CALLING IN MY FELLOW WHITE WOMEN

You need to show up for Black women right the fuck now

I want to expand on this note I shared, because it’s time for white women and Black women to have more public-facing conversations with each other.

It’s not a coincidence that the strongest Democratic voices emerging right now belong to Black women and other women of color. Something I’ve tweeted regularly is “When Democratic Black Women Run, Stuff Gets Done” (and I only use “stuff” instead of “shit” because I’m still hoping for a trademark/licensing opportunity to make sure there’s always a Congressional Black Caucus, for starters).

BRB, my breath was just taken away.

Look at Texas firecracker Jasmine Crockett. She rightfully became an overnight superstar for her DGAF takes during Committee hearings and media appearances. I. LOVE. HER. She’s got an amazing future in the party, and we need her voice to prevail above the lies. Nazi Nancy Mace is so lucky Queen Jasmine held back on her.

Imagine thinking you can speak to anyone this way, let alone a Black woman. The Citadel should revoke Nazi Nancy Mace Prynne’s diploma for her overt racism and transphobia, but we’re not here to talk about that today.

We’re here to talk about being allies for Black people, but especially Black women. And not just during Black History Month.

As I’ve often said, I believe it’s my responsibility as a human being to be an ally to the communities I wasn’t born into. It should be the easiest thing, for humans to accept other humans existing in the same space and then agree to coexist peacefully. LIVE AND LET LIVE, right?

And yet it’s the biggest problem in the world. All you have to do is live your life while elevating positive messaging from others without making any of it about yourself.

And right now, my fellow white women, it’s more important than ever for us to amp up our allyship and show up for Black women. But you need to learn HOW.

As I wrote in the note, too many white women are worried about coming across like they’re doing a monologue from “The Help” whenever they speak to Black women. To let a Black woman know they’re one of the “good ones,” they’ve stumbled and created cringeworthy moments. I’ve also been guilty of trying too hard, and I’m grateful to the Black women who saw me and taught me how to be the kind of ally they needed.

That meant following the lead of Black women, which I’ve done since a young age. In telling the story of where my support for Black women comes from, I first need to explain the culture I grew up in.

Welcome to Hazlet, a middle-class New Jersey suburb, in the 70s and 80s. My neighborhood’s demographics were divided into thirds: Jewish, Irish Catholic, and Italian Catholic. That’s what I saw on my block. That’s what I saw at my nursery school (which is now called Pre-K), at Temple Shalom, and wherever else we went. No one looked different than we did.

The first and only time I saw any people of color was on TV. My earliest memories are not of my parents, but of Maria and Luis, Susan and Gordon, and David, who worked at Mr. Hooper’s store. “Sesame Street” looked nothing like my street, Bethany Road.

When my brother Philip was born in March 1972, a month before I turned four, my parents hired a Black nurse, which is what most Jewish families did back then. Some hired night nurses and some hired nurses who would move in for however long she was needed. I think Linda stayed in the guest room so that she could be up with the baby at night and give me breakfast so my mom could sleep.

My mother had to plan a bris while being postpartum, something I couldn’t have understood back then. The pictures from the bris show her exhausted and checked out while I’m proudly showing off my baby brother’s gifts. There was also a picture of Linda, the baby nurse, holding my brother in a rocking chair, but I don’t know what happened to it.

What I do know is that Linda was the first Black person I had ever seen in real life, not on TV. She kept her hair natural, like David from “Sesame Street,” and so the first thing I said to Linda when I saw her was, “Are you David’s sister?”

My mother had to explain what I meant and I remember Linda smiling at that. Now I wonder what she was thinking about the little white girl who had never seen a Black person outside of a TV before.

My other memories of this time are spotty, but they’re all about Linda. I don’t remember the bris, but I remember Linda bathing me instead of my mom doing it, and teaching me how to wash my body. Linda wouldn’t wash my vagina. “That’s your special place,” she said firmly. “Nobody touches your special place except you, and if anyone tries, you tell your Mama.”

Linda taught me about consent before I knew the word. I think it’s possible Linda saw things in our house that week she stayed with us. Our block was full of older boys. We all ran around like feral children while our parents—who were barely out of their teens when they had their first babies—sat around smoking and drinking, not caring where we were as long as we weren’t bleeding. People were coming and going that whole week, kids running around our house doing whatever without any parental supervision. Who knows what she saw?

Maybe Linda was worried about those older boys being too rough with me, but in 1972, would her white employers listen if she said anything? So Linda taught me how to protect myself the best I could, and she imprinted on me in ways that have stayed with me forever.

Linda (and her sister, who later stayed with us when my parents went on vacation) is why I’ve always associated Black women with protection and why I’ve always been interested in learning just how they came into their strength while doing my best to honor their legacy. It’s about appreciation and elevation, not appropriation. It’s about being supportive by listening, learning, and then living by the example.

That’s how you get invited to the cookout.

And now, we resume.

Look, I saw lots of you on that White Women For Kamala Zoom call last July after Black women showed up in record Zoom numbers for Kamala Harris THE DAY JOE BIDEN STEPPED ASIDE. Black women already had that weekly Zoom scheduled, shit just got extra urgent that Sunday.

Did white women have a regular weekly Zoom for Joe Biden? We did not.

But something about Kamala Harris made you all start immediately demanding a Zoom Of Our Own.

While I know everyone’s hearts were in the white right place, I also saw a lot of self-congratulatory performative bullshit during that call. So many famous white women taking the time to scold us for not doing this sooner, then making us all pledge to Do Better. We raised a fuckton of money for Kamala that night, but then it seemed like most of them took off for the Hamptons. I referred to them as White Claw Women while we were having our Brat Summer amplifying Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to the best of our abilities.

The corporate media certainly wasn’t helping, and neither was the suppression from Elon Eichmann over on the Nazi Bird app, but that didn’t stop me from my daily screams into the Twitter abyss.

It also didn’t stop me when I started getting extra anti-Semitic responses to my tweets, many of them pushing a similar message: Because I’m Jewish—descended from Russian and Polish Ashkenazi Jews—MAGA trolls told me I’m not white.

I’ve had my share of Nazi shit flung at me throughout my life, one of the many joys of being an American Jew, but I’d never been told I wasn’t white. If you knew nothing about me and walked past me on the street, you would clock me as a little white lady. With a name like mine, almost no one has ever presumed I was anything other than Irish (and I’m not).

As I started replying to that bullshit, some people of color responded in agreement with the MAGA trope. It’s disheartening for me to see Black people who are anti-Semitic because our two communities should be intertwined and superconnected. Yeah, fuck you too, Ice Cube.

At least I learned something from that experience thanks to the Black women who welcomed me into their DM rooms: I’ve been passing as a white woman for almost 56 years while being in a minority community. I knew I’d been enjoying white privilege my whole life, but now I know it’s helped me in even more ways I wasn’t aware of. It gives me a unique perspective while I’m making Good Trouble.

When I was at the Democratic National Convention last August, white women were in the minority of the attendees. Everywhere I went, Black women were dressed to the Nines in celebration of the historic moment. There were also the most gorgeous Black men I’d ever seen outside of Hollywood everywhere I looked. I had opportunities to have conversations that I’d otherwise never get to have here in super-white Portland.

And those conversations were about “How do we get more white voters to support this Presidential candidate?”

I firmly believe more white women showed up for Kamala than the results showed thanks to Clarice Starlink fucking with our elections, and we deserve a big investigation as part of the Impeachment Threepeat. I think Elonald Trumpmusk wanted everyone to believe this country is just as racist as the MAGA cult is. I don’t believe we’re as bad as they are. This was all part of manipulating the results. There’s no way he won all seven swing states, not with the voter turnout we had. All of it was meant to divide our party, and to further the divide between white Americans and Americans of color, specifically Black Americans.

And even more specifically Black women. Trump’s favorite scapegoats are Black women because Letitia James and Fani Willis are leading the charge to end him. It’s up to white women to push back when we see white men using Black women as political props and scapegoats. It’s up to us to speak louder than the racists who want to silence all of us into compliance.

I took this picture a couple of years ago in a store on N Mississippi Avenue in Portland. I asked the woman if it was okay for me to do that because I believed in its message with my entire being. It led to a brief but meaningful chat about how more white women need to learn how to connect better with Black women. Eye contact, a nod, a smile—that’s how it starts and grows.

Be present. Be an advocate. Be an ally.