White Feminism Won't Save Us

The Trouble with White Women, Kyla Schuler. Kyla Schuler is a Rutgers University professor and has done a history right, almost a recounting of how we have arrived at this place. Where As she will tell us in the interview that Pew research showed over the summer that get this, folks, forty percent of women who identify as feminists vote Republican,

forty percent for zero. And when Kyla utters this to me, I am absolutely shocked because I'm saying to myself, how is it that you one could call a white woman, could call themselves a feminist and then vote for a party that elected a man that was giddy about grabbing women by the pussy, that has over twenty sexual assault and harassment cases pending against him and accusations. It's a known womanizer articulated that himself the Republican Party pre Donald

Trump wasn't much better. They vote against the ability of a woman to have autonomy or a person with a uterus to have autonomy over their own body. They will not vote for an Equal Pay Act that would have all women, regardless of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity, to be able to be paid on par with her

male counterparts. They vote against that. Many of them voted against the Violence Against Women Act, right, And so how could this twenty twenty report from Pew Research showcase that forty percent of white women who deem themselves to be

feminists vote against their own interests. I mean, we have this conversation every week with regard to dying of whiteness with our friend Jonathan Metzo, and it is so dumbfounding to those of us that exist outside of these communities to say, how can both of these things be true at the same time? And in my humble opinion, they fucking can't, because you can't on one hand, say that you're a feminist, right, which is the articulation of the

equity of people regardless of gender. Right, and yet at that same time vote alongside party lines for a party that doesn't see you as equal. But this is where we are and what Kyla's book, The Trouble with White Women gets to the heart of the heart is that this is nothing new. Where we found ourselves in twenty sixteen, right with the startling statistics of fifty percent over fifty percent of white women voting against another white woman, Hillary Clinton,

in favor of a pussy grabbing Republican male candidate. Then that number, after watching Donald Trump ripped children away from breastfeeding, putting children in cages right using the most horrific and offensive language in which to discuss his political adversaries, that he would gain ground with white women, not lose it.

And the thing is why I think that it's important to have this conversation with Kyla, who is herself a white woman, is because I am tired, as a black queer woman trying to get white communities to come together to recognize how they have been brainwashed, how their history has purposely been whitewashed as a means to keep them

ignorant and beholden to the white suprema structure. And what is so troubling to me is that even now, following the election in Virginia where once again white women showed their full and entire your ass in voting for junkin Right, a man that wants to ban a Pulitzer Prize winning author Tony Morrison, a black woman from being taught in schools because of the fragile emotions and feelings that he believes that white children have around their own identity, which

frankly hasn't even been discussed as an identity at all. And so what Kyla articulates in our interview and in her book is that this goes all the way back, folks, to slavery. This goes back hundreds of years. And I've said this before in WOKF and I say it everywhere that I have a mic in front of my face. White women get their power, glean their power from white men. White men vote overwhelmingly Republican, regardless of education, regardless right

of economic status. So that being said, then of course you're going to continue to align yourself with white men if that is where you find your security. Right. But at the same time, I am not one to let white women off the hook and say like that is totally acceptable, being as how we also know about the weaponizing of tears. We also know that there are plenty of black men and black people that have been lynched, murdered, beaten, and raped over the false accusations uttered from the lips

of white women, right. And so we also know that we spend a particular amount of time in history discussing the slave master, but we don't ever discuss the slave mistress, the white woman that was just as vile, just as cruel, just as vicious, but was just an address standing by and watching atrocities be done in her name and in her honor right and doing so on her own front. Right. So, to me, this is a community that needs to be unpacked, that we need to be interrogating and asking questions as

to why. Right. I don't think it is a why in the belief that I feel like we're going to suade, you know, move white women to a different place, because honestly, I don't think that that is the truth. I think that what we are seeing right now in our society is a complete and total doubling and tripling down of

white supremacy. And what we know to be true is that when you look back at these movements from suffragists to third wave feminism, right, you're looking at the denial of any other representation, of any other identities in choice of only putting forward the woman's agenda, namely making white women the neutral palette for which we fight for women's rights.

And that is just bullshit because for me, as a black queer woman, I don't get to part and parcel out which sides of me society chooses to deem bad or good. It's just how the fuck I show up. But what's fascinating is what we are seeing right, whether it be from the Karens right, the calling of the police, believing that every police person is basically your own security force.

When you feel unsafe and want to shriek and perform fear right that you know that the cavalry will come marching in, and there are no penalties for that, there's no accountability for that. We saw it with Amy Cooper, right. She may have lost her job, but then she's suing her employer saying that she was wrongfully terminated. Well, they decided they don't want to work with a racist. But it's this idea, it's you know, the conjuring of the mcclusky's.

If you remember that couple, the white couple in front of their mansions brandishing their weapons, right, that is the image that comes to mind of the stand by your white man, white woman. And if we don't interrogate the truth right and get to the heart of the matter, then we're never moving anywhere. And I think that the point and the purpose of this book is to want to examine our history right from slavery to suffragist to Jim Crow to civil rights and then onward to where

we find ourselves right now. The problem that we have in our society is that there is a deep desire and force at play that doesn't want critical thinking to be a thing, that wants people to remain asleep. Right, there's a war on wokeness that we've been talking about on this show and on others. And what did they say, Oh, there's this woke culture, this cancel culture. Well, what is the opposite of being woke. It's to be asleep. So instead of us going back and forth on this intellectually

dishonest volleying that we're doing about woke culture. We may want to ask the question as to why Republicans, why white supremacy want Americans to remain asleep, particularly white Americans, to remain asleep unconscious, to how the systems of white

supremacy and patriarchy were built for their favor. Because you see, when you begin to think critically, when you start to act questions, then you understand your power to be able to shift things, because the beginning of change comes with the questioning, comes with the asking of why and the

justification thereof. But if you formulate your life living right behind a veil rose colored glasses, hiding behind things like patriotism and freedom and liberation which are just catchphrases with no foundation and what it means to truly be free in this country, if you find yourself articulating feminist values but then being completely disconnected from the idea of intersectionality, then you're not doing the work right. And that's the reality.

And so I think that you all will enjoy this conversation with Kyla Schuler, and I encourage everyone to pick up her book The Trouble with White Women, because I want I will be having this conversation and not just a conversation out of anger, although anger is productive right when it's formulated and targeted towards change. But the reality is is that there is a lot of work to do, and it's not going to be on my back that

this work is going to be done. It is going to be in the communities of white women who are woke and conscious to be able to carry the water to splash on their sisters faces and wake them the fuck up. Coming up next is my conversation with the author of The Trouble with White Women, Kayla Schuler. Folks. I am so excited to welcome to wok F for the very first time Kayla Schuler, who is the author of the book The Trouble with White Women. And I

think that this book, love it, love it. I think that this book is so incredibly timely Kyla, in so many ways, because look, every single time that we have an election, every single time that we want to talk about particular populations, we will talk about every other group. We will talk about white women, we will talk about Latin X women, we will talk about Asian Pacific Islander women, we will talk about everyone, But we never talk about white women. It is like the third rail not only

in our politics, but in our society as well. And I say that as somebody who started their professional career believing that they were going to work for a storied women's organization. My first internship in college was at the National Organization for Women, which I'll tell you more about later and how that ended. But it wasn't great. So tell tell me about why this book is so important,

particularly now, Yeah, thank you. Um, you know, the one of the key political tropes of our supposed universal voter that Stragis would go after, which you would know much better than I, you know, which was the soccer mom forever, but for so long that soccer mom was totally devascinated right like, of course, by by soccer mom, we often means suburban white woman, but it just got stripped instead as if she's the female universal right, no race, no class,

just a soccer mom. And that did start to shift after twenty sixteen, um with you know, famously almost fifty percent of white women voting for Trump and then also voting for Roy Moore, um in the election, and then in the second Trump election, you know, um, he got a slightly higher percentage of white women voters. Um, and you know, so then we did start to talk about

white woman. But I found in doing this research that even when we are repeating to ourselves, how can it be that of white women are voting for candidate to run on white supremacist, anti women platforms, the problem is even more confounding than that, and that is that recent research last summer has shown that forty two percent of people who identify as feminists vote Republican. Wait saya say

that statistic? One more time research poll, a Pure Research poll in August of twenty twenty found that forty two percent of women who identify as feminist vote Republican. And again, this is not Republicanism has always been, you know, a conservative party. It did not support racial and civil rights. That said, it has not weaponized itself against them for a while to the degree that the Trump administration has.

And yet in this moment, what we actually have is an issue of not just white women supporting racist candidates. We have a thriving feminism that understands itself to be compatible with the worst forms of capitalism and white supremacy. And so when I did the research and wrote The Trouble of white women. That's actually what I'm writing about. Like, how is it that in our current moment, Ivanka Trump

claims that her father is a feminist? How is it the researchers have shown that white supremacist groups like Stormfront online actually have thriving discussions about feminist topics? How do we have feminist white supremacy? And that I wrote this book to look backwards and find out how did we get here? Is this a new rupture in the Trump era or not? And what I found is that we

were always going to end up here. Unfortunately, there is a very long history from the very beginning of feminism led by white women the understood itself to be compatible with racism, capitalism, and empire that focused only on the goals of privileged white women and securing their rights and liberties and opportunities, and actually leaned into other existing structural

inequalities in order to bolster their own position. Yeah, I mean, you know, when we go back to the beginning of just the suffragists, right like, like, let's let's just start at that point. We won't even go all the way back to slavery and talk about um, you know, we

always want to talk about the white slave master. But we never want to talk about the white slave mistress, right, um, the white woman that stood exactly next to the slave master and participated in and condone the violence, the cruelty

that was bestowed upon enslaved Africans. But starting with the suffragist movement, you know, I find so many ties between that and how I got involved in the LGBTQ plus movement, you know, a century if so later, where you're always told if you are a person that exists at the intersection of multiple identities, that you need to leave parts of those identities behind if they are not in service of what those that are in charge of said movement believe is going to be part of what they believe

progress looks like. And so during this time you have very racist and I want you to talk about that, very racist white women that were leading the suffragist movement, who, when pointedly asked by black women right in particular, that we need to be more inclusive and encompassing, were literally written out of that history. Yes, and when they were written in, we're written incorrectly, like in the case of

a general truth, which y'all mention in the minute. So you know they by the very beginning of what we consider the dawn of women's rights in the US, which is the famous eighteen forty eight Seneca Falls Convention led by elizabth KT Stanton and a number of others. She staked her position in that speech as I am a daughter of a Mayflower immigrant, I am a daughter of a revolutionary war hero, and yet I am denied the

full rights and privileges. And you know, famously, at that convention she first proposed that women should have the right to vote. And the only person who support ordered her publicly and immediately upon saying that was Frederick Douglas, who was also the only man and the only black person in attendance out of several hundred. But he understood himself to be a partner of the project of fighting for rights in the area of sex and of grace, and they did work together for a number of years, and

Stanton and Tutan B. Anthony were active abolitionists. But after the Civil War, when the Fifteenth Amendment gave the right to vote to black men and men of color for the first time, and also introduced the word mail into the Constitution for the first time, but did not give the right to vote to any women. Then Anthony and Santon really went on the attack. Susan B. Anthony would say things like I'll cut off my right hand before

I support rights for black men over women. Unlisa Katie Stanton would give long speeches about how the morally pure wives like her were being denied rights but illiterate ditch diggers, and she would be racial slurs and anti immigrant slurs were Chinese people and Irish people, but especially slurs against the formerly enslave. She said, you are letting letting the most degraded elements of society vote before you let your

upright wives vote. And they even partnered with a notorious white supremacist in the West and so and then at that point Fredrict Douglas broke off from them and formed a different organization with a mixture of black and white Ayellies to fight for voting rights for all. But they really weaponized the case for women for women's rights as an issue of the rights of men of color and

then formally enslavement, especially versus white women. And that's one reason that in this book, a key argument I make is that in this process of studying the hundred and eighty year history of feminism and being really excited about the popularity of the term white feminism now and how it helps us identify something we hadn't seen so clearly before. But I also wanted to find out what is that

term mean exactly? And what I found is that our most common definition of white feminism as a feminism that ignores the conditions, the rights, the liberties of women of color, actually doesn't go far enough. The trouble with white feminism is not that it ignores women of color and the more marginalized. The trouble of white feminism is that it actually exploits the more marginalized as a way to bolster the position of white women. It's not a sin of omission.

The trouble with white feminism is actually an active possession.

To give you an example, you know the figure that I so each chapter of this book, I give you a main woman would often know from history, like Eliza Katy Stanton or Margaret Sanger or in the contemporary moment, Cheryl Sandberg, and but show that at her time, at her moment, she was in struggle with a different kind of feminism and a different key figure who has been more erased from history, and I focus in particular in the suffrage era on Francis E. W. Harper, who was

the best selling black poet of the nineteenth century. And yet it is often forgotten outside of college classrooms today. And who we hear about is so journ Our Truth. And so Journer Truth was an incredible activist. But what we know about her is that she said at one of these conventions at will. But the black feminist historian nel Urban Painter showed us twenty years ago that so journey Truth never said ain't woman. She wasn't from the South.

She was from upstate New York. Her first language was Dutch. She learned English at age nine and prided herself in her impeccable English. There is a transcription of her speech publishing a black newspaper two weeks after, and the first line is something like, can I have a moment here?

I like to speak for a moment here. Fifteen years later, Stanton and Anthony published a history of Woman's rights, and they tapped a white woman ally to write up so journal Truth speech, and that speech is anti woman and is entirely in dialect that's completely made up. Fifteen years later by a white woman to create a kind of plants many figure here, and even you know, one hundred and sixty years later, we still think that we are

correcting history by giving the characters a version. But black newspapers and black womanists have been correcting us on that for since the eighteenth I mean, it's just what is

so utterly disturbing to me. You know, at the top, you mentioned, you know, the weaponization right of you know, other people's struggles, right as in order to advance for white women as in order to advance their own And what is so disturbing and disgusting is that it persists, and it is so incredibly obvious, right you know, And what I have said on on Woke af and so many other shows is that white women find their power in proximity to white male patriarchy, right And that is

that is where they find their power, That is where

they find their influence and always have, right um. And I will go back, you know, to to the plantations and the slave masters and what have you that you know, there is a reason why there is no incredible pushback right now with regard to the anti abortion laws that are happening across the country because white women will always have access to an abortion right because they have the means and they have the ear and the attention of white men who have always been looked at as their

caretakers in order to make sure that those things happen. It is everyone else who is low income, who is a person of color, um that is left out in the cold. My question for you is, you know, in studying this and understanding that to be true, and recognizing that we were always going to arrive at this point in our in our in our current day like was there there was no way to deter, you know, to

throw to throw this off course. And if even if we're all recognizing this truth now in our own ways, how are we How are we shifting that narrative or can it not be shifted? Yeah, that's a great question. And one reason I did go with this provocative title the Trouble with White Women, is that I also see it to encompass the trouble that white women's face, and that trouble the white women themselves face is exactly what

you mentioned of. There's always this carrot dangling there, especially from middle class and wealthier women, that they could of the lure of to have the privileges that their brothers and our husbands and our boyfriends, our family members have. Right, there's that lure of you could join the rest of the top of the power hierarchy if you just can get past that sex, which, of course, traditionally into this day,

that hindreds of sex is still enormous. I don't mean to discount the structural inequalities of sex, but I would also point out that the people who gave us the political language to understand the structural and equalities of sex are people like Murray Right, Kimberly Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, the black feminist who said, we can understand sex the structural and equality because we also understand race and class of structural equalities, and here's a framework for understanding them.

So for now, for you know, like like you mentioned, you worked with NOW, there is a moment that things

could have gone differently. No Now was formed in the nineteen sixties in the wake of the resurgence of women's rights, which traditionally it's credited to the publication of Ready Finance Feminine to Speak in nineteen sixty three, but there was another key pickoff in nineteen sixty three, and that was the March on Washington, and how much the male leadership of March on Washington relegated the women involved to the sidelines, didn't let them speak on the march platform, made women

like Rose A Parks march with their wives instead of with the civil rights leaders and involved a leadership team like Polly Murray fought them for months and then gave many speeches afterwards saying, we have to recognize that what we're feeling in this anger for how we were treated by our by the men and the sotal rights movement. But this is not just an emotional issue. It's a

political issue. And Polly Murray game a really really rousing speech about the sexism in the march in Washington that Betty Fernan read about in the newspaper, and she called her up the next morning and said, let's talk. Let's start an organization for women, and the nash Contization Women was born a few months later at a major conference and Polly Murray was on the board. So we're a

number of other we're going to call our leaders. It was in a year Polly Murray dropped out because she said this platform is only going to focus on the needs of the class by women. Wasn't turning out to be an anti racist organization. It wasn't turning out to be organizations supporting workers and labor. And said, I can't be pulled into three directions a black person here, a

woman here, and a worker here. And she dropped out, and and now I've had a lot of difficulty being anything but a middle class white women organizations since and I would and I would, I would just add to that also a incredibly cisgender and straight white woman, middle class you know organization because you know, at the beginning of you know, the turn of the decade of the two thousands, I found myself at the National Organization for

Women because it was a storied organization. I always wanted to work for a women's rights organization, and as a young black, queer woman that was getting ready to graduate from college, I found myself there on an internship with a myriad of you know, young women of color from all across the country, queer and straight. And you know, after several months realizing that, you know, I was, I was invisible, right like there the issues and the intersectionality

that we speak of today, right was was purposefully. I don't even want to say that it was lost. It was purposefully ignored because if you were going to be in and that organization at that time, then you needed to be a woman and a woman only, and that meant to neutralize any other forms of your identity. Yeah, yeah, that is really powerful, right. And Betty Franz famously tried to kick all the lesbians out of NOW in nineteen sixty nine, nineteen seventy, and there was a lot of pushback.

But what you're saying is those legacies like don't go away. The organization never really truly tried to collect itself. There was an important woman in the organization in nineteen seventies,

but then but that really kind of got erased. And I found that his historian has found that NOW has not ever even done a demographic survey of its membership since nineteen and if they're serious, if they have, If they have, it's not released publicly, I think because what it yields is not going to be good for them, so they just haven't made the data available. Um, but I think, yes, like there there certainly are other other other opportunities. I think that what we're seeing in the

outcry against white feminism across the world right now. M is hugely important in helping people understand that just because something as feminist doesn't mean it's necessarily progressive and doesn't mean it's against structural inequality. I think that intersectional feminism,

you know, which reframes the goal. Instead of being we want a quality between the sexes, intersectional feminism says we need to broadly redistribute resources, that we have equality for the many, not for thee, and that means racial justice, economic justice. We are in transjusice, climate justice, you know,

disability justice. It is a huge umbrella category. And the leaders of those theories like Kimberly Crunshaw again, Poticia Health Collins, and then Paul even Paul Murray, I've been also very clear that that is only achieved by people working in coalition, that we have to reach across our differences in order but on a common political platform to build a movement strong enough to actually go after systemic inequality on all

those levels. I think that that is happening at some level, and I think that I think that the leadership of Black Lives Matter have been absolute models of that for years of what a black queer anti violence. The organization can look like that against structural violence and police brutality. I think a lot of the Me Too movement has actually been very successful, you know, especially especially what the Toronto Burke does, but working across groups and also internationally.

I'm getting a lot of interests in this book from Japan and Korea, for example, because Me Too has caused a stimulated major feminist awakenings, and I think that is really exciting to see a movement like that have have such legs. And then you know, the work of activists in Congress, even right of the Squad and the expanded Squad with Corey Bush and then the others are showing us what it can look like to actually fight for quality on multiple fronts of one, not just choosing one thing.

You know. I think that it's so you know, it's it's funny. I want to say that I sadly just recently learned of Paul Murray and was so angry at the fact that I didn't know I didn't know who she was. It wasn't until literally two months ago that I was asked to UH moderate a panel for the documentary the document the documentary UH that is out now

on Amazon Prime. And I met with the I you know, interviewed the director, one of the directors of the film, and you know, and and and she talked about the fact like this is why we wanted to do this. You know, she was instrumental in so many different in

so many different avenues. I mean, when when you understand the story of a person that was advocating well before advocating, you know, for for for desegregation, I mean, for yeah, you know, well before Rosa Parks even got on a bus, you know what I'm saying, And like, you know, trying cases that would and setting up the framework for what we would use for Brown versus the Board of Education

and Title nine, um. And it's just it's astonishing to me that you can have these towering figures who, for not for their existence, we wouldn't even be here, right in so many different forms of fashion that are utterly

and completely whitewashed and erased from history. And you know, and I think that it's so the work that you're doing and the studying that you're doing is so important because when you think about what it means to purposefully mischaracterize, to join a truth, to make her into a figure that was this uneducated mammy right that they could then use, you know, to justify why they needed their rights and

why they were superior. And like the desire to degrade in order to you know, in order to progress to me seems to be white women's like, you know, mode of entree and I just don't understand. I don't understand it, you know, And I ask you, you know, the last question I have for you, like, as a white woman doing this work, right, like, what kind of pushback do

you receive? Right? Like, what kind of conversations do you have you had and do you get into with this type of provocative research and discussion because again from the beginning, this community white women is the third rail in our society and politics. We don't ever discuss unless we're empathizing or lifting up. Yeah, and you know, I'll admit that I first heard of Polymurray about eight years ago, and I was already a professor of gender studies at Rutgers University.

And I heard of poly Murray because my new polleague, Britney Cooper, gave a talk about Polymurray and my eyes were opened. And I want to emphasize that that is part of my role in perspective in coming to this work is that these counter histories I'm telling of the Black trail and Indigenous and Latina women who are who are fighting against white feminism were less ignored than deliberately erased, right, but not forgotten for everyone and not forgotten by everyone.

The work of black feminist historians, in particular since the nineteen eighties, like Angel Davis and Paula Gettings and many others has been to recover these histories and bring them back into the public eye. And that work is certainly

out there. I'm not making any major discoveries in terms of the counter history of what I'm trying to do, and partnesses in my role as a white woman is to provide to synthesize this work and combine it with my much more original critique of white feminism, and to provide another avenue for people to encounter these these other histories and to you know, to to build on and pull together the all this important work that's been done

for decades. So for you know, for example, the one of the most outrageous details that I found it is about Paul Murray, and this isn't in the nineteen fifty five nineteen fifty six. At that point she had done all the things you mentioned right, created the legal rationale for Brown versus Board, but her male supervisors had never even told her that was the case. She was had invented the sit in um. She had written a book, a law textbook of civil rights law, the third and

Marshall called the Bible. She had become the first African American to get a residency at the McDowell Artists Colony, and she was a regular visitor at Elanor Roosevelt's upstate Hudson River treat because they made they became friends after she wrote a scathing letter in the paper about her husband, Ye, and because exactly there were friends for a decade at that point. And yet what Polly Murray was doing for a living was typing. She couldn't get full time work

as a lawyer. She also had a master's in law from Berkeley, and they graduated top of her class at Howard. She was typing, and she was typing anonymously for the work of other writers. And one of her main clients was Betty for Dan And so in that chapter I counterpoise Betty Franz's story with Polly Murray's story, and we are quite literally one person got erased through the but another person got elevated to the role of the key

feminists of that time. In terms of pushback, I mean, definitely some white women don't like the title of the Trouble with White Women, right, I mean, I definitely may be accused of being a racist, you know, or that you know, racist again against white people, and that kind of like race trader logic. But really I want to I want to emphasize that I think that I want you know, that it's important for white women to be

talking to other white women about this work. I also think we are past the point for that conversation to be fully insular and where we're only talking about whiteness. That we need to be also listening and learning about other forms of feminism and from especially from intersectional feminism, which is absolutely showing us the way to what equality

on all fronts looks like. But I really understand myself to be a student of intersectional feminism and helping to listen to that work and again to provide a new road to reach it, not to claim any kind of ownership or discovery because black women have been doing this

work since the eighteen sixties. I mean, Kyla, I just you know, I am so appreciative one that you are doing this work, that as a white woman you did write this book, and that you are researching and presenting you know, centuries of evidence right of how you know, because I don't want to have I don't want to be stuck in the conversations of how did we get here?

I want to finally get to a place and you know, and and again, because we have so many purposeful wrongs in our history, we have to do both end at the same time, question how we got here and then how we where we are headed next? Like we just don't have the luxury to be able to do one and then the other. Not at not at at this critical stage. Um. I just I again, folks, the book is the Trouble with White Women, Kyla Schuler. I really hope that you will come back to woke a f

and continue this conversation. I know that it's gonna spark commentary among the wike AF audience, So I hope that you'll join us again soon. I would love to thank you, so thank you. Take care of by That is it for me today. Folks on Woke app as always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay woke as fuck.