Feminists Talk Whiteness offers a multidimensional introduction to whiteness as an ideology and a system of institutional practices, exploring how and why whiteness is a feminist issue.
Readers will gain insights and strategies for action from the chapters and poems, which approach whiteness through multiple perspectives and disciplinary approaches. The contents are organized into sections on history, theory and self-reflection, and antiracist praxis. Each section includes suggested questions for writing or discussion, as well as varied activities—from quick research to community action.
Feminists Talk Whiteness is for college students, community groups, and book clubs studying whiteness and antiracism. It will work well as a main or companion text in courses in Women’s, Gender, and Feminist Studies, as well as other courses across the humanities and social sciences.
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction
Part I. Histories and Counterstories
Introduction: Women, Feminism, and Whiteness: Histories
Chapter 1 Strategic white womanhood: Challenging white feminist perceptions of “Karen”
Ruby Hamad
Chapter 2 White Women’s Participation in the Attempted Genocide of Native American Peoples
Karla J. Strand
Chapter 3 White women as white supremacist political actors: From the suffragists to the Karens
Christina Cavener
Chapter 4 “The good, the bad, and the indifferent”: The political pedagogy of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Leslie K. Dunlap
Chapter 5 The unbearable whiteness of lesbian studies
Stephanie Andrea Allen
Chapter 6 bell hooks: Black indigeneity, ancestral memory, and lessons on resistance
Reanae McNeal
La sangre llama
Denise Zubizarreta
Questions, Activities, and Resources
Part II. Theory and self-reflection
Introduction: Building critical consciousness
Chapter 7 On white privilege and anesthesia: Why does Peggy McIntosh’s knapsack feel weightless?
Alison Bailey
Chapter 8 Fear, loathing, and las whiteness: Whiteness as fearfulness
Andrea Warmack
Chapter 9 Academic survival: Troubling the tensions between race, gender, and class in a predominantly white academic institution
Carolyn Tinglin
Chapter 10 Colorism in the Latina community: The internalization of racialized sexism
Melissa K. Ochoa
Chapter 11 Feminists talk whiteness: Disrupting the grip of white supremacy culture on feminist movement building
Ann Russo
Chapter 12 Beyond choice: A dialogue on the whiteness of liberal feminism and reimagining freedom beyond individual choice
Houda Ali and Britt Munro
Amazing Grace (for the children of John Newton)
Liseli A. Fitzpatrick
My Body is a River
Rachel O’Hanlon-Rodriguez
What chou mean we, white girl, revisited
Becky Thompson
Questions, Activities, and Resources
Part III. Feminist antiracism praxis
Introduction: Resisting hiteness
Chapter 13 From performing equity to loving equity: Combating whiteness in emerging allyship movements
Meena Mangat
Chapter 14 The ally’s tools: Racialized power and privilege within antiracist praxis
Samantha L. Vandermeade
Chapter 15 Whiteness and indigeneity: Feminism as a settler colonial discourse
Ruth Alminas and Cory Pillen
Chapter 16 Teaching transgender studies: Experiential knowledge and race
Dana Ahern
Chapter 17 Shame work: Reducing supremacy and the violence of white men
Cameron Rasmussen
Chapter 18 Like, share, tweet: Antiracist cyberactivism vs. performative slacktivism
Sara Blanchard and Misasha Suzuki Graham
Chapter 19 Making mistakes: A conversation
Peggy Diggs and Lucy R. Lippard
and i am sorry
Anais Peterson
White me: A check list
Ivy T. Schweitzer
MIRANDA WAIVER FOR WHITE PEOPLE
Becky Thompson
Questions, Activities and Resources
Index
Biography
Leigh-Anne Francis is a Black queer associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African American Studies at The College of New Jersey. Her publications examine Black women and the carceral state, queer and trans people of color, and the continuum of subaltern resistive strategies in US history.
Janet Gray is a white professor emerita of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The College of New Jersey. She has published on whiteness in nineteenth-century American women’s poetry and on the convergences of feminist, peace, and environmental studies.
