How Nice White Ladies and the Politics of Being Basic Turned Virginia Red

In this post: How Nice White Ladies and the politics of being basic turned Virginia red.

Last week: An Interview with Jessie Daniels about the subconscious terrorism of racism & the need to take down nice white ladies.

Next week: What Black feminism offers us all as we bravely prepare to enter the holidaze.

Dear friends and fam,

I’m back, after what I wish was a two-week vacation, but was really just a writing rabbit hole revising my book proposal and sample chapters, which were already done, but of course, they are never done, and of course, I had to make substantial edits in a very short amount of time just for my own sanity, and yes my therapist has already pointed out the OCD that guides me through life like a pageant mom.

Y’all get it, the hustle is real, and its main command is endurance. This article, “I’m not tired, you’re tired,” is really about the burnout writers are starting to feel from the newsletter grind. In my brief hiatus from Not Safe for School, I had the space to really think about why I spend so much time on this newsletter and the daily grind of spinning out free content. 

The answer I came up with was? Because the work is never done. 

I’m excited to announce that for today’s NSFS, we have an anonymous (to y’all) guest post about last week’s election results and why we all need to be reading Jessie Daniel’s Nice White Ladies.

As Anonymous Becky writes in this week’s post, “nice white ladies have been not only decidedly not nice, they’ve been a key ingredient of a white supremacist machine that still oppresses Black and brown people.” Which is why y’all need to go buy Jessie Daniels’ book. And not her ebook because, as I just learned, they get pennies compared to what real paper book sales get (god, this week, I’ve been hard-pressed to find the differences between academic publishing/ the game and the “real world” publishing game). Book buying is also a form of activism. Click here to get Nice White Ladies.

Another exciting lyfe update is I have both a fantastic undergrad intern helping me, check out their TikTok and see how they’re using it as a space to speak out, AND a behind-the-scenes editor who remains in academia and thus wishes to remain anonymous for the time being. We’ll call them Anonymous Becky, a fellow white lady academic, who is helping me re-imagine Post-PhD as a space for writing, collaboration, and coalition building for education activists. As it turns out, she is also a pretty good guest writer.

Without further ado, here’s ...

What’s your damage, white women? How Nice White Ladies and the Politics of Being Basic Turned Virginia Red

This past week in Virginia, Republicans swept every statewide executive office on the ballot, and white women were in the news again. Republican Glen Youngkin, who defeated Democratic candidate and former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, pointedly relied on white women’s rage to propel him across the finish line in a tossup race. One voter who sat down with CNN’s Pamela Brown last week voiced her frustration over pandemic-relate school closings and subsequent learning loss, claiming that Youngkin made her “feel listened to for the first time.”

He was the political version of John Cusack standing in Virginia white women’s driveways, holding up a boom box and blasting “In Your Eyes,” literally courting the nice white ladies of Virginia by meeting with them in person, or sending his wife to conference with them. 

These women were basic, and I use that word not as a sneering invalidation of their fashion choices, but in the political sense, which Tressie McMillan Cottom brilliantly described in this post last year. To be basic is to believe oneself apolitical and generally benign, but this political ambivalence is itself a mark of privilege and complicity through complacency. Basically, whiteness. 

What is crucial here is that the very basicness of the nice white ladies of Virginia allowed them to be played by the Republican campaign like a fiddle in a Charlie Daniels song because these women were so easily convinced to vote against their own interests. We all know damn well that a Youngkin administration is not going to do anything to promote equitable working conditions, maternity leave, better pay, or any social infrastructure that would benefit these very women. And most of the women Brown interviewed seem to register this on some level too since three of the four voted for Biden in last year’s presidential election - a political shape-shifting that being basic affords. Youngkin’s act of listening was a weaponization of white womanhood and white women’s tears dressed up as compassion.

This political sleight of hand mollified the aggrieved parents on a local issue while broadcasting a racist dog whistle to statewide voters. To the Republican base, the campaign’s promise to listen to parents was a signal that Youngkin was on their side in the culture wars. It meant that Youngkin was listening to the loudest right-wing parents in the room, like Laura Murphy, a Loudon County gadfly and Karen extraordinaire who has led a campaign to ban Toni Morrison’s Beloved from AP English reading lists. 

Jessie Daniels obviously wasn’t writing about last week’s election, but Nice White Ladies was practically a roadmap to it. It is a veritable scrapbook of the damage inflicted by white women voting and acting against their interests. 

The majority of white women oppose affirmative action - broadly defined as action to ensure equity and diversity in institutions from workplaces to universities - and this has been increasingly true over the past 20 years. [Tim Wise, “Is Sisterhood Conditional? White Women and the Rollback of Affirmative Action,” NWSA Journal, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 1-26.]

Yet who benefits most from affirmative action policies?

White women.

So what the fuck?

Daniels breaks it down with heartbreaking precision. The punditry of the political right has spent years presenting affirmative action - and civil rights in general - as a zero-sum game. In the American workforce and the institutions of higher education that (ostensibly but debatably) prepare people for that workforce, a win for a person of color is a loss for some white dude. And white women are drinking the Kool-Aid, the pumpkin spice whatever-the-fuck, and believe that (a) this is true (it’s not) and (b) it hurts them (it doesn’t).

Rolling back affirmative action means rolling back not only efforts to promote and retain racially diverse workplaces and student bodies but also efforts aimed at equity across the spectrum of gender. What Daniels lays bare is that white women, when given the opportunity to support a policy that promotes racial diversity and gender equality, will opt to maintain the racial status quo at their own expense.

This is why that nice white lady facade, that basic pumpkin spice apolitical bullshit is so insidious. It’s not only not nice, but it’s also instrumental in perpetuating racial violence, as McMillan Cottom and Daniels so fiercely attest.

On that note, that's all we wrote this week folks. Enjoy your pumpkin spice latte season!

xoxo,

discontented white ladies

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NSFS: Not Safe for School, your snark-filled antidote to racism and corruption in education. Follow @postphdtheblog on Twitter and @allisonharbin_postphd on Instagram