Review of White Women, by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao

Are you sitting comfortably?

Two years ago (ish) I finally yielded to Instagram. Earlier this week I yielded to Audible. My move back to the UK has been a crash course in passwords, websites and going back to living in a world “at pace.” 

A few weeks into my return from New Zealand, I found myself at the hospital having an ongoing breast issue checked (get yours checked). That would also happen to be the day a sofa was arriving. The door to our property opens through an intercom that connects to my phone. The sofa arrived as I was having an ultrasound. I leaned over from the hospital bed thing, an hour’s drive from where I lived, and let the chaps in. The radiologist (not impressed that I had to take a phone call) asked how it was to settle back to Blighty. My raw answer, as one often resorts to in a state of undress with a medical professional, was one of “overstimulation.” I found myself qualifying the statement by discussing Amazon and describing that I was getting used to ordering things online and them arriving the same day. Moving back has been hugely stimulating by comparison to living in New Zealand where things move, operate and are provided at a very different pace.

I haven’t looked back though and I have signed up to doing everything online, as one has to, as Artificial Intelligence takes over. I had learned about this in the course I completed all the way away in New Zealand with the LSE. The automated life that I learned about that was one of the focusses of the modules of that course on International Relations, Business and The Political Economy, is my every single day experience. 

One of my daughters recently remarked to me, “Everything is so real here.” She said it as if she too, was overwhelmed. I am at least glad that things are “real” for her. I asked her to expand her theory and she went on to describe that everywhere you go you hear the news, discourse, crime, death, good things, bad things. She mentioned the cost of water, heating, and the wars currently raging. Her teachers are weaving politics, the cost of living, the world in everything they do. Things of topic are on topic. We had just returned from a weekend in London, North London to be precise and I could not help but think that had something to do with it as well. London is real, and it is multi ethnic.

Which brings me to Audible. Reconnecting with friends after eight years, who have known you for twenty five, is also quite real and defining. And our trip to London was to meet a friend of mine who had settled in North London with her family. This friend mentioned to me that she listens to Audio books. This planted a seed. Then, last week, as we decorate our new home and are choosing bedroom lights, my husband remarked that given I did not read much in bed, lighting would not be an urgent matter for me. Ouch. I need to read more. 

So I downloaded Audible and the first book I bough was “White Women, Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better.”

Ouch. What a title? Would you have that title laying about on your coffee table? What would it say about you?

To be honest there are two other books currently sitting on my coffee table. One is EmpireLand by Sathnam Sanghera. The other is India, A Wounded Civiliazation, by V S Naipaul. 

But White Women had been on my radar for a few months now. More importantly Saira Rao, an American of South Asian descent who is one of the authors, was on my radar. She was on my radar for being hated. 

Hate. Hate. Hate. Rao was recently lambasted for a Tweet suggesting Taylor Swift could effect a ceasefire in Gaza if she called for one. The suggestion here that Taylor Swift’s and her predominant white following have the power to call it. If you didn’t know, 74% of her fans are white. Swift that is, no Rao.

THE REVIEW

“White Women, Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better,” is a book every parent should read. In fact, it reminded me of Barbie movie, but you just have to switch the patriarchy with white women. It is also about personal development.

I know. The title doesn’t suggest that though does it?

The writing is aimed solely at white women. It is direct, discomforting, unforgiving and gives a clear message to white women from which none of them can escape. It pinches. I am brown and it pinched me.

White women are told they are ‘unique as fuck.”  I fidgeted when I heard how white women insist on being “strawberry blonde” or “it’s Katherine with a K.” This physically moved me as these two authors were saying all the things I have heard so many white women say, as a means for them to be individual and claim their uniqueness. We all want to be unique right?

No sooner, even as a brown woman that I am getting used to this unprecedented relentless direction at white women, that the authors preempt that white women will likely put the book in the recycling bin. These authors are committed and consistent in their aim. Like all experts, they know what their subject matter will do next.

Then there is discourse on the mere hatred of white women being called white. The authors question why it's acceptable to call your colleague Indian for example, but not your white colleague your ‘white colleague.” 

So who are the authors? They are two women of colour. They have impressive and tenacious backgrounds. Saira Rao and Regina Jackson. Saira describes herself as “Asian” (and I know for my Kiwi readers that suggests only Chinese/Japanese/Korean but in the US it means South Asian) and Jackson is a black woman. 

They both set up Race2Dinner which offers evenings with Jackson and Rao, where they sit down to dinner with eight to ten white women (who all know each other) at the house of one of them, and talk about race, in America. This all began before George Floyd was killed by the way. 

Rao and Jackson are small women. They are small and determined. 

The dinners cost hundreds of dollars per head. They have been criticised for this and from the outset the authors address the criticism as racism. If this was a yoga retreat where the hosts were wispy waspy blond, and the participants were fed nothing and slept on wooden beds charging an extortionate cost, it would be ok right? But a dinner with two small women of colour talking to you about race that costs USD600 per head? That’s robbery right? I mean how exactly are they qualified? 

Oh and speaking of robbery, Jackson and Rao also have a white woman friend who comes along to the dinner with them (a form of support and perhaps kind of proof that they don’t hate white women). No she doesn’t rob either, although later in the book we learn that white women steal the ideas of women of colour at work. But it is Jackson and Rao who are perceived as untrustworthy with money. Of course they are and I cringe when I learn that at the end of the first few dinners,  the nice white ladies ask the white woman friend of Jackson and Rao “where the money goes.” Of course women of colour can’t be trusted with money right? The authors in fact rationalise this by saying white women expect this work to be charitable. They even go further and claim white women want control over what brown women do with their money.

So what do you think? How do you think these dinners go? What kind of women do you think sign up to them? 

If you are already in the know of Rao and Jackson, you will know that these dinners are tense and end up with some white women in tears. I knew this. What was new learning for me however, was that the women who signed up to the dinners were mostly liberals. And it was these liberals who ended up in tears. Some have mixed race kids. These women are not KKK members. They have black brown and indigenous friends. But despite their liberal CVs and track record of donating to racial justice causes, the views and feelings that come out, are racist.

White Women carefully extracts so many experiences that women of colour have experienced at the actions and words of white women, that you really cannot come away thinking that perhaps there is not an issue with white womanhood. 

THE OPPRESSION OF WHITE WOMEN BY WHITE MEN AND WHITE WOMEN

The book pans out a clear argument as to why the authors use the term white women, why they speak about white women the way they do, and what the issues are. They make a strong case based on their dealings with white women and those of others. And one element of their case is that white women oppress Black, Brown and Indigenous women because they themselves are oppressed in their own lives by white men. 

This is groundbreaking as we are so used to seeing it the other way around. We are so used to a feminism that tacitly assumes women as only white, and women of colour as oppressed with no control over their lives, their clothes, their education. 

No wonder Jackson and Rao are hated. 

So what is the oppression of white women? Well they discuss the fractured relations between white women and their daughters, white mums overlaying thinness on their daughters, their inability to call out the men in their lives, the inability to call out racism from their fathers, their obsession with being nice at all costs, how mean they are to each other, their obsession with brunch, their obsession with their daughters finding a rich husband. They anticipate your rage at these thoughts.

I stop myself and think this is just all about American white women. Or is it?

But I understand that what they believe is not that white women are a lost cause, but that white women are subject to the principles of their own oppression which leads them to oppressing women of colour. We are also repeatedly told that white women know exactly what racism is and know how racist they are. I don’t see what is wrong with this as a theory. 

I mean, even if you really do not feel that you fall in the category of racist white woman (and Rao and Jackson believe anyone thinking they are not racist is racist in itself), don’t you see that this is a thing? And even if you don’t see this as a thing, are you not open to seeing it as one potentially when presented with the evidence?

So where else do we see this white woman phenomenon, if this is not just limited to America?

Well, this book matches my experiences with many, many women in New Zealand. But my experiences aren’t relevant here, firstly because they are unlikely to be believed and secondarily I want to focus on the book as that is evidential, that is where the work has been done and that body of evidence is diverse. 

Notably in relation to my experiences however, there are two things in the book that resonated. The first is that according to the authors, it's easier for white women to go that extra mile to tell us to behave, and be less aggressive and less rude than, than to tell their own to do so. Yes I definitely felt that happened to me.

And secondarily, they repeatedly point out that a key tenet of white womanhood is for them to backstab each other. In this regard, the restaurant example that they give of watching a group of white women having a meal together, and what they say about each one when each one leaves to powder their nose is damning. And yes, I saw some pretty heinous behaviour between white women, but the difference was it was between these women as friends. 

So how can a book that tells us that white women are oppressed be a parenting tool? Because the chapter on the experiences of black brown and indigenous women in the workplace at the hands of white women, is not just a tirade against white women, it is an essential survival guide on how to save yourself even if you are a white woman, from white women exhibiting these behaviours.

BUT ARE RAO AND JACKSON TRAILBLAZERS?

You see this has been done before. We just weren’t spoon fed it.

When we don’t throw our arms up in the air over the sheer nastiness and back stabbing between (white) women that we see in Legally Blonde, Sex and The City, and even Friends, in their all white casts, if we are not getting upset when white women on films and movies and in real life, are stealing husbands of their friends etc, sleeping with their bosses etc, why on earth are we getting upset with two women of colour writing this book pointing out a lacking in their sorority and calling it a white woman thing? 

Would it have been better or more palatable for example if these two women of colour had made a film with an all white cast addressing the issues in this book, and just calling it women omitting the white? 

And what about Bessell Van Der Kolk? His book The Body Keeps The Score admits that his data and frankly his entire book on trauma, is collected on white women. Where is the outrage on him for pointing out the overwhelming statistics of white women being sexually abused by fathers and relatives in America? There is no outrage on him, as he comfortably just refers to his data as “women”, only very minimally pointing out that actually he has minimal data on the trauma of brown women. Imagine if he rewrote his book and in each and every case put the word “white” in front of the cases of the “women '' he was describing. 

ASIAN WOMEN ARE RACISTS TOO, THEY SAY

Rao criticises Asian people in her book too, its not just white women! Yes, she criticises women, just like me for being anti black. Rao delves into the psyche of Asians in America who raise their kids to be anti black. All Asians are anti black she says. She describes how it is an unwritten rule in Asian families to raise kids to align with white people over black. 

Oh but this is America right? Asians aren’t like this elsewhere right? But I believe that we can take exactly the same principles against all white women in this book, and apply the principles to all asian women being anti black. ALL. 

And does this upset me to hear that all Asian women are anti black? No.

When Rao denigrates herself for once falling for “Laura Ashley”  and wearing pearls, it made me see how other Asian women dressed in this way, and myself. 

Did I cry that women like me were being accused of white supremacy? No. When the authors criticise white women for upholding the white male patriarchy by merely marrying white men, do I quiver and worry that I too am upholding the white supremacy by marrying a white man? No I do not. 

But what I do, as the authors request time and time again of white women, is that I sit in discomfort of these ideas.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO YOGA

Flanking the book White Women there is the documentary of “Deconstructing Karen.” This is the televised one hour or so version of some of these dinners and gives more information on Jackson and Rao. This documentary has a famous white New Zealander woman as an executive producer.

In one scene of the docummentary, sadly yet predictably, one of the white women so very resistant to the learning Jackson and Rao have imparted, accuses them of being “resistant.” I don’t want to give away more of what she says but let's just say she preaches love. It’s actually golden reality TV. And what this does is undo everything she had been told. Yet she still pushes that it was Rao and Jackson who had the problem, and not her and white women.

And this took me to yoga. 

“Sitting with the resistance” is a key tenet of the white parlance in yoga. Just to confirm, I believe that being required to sit in discomfort is commendable. But it made me wonder. Why is it that when a white woman yoga teacher says it, it works and white women readily sit in the discomfort, but when two short women of colour say sit in the discomfort, it doesn’t work. At all. Instead they are told they are being unreasonable and aggressive.

Why are white women so happy to sit and explore and inquire in a terribly uncomfortable yoga pose, but remain so resistant to questioning their own white supremacy? 

Time for a little story. 

When I was in Auckland I used to go to a yoga studio. It was great. The classes were so diverse, young and old, black and brown and Chinese, binary and non, big and small, injured and not. My husband once said a Muslim woman attended with a Hijab. The studio was owned by a white American lady. And she was nice. She also had that American air about her. For me she treated me like every other person. Her yoga classes focussed on growth and achievement. It followed Baron Baptiste. I found a safe space to do yoga. Sure there was Namastay at the end, but there was little cultural appropriation. The teachers were humble and body positive. There was no reference to the Gita, and any spirituality was offered by an indigenous instructor. 

But then I moved house and it was far from the studio. And then the studio changed hands. I could tell it was going to change hands as a new teacher arrived with a different style. She was an appropriator. She said “Hari Om Tat Sat” at the end of class and told us all that we would not know what that meant. It was annoying. Anyway, a year or so after it changed hands a yoga influencer and winner of awards in the yoga space in Auckland contacted me about this studio. She was concerned about the appropriation of this studio around using Goddess Kali. The long and short of it was that I ended up having a call with the new white woman owner asking her what she knew about Hinduism and Yoga, and had she considered that making yoga religious in this way had to respect both the religion of Hinduism, and had to ensure she was being inclusive of other yoga people whose religion needed to be respected. 

And boy was she rude. She didn’t know that Muslims could be excluded by a Kali event. She didn’t know what intersectionality was. She did not know much to be honest. Aside from how to be rude to me.

She was terse, she protested “we are good people,” she wanted “not to overthink it” and in fact just as this book explains, she made my call for respect and inclusivity all about her character. 

The call ended. I never heard from this woman again, there was no follow up, there was no inquiry, there was no desire to show me what she had learned. And there was none of this because she did not want to learn. The demographics and reach of her yoga studio were not her problem when it came to inclusion. 

Love and light have no colour right?

But something interesting did happen. One of the newer white British yoga teachers from this studio who was still working at that studio under our new offended yoga studio owner, stopped following me on Instagram within days of this call. And she stopped following the yoga instructor who called me with her original concerns. 

I guess there was no desire to sit in discomfort right? Nope. It was just unfollow, move away, move off that table when you hear people talking of racism and group together with your white woman friends and stay away from those radicals! When white women collectively shut down on a critique of their actions, it is, according the authors, “white solidarity.”

Rao cuts a really interesting figure for me because I have not encountered many Asian women, married to an Asian man like she is, who are so switched on to racism. My own experience is that many Asian people of my generation are raising there children exactly how we were - align with being white, shut up about racism, racism is not something you talk about, racism is weakness, shut up and become a doctor banker and lawyer and you wont experience racism (this is one of the greatest lies all Asian kids are fed), talking about racism is anti white and when you are anti white you align yourself with Muslims and Black people, which is societall suicide, saying white in itself is offensive, and seeing colour means you have the problem. 

Saying white, in my own culture is seen as bad, hence the title even put me off.

And what this does, revering whiteness, as it did to Rao was push her into an all white crowd of people who did not let her be her authentic self. And at worst, what this does to young Asian girls whose parents are actively veering them towards white friends over black brown and indigenous is actually, in my opinion, having devastating effects on the mental health of young brown girls.

People of colour veering their kids towards white people is a well trodden path.

I found this book confronted my own behaviours, my own perceptions, my own allegiances and made me question what I have seen in my own life, and not stood up for it. It also made me realise that I need to prepare my children not to be weary of white women, but to ensure that they are mindful of what happens in the workplace and have tools to deal with it regarding the behaviour and race of all women. 

I want my kids to call this racism out that white women inflict on women of colour, AND I want them to call white women out on the backstabbing they engage in on their own women, AND I want my kids not to align with whiteness in order to survive. 

THE TOKEN

And why I would like my kids and your kids to do this, is because I also do not want young girls and women to be tokens. 

“Tokenism” namely the idea that the one friend of colour in a white group is a token, upholding the racism to survive, is really well addressed in this book.

And so whilst I was lucky not to have had the same experiences of Rao in my formative years at university, it was however my experience in New Zealand with a group of school mums in Auckland that made me confront tokenism and racism. And when I realised that I was being treated as a token for the first time in my life, I ran. Now I just want to explain that it was not that Great Britain is a haven of no tokenism, it was more that when I did meet women who treated me this way in the UK, I stayed away from them and they stayed away from me, crucially. As such I look back and enjoy many positive relationships with white women prior to moving to New Zealand. But certainly it was moving to New Zealand when I met women who seemed not to be able to cope with me, my education, my wealth and opinion, and they moved in packs. I have never met more white women who move in packs as I have done in New Zealand, and if it is the case that it happens in the UK, I am really lucky I never had that experience. Most of my white friends here are independents.

But when my eyes opened to what was happening in New Zealand, I would run hard. I ran from the Book Club that refused to discuss race and ethnicity when it came to adoption and in which I became a target (text about me accidentally sent to the wrong Mel)) despite there being me a brown and another indigenous woman who just sipped and stayed silent, I ran from drinks parties where I was the only woman of colour where no one talked to me and if they did they assumed I was a relative of the other brown person, or if they would, they commented on my skin. Boy that was funny, commenting on the skin of a black/brown woman is something an old white woman told me she openly admits to it. Can you imagine me asking my husband why white women did this to me and me asking him if they want my skin?? No Dear….

I ran from the Taylor Swift mums who hated on Beyonce and whose kids did the same and excluded the other brown kids who liked her, I ran from the Dance School which was constantly appeasing the hard case white mums for my daughter’s abilities like she was an alien who should not have had the ability, their comments on dresses suiting her colour so backward, I even ran from the Maori Dad who told me of his one racism experiences whose daughter dropped mine for white girls and friends and circles as kids in New Zealand do when they go higher and higher up Senior School, I ran from the white dad on the board of the school (and formerly on the board of an international charity) who sped off aggressively near me in a car park after I had highlighted how racist the school was, I ran from a yoga group when the mum whose mixed race daughter actively stayed away from the Asian girls in our school (and the Asian mums saw this and talked about it) joined, I never dined with white women again who got up and walked away from the dinner table when I mentioned the racism I had experienced, and I ran from a woman of colour who consistently gas lit me over my racist experiences, as she just wanted me to shut up about it all as that was her means of survival.

I ran from as many people as I could until my white woman friends dwindled into a fraction of the people I had met. And the ones left? All these women come from a range of backgrounds yet, all having one thing in common, a desire to look at oneself and one’s people. A desire to not make any thing about them. You see when I talk about racism, like Jackson and Rao, it is not about me, it is about all women of colour. But my experience of talking to most white New Zealander women I met, was that when I talked about racism, it became all about them. Just like this book describes, they would either be upset, they would want to tell me that they were poor, what they did at school, how shocked they were. I was like, dude this is not about you, this is about your people.

How can we discuss something unless we look at it collectively?

THE OPPRESSION OF BROWN WOMEN 

And, speaking of your people, this is what Jackson and Rao also do in this book. All the while that this account paints white women as oppressed and badly behaved, it also talks of the oppression of Black Brown and Indigenous women. 

Unlike feminism which never talks of colour and always assumes that white women are more liberated and free, and have self respect and autonomy than Black, Brown and Indigenous, this book also concedes that Black Brown and Indigenous women are oppressed by their own men and women too. Jackson and Rao are not saying white women are oppressed and their own women liberated. 

In my own Asian culture I have seen women are generally expected to shut up, not speak their mind and yield to traditions. Thankfully many of us are allowed an education, but speak up about the abusive hostile behaviour of a male relative whether younger or older? Tell a male elder to get lost? Watch male members of the family be lauded despite their infidelity, drinking and abusing their wives. You are having a laugh. Matriarchs use men to prop them up.

And just like white women are accused in this book of hailing their mums as civil rights marchers yet at the same time unable to call out their father’s racism, as I write this, I think of many Asian women who claim that their mums were liberated or “modern” because they worked or because their Dads did housework, but who equally do not call out the patriarchy in their own family. In the same vein in which white women are accused of being powerless to colleagues and friends when racism is spoken, I wonder how many brown women stand up and speak out when they are hearing Islamophobia, Anti Black or colorist and casteist statements? 

I have seen Asian women make exactly the same calculation white women make in arriving at the conclusion that there is “no point in calling it out” as the perpetrator is old, it doesn’t matter, it’s ok, as some of the excuses I hear when I enquire why Asians do not try and break the patriarchy in their own families. 

And as with white families, macho also pays in my Asian culture. A husband that drinks, abuses his wife and treats his wife like a servant is a ”man”. A son is still King and a husband that cooks, stays at home and whose wife calls the shots is a loser, and his wife a bad person.

This book my friends is not an attack on white women, it is a critique on all of us and our track record on racial justice and patriarchies in our lives. 

The punchline of this book is not that white women are bad, it is a plea to white women to ease off women of colour as we are experiencing patriarchy from white men and our own men and oppression from white women, as well women in our own culture upholding patriarchy and white women, to get ahead. 

And this pretty much sums up what it is like being a woman of colour. You either join white men and women and brown men, or you just get pushed down.

AT THE TIME OF WRITING 

And so in that vein, the final thing that I want to extract from this book is how much women of colour talk of experiencing racism each day and every day on their journey before work, only to then experience aggressions at work. 

Listening to LBC radio recently, I  was really saddened by a Sikh man whose childhood involved him seeing his mum be racially abused, every morning by their white neighbour before he went to school and she started her day. Can you imagine that? 

You know, for those of us for whom this racism does not happen, and now that I do not live in Auckland my daily experiences of racism have drastically reduced, I still remind myself of how disappointing it was to be on the end of racism and further how disappointing it was when I told white New Zealanders of the racism, and they expressed “shock.”

Rao and Jackson describe “shock” as white supremacy”. Because shock at a problem is distancing yourself from it. Eventually, in addition to cutting myself from being the token, I dealt with this repeated issue by cutting my social circle to people who understood it was prevalent and who did not get offended by it.

I walked away from as many nice white couples who hated me talking of racism as I hated their response to it. Anecdotally I felt safer around white people who wanted to discuss their experiences and opposing thoughts on racism when hearing mine, than the silent ones. 

And so I remind myself of this and I remind myself to be understanding and I remind myself to engage, because I know despite my privilege in the UK, there are people here who experience racism every day.

I have been back here in the UK a few months and I have already witnessed two instances of racism, experienced two instances of bias and heard of one instance of racism against a child. 

At the time of writing, Barbie has not won any BAFTAS and Oppenheimer, a film about a white man and which I am told has outrageous sex scenes, has swept the board, confirming to me that Greta Gerwig should have kept her Barbies solely white and having sex in order to be accoladed. 

Meanwhile Beyonce has been overlooked yet again for album of the year at the Grammy’s and the white media are not enraged as it seems that she just needs to stay in her lane. I just watched Killers of the Flower Moon, a movie about the violence inflicted on indigenous women in America, a film that I don’t think is going to help the many indigenous women who go/ have gone missing in America as it centres De Niro and Di Caprio. And Gabriela Rodriguez, a single mother and cleaner from Ecuador who is a cleaner in London is in the news - it is alleged that she was sacked by her employer for eating a leftover tuna sandwich at Devonshires Law Firm. What is even more horrific is that it is alleged that Devonshires allegedly complained to her employer about it. Rodriguez is claiming none of this would have happened if she was white. Beyonce is also in the headlines over her release of a country song (that ties in with her heritage) and white men like the chap from Dukes of Hazard are losing their stools over it comparing her to a “dog that must urinate on every tree.” Has no one told this chap of the sheer number of white women artists who delve into rap, salsa and take on Asian looks in their own music? Oh, and a hair care brand Beyonce has launched is being discussed by a white woman reporter on the TV as celebrities “making money.” No discussion about the fact that there is a huge gap in the market for women with African hair.

And we go back to the same point at the beginning of this Substack, black women’s activities are never seen as benign and their money must be dissected and policed. This reminds me of a lawyer I once worked with in the UK, a chap with white and Indian heritage who moved back to New Zealand and read one of my opinion pieces on his arrival. He was such a numpty that he forgot he once worked with me in London. This man reached out to the paper and asked to speak to me and then (not knowing he knows me) had a tirade at me for talking about racism in New Zealand against Indians. That was fine. I did not mind that. But then he said he heard me talking about racism on the radio, again that was fine. But it was the last point he made. He said I was “touting for work.” And there you have it, a white woman can go on the radio and talk about her business and it is all ok and fine, but a brown woman talking about racial justice is “touting for work.” No shit I was looking for work. There is a lot to be done. 

Oh and someone just told me about a podcast they were recommended in New Zealand of Joe Rogan and the topic of white privilege not being a thing. I just laughed. 

But it happens that this book is actually very funny as well.

White Women, Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better, by Saira Rao and Regina Jackson. Personal Development.

I hope this Susbtack informs your outlook.