calling all white girls

By a white girl, for all white girls.

I’d like to have a conversation. Let’s start here:

What feeling does reading the title invoke in you? 

We have a responsibility to claim and to hold each other accountable for taking. 

If the title and/or above sentence angers you at all, how come you feel this way? If not, how do you feel?

I can echo my peers and write a piece for an audience who shares my opinions. I can continue to live in a bubble inhabited by like-minded people. So now I’ll ask a question to myself: what good does that do for the society I live in?

Not much.

I write this with the lived experience as a white girl, to the ones who don’t agree with me and to the ones who do, because this is a call to all white girls. 

Let’s have an honest conversation. I’ll start with an honest statement: we are agents of white supremacy. We reap the benefits of the systemic oppression of people of color, especially Native Americans and Black Americans, inflicting violence against them and erasing their cultural identity. 

How do you feel? You feel bad?

If you don’t, ask yourself why. Is it apathy? Apathy is a luxury few, certain people can afford. 

If you do feel bad, sit with it.

I used to feel an awful pit in my stomach when I thought about participating in and benefitting from systemic abuse. I would hear my friends trade stories about how they were harassed by police since childhood, ridiculed by classmates and even teachers with no consequence, had to and continue to work twice as hard for half as much--and while enduring all this and much more--having to represent your entire race. How their parents were tormented and their grandparents were tortured at the hands of people who hold all the power; people who gave me that same, stolen power.

When I mess up, I only represent myself. When I don’t get a job, it’s never because of my race. When I make a fraction of a man’s dollar, it’s still a bigger fraction than another woman’s dollar. We get that privilege. My friends shared their experiences and I’d just listen, upset. And if you feel it too, that’s fine. That’s reality kicking us in the stomach.

You may be thinking, “Wow, that sounds harsh.” Is it though? A person coming to terms with the fact that they are actively supporting and contributing to institutional abuse, and then feeling a negative reaction, is standard human decency. Baseline empathy for other people. The fact that the kick was delivered to us is ridiculous, as it couldn’t have disrupted the active delusion we all live in if we did not live in it.

So will you continue to ignore that feeling? That pit in your stomach? Ignoring it is why you have it, because you’re doing nothing to solve the problem causing it.

Guilt! There it is. Ah, precious white guilt: abundant, valueless, and detrimental to society. 

C’mon white girls, what are we going to do? Posting about how sorry we feel doesn’t matter. People show that they’re sorry through changed behavior. 

On the other side of the coin, what do you consider ‘changed behavior’? Do you applaud yourself when you do the bare minimum? Do you even realize it’s the bare minimum? Do you expect your non-white friends to thank you and are surprised when they don’t?

And on the other hand holding that same coin, do you get a weird feeling when you see white friends and family members posting that Black Lives Matter? Do you feel offended by white peers supporting Black strangers? If you do, how come?

“But Stefania, I’m a wwoooommmmaaaannnn. I deal with horrible things all the time.”

Yes, so am I and so do I. Think of all the shit we deal with. You’ll think of 10 different things in 30 seconds. We’ve been raised in a patriarchy and we live in a patriarchy--but guess what sisters--it’s a white patriarchy. 

If you think your life is hard as a white woman, what is making you resist the idea that life is harder for a Black woman, or that others suffer more than you do? Are you gaining anything from this denial? Just when you think the answer is no, it’s really yes. By denying that women of color endure challenges and overcome obstacles we can’t even imagine, we subconsciously acknowledge that we are in a better societal position. How do you feel when white men tell you that you’re weak, or that they’re stronger than you are? You think about how they have no idea what kind of pain we carry, because they’ve never had to experience that pain or the burden of carrying it, and they never will. We, as white women, can never fully comprehend or feel the pain that people of color experience because we have never been the victims of systemic racist oppression and we never will be. Actively denying that there is a disparity between the societal treatment of white women versus women of color further entrenches us in white supremacy.

Now that we’re discussing this baseline fact, how are you feeling? If you’re on either side of the aisle, you’ll agree that facts don’t care about your feelings, and actions speak louder than words. 

This is not an attempt to shame anyone, because our feelings are not the center of this discussion and they shouldn’t be. This is a call to action. We view the world through rose-colored lenses so it’s hard to see all the blood.

If you keep the glasses on knowing the blood is there, what does that say about you? Do you look down and see the blood on our hands? Will you keep your glasses on or try to stop the bleeding?

I need to be held accountable as well. I’m fortunate enough to have a platform that supports my writing, and I am using this opportunity to call attention to our role in white supremacy. Do you also have a platform with an audience? Are you in any kind of position where people listen to you? If you are, are you using your power to uplift others’ voices? If you’re not, when and how will you start?

How much of our fashion sense, music taste, artistic and cultural inspirations, is appropriated and stolen from others? Look at what’s in your closet and how you do your hair. Where did these influences come from? How much are we supposed to take before we finally start to give back?

Go online and find the dozens of articles with steps to take. They’re waiting for you. It’s crazy that these resources are even available. There’s unlimited information out there waiting to be utilized and here we are, sharing black squares on Instagram because another Black person was murdered by police. Normalizing tragedy and becoming desensitized to it, because it happens so frequently and never to us, is indicative of a dystopia.

What will you do now?

Stefania D'Andrea is a prose and comedy writer from Queens, NY. She is one of the original staff readers for the literary magazine Cagibi, where she edits and reviews works of fiction and non-fiction. Her first short story, In Her Head, is published in the 12th issue of Newtown Literary. Many of her comedy sketches have been performed at the People's Improv Theatre (PIT) in New York City in 2018 and 2019. Stefania received her B.A. in English, with a concentration in Creative Writing, from the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Hunter in 2017.