Subconscious terrorism & white ladies

Thoughts on writing fiction based in psychological truths.

Oh hey y’all

This post is a day late because the struggle is real y’all. 

What I’ve been thinking about: This subconscious terrorism of the mind that white supremacy perpetuates, and how it makes white people act foolish (aka racist). If you can’t first name the white supremacy lurking in your own mind, you aren’t going to be of much use in the revolution. 

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the tragic story of a racist white teacher being called out on her shit, crying about it, and then because we live within a country steeped and loathing in white supremacy, this teacher got her job back. The thing is, white women like her are a dime a dozen in education, which is a problem not just for minorities. In case you missed it: “Draco Malfoy’s trashy-ass sister is actually a teacher.”

 In between leading students in a zummer of misery, getting some dev-editing done for my academic clients, and generally just living that freelance writer hustle life, I’ve been working on fictionalizing the nonfiction book I wrote last year, and queried to no avail. As I tell my clients and watch them cringe: writing is re-writing, so this betch is getting back to werk. 

The delicious part about fiction writing (for me) is developing the characters, and as you can imagine, the evil ones in my book are most certainly white. Every time I see an example of a white woman whiting out & behaving badly towards minorities, I make a note to add in another layer of detail into my villains. 

In my research, I re-opened the book Nice White Ladies, and found Jessie Daniel’s words as prescient as ever. If we do not continue to question the ways in which white supremacy has infiltrated our minds, we will never be free from its hatred. 

Last year, I sat down with author Jessie Daniels to talk about her book Nice White Ladies, and how white people can expand their horizons and be a lot better off living in an anti-racist world as well.  Because Dr. Daniels is a far bigger deal than me, I got trolled alongside her, and I have to say, it was delicious making racists squirm in the comments section. Click here to watch the video of our interview. 

I’m re-posting portions of our conversation to discuss why nice white ladies can do a lot of damage, even with the best of intentions. 

The Project of Making Visible White Supremacy:

AH: Thanks for agreeing to speak with me, I’m so excited for this. I’d like to begin with this question that I think we are both deeply concerned with in our work: How do we make real and urgent what’s going on? Further, how do we make visible white supremacy?

For me, I found that going back to story, narrative nonfiction, specifically was the best medium I could find to embark on this project. 

JD: It’s hard right?

JD: Yeah, I mean it’s a hard question in part because, In my experience, white people I talk to, mostly middle class liberal types, are allergic to the term white supremacy. So you say that, and it’s like ::gestures with her arms:: the room is cleared. I had a brief encounter with a big tech company whose name you would recognize, and I was trying to do a session with them about whiteness and how our assumptions about the world shape, for example, the technology that we make. And somewhere in there, I used the term white supremacy, and one of the bosses that had hired me said, “well we won’t be sharing any of that…” 

So I feel like I’m often, it’s funny when I was talking with the publisher about this book, and we mostly agreed on the title, but there was a big thorough robust conversation about whether or not people would buy this book if it had the term white supremacy in it. And I was like, “well, that’s terms used a lot in the book so…”

(let’s prove them wrong: buy her book here). 

AH: Yeah, it’s also important to name it I think. I mean hey, at least you used the term “white supremacy,” my early editors of my book so far have been like “Allison, you can’t say that about whiteness itself, you have to specify you’re talking about white supremacy” and I just think, “I’m not hearing the difference”

JD: Hah! Yeah. I don’t know if I have an answer to that question, but when I do, I’ll let you know! It’s certainly one I keep grappling with so I’ll let you know what I come up with.” 

And here, I interrupt the normal interview format to explain that I think Daniels is being overly humble. Let’s turn the introduction from Nice White Ladies, so I can show you what I mean. She writes:

“Just as I inherited this constellation of identities that I have chosen to interrogate and reject, similarly, I want this book to challenge and subvert both “whiteness” and “ladyhood.” And that further, Nice White Ladies is so much more than “merely the refusal of a set of ideas, this book points to another way of being in the world. There are white women who have found new pathways to wholeness and resistance. I write about them with the hope that there will be more of us, and new generations in which these conversations will no longer be necessary.”

The stakes of dismantling white supremacy? Why, it gives us radical new ways of being in the world not tied to hate and violence, of course. 

And in this tall order, for Daniels at least, she knows exactly where to begin. For her, the project of making visible and urgent the need to dismantle white supremacy begins with what we always tell kids to do (but rarely do as adults): it’s to tell the truth. As she says in her introduction to Nice White Ladies, 

“For me, telling the truth about white supremacy and working to end it are interlaced with my own liberation and yours. I want this book to be a catalyst for dismantling the systemic racism that we, nice white ladies, have upheld. And I want this book to help women raised white to reach beyond the strictures of niceness and the constraints of ladyhood to experience their full humanity and to join the rest of us working toward a better world for everyone.”

“For me, this kind of terrorism exists primarily at the level of the subconscious. But this awareness of being the "subject" of white supremacist discourse has given me, as much as anything else, an even deeper realization of my own privilege within a white supremacist context. Through the course of my daily life, I do not encounter racial hostility or overt threats of homophobic violence or more than the usual amount of gender oppression; instead, I can often coast on the privileges of middle-class whiteness and the presumption of heterosexuality.” - Jessie Daniels in her introduction to Nice White Ladies.

To read the original interview, click here. To watch a recording of our interview on Youtube, which earned us some love from some conservative trolls in the comments, click here.

Your tik tok moment of zen of the week:”if you have to wonder what you would have done in Nazi Germany, you don’t have to wonder, it’s what you’re doing right now.”

Woof. Them Gen Z’s  sure to do know how to sling an insult.