral and she became known as “Central Park Karen.” (Christian Cooper survived “the incident” and has gone on to shine. Love.)
Later that same day, in Minneapolis, a white cop placed his knee on George Floyd’s for nine and a half minutes until he died. And all of us, staying home because of the pandemic, watched in horror, disgust and outrage. Those two events are forever conjoined for me because what Amy Cooper tried to do was use the power of her white femininity to summon the police to “handle” the Black man in front her, Christian Cooper, the same way they handled George Floyd. The summer of 2020, just four years ago, we saw the largest movement ever of people — from all racial and ethnic backgrounds — in the streets, demanding that “Black Lives Matter” and that no amount of reform could fix the system of policing that we have funded.
In the midst of all that, I was writing. A few weeks before the world changed that spring, I’d sent a book proposal to my agent. By then, I’d been working for a few years on a book that I was calling “the trouble with white women and white feminism,” after a blog series I’d done with the same name. My agent came back to me and said, “there are a lot of books in the works right now about this same topic, but let’s try!” She sold the proposal, I signed a contract, wrote long hours through that summer of 2020, and in fall 2021, Nice White Ladies was published alongside all those other titles that my agent mentioned. Among these, Regina Jackson and Sairo Roa joined with documentary filmmakers to make, “Deconstructing Karen,” a 2022 documentary that takes white women through a confrontational dinner party. All of this cultural work - books, films - was challenging the kind of feminism I’d been taught, the feminism that tells a partial story of white women’s victimhood but not our advantages. These books, collectively, were part of what some people called a “reckoning” for white women about the harm we do in a society geared for our comfort.
But cultural memory is short in the U.S. on the best day. And, in the backlash since the uprisings in 2020, far right cultural thugs like Chris Rufo invent narratives to reshape the past and remake the future to suit their agenda. Rufo has done this through a campaign of terror against academics who write about critical race theory (or, what they imagine it is). Rufo has also unleashed a swarm of far right actors to go after anyone in positions of authority who is Black, including Claudine Gay, who he and his minions bullied into resigning from her position as president of Harvard.
It is into this moment of revanchism that “SUFFS” emerges on Broadway. From the French word revanche, "revenge" What we are living through is a moment of not mere backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, but a broader effort to restore a mythical, lost world of whiteness unchallenged by the colonized and the oppressed. While it is easy to despise figures like Chris Rufo who do this cultural work, it is often white women who are leaders in revanchism.
For example, after the Civil War there was an effort by southerners to recast their defeat as the noble “Lost Cause.” White women, organized in the Daughters of the Confederacy, were the main drivers of that effort. They launched an education and propaganda campaign to get their version of the Civil War into history books across the U.S., not only in the south, and they raised money to build nearly every Confederate monument around the nation, including at Stone Mountain. As Bryan Stevenson, civil rights attorney and founder of Equal Justice Initiative, puts it: “The North may have won the Civil War, he said, but the South won the narrative war.” In large part, they won the narrative war because of the cultural work that white women put in.
“SUFFS” is doing a similar kind of revanchist project to rehabilitate white feminism following the BLM movement of 2020 and the lists, so many lists, of books for white people. It is clear from their education page that “SUFFS” has cultural and curricular ambitions similar to that of another show, “Hamilton.” I mentioned this in an earlier post, and it merits returning to Lyra Monteiro’s writing about the impact of that show:
The musical undoubtedly does have a special impact on this audience. Seth Andrew, the founder of Democracy Prep Public Schools took 120 students to see the show and reported, ‘‘It was unquestionably the most profound impact I’ve ever seen on a student body.’’ And Miranda has noted that young people ‘‘come alive in their heads’’ when they’re watching the show. If the goal is to make them excited about theater, music, and live performance, great. But reviews of the show regularly imply that what is powerful about the show is how it brings history to life. So I ask again: Is this the history that we most want black and brown youth to connect with—one in which black lives so clearly do not matter? [emphasis added]
It seems clear to me that “SUFFS” aspires to a similar place in the culture. From the buses lined up in front of the Magic Box Theater, the bulk-ticket sales, and even Hillary doing social media hits to build the hype, the producers are gearing up for making this a history lesson.
During intermission, I wandered around the theater and chatted up one of the ushers. She, a young Latinx woman, said she was enjoying the show and when I asked why, she said, “I learned this history in school, maybe but I’ve forgotten most of it, so it’s great to see it on stage.”
And herein lies the harm of the cultural work that “SUFFS” is trying to do. By telling the story of the “women’s vote” through the lens of Alice Paul’s life, the production reinforces an essentialist, binary view of gender (similar in that way to the “Vagina Monologues”). This binary view of gender is encoded with whiteness in a way that protects the fantasy of white women’s innocence. This is what I’ve referred to as “vagina feminism,” which sets up TERF-ism, a trans-exclusionary form of feminism. To its credit, the “SUFFS” has employed non-binary actors, but the overwhelming message remains one of a gender binary and these always work to uphold white, hetero-patriarchal systems.
“SUFFS” and The Harm of a Partial Story
If Broadway is an industry, then New York is a company town. A show opening on Broadway means jobs for people and I don’t want to take anyone’s job away from them, especially not in this economy. That said, “SUFFS” is dangerous, and is doing real harm where it thinks it’s doing good (“history”). It is not educating or enlightening audiences as much as it is giving certain people a supposedly feel-good experience based on a fantasy of white women’s innocence and victimhood. And, perhaps more than that, the cultural work that “SUFFS” does operates through an historical delusion — focusing on white women yet ignoring whiteness, reinforcing a gender binary — all of that makes actual, intersectional, feminist organizing in the present even more difficult. It also perpetuates a lie about white women that we are somehow more deserving, more interesting, more worthy of having our stories told than say, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (listed on the education page as a “lynching rights activist” - a non-sensical description of her work) or Mary Church Terrell. Where are the musicals about them, I wonder?
If it continues, this show will perpetuate the harm of white feminism. It is the harm of a partial story in which white women are only ever victims or fighters, never perpetrators. I happen to think that young women, like the one who came in her sequined, Converse high tops, deserve better than this, they deserve a fuller history. Certainly, young Black women need and deserve better than this, as do young Indigenous, Latinx, Asian women, all erased from this version of women’s history. Young white women need to be able to see themselves connected to others in a collective struggle for liberation. Otherwise, they revert to the grievance politics of whiteness.
In 2016, right after the presidential election that Hillary Rodham Clinton lost, a reporter interviewed a young white woman. The young woman, Emily, was in her mid-twenties and had voted for the other candidate. Emily was in a hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C. with people on the far right who were gathered to listen to a speech by the odious Richard Spencer. When asked what brought her there, she replied:
“I hated myself my whole life because I was white, like ever since I was eleven years old, and the guilt just kept piling on.”
Emily recalled with resentment being assigned to read the novel To Kill a Mockingbird and being told that white people were responsible for slavery. She says she found comfort in the ideas of the alt-right, which she encountered through the notorious online forum 4chan. “After joining this movement, I found that it—the guilt—I don’t have it anymore,” she said.
I think about Emily, and young white women like her, often. They deserve better role models than what’s on offer in “SUFFS.” They deserve to see white women who are feminists who aren’t afraid to confront their own whiteness and break the cycle of harm it causes. In fact, the young women I know have already rejected this old version of white feminism and are hungry, desperate even, for something different. Something that truly points the way to collective liberation, but that’s not what they’ll find in “SUFFS.”
Like the women of the Daughters of the Confederacy, “SUFFS” is a kind of white supremacist propaganda that exploits our collective lack of historical knowledge about gender, race and the progressive era in order to sell us a fantasy about a past that never happened.
Tomorrow, I’ll be back with thoughts about the producers of the show.