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I. Theological Reflection on White Women's Misery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 June 2023
Extract
Following 2020, which has been called “the Year of Karen,” 2021 saw several highly anticipated, book-length indictments of white womanhood. Among them was sociologist Jessie Daniels's Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It. There, Daniels weaves stories from her life as a white queer woman and academic with multi-disciplinary research and current events to sketch white women's unique complicity in white supremacy in the United States. Some of her harshest critiques are pointed at progressive white women, who—being “nice white ladies”—are quick to exonerate themselves from responsibility for any number of intersecting structures of oppression. In turn, Daniels calls white women readers to interrogate their own lives and do better, especially through the hard work of sustained collective action.
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- Theological Roundtable
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- Copyright © College Theology Society 2023
References
1 See Julia Carrie Wong, “The Year of Karen: How a Meme Changed the Way Americans Talked about Racism,” The Guardian, December 27, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/27/karen-race-white-women-black-americans-racism. Wong includes a definition of the slang term “Karen” from Apryl Williams, a professor of communication and media: a Karen is “a white woman surveilling and patrolling Black people in public spaces and then calling the police on them for random, non-illegal infractions.”
2 See Zakaria, Rafia, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021)Google Scholar, and Beck, Koa, White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021)Google Scholar. Also coinciding with the year of Karen was the publication of Hamad's, Ruby White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color (New York: Catapult, 2020)Google Scholar.
3 Daniels, Jessie, Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It (New York: Seal, 2021)Google Scholar.
4 M. Shawn Copeland, “An Imperative to Act,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 75 (2021): 27–32.
5 Daniels, Nice White Ladies, 219. Here and throughout the roundtable, the authors join other antiracist scholars in understanding “whiteness” as a social construct that is synonymous with white supremacy. Whiteness is not the same as having white skin, though individuals with white skin in the United States and many other contexts are invested with the social affordances, powers, and expectations of whiteness.
6 James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’ . . . and Other Lies,” in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David R. Roediger (New York: Schocken, 1998), 177–80.
7 Baldwin, “On Being ‘White,’” 179.
8 Daniels, Nice White Ladies, 206.
9 Daniels, Nice White Ladies, 211.
10 Daniels, Nice White Ladies, 211.
11 Daniels, Nice White Ladies, 198.
12 See Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
13 Daniels, Nice White Ladies, 204.
14 Daniels, Nice White Ladies, 210.
15 Daniels, Nice White Ladies, 219.
16 For a more in-depth look at how social injustice contributes to suicide, see Mark E. Button and Ian Marsh, eds., Suicide and Social Justice: New Perspectives on the Politics of Suicide and Suicide Prevention (New York: Routledge, 2020).
17 Dana Crowley Jack, Silencing the Self: Women and Depression (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 56. For more, see Janet M. Stoppard, Understanding Depression: Feminist Social Constructionist Approaches (New York, Routledge, 2000); Janet M. Stoppard and Linda M. McMullen, eds., Situating Sadness: Women and Depression in Social Context (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Michelle N. Lafrance, Women and Depression: Recovery and Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2009); and Dana C. Jack and Alisha Ali, eds., Silencing the Self across Cultures: Depression and Gender in the Social World, reprint ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
18 Crowley Jack, Silencing the Self, 89–127.
19 For example, in conversation with Crowley Jack, Chanequa Walker-Barnes interrogates how the archetype of the “StrongBlackWoman” leads Black women to repress negative emotions to their own detriment, a reality she also links to devasting rates of mental health struggles among American Black women. See Walker-Barnes, Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength (Eugene, OR: Cascade: 2014). See also Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009).
20 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage, 2011); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 50th anniversary ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).
21 See, for example, bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1–3.
22 Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 65.
23 Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1992), 26.
24 Whereas this critique concerns white Catholic feminist theological oversights regarding women's psychological suffering, Karen Teel makes a similar critique concerning white feminist theology's treatment of women's suffering more broadly. See Karen Teel, “White Feminist Theologies and Black Womanist Theologies,” in T & T Clark Handbook of African American Theology, ed. Antonia Michelle Daymond, Fredrick L. Ware, and Erin Lewis Williams (New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2022), 367–78.
25 Ann O'Hara Graff, “Strategies for Life: Learning from Feminist Psychology,” in In The Embrace of God: Feminist Approaches to Theological Anthropology, ed. Ann O'Hara Graff (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1995), 122–37.
26 See Jessica Coblentz, Dust in the Blood: A Theology of Life with Depression (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2022).
27 Whereas this analysis concerns the importance of this self-critical move in white Catholic feminist treatments of women's psychological suffering, Margaret D. Kamitsuka has extended a similar, broader call to all white feminist theologians in Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
28 For more on this popular Christian view of depression, see Coblentz, Dust in the Blood, 49–72.
29 See, for example, M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009; Emilie M. Townes, ed., A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil & Suffering (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996); and James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 40th anniversary ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010). Elisabeth T. Vasko brings similar insights from Black and womanist theologies of sin to bear on white privilege in Beyond Apathy: A Theology for Bystanders (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), 69–151.
30 Regarding the importance of emphasizing the agency of those with psychological disorders amid the limitations imposed by these conditions, psychologist Marcia Webb explains, “While persons with psychological disorders may not be responsible for the onset of these problems, they are not therefore victims of forces outside their control, with no opportunities to better themselves. At the very least, people with psychological disorders have various freedoms in the ways they address the reality of disorder in their lives.” Furthermore, “When people do take responsibility for their disorders, this choice can make an enormous difference over the long term.” See Webb, Marcia, Toward A Theology of Psychological Disorder (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017), 112Google Scholar and 113.
31 Andrew Prevot put this point into focus for me in “Shared Worlds” (Invited paper, American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, November 18, 2023).
32 Thanks to the anonymous reviewer who raised this point. For more on the entanglements of whiteness and Christocentrism, see Joshi, Khyati Y., White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America (New York: NYU Press, 2021)Google Scholar, and Fletcher, Jeannine Hill, The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, and Religious Diversity in America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017)Google Scholar.
33 Special thanks to Megan McCabe, Kate Ward, Jaisy Joseph, Elisabeth Vasko, Tracy Tiemeier, and Julia Feder for their helpful feedback on drafts of this essay.