Coming to Terms with White Women
Yesterday, I listened to Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk Podcast where she discussed her struggles to come to terms with racial bias against white women.
I have to confess that even though I have a white husband, a beautiful white daughter-in-law, and there are many white women in my life that I love, I often struggle with bias against white women. I say this knowing that I’m part white and understanding that my daughter is better than half-white.
My issues with white females started early in my childhood. In 1978, when I was about nine years old, my family moved from mostly black Inglewood to almost exclusively white Torrance. With the exception of two half-black boys who were doing a really great job at passing, I was the only black student in my elementary school.
I dealt with prejudice from day one. No one wanted to sit next to me. My teacher sat me next to a girl with long blonde hair, and the girl literally cried.I was then moved next to a boy who spent our first week together sitting at the corner of his desk as far away from me as he could get. This is when I learned that white girls could cry at pretty much anything and get away with it. When I cried for little to no reason, my parents promised “to give me something to really cry about.” Teachers had little to no patience for crying black girls either.
I got teased constantly about my hair, which was in braids with beads at the end. I’d get called “bead-head” and “click-clack”. Most of the girls in my school were really excited about the “feathered” hair-style made popular by Farah Fawcett. At recess, they would pretty much all stand around combing their hair, mastering the hair toss, and looking down their noses at me and my corn-rowed hair.
I spent my time playing on the bars with my best-friend Deena, who was a cute-chubby girl with curly red hair. The feathered look was beyond her and she got teased about her body constantly, but she didn’t care because she was going to be an actress! I wasn’t going to be an actress. I played the clarinet, so I cared. I cared a lot. My life wasn’t made any easier when beads fell out of my hair. If boys found the beads, they’d make a game out of throwing them at my head.
Then the movie trailer for “10” introducing then new actress Bo Derek came out. I couldn’t turn the channel on my television without seeing Bo Derek running half-naked along a beach, her long corn-rowed blonde hair (yes, with beads) bouncing off her shoulders.
That’s when things changed for me. The same girls who looked down their noses at me were now begging me to ask my mother to braid their hair. I think that this was my first experience with cultural appropriation. Back then, I didn’t know any more than to be excited that I wasn’t being teased for my hair anymore.
I remember how frustrated my mom was with the whole situation. She kept saying to me that you just couldn’t throw a black hairstyle on a white head, and she refused to do it telling me that she wasn’t going to waste her time braiding hair that wouldn’t hold.
Looking back now, I am bitter at how easily those girls changed their minds about me and their concept of beauty, and as I got older and as time changed, my frustration with white women grew. It felt like one day, I would get teased about my big lips, and the next day I’d see white women paying for lips like mine. One day, my brown skin was ugly, the next time I turned around, white women were paying to get skin darker than mine. And always at the end of the day, I was seen as the lesser one.
I modeled for a while in my 20s, and I will never forget when my agent said he would have a problem booking me because my features weren’t white enough and asked me to consider getting my nose redone to look more like Iman’s, who was only popular because of her white features (his words, not mine).
Regardless of how others see us, black women do a lot of self-cheerleading. We tell ourselves that no matter what, we are beautiful. Our mothers were also our greatest cheerleaders. If I came home upset about getting teased about something, my mother would always turn it around and tell me that the problem wasn’t with me but the world. The only exception is our hair. It often seems that neither a black woman nor her mother was satisfied with her hair.
On the other hand, white women seem to constantly struggle with self-esteem. According to a survey in Glamour, while 59% percent of black women consider themselves beautiful only 25% of white women consider themselves beautiful. I often see my white friends struggle with self-esteem, especially weight. I want to shake them and say, “Shut up, you’re beautiful.” I struggle with self-esteem and weight too, but I still look in the mirror, and say, “I’m fat, but I’m as adorable as hell.”
I struggle with getting angry with white women a lot. Actually, I got particularly angry with this white woman this morning. Over the years, I have learned to keep myself in check. I have to constantly lecture myself on accepting white women as they are. After all, I want them to accept me as I am. I also have to say to myself, “One white woman doesn’t represent the whole population of white women.”
However, in 2016 white women pissed me off. After the election, I felt betrayed by white women as a whole. Every time I turned on the news, reporters kept reminding me how white women did not come out for Hillary. I saw white women voting for Trump as not only a betrayal against blacks, but as a betrayal against their own. When asked why by reporters, white women’s only response seemed to be “I just can’t stand Hillary.” A black woman could hate another black woman to her face, but at the end of the day, she’s still going to turn around and vote for that same black woman because sisters stick with sisters. And sisters stuck with Hillary. We came out for Hillary 94% while white women came out for Hillary 43%. While white women’s mouths were saying, “We hate Hillary”, white women’s actions were saying, “We don’t care about women or black people.”
I think at the end of the day, it comes down to that sense of betrayal. White women activists will spend a lot of hot air telling black women we are the same because we share the same struggles as women, but in the end, white women will abandon us and vote for people like Trump. Or, in the case of Megyn Kelly, will abandon us and say that there’s nothing wrong with blackface, thus proving that our struggles are not the same. White women are not in this with us. We black women are on our own, no matter how much white women try to tell us we’re not.
While logically, I understand that this doesn’t speak to white women as a whole, and it does not speak to the majority of the white women that I consider my friends, it does speak to that large majority that voted Trump. And now in the recent election, the news could not stop talking about how white women came out for the Democrats this year, as if we’re supposed to be grateful for the fickle finger of the white ballot box.
I have spent the past few years trying to move past that awful vote and the sour feelings I have in my stomach not only against white women, but the whole Trump voting population. At the end of the day, we all still have to live with each other. The bitterness and sense of betrayal does nothing but hurt the world around us, so I’m endeavoring to let it go and focus on the good in the world, and there is plenty of good to spread around even if it is hard to see right now.
And I will endeavor to understand and accept white women, especially on days when they just plain boggle my mind. I have spent a lot of time talking to a lot of women who voted for Trump. I think I understand them a little better. We are motivated by different things. It does not make them evil or even racist. It just makes them very different from me and my experiences.
Stay tuned for a follow up to this story.
Katerina Canyon is a writer currently living in Seattle, Washington. She served as Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, California from 2000 to 2003. She has a MALD from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a BA in English, Creative Writing, and International Studies from Saint Louis University. She has been published in the New York Times and Huffington Post. Her most recent poetry was published in From Whispers to Roars. Her latest collection Changing the Lines is currently available on Amazon and Elliott Bay Book Company. You can learn more about Katerina at PoeticKat.com.
