Feminists Talk Whiteness

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.

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Facing the dragon

Leigh‑Anne Francis and Janet Gray

PART I

Histories and counterstories 17

1 Strategic white womanhood: Challenging white feminist perceptions of “Karen”

Ruby Hamad

2 White women’s participation in the attempted genocide of Native American peoples

Karla J. Strand

3 White women as white supremacist political actors: From the suffragists to the Karens

Christina Cavener

4 “The good, the bad, and the indifferent”: The political pedagogy of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Leslie K. Dunlap

5 The unbearable whiteness of lesbian studies

Stephanie Andrea Allen

6 bell hooks: Black indigeneity, ancestral memory, and lessons on resistance

Reanae McNeal

Poem: La sangre llama

Denise Zubizarreta

Questions, activities, and resources

PART II

Theory and self‑reflection

7 On white privilege and anesthesia: Why does Peggy McIntosh’s knapsack feel weightless?

Alison Bailey

8 Fear, loathing, and las whiteness: Whiteness as fearfulness

Andrea Dionne Warmack

9 Academic survival: Troubling the tensions between race, gender, and class in a predominantly white academic institution

Carolyn Tinglin

10 Colorism in the Latina community: The internalization of racialized sexism

Melissa K. Ochoa

11 Feminists talk whiteness: Disrupting the grip of white supremacy culture on feminist movement building

Ann Russo

12 Beyond choice: A dialogue on the whiteness of liberal feminism and reimagining freedom beyond individual choice

Houda Ali and Britt Munro

Poem: Amazing Grace (For the children of John Newton)

Liseli A. Fitzpatrick

Poem: My body is a river

Rachel O’Hanlon‑odriguez

Poem: What chou mean we, white girl, revisited

Becky Thompson

Questions, activities, and resources

PART III

Feminist antiracism praxis 229

13 From performing equity to loving equity: Combating whiteness in emerging allyship movements

Meena Mangat

14 The ally’s tools: Racialized power and privilege within the antiracist praxis

Samantha L. Vandermeade

15 Whiteness and indigeneity: Feminism as a settler colonial discourse

Ruth Alminas and Cory Pillen

16 Teaching transgender studies: Experiential knowledge and race

Dana T. Ahern

17 Shame work: Reducing supremacy and the violence of white men

Cameron Rasmussen

18 Like, share, tweet: Anti‑racist cyberactivism vs. performative slacktivism

Sara Blanchard and Misasha Suzuki Graham

19 Making mistakes: A conversation

Peggy Diggs and Lucy R. Lippard

Poem: and i am sorry

Anaïs Peterson

Poem: White me: A check list

Ivy T. Schweitzer

Poem: Miranda Waiver for white people

Becky Thompson

Questions, activities, and resources

Index