Speaker 1: Good morning, peeps, and welcome to WIKA F Daily with
Speaker 1: Meet your Girl Danielle Moody recording not so live from
Speaker 1: my Brooklyn Silarium. Folks. As many of you know, it
Speaker 1: is my birthday week, and as a person who advocates
Speaker 1: for rest and recharging, I am taking the week off
Speaker 1: Monday and Tuesday. Was live Wednesday through Friday, prerecorded, but
Speaker 1: in true scorpio form, I wanted to make sure to
Speaker 1: deliver you the content that all of you deserve. So
Speaker 1: today getting into a conversation with author of the book
Speaker 1: The Trouble with White Women, Kyla Schuler. Kyla Schuler is
Speaker 1: a Rutgers University professor and has done a history right,
Speaker 1: almost a recounting of how we have arrived at this place.
Speaker 1: Where As she will tell us in the interview that
Speaker 1: Pew research showed over the summer that get this, folks,
Speaker 1: forty percent of women who identify as feminists vote Republican,
Speaker 1: forty percent for zero. And when Kyla utters this to me,
Speaker 1: I am absolutely shocked because I'm saying to myself, how
Speaker 1: is it that you one could call a white woman,
Speaker 1: could call themselves a feminist and then vote for a
Speaker 1: party that elected a man that was giddy about grabbing
Speaker 1: women by the pussy, that has over twenty sexual assault
Speaker 1: and harassment cases pending against him and accusations. It's a
Speaker 1: known womanizer articulated that himself the Republican Party pre Donald
Speaker 1: Trump wasn't much better. They vote against the ability of
Speaker 1: a woman to have autonomy or a person with a
Speaker 1: uterus to have autonomy over their own body. They will
Speaker 1: not vote for an Equal Pay Act that would have
Speaker 1: all women, regardless of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity,
Speaker 1: to be able to be paid on par with her
Speaker 1: male counterparts. They vote against that. Many of them voted
Speaker 1: against the Violence Against Women Act, right, And so how
Speaker 1: could this twenty twenty report from Pew Research showcase that
Speaker 1: forty percent of white women who deem themselves to be
Speaker 1: feminists vote against their own interests. I mean, we have
Speaker 1: this conversation every week with regard to dying of whiteness
Speaker 1: with our friend Jonathan Metzo, and it is so dumbfounding
Speaker 1: to those of us that exist outside of these communities
Speaker 1: to say, how can both of these things be true
Speaker 1: at the same time? And in my humble opinion, they
Speaker 1: fucking can't, because you can't on one hand, say that
Speaker 1: you're a feminist, right, which is the articulation of the
Speaker 1: equity of people regardless of gender. Right, and yet at
Speaker 1: that same time vote alongside party lines for a party
Speaker 1: that doesn't see you as equal. But this is where
Speaker 1: we are and what Kyla's book, The Trouble with White
Speaker 1: Women gets to the heart of the heart is that
Speaker 1: this is nothing new. Where we found ourselves in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: right with the startling statistics of fifty percent over fifty
Speaker 1: percent of white women voting against another white woman, Hillary Clinton,
Speaker 1: in favor of a pussy grabbing Republican male candidate. Then
Speaker 1: that number, after watching Donald Trump ripped children away from breastfeeding,
Speaker 1: putting children in cages right using the most horrific and
Speaker 1: offensive language in which to discuss his political adversaries, that
Speaker 1: he would gain ground with white women, not lose it.
Speaker 1: And the thing is why I think that it's important
Speaker 1: to have this conversation with Kyla, who is herself a
Speaker 1: white woman, is because I am tired, as a black
Speaker 1: queer woman trying to get white communities to come together
Speaker 1: to recognize how they have been brainwashed, how their history
Speaker 1: has purposely been whitewashed as a means to keep them
Speaker 1: ignorant and beholden to the white suprema structure. And what
Speaker 1: is so troubling to me is that even now, following
Speaker 1: the election in Virginia where once again white women showed
Speaker 1: their full and entire your ass in voting for junkin Right,
Speaker 1: a man that wants to ban a Pulitzer Prize winning
Speaker 1: author Tony Morrison, a black woman from being taught in
Speaker 1: schools because of the fragile emotions and feelings that he
Speaker 1: believes that white children have around their own identity, which
Speaker 1: frankly hasn't even been discussed as an identity at all.
Speaker 1: And so what Kyla articulates in our interview and in
Speaker 1: her book is that this goes all the way back, folks,
Speaker 1: to slavery. This goes back hundreds of years. And I've
Speaker 1: said this before in WOKF and I say it everywhere
Speaker 1: that I have a mic in front of my face.
Speaker 1: White women get their power, glean their power from white men.
Speaker 1: White men vote overwhelmingly Republican, regardless of education, regardless right
Speaker 1: of economic status. So that being said, then of course
Speaker 1: you're going to continue to align yourself with white men
Speaker 1: if that is where you find your security. Right. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, I am not one to let
Speaker 1: white women off the hook and say like that is
Speaker 1: totally acceptable, being as how we also know about the
Speaker 1: weaponizing of tears. We also know that there are plenty
Speaker 1: of black men and black people that have been lynched, murdered, beaten,
Speaker 1: and raped over the false accusations uttered from the lips
Speaker 1: of white women, right. And so we also know that
Speaker 1: we spend a particular amount of time in history discussing
Speaker 1: the slave master, but we don't ever discuss the slave mistress,
Speaker 1: the white woman that was just as vile, just as cruel,
Speaker 1: just as vicious, but was just an address standing by
Speaker 1: and watching atrocities be done in her name and in
Speaker 1: her honor right and doing so on her own front. Right. So,
Speaker 1: to me, this is a community that needs to be unpacked,
Speaker 1: that we need to be interrogating and asking questions as
Speaker 1: to why. Right. I don't think it is a why
Speaker 1: in the belief that I feel like we're going to suade,
Speaker 1: you know, move white women to a different place, because honestly,
Speaker 1: I don't think that that is the truth. I think
Speaker 1: that what we are seeing right now in our society
Speaker 1: is a complete and total doubling and tripling down of
Speaker 1: white supremacy. And what we know to be true is
Speaker 1: that when you look back at these movements from suffragists
Speaker 1: to third wave feminism, right, you're looking at the denial
Speaker 1: of any other representation, of any other identities in choice
Speaker 1: of only putting forward the woman's agenda, namely making white
Speaker 1: women the neutral palette for which we fight for women's rights.
Speaker 1: And that is just bullshit because for me, as a
Speaker 1: black queer woman, I don't get to part and parcel
Speaker 1: out which sides of me society chooses to deem bad
Speaker 1: or good. It's just how the fuck I show up.
Speaker 1: But what's fascinating is what we are seeing right, whether
Speaker 1: it be from the Karens right, the calling of the police,
Speaker 1: believing that every police person is basically your own security force.
Speaker 1: When you feel unsafe and want to shriek and perform
Speaker 1: fear right that you know that the cavalry will come
Speaker 1: marching in, and there are no penalties for that, there's
Speaker 1: no accountability for that. We saw it with Amy Cooper, right.
Speaker 1: She may have lost her job, but then she's suing
Speaker 1: her employer saying that she was wrongfully terminated. Well, they
Speaker 1: decided they don't want to work with a racist. But
Speaker 1: it's this idea, it's you know, the conjuring of the mcclusky's.
Speaker 1: If you remember that couple, the white couple in front
Speaker 1: of their mansions brandishing their weapons, right, that is the
Speaker 1: image that comes to mind of the stand by your
Speaker 1: white man, white woman. And if we don't interrogate the
Speaker 1: truth right and get to the heart of the matter,
Speaker 1: then we're never moving anywhere. And I think that the
Speaker 1: point and the purpose of this book is to want
Speaker 1: to examine our history right from slavery to suffragist to
Speaker 1: Jim Crow to civil rights and then onward to where
Speaker 1: we find ourselves right now. The problem that we have
Speaker 1: in our society is that there is a deep desire
Speaker 1: and force at play that doesn't want critical thinking to
Speaker 1: be a thing, that wants people to remain asleep. Right,
Speaker 1: there's a war on wokeness that we've been talking about
Speaker 1: on this show and on others. And what did they say, Oh,
Speaker 1: there's this woke culture, this cancel culture. Well, what is
Speaker 1: the opposite of being woke. It's to be asleep. So
Speaker 1: instead of us going back and forth on this intellectually
Speaker 1: dishonest volleying that we're doing about woke culture. We may
Speaker 1: want to ask the question as to why Republicans, why
Speaker 1: white supremacy want Americans to remain asleep, particularly white Americans,
Speaker 1: to remain asleep unconscious, to how the systems of white
Speaker 1: supremacy and patriarchy were built for their favor. Because you see,
Speaker 1: when you begin to think critically, when you start to
Speaker 1: act questions, then you understand your power to be able
Speaker 1: to shift things, because the beginning of change comes with
Speaker 1: the questioning, comes with the asking of why and the
Speaker 1: justification thereof. But if you formulate your life living right
Speaker 1: behind a veil rose colored glasses, hiding behind things like
Speaker 1: patriotism and freedom and liberation which are just catchphrases with
Speaker 1: no foundation and what it means to truly be free
Speaker 1: in this country, if you find yourself articulating feminist values
Speaker 1: but then being completely disconnected from the idea of intersectionality,
Speaker 1: then you're not doing the work right. And that's the reality.
Speaker 1: And so I think that you all will enjoy this
Speaker 1: conversation with Kyla Schuler, and I encourage everyone to pick
Speaker 1: up her book The Trouble with White Women, because I
Speaker 1: want I will be having this conversation and not just
Speaker 1: a conversation out of anger, although anger is productive right
Speaker 1: when it's formulated and targeted towards change. But the reality
Speaker 1: is is that there is a lot of work to do,
Speaker 1: and it's not going to be on my back that
Speaker 1: this work is going to be done. It is going
Speaker 1: to be in the communities of white women who are
Speaker 1: woke and conscious to be able to carry the water
Speaker 1: to splash on their sisters faces and wake them the
Speaker 1: fuck up. Coming up next is my conversation with the
Speaker 1: author of The Trouble with White Women, Kayla Schuler. Folks.
Speaker 1: I am so excited to welcome to wok F for
Speaker 1: the very first time Kayla Schuler, who is the author
Speaker 1: of the book The Trouble with White Women. And I
Speaker 1: think that this book, love it, love it. I think
Speaker 1: that this book is so incredibly timely Kyla, in so
Speaker 1: many ways, because look, every single time that we have
Speaker 1: an election, every single time that we want to talk
Speaker 1: about particular populations, we will talk about every other group.
Speaker 1: We will talk about white women, we will talk about
Speaker 1: Latin X women, we will talk about Asian Pacific Islander women,
Speaker 1: we will talk about everyone, But we never talk about
Speaker 1: white women. It is like the third rail not only
Speaker 1: in our politics, but in our society as well. And
Speaker 1: I say that as somebody who started their professional career
Speaker 1: believing that they were going to work for a storied
Speaker 1: women's organization. My first internship in college was at the
Speaker 1: National Organization for Women, which I'll tell you more about
Speaker 1: later and how that ended. But it wasn't great. So
Speaker 1: tell tell me about why this book is so important,
Speaker 1: particularly now, Yeah, thank you. Um, you know, the one
Speaker 1: of the key political tropes of our supposed universal voter
Speaker 1: that Stragis would go after, which you would know much
Speaker 1: better than I, you know, which was the soccer mom forever,
Speaker 1: but for so long that soccer mom was totally devascinated
Speaker 1: right like, of course, by by soccer mom, we often
Speaker 1: means suburban white woman, but it just got stripped instead
Speaker 1: as if she's the female universal right, no race, no class,
Speaker 1: just a soccer mom. And that did start to shift
Speaker 1: after twenty sixteen, um with you know, famously almost fifty
Speaker 1: percent of white women voting for Trump and then also
Speaker 1: voting for Roy Moore, um in the election, and then
Speaker 1: in the second Trump election, you know, um, he got
Speaker 1: a slightly higher percentage of white women voters. Um, and
Speaker 1: you know, so then we did start to talk about
Speaker 1: white woman. But I found in doing this research that
Speaker 1: even when we are repeating to ourselves, how can it
Speaker 1: be that of white women are voting for candidate to
Speaker 1: run on white supremacist, anti women platforms, the problem is
Speaker 1: even more confounding than that, and that is that recent
Speaker 1: research last summer has shown that forty two percent of
Speaker 1: people who identify as feminists vote Republican. Wait saya say
Speaker 1: that statistic? One more time research poll, a Pure Research
Speaker 1: poll in August of twenty twenty found that forty two
Speaker 1: percent of women who identify as feminist vote Republican. And again,
Speaker 1: this is not Republicanism has always been, you know, a
Speaker 1: conservative party. It did not support racial and civil rights.
Speaker 1: That said, it has not weaponized itself against them for
Speaker 1: a while to the degree that the Trump administration has.
Speaker 1: And yet in this moment, what we actually have is
Speaker 1: an issue of not just white women supporting racist candidates.
Speaker 1: We have a thriving feminism that understands itself to be
Speaker 1: compatible with the worst forms of capitalism and white supremacy.
Speaker 1: And so when I did the research and wrote The
Speaker 1: Trouble of white women. That's actually what I'm writing about. Like,
Speaker 1: how is it that in our current moment, Ivanka Trump
Speaker 1: claims that her father is a feminist? How is it
Speaker 1: the researchers have shown that white supremacist groups like Stormfront
Speaker 1: online actually have thriving discussions about feminist topics? How do
Speaker 1: we have feminist white supremacy? And that I wrote this
Speaker 1: book to look backwards and find out how did we
Speaker 1: get here? Is this a new rupture in the Trump
Speaker 1: era or not? And what I found is that we
Speaker 1: were always going to end up here. Unfortunately, there is
Speaker 1: a very long history from the very beginning of feminism
Speaker 1: led by white women the understood itself to be compatible
Speaker 1: with racism, capitalism, and empire that focused only on the
Speaker 1: goals of privileged white women and securing their rights and
Speaker 1: liberties and opportunities, and actually leaned into other existing structural
Speaker 1: inequalities in order to bolster their own position. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, when we go back to the beginning of
Speaker 1: just the suffragists, right like, like, let's let's just start
Speaker 1: at that point. We won't even go all the way
Speaker 1: back to slavery and talk about um, you know, we
Speaker 1: always want to talk about the white slave master. But
Speaker 1: we never want to talk about the white slave mistress, right, um,
Speaker 1: the white woman that stood exactly next to the slave
Speaker 1: master and participated in and condone the violence, the cruelty
Speaker 1: that was bestowed upon enslaved Africans. But starting with the
Speaker 1: suffragist movement, you know, I find so many ties between
Speaker 1: that and how I got involved in the LGBTQ plus movement,
Speaker 1: you know, a century if so later, where you're always
Speaker 1: told if you are a person that exists at the
Speaker 1: intersection of multiple identities, that you need to leave parts
Speaker 1: of those identities behind if they are not in service
Speaker 1: of what those that are in charge of said movement
Speaker 1: believe is going to be part of what they believe
Speaker 1: progress looks like. And so during this time you have
Speaker 1: very racist and I want you to talk about that,
Speaker 1: very racist white women that were leading the suffragist movement, who,
Speaker 1: when pointedly asked by black women right in particular, that
Speaker 1: we need to be more inclusive and encompassing, were literally
Speaker 1: written out of that history. Yes, and when they were
Speaker 1: written in, we're written incorrectly, like in the case of
Speaker 1: a general truth, which y'all mention in the minute. So
Speaker 1: you know they by the very beginning of what we
Speaker 1: consider the dawn of women's rights in the US, which
Speaker 1: is the famous eighteen forty eight Seneca Falls Convention led
Speaker 1: by elizabth KT Stanton and a number of others. She
Speaker 1: staked her position in that speech as I am a
Speaker 1: daughter of a Mayflower immigrant, I am a daughter of
Speaker 1: a revolutionary war hero, and yet I am denied the
Speaker 1: full rights and privileges. And you know, famously, at that
Speaker 1: convention she first proposed that women should have the right
Speaker 1: to vote. And the only person who support ordered her
Speaker 1: publicly and immediately upon saying that was Frederick Douglas, who
Speaker 1: was also the only man and the only black person
Speaker 1: in attendance out of several hundred. But he understood himself
Speaker 1: to be a partner of the project of fighting for
Speaker 1: rights in the area of sex and of grace, and
Speaker 1: they did work together for a number of years, and
Speaker 1: Stanton and Tutan B. Anthony were active abolitionists. But after
Speaker 1: the Civil War, when the Fifteenth Amendment gave the right
Speaker 1: to vote to black men and men of color for
Speaker 1: the first time, and also introduced the word mail into
Speaker 1: the Constitution for the first time, but did not give
Speaker 1: the right to vote to any women. Then Anthony and
Speaker 1: Santon really went on the attack. Susan B. Anthony would
Speaker 1: say things like I'll cut off my right hand before
Speaker 1: I support rights for black men over women. Unlisa Katie
Speaker 1: Stanton would give long speeches about how the morally pure
Speaker 1: wives like her were being denied rights but illiterate ditch diggers,
Speaker 1: and she would be racial slurs and anti immigrant slurs
Speaker 1: were Chinese people and Irish people, but especially slurs against
Speaker 1: the formerly enslave. She said, you are letting letting the
Speaker 1: most degraded elements of society vote before you let your
Speaker 1: upright wives vote. And they even partnered with a notorious
Speaker 1: white supremacist in the West and so and then at
Speaker 1: that point Fredrict Douglas broke off from them and formed
Speaker 1: a different organization with a mixture of black and white
Speaker 1: Ayellies to fight for voting rights for all. But they
Speaker 1: really weaponized the case for women for women's rights as
Speaker 1: an issue of the rights of men of color and
Speaker 1: then formally enslavement, especially versus white women. And that's one
Speaker 1: reason that in this book, a key argument I make
Speaker 1: is that in this process of studying the hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty year history of feminism and being really excited about
Speaker 1: the popularity of the term white feminism now and how
Speaker 1: it helps us identify something we hadn't seen so clearly before.
Speaker 1: But I also wanted to find out what is that
Speaker 1: term mean exactly? And what I found is that our
Speaker 1: most common definition of white feminism as a feminism that
Speaker 1: ignores the conditions, the rights, the liberties of women of color,
Speaker 1: actually doesn't go far enough. The trouble with white feminism
Speaker 1: is not that it ignores women of color and the
Speaker 1: more marginalized. The trouble of white feminism is that it
Speaker 1: actually exploits the more marginalized as a way to bolster
Speaker 1: the position of white women. It's not a sin of omission.
Speaker 1: The trouble with white feminism is actually an active possession.
Speaker 1: To give you an example, you know the figure that
Speaker 1: I so each chapter of this book, I give you
Speaker 1: a main woman would often know from history, like Eliza
Speaker 1: Katy Stanton or Margaret Sanger or in the contemporary moment,
Speaker 1: Cheryl Sandberg, and but show that at her time, at
Speaker 1: her moment, she was in struggle with a different kind
Speaker 1: of feminism and a different key figure who has been
Speaker 1: more erased from history, and I focus in particular in
Speaker 1: the suffrage era on Francis E. W. Harper, who was
Speaker 1: the best selling black poet of the nineteenth century. And
Speaker 1: yet it is often forgotten outside of college classrooms today.
Speaker 1: And who we hear about is so journ Our Truth.
Speaker 1: And so Journer Truth was an incredible activist. But what
Speaker 1: we know about her is that she said at one
Speaker 1: of these conventions at will. But the black feminist historian
Speaker 1: nel Urban Painter showed us twenty years ago that so
Speaker 1: journey Truth never said ain't woman. She wasn't from the South.
Speaker 1: She was from upstate New York. Her first language was Dutch.
Speaker 1: She learned English at age nine and prided herself in
Speaker 1: her impeccable English. There is a transcription of her speech
Speaker 1: publishing a black newspaper two weeks after, and the first
Speaker 1: line is something like, can I have a moment here?
Speaker 1: I like to speak for a moment here. Fifteen years later,
Speaker 1: Stanton and Anthony published a history of Woman's rights, and
Speaker 1: they tapped a white woman ally to write up so
Speaker 1: journal Truth speech, and that speech is anti woman and
Speaker 1: is entirely in dialect that's completely made up. Fifteen years
Speaker 1: later by a white woman to create a kind of
Speaker 1: plants many figure here, and even you know, one hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty years later, we still think that we are
Speaker 1: correcting history by giving the characters a version. But black
Speaker 1: newspapers and black womanists have been correcting us on that
Speaker 1: for since the eighteenth I mean, it's just what is
Speaker 1: so utterly disturbing to me. You know, at the top,
Speaker 1: you mentioned, you know, the weaponization right of you know,
Speaker 1: other people's struggles, right as in order to advance for
Speaker 1: white women as in order to advance their own And
Speaker 1: what is so disturbing and disgusting is that it persists,
Speaker 1: and it is so incredibly obvious, right you know, And
Speaker 1: what I have said on on Woke af and so
Speaker 1: many other shows is that white women find their power
Speaker 1: in proximity to white male patriarchy, right And that is
Speaker 1: that is where they find their power, That is where
Speaker 1: they find their influence and always have, right um. And
Speaker 1: I will go back, you know, to to the plantations
Speaker 1: and the slave masters and what have you that you know,
Speaker 1: there is a reason why there is no incredible pushback
Speaker 1: right now with regard to the anti abortion laws that
Speaker 1: are happening across the country because white women will always
Speaker 1: have access to an abortion right because they have the
Speaker 1: means and they have the ear and the attention of
Speaker 1: white men who have always been looked at as their
Speaker 1: caretakers in order to make sure that those things happen.
Speaker 1: It is everyone else who is low income, who is
Speaker 1: a person of color, um that is left out in
Speaker 1: the cold. My question for you is, you know, in
Speaker 1: studying this and understanding that to be true, and recognizing
Speaker 1: that we were always going to arrive at this point
Speaker 1: in our in our in our current day like was
Speaker 1: there there was no way to deter, you know, to
Speaker 1: throw to throw this off course. And if even if
Speaker 1: we're all recognizing this truth now in our own ways,
Speaker 1: how are we How are we shifting that narrative or
Speaker 1: can it not be shifted? Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 1: And one reason I did go with this provocative title
Speaker 1: the Trouble with White Women, is that I also see
Speaker 1: it to encompass the trouble that white women's face, and
Speaker 1: that trouble the white women themselves face is exactly what
Speaker 1: you mentioned of. There's always this carrot dangling there, especially
Speaker 1: from middle class and wealthier women, that they could of
Speaker 1: the lure of to have the privileges that their brothers
Speaker 1: and our husbands and our boyfriends, our family members have. Right,
Speaker 1: there's that lure of you could join the rest of
Speaker 1: the top of the power hierarchy if you just can
Speaker 1: get past that sex, which, of course, traditionally into this day,
Speaker 1: that hindreds of sex is still enormous. I don't mean
Speaker 1: to discount the structural inequalities of sex, but I would
Speaker 1: also point out that the people who gave us the
Speaker 1: political language to understand the structural and equalities of sex
Speaker 1: are people like Murray Right, Kimberly Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins,
Speaker 1: the black feminist who said, we can understand sex the
Speaker 1: structural and equality because we also understand race and class
Speaker 1: of structural equalities, and here's a framework for understanding them.
Speaker 1: So for now, for you know, like like you mentioned,
Speaker 1: you worked with NOW, there is a moment that things
Speaker 1: could have gone differently. No Now was formed in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties in the wake of the resurgence of women's rights,
Speaker 1: which traditionally it's credited to the publication of Ready Finance
Speaker 1: Feminine to Speak in nineteen sixty three, but there was
Speaker 1: another key pickoff in nineteen sixty three, and that was
Speaker 1: the March on Washington, and how much the male leadership
Speaker 1: of March on Washington relegated the women involved to the sidelines,
Speaker 1: didn't let them speak on the march platform, made women
Speaker 1: like Rose A Parks march with their wives instead of
Speaker 1: with the civil rights leaders and involved a leadership team
Speaker 1: like Polly Murray fought them for months and then gave
Speaker 1: many speeches afterwards saying, we have to recognize that what
Speaker 1: we're feeling in this anger for how we were treated
Speaker 1: by our by the men and the sotal rights movement.
Speaker 1: But this is not just an emotional issue. It's a
Speaker 1: political issue. And Polly Murray game a really really rousing
Speaker 1: speech about the sexism in the march in Washington that
Speaker 1: Betty Fernan read about in the newspaper, and she called
Speaker 1: her up the next morning and said, let's talk. Let's
Speaker 1: start an organization for women, and the nash Contization Women
Speaker 1: was born a few months later at a major conference
Speaker 1: and Polly Murray was on the board. So we're a
Speaker 1: number of other we're going to call our leaders. It
Speaker 1: was in a year Polly Murray dropped out because she
Speaker 1: said this platform is only going to focus on the
Speaker 1: needs of the class by women. Wasn't turning out to
Speaker 1: be an anti racist organization. It wasn't turning out to
Speaker 1: be organizations supporting workers and labor. And said, I can't
Speaker 1: be pulled into three directions a black person here, a
Speaker 1: woman here, and a worker here. And she dropped out,
Speaker 1: and and now I've had a lot of difficulty being
Speaker 1: anything but a middle class white women organizations since and
Speaker 1: I would and I would, I would just add to
Speaker 1: that also a incredibly cisgender and straight white woman, middle
Speaker 1: class you know organization because you know, at the beginning
Speaker 1: of you know, the turn of the decade of the
Speaker 1: two thousands, I found myself at the National Organization for
Speaker 1: Women because it was a storied organization. I always wanted
Speaker 1: to work for a women's rights organization, and as a
Speaker 1: young black, queer woman that was getting ready to graduate
Speaker 1: from college, I found myself there on an internship with
Speaker 1: a myriad of you know, young women of color from
Speaker 1: all across the country, queer and straight. And you know,
Speaker 1: after several months realizing that, you know, I was, I
Speaker 1: was invisible, right like there the issues and the intersectionality
Speaker 1: that we speak of today, right was was purposefully. I
Speaker 1: don't even want to say that it was lost. It
Speaker 1: was purposefully ignored because if you were going to be
Speaker 1: in and that organization at that time, then you needed
Speaker 1: to be a woman and a woman only, and that
Speaker 1: meant to neutralize any other forms of your identity. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is really powerful, right. And Betty Franz famously tried
Speaker 1: to kick all the lesbians out of NOW in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine, nineteen seventy, and there was a lot of pushback.
Speaker 1: But what you're saying is those legacies like don't go away.
Speaker 1: The organization never really truly tried to collect itself. There
Speaker 1: was an important woman in the organization in nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: but then but that really kind of got erased. And
Speaker 1: I found that his historian has found that NOW has
Speaker 1: not ever even done a demographic survey of its membership
Speaker 1: since nineteen and if they're serious, if they have, If
Speaker 1: they have, it's not released publicly, I think because what
Speaker 1: it yields is not going to be good for them,
Speaker 1: so they just haven't made the data available. Um, but
Speaker 1: I think, yes, like there there certainly are other other
Speaker 1: other opportunities. I think that what we're seeing in the
Speaker 1: outcry against white feminism across the world right now. M
Speaker 1: is hugely important in helping people understand that just because
Speaker 1: something as feminist doesn't mean it's necessarily progressive and doesn't
Speaker 1: mean it's against structural inequality. I think that intersectional feminism,
Speaker 1: you know, which reframes the goal. Instead of being we
Speaker 1: want a quality between the sexes, intersectional feminism says we
Speaker 1: need to broadly redistribute resources, that we have equality for
Speaker 1: the many, not for thee, and that means racial justice,
Speaker 1: economic justice. We are in transjusice, climate justice, you know,
Speaker 1: disability justice. It is a huge umbrella category. And the
Speaker 1: leaders of those theories like Kimberly Crunshaw again, Poticia Health Collins,
Speaker 1: and then Paul even Paul Murray, I've been also very
Speaker 1: clear that that is only achieved by people working in coalition,
Speaker 1: that we have to reach across our differences in order
Speaker 1: but on a common political platform to build a movement
Speaker 1: strong enough to actually go after systemic inequality on all
Speaker 1: those levels. I think that that is happening at some level,
Speaker 1: and I think that I think that the leadership of
Speaker 1: Black Lives Matter have been absolute models of that for
Speaker 1: years of what a black queer anti violence. The organization
Speaker 1: can look like that against structural violence and police brutality.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of the Me Too movement has
Speaker 1: actually been very successful, you know, especially especially what the
Speaker 1: Toronto Burke does, but working across groups and also internationally.
Speaker 1: I'm getting a lot of interests in this book from
Speaker 1: Japan and Korea, for example, because Me Too has caused
Speaker 1: a stimulated major feminist awakenings, and I think that is
Speaker 1: really exciting to see a movement like that have have
Speaker 1: such legs. And then you know, the work of activists
Speaker 1: in Congress, even right of the Squad and the expanded
Speaker 1: Squad with Corey Bush and then the others are showing
Speaker 1: us what it can look like to actually fight for
Speaker 1: quality on multiple fronts of one, not just choosing one thing.
Speaker 1: You know. I think that it's so you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's funny. I want to say that I sadly just
Speaker 1: recently learned of Paul Murray and was so angry at
Speaker 1: the fact that I didn't know I didn't know who
Speaker 1: she was. It wasn't until literally two months ago that
Speaker 1: I was asked to UH moderate a panel for the
Speaker 1: documentary the document the documentary UH that is out now
Speaker 1: on Amazon Prime. And I met with the I you know,
Speaker 1: interviewed the director, one of the directors of the film,
Speaker 1: and you know, and and and she talked about the
Speaker 1: fact like this is why we wanted to do this.
Speaker 1: You know, she was instrumental in so many different in
Speaker 1: so many different avenues. I mean, when when you understand
Speaker 1: the story of a person that was advocating well before advocating,
Speaker 1: you know, for for for desegregation, I mean, for yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, well before Rosa Parks even got on a bus,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, And like, you know, trying
Speaker 1: cases that would and setting up the framework for what
Speaker 1: we would use for Brown versus the Board of Education
Speaker 1: and Title nine, um. And it's just it's astonishing to
Speaker 1: me that you can have these towering figures who, for
Speaker 1: not for their existence, we wouldn't even be here, right
Speaker 1: in so many different forms of fashion that are utterly
Speaker 1: and completely whitewashed and erased from history. And you know,
Speaker 1: and I think that it's so the work that you're
Speaker 1: doing and the studying that you're doing is so important
Speaker 1: because when you think about what it means to purposefully mischaracterize,
Speaker 1: to join a truth, to make her into a figure
Speaker 1: that was this uneducated mammy right that they could then use,
Speaker 1: you know, to justify why they needed their rights and
Speaker 1: why they were superior. And like the desire to degrade
Speaker 1: in order to you know, in order to progress to
Speaker 1: me seems to be white women's like, you know, mode
Speaker 1: of entree and I just don't understand. I don't understand it,
Speaker 1: you know, And I ask you, you know, the last
Speaker 1: question I have for you, like, as a white woman
Speaker 1: doing this work, right, like, what kind of pushback do
Speaker 1: you receive? Right? Like, what kind of conversations do you
Speaker 1: have you had and do you get into with this
Speaker 1: type of provocative research and discussion because again from the beginning,
Speaker 1: this community white women is the third rail in our
Speaker 1: society and politics. We don't ever discuss unless we're empathizing
Speaker 1: or lifting up. Yeah, and you know, I'll admit that
Speaker 1: I first heard of Polymurray about eight years ago, and
Speaker 1: I was already a professor of gender studies at Rutgers University.
Speaker 1: And I heard of poly Murray because my new polleague,
Speaker 1: Britney Cooper, gave a talk about Polymurray and my eyes
Speaker 1: were opened. And I want to emphasize that that is
Speaker 1: part of my role in perspective in coming to this
Speaker 1: work is that these counter histories I'm telling of the
Speaker 1: Black trail and Indigenous and Latina women who are who
Speaker 1: are fighting against white feminism were less ignored than deliberately erased, right,
Speaker 1: but not forgotten for everyone and not forgotten by everyone.
Speaker 1: The work of black feminist historians, in particular since the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, like Angel Davis and Paula Gettings and many
Speaker 1: others has been to recover these histories and bring them
Speaker 1: back into the public eye. And that work is certainly
Speaker 1: out there. I'm not making any major discoveries in terms
Speaker 1: of the counter history of what I'm trying to do,
Speaker 1: and partnesses in my role as a white woman is
Speaker 1: to provide to synthesize this work and combine it with
Speaker 1: my much more original critique of white feminism, and to
Speaker 1: provide another avenue for people to encounter these these other
Speaker 1: histories and to you know, to to build on and
Speaker 1: pull together the all this important work that's been done
Speaker 1: for decades. So for you know, for example, the one
Speaker 1: of the most outrageous details that I found it is
Speaker 1: about Paul Murray, and this isn't in the nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: five nineteen fifty six. At that point she had done
Speaker 1: all the things you mentioned right, created the legal rationale
Speaker 1: for Brown versus Board, but her male supervisors had never
Speaker 1: even told her that was the case. She was had
Speaker 1: invented the sit in um. She had written a book,
Speaker 1: a law textbook of civil rights law, the third and
Speaker 1: Marshall called the Bible. She had become the first African
Speaker 1: American to get a residency at the McDowell Artists Colony,
Speaker 1: and she was a regular visitor at Elanor Roosevelt's upstate
Speaker 1: Hudson River treat because they made they became friends after
Speaker 1: she wrote a scathing letter in the paper about her husband, Ye,
Speaker 1: and because exactly there were friends for a decade at
Speaker 1: that point. And yet what Polly Murray was doing for
Speaker 1: a living was typing. She couldn't get full time work
Speaker 1: as a lawyer. She also had a master's in law
Speaker 1: from Berkeley, and they graduated top of her class at Howard.
Speaker 1: She was typing, and she was typing anonymously for the
Speaker 1: work of other writers. And one of her main clients
Speaker 1: was Betty for Dan And so in that chapter I
Speaker 1: counterpoise Betty Franz's story with Polly Murray's story, and we
Speaker 1: are quite literally one person got erased through the but
Speaker 1: another person got elevated to the role of the key
Speaker 1: feminists of that time. In terms of pushback, I mean,
Speaker 1: definitely some white women don't like the title of the
Speaker 1: Trouble with White Women, right, I mean, I definitely may
Speaker 1: be accused of being a racist, you know, or that
Speaker 1: you know, racist again against white people, and that kind
Speaker 1: of like race trader logic. But really I want to
Speaker 1: I want to emphasize that I think that I want
Speaker 1: you know, that it's important for white women to be
Speaker 1: talking to other white women about this work. I also
Speaker 1: think we are past the point for that conversation to
Speaker 1: be fully insular and where we're only talking about whiteness.
Speaker 1: That we need to be also listening and learning about
Speaker 1: other forms of feminism and from especially from intersectional feminism,
Speaker 1: which is absolutely showing us the way to what equality
Speaker 1: on all fronts looks like. But I really understand myself
Speaker 1: to be a student of intersectional feminism and helping to
Speaker 1: listen to that work and again to provide a new
Speaker 1: road to reach it, not to claim any kind of
Speaker 1: ownership or discovery because black women have been doing this
Speaker 1: work since the eighteen sixties. I mean, Kyla, I just
Speaker 1: you know, I am so appreciative one that you are
Speaker 1: doing this work, that as a white woman you did
Speaker 1: write this book, and that you are researching and presenting
Speaker 1: you know, centuries of evidence right of how you know,
Speaker 1: because I don't want to have I don't want to
Speaker 1: be stuck in the conversations of how did we get here?
Speaker 1: I want to finally get to a place and you know,
Speaker 1: and and again, because we have so many purposeful wrongs
Speaker 1: in our history, we have to do both end at
Speaker 1: the same time, question how we got here and then
Speaker 1: how we where we are headed next? Like we just
Speaker 1: don't have the luxury to be able to do one
Speaker 1: and then the other. Not at not at at this
Speaker 1: critical stage. Um. I just I again, folks, the book
Speaker 1: is the Trouble with White Women, Kyla Schuler. I really
Speaker 1: hope that you will come back to woke a f
Speaker 1: and continue this conversation. I know that it's gonna spark
Speaker 1: commentary among the wike AF audience, So I hope that
Speaker 1: you'll join us again soon. I would love to thank you,
Speaker 1: so thank you. Take care of by That is it
Speaker 1: for me today. Folks on Woke app as always, Power
Speaker 1: to the people and to all the people. Power, Get
Speaker 1: woke and stay woke as fuck.