Why is this course designed for white women and led by white women?
White Women and the Power Paradox was born so Brianna Boggs, Madeline McNeely and others could lead a movement of white women to show up, speak up and act up more powerfully to lead racial justice and dismantle white supremacy. Join us, we and the world wants and needs you.
Grappling with the “intersectional dimensions of patriarchy and white supremacy” (Kimberly Crenshaw) is complicated. Madeline has held a mirror up to herself for her whole young adult and adult life exploring each of her identities and unpacking how they shape and inform her consciousness and work in the world. The first decade of her career as a youth worker and consultant to youth organizations was in communities of color systematically targeted by white supremacist policies. When she was in her early 30s, she knew if she was going to continue to dismantle racism and be an even more effective anti-racist leader, organizer, consultant, coach, she had to learn to lead people of her own race more effectively since her people are the designers of white supremacy.
White supremacist practices has stripped people of their souls. Although not from a religious family, she knew leading white people in a faith-based context would force her to sit with the rage and confusion she had towards the Christian religion and it would help her deepen love for herself and her white brothers and sisters. After practicing Paganism, Buddhism, Yoga, she knew she had to wrestle with her Christian roots and not run away from her own cultures religious traditions. Christians have to have been traumatized and dehumanized to initiate, tolerate and perpetuate enslavement and genocide of other human beings for hundreds of years.
Madeline has slave owning and slave trading ancestors and her work is as much about liberating herself as it is other whites who have lost their sense of dignity through tolerating, maintaining and exacerbating white supremacy for 401 years. There is no neutrality as a white person given the legacy of colonization and the USA’s love of and obsession for extractive capitalism and militarization.
White women have been shaped by internalized sexism and patriarchy to collude with white supremacy. Most white people in the USA don’t grow up with a racialized consciousness. We have a white-washed experience of the world. We think our worldview is normal and healthy. We learn as girls to be good, support men to maintain economic and social structures that privilege men over women, white people over people of color, young people over elders, cis-gendered folks over trans and non-binary people etc...
There is still a glass ceiling for women in this country. Corporate women leaders are disproportionately asked to rescue companies when they’re failing, placing women at the edge of the glass cliff. Working class women disproportionately are responsible for raising children and maintaining careers often working 2-3 jobs just to make subsistence wages. The way racism, classism and many forms of oppression interlock to maintain white supremacy is a white problem.