I. Theological Reflection on White Women's Misery

Following 2020, which has been called “the Year of Karen,”¹ 2021 saw several highly anticipated, book-length indictments of white womanhood.² Among them was sociologist Jessie Daniels's Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It.³ There, Daniels weaves stories from her life as a white queer woman and academic with multi-disciplinary research and current events to sketch white women's unique complicity in white supremacy in the United States. Some of her harshest critiques are pointed at progressive white women, who—being “nice white ladies”—are quick to exonerate themselves from responsibility for any number of intersecting structures of oppression. In turn, Daniels calls white women readers to interrogate their own lives and do better, especially through the hard work of sustained collective action.

This theological roundtable grew out of a session at the 2022 College Theology Society annual convention where the authors engaged Daniels's Nice White Ladies as a springboard for critical reflection on white womanhood in US Catholic theology, especially white feminist theology. Although Daniels's text remains central, this roundtable invites readers to consider insights from several antiracist thinkers and explore the broad implications of white womanhood for academic theology. As white women in theology, we recognize and are indebted to the growing body of work addressing racism and whiteness in both society and theology. Our goal is not to suggest that this theological roundtable is innovative by treating these topics. Rather, this roundtable seeks to respond to the call of theologians like M. Shawn Copeland that all theologians, including and especially white theologians, must attend to the harmful realities of whiteness and racism as they address questions within respective fields of expertise.⁴ Specifically, we turn to questions within theological anthropology, the Catholic social thought tradition (CST), and moral theology.

“Whiteness is the lie that is killing us, and the lie is gendered.”⁵ This line from Daniels's Nice White Ladies captures both the central argument of her sixth chapter, where it appears, as well as a Baldwinian anthropological thread that runs across her larger project.

In 1984, in Essence magazine, James Baldwin published an essay titled “On Being White . . . And Other Lies,” where he observed the false promise of whiteness: whiteness pitches itself as the best kind of human life, he observed.⁶ It does so through American civic education, TV and films, the white family, the white church, and the commercial advertising that pervades contemporary life. All emphasize the glories of being white. What they do not disclose, however, are its costs. Maintaining the rigid social order of whiteness requires whites to relate inhumanely to others and to themselves. This of course harms others, and it also results in whites’ own moral and psychological erosion—erosion that, according to Baldwin, whites often distract themselves from with “garbage” TV and a “vast amount of attention to athletics.” White people settle for an inhumane life of cold comforts because “They do not want to know the meaning, or face the shame, of what they compelled—out of what they took as the necessity of being white.”⁷

Nearly forty years on, Daniels agrees with Baldwin's conclusion that “the ‘price of the ticket’ required to become white is to give up one's full humanity.”⁸ She strives both to substantiate the claim that whiteness demands the self-destruction of white people and to build on it by showing that the false promise extended to white people is a gendered one: white women are uniquely told that their capitulation to whiteness will ensure happiness, satisfaction, comfort, belonging, meaning, safety, and value. Yet white women incur particular forms of psychological damage in the trade-off they make to become white in this way.

Daniels's attention to the psychological effects of oppressive social and cultural systems bids US white feminist theologians to revisit a line of critique concerning the psychological oppression of women that runs through white feminist theology from its very beginnings. Daniels's argument exposes how this line of critique has frequently reflected and perpetuated white normativity and neglected white women's complex complicity in the workings of whiteness. Contending with white women's misery and reclaiming the God-given, full humanity of all will thus require white feminist theologians to revise their theoretical reflections on psychological suffering in several ways.

Before proceeding, it is important to acknowledge that white supremacy scams and harms everyone with its false promises: whiteness promises white men security and satisfaction that it cannot guarantee; it tells Black men and women that if they are a certain kind of Black man or a certain kind of Black woman, then they too can find happiness and contentment within this social order. All these lies demand that individuals live in ways that compromise their full humanity. For her part, Daniels is focused on the promises extended to white women. As she describes it, white women “think the bargain is this: be nice, channel light and love, and everything will work out.”⁹ Go along with whiteness by aspiring to be a particular kind of person: a property-owning, upper-middle-class, consumerist, self-interested, Christian, straight-married, child-rearing, hot-and-thin housewife. Do so and you will gain a happy, satisfying, and valuable existence under the protection of the white community, especially benevolent, powerful white men. This is what whiteness sells white women like me.

This promise of white, womanly happiness, however, comes at a hidden cost. Daniels warns: “The real bargain is actually: be nice and do not speak up because our collective silence, and especially the silence of white women, facilitates the continued smooth operation of oppressive systems.”¹⁰ This silence is the “price of the ticket” to white womanhood, as Baldwin would put it, and while so many white women deem this transaction worthwhile, others find that their silence is a higher price to pay than they bargained for.

This silence is not just a matter of literal words. Importantly for Daniels, it also entails the sublimation of any and all affects that challenge prevailing regimes of whiteness. It therefore requires the denial of a whole range of white women's human experience. For, when the “perfect PTA mom” admits the dissatisfaction or even disgust she harbors toward her lonely and materialistic white suburban life, or when the nurturing mother confesses how much she despises her pure white children, or when the beautiful and doting white bride discloses her depression—these feelings indict the promises of American whiteness.¹¹ These expressions of misery and dissatisfaction evince that white womanhood is not as glorious as promised.

Whiteness insists, however, that if white women just stay the course of white womanhood—stay quiet, cooperative, happy, and nice—then someday they, too, will be rewarded with a happy white life. Told to fake happiness until they achieve it—someday, eventually—many white women are left with lives marked by discontent. Thus, citing affect theorist Sara Ahmed, Daniels sees a terrible irony in the white supremacist lie that is extended to white women: the very pursuit of white happiness is what undermines so many women's genuine happiness.¹²

Daniels links the lies of white womanhood and its accompanying psychological costs to rising rates of suicide among American white women, especially those at middle age—the very age when white women should supposedly be relishing in the actualization of their marriages, motherhood, and upper-middle-class comforts.¹³ For this connection, Daniels references studies on how suppressing one's emotions can engender negative health effects, including mental health conditions.¹⁴ This leads her to suggest that the promise of white womanhood necessitates the denial of negative emotions, which in turn causes mental illness and the disproportionate rates of suicide among this population. Hence her statement: “Whiteness is the lie that is killing us, and the lie is gendered.”¹⁵

Some important truths about mental illness and suicide provide additional nuance to Daniels's reflection on the relationship of white women's suppressed emotions, mental illness, and suicide. First, though scholars of mental health tend to agree that social realities like sexism and white supremacy can contribute to and magnify mental health struggles, most assert that these realities alone cannot account for mental illness. Among the additional complex causalities of mental illness are individual biology, personal experiences, and family genetics (including, potentially, genetic modifications that result from the intergenerational trauma of whiteness). Second, though most who die by suicide experience a mental disorder of some kind, most mental illness does not end in suicide. Thus, to the extent that the emotional suppression of white womanhood contributes to mental illness, this alone cannot account for a dramatic increase in suicide deaths. Like mental illness itself, suicide has a more complex causality than the mere presence of mental illness.¹⁶

That being said, there is corroborating research on the connection of social oppression, silencing, and women's mental health. For example, Dana Crowley Jack observes how gendered affect norms shape the depression of heterosexual women who suppress negative feelings in order to embody the ideal of the “good wife” who is “friendly and smiling all the time.”¹⁷ When women find themselves unable to sustain this silent, idealized image of the “happy wife,” they often judge and blame themselves for their failure; this in turn magnifies the self-loathing and isolation of depression, perpetuating a cycle of self-stigma that can heighten depression.¹⁸ Although the whiteness of the women in Jack's study is mostly implied, her findings track with what Daniels observes and explicitly associates with white womanhood.

Research like this substantiates important aspects of Daniels's argument by illustrating, first, that the detrimental silencing of women is racialized, if not in a way that is exclusive to white women,¹⁹ and second, that Daniels has good reason to link this suppression of negative emotions to mental health struggles.

In these regards, Daniels's account of whiteness's gendered lies offers important lessons for all feminists and antiracists but especially those engaged in and with US white feminist theology. For one, it serves as a corrective to the reductive narrative that patriarchy is the sole or primary social factor to blame for women's misery. Attention to patriarchy's effect on women's psychological distress has been rigorously theorized at least since Simone de Beauvoir, but it came into wider recognition in 1963 with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.²⁰ Black and Brown feminists critiqued Friedan's inattention to the diversity of women's experiences, asserting that classism and racism—including the racism that benefits miserable white women—also contribute to and magnify the psychological burdens of women of color.²¹ Daniels builds on their important criticisms by showing that racism not only hurts Black and Brown women but also magnifies the psychological burdens of the white women who in other ways benefit from it.

That white women suffer psychologically from their own whiteness means that the moral agency of white women is far more complicated than what has often been represented in white feminist discourse about psychological suffering, including white feminist theological discourse. To the extent that white feminist theology has attended to the psychological burdens born of social oppression, it has frequently spotlighted patriarchy as the source of women's distress, not acknowledging how racism, classism, and other social oppressions also contribute to women's psychological pain. In Mary Daly's The Church and the Second Sex, for example, she engages de Beauvoir's account of sexism to argue that women's exclusion from leadership in the church “contributes significantly to the process of inculcating inferiority feelings and causes psychological confusion.”²² In another ground-breaking feminist text, She Who Is, Elizabeth Johnson similarly observes how patriarchy and sexism lead “to an internalized sense of powerlessness” that inflicts psychological damages including “low self-esteem, passivity, and an assessment of oneself as inadequate even where that is patently untrue.”²³ Frequently throughout Johnson's text, she acknowledges the diversity of women's experiences and the effects of racism, classism, and other structures of oppression on women of color. Yet when it comes to women's psychological suffering, her analysis focuses on the contributions of patriarchy alone—as if this particular suffering is merely gendered.²⁴

Even when white feminist theologians have acknowledged the psychological consequences of racism in addition to patriarchy, they have often done so in a way that reproduces white normativity. For example, Ann O'Hara Graff's chapter on feminist psychology and theological anthropology in the edited volume, In the Embrace of God, discusses how a range of social oppressions—racism, classism, and sexism—contribute to different women's experiences of depression and other forms of psychological distress.²⁵ In contrast to Daniels's analysis, however, O'Hara Graff identifies racism as something that negatively affects women of color alone—as if white women are unaffected psychologically by the racism that they participate in as white people.

I count myself among white feminist theologians who have discussed how white supremacy contributes to and magnifies experiences of depression among people of color, all while never questioning whether the white supremacy that I participate in also contributes to the depression of white women like me.²⁶ This analytical shortcoming reinscribes the notion that white people are unaffected by race, a falsity that perpetuates white normativity and supremacy and which, as Daniels shows, misrepresents the entangled and detrimental workings of whiteness in our lives.

This oversight undermines a truly intersectional feminist theological analysis of women's psychological suffering, and it is one that white feminist theologians, including me, need to remedy in our scholarship and teaching.²⁷ Doing so will come with some intellectual and personal risk. Ignoring the psychological effects of whiteness on white women conveniently sidesteps white women's collective complicity in their own misery. Daniels's project challenges white feminist theology to address the fact that while many white women are miserable, they are sometimes not wholly innocent victims of their misery. This is a second lesson that white feminist theology can take from Daniels's work: By opting into whiteness, white women may be at least partially complicit in some social realities that contribute to their own distress.

In speaking about how whiteness contributes to white women's misery, a reductive reading of Daniels could suggest that white women's participation in whiteness is the cause of their depression, such that their depression is their own fault and repentance from whiteness would rid them of mental illness. Daniels is not as explicit about eschewing this reading as she could be, but ultimately, this does not appear to be her message. Still, many US Christians are primed for this kind of account of depression, for it remains common in many faith communities to hear that depression is one's own fault—that it is the result of one's own sinfulness, for example—and so one need only repent from sin in order to free oneself from depression.²⁸ This popular Christian view of depression individualizes a sufferer's culpability, casting it as a moral sin that the sufferer actively chooses for herself. Note that a hyper-autonomous, modern—and thus white—anthropology underpins this view of depression.

It is important and clarifying to note how Daniels's observations about white women and psychological distress depart from this particular Christian view. Instead of casting depression as an individual problem that white women should deal with independently—perhaps by willing themselves to “cheer up” or simply “get over it”—Daniels situates mental health at the intersection of the individual and the collective, the personal and the political. She implicates white women in a form of collective social sin, which deindividualizes culpability in white supremacy and its effects on depression. This analysis situates the depressed white woman within a network of relations and power structures. In so doing, it forwards a more relational anthropology, one that understands sin and agency in interpersonal, collective, and structural terms. This is appealing as an alternative to modern, white-supremacist constructions of the self—and also as a more adequate Christian anthropology.

These differences present white feminist theology with a third lesson: contending with white women's complicity in their own psychological suffering will require a commitment to a truly relational anthropology. Without an anthropology that accounts for the complex entanglements of our personal and collective freedoms and sins—the kind that Black and womanist theologies have exhorted for some time now²⁹—white feminist theology will miss Daniels's insights about the relationship between white women's moral agency and their own psychological suffering. Too, white feminism will continue to misunderstand the complexities of racism and its responsibilities for it, as Megan McCabe's contributions to this roundtable illustrate further.

Fourth and finally, Daniels's analysis can support white feminist theology as it strives to envision a world where all can flourish. Counterintuitively, contending with white women's complicity in whiteness and its psychological effects could actually help some white women who struggle with depression by presenting a message of hope and another, richer vision of human life. One reason why moralizing views of depression are likely so popular among Christians is because they tell sufferers that they can do something to better their situation: if depression is my fault, then I can do something about it! Though this message individualizes and frequently overestimates sufferers’ agency, some see this as a hopeful message amid a condition that can often feel otherwise hopeless. So, too, in naming how participation in white supremacy might contribute to white women's misery, Daniels spotlights the possibility that white women can do something; they are not helpless victims.³⁰ White women may be unable to fix their own their depression by sheer force of will, but they can join with others to do something about white supremacy—something that, in turn, may also support their psychological well-being.³¹

For, though a move beyond whiteness will not itself resolve depression, a life beyond whiteness might make depression more livable for women and all those who live with this mental health condition and other forms of psychological distress. Conceivably, a life beyond whiteness would be a world where negative affect is less threatening to the status quo. Insofar as American whiteness is defined by individualism and materialism, it would be a more communitarian world where people recognize their responsibility to care for those who are struggling and where care for others and for the self take priority over productivity and wealth acquisition. And in a context where Christian supremacy is constitutive of whiteness as well, moving beyond whiteness would entail the rejection of Christocentricism. With that would emerge new possibilities for interreligious companionship and collaborative innovation in pursuit of a better world for all.³²

For white women to work toward this better, more satisfying way of life, they must choose to invest their agency in something other than whiteness—a countercultural move that requires some personal risk. It requires them to opt out of the affective economy of whiteness by denying the promise of happiness, security, and superiority in exchange for another, less socially prized and privileged way of living. For Daniels, opting out of whiteness is the condition for the possibility of living a full human life—one that includes the entire range of human experience, including anger, disgust, frustration, sadness, but also real joy, community, and belonging—all realities of which are precluded by a whiteness that demands conformity to a very narrow and overdetermined affective range.

For these reasons, white feminist theologians like me need to continue attending to the link between social oppression and psychological suffering, albeit with a truly intersectional approach that includes considerations of how our whiteness hurts Black and Brown women as well as ourselves. Doing so will help white women contend with their complex complicity in whiteness, it will better reflect Christianity's relational anthropology, and it may help depression sufferers, including many white women, by casting a better vision for another possible world.³³