why i write about whiteness

oh, you're scared? go deeper

Hellooo…remember me?

Yes, I’m the Sabrina Carpenter girl.

It’s been (genuinely) fun over the past few months to see the reception of my essay about popstar Sabrina' Carpenter’s brand shift, and the media rollout of her smash hit album, Short n’ Sweet. As we rode the political rollercoaster of the fall and early winter here in the United States, 120K of you engaged in a lively discourse (again, genuinely) on her brand’s implications for intersectional feminist politics in the US and beyond. As Sabrina’s popularity continued to skyrocket—including a reportedly fantastic, reportedly camp holiday special I’m due to view—the engagement with my article rose. Turns out that a few, routine voice memos between you and your friend Emily might be the thing to make you go Substack viral. (Ish.)

Internet attention historically makes me want to yak, but the conversations I was able to have in comments, DMs, and in real life were refreshing, thoughtful, and productive. Considering the even darker time my sheepish Americans and I are entering, the honest feminist discourse we produced on here—despite the platform’s many, many drawbacks—lent me some additional resilience and curiosity going into 2025.

There is one thing, though. Many of you did not want to talk about whiteness.

An excerpt from my comments section.

Perhaps it’s that I’m fresh off the literature review for my Master’s Thesis. Maybe it’s the constant, cold-plunge experience of the Chicago winter that affords me the audacityclarity to write back to you all. Whatever it’s sprung from, I’d like to talk about whiteness with you now, please.

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As always—just kidding, this will only happen twice—let’s begin with Sabrina. She’s white. I chose to write about her whiteness because to write about just her womanhood would be too simplistic. It would homogenize 50% of the world’s population. And as someone who went to journalism school, it would be inaccurate to write about Sabrina Carpenter’s presentation of and commentary on femininity without also referencing her whiteness.

My spidey senses (okay, my whiteness) tells me you might be getting defensive right about here. I don’t reference her whiteness because it is a slight to her. I reference it because it informs how she represents herself as a celebrity, as a woman, and as a brand. Her whiteness is a vital piece of the knot I’m unraveling, because our understanding and performance of gender here in the United States—heck, maybe I can even extend it to our collective experience across the post-colonial world—is built on the foundation of the Atlantic Slave Trade.¹ It was Black & African women, Indigenous women, Asian women, SWANA² women, Jewish women, and more historically other-ed communities who Western Europeans used as alchemical mirrors. In order to create what we now know as white womanhood—one amorphous thing followed by another, equally disputed one—there had to be something that was neither.³ That was, well, everyone else, but that tradition of comparison and self-definition was passed down through Western European lineages until your eyeballs landed on my essay. Afterward, too.

But it’s not only white women who practice this comparative minuet. In white-dominant societies like the United States, non-white women are also forced to formulate their own femininity according to markers not meant for them. I don’t need to wax poetic to you about media representation or structural racism (I hope), but the impulse to church-and-state-ify the concepts of race and gender is, in today’s world, impossible. The standard of femininity in my country is that of a blonde, Western European white woman, just as it is in most nations which carry legacies of European colonization. While each racial, ethnic, even cultural community has their own set of beauty standards, I can bet each are, at most, seven steps away from anti-Blackness and/or anti-Indigeneity. We live in a globalized, colonized, imperialized world, baby! Get hip to it and see the signs!

Sabrina Carpenter—just like you and me—does not exist in a vacuum. The difference between us and her is that she is a brand being purchased, repackaged, and resold, over and over again, by the American public and beyond. As a writer, as a feminist, as a pophead, and as a woman, I believe I have the responsibility to paint the full picture of the brand I’m critiquing when I share it with you. Womanhood is not exclusive to white womanhood. To discuss her as a woman without discussing her background—including her race and ethnicity—is only one piece of the puzzle.

I want to complete a bit more than that.

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If I were a literal publication—and I know the Jade Fax logo may make it seem otherwise—I would stop here. But I’m also a person; my name is behind my posts, I’m Google-able, and I have a photo of myself as my profile picture. There seems to be confusion as to why a white woman, or a woman who looks like me, would write about Sabrina’s whiteness in the way I did. Perhaps there’s confusion as to why I’d write about whiteness at all.

Here’s an uh-oh: I like to study what the f*ck is going on with whiteness and white feminism in a similar-but-different-way to when I look to Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Davis, or Nadine Naber for feminist perspectives. I am neither Latina nor Black nor Arab. Yet I am interested in this world because I am a part of it, and I am interested in whiteness as one of many cultures and ideologies that contribute to our experiences in our time here. In studying womanhood and femininity, I have a responsibility to understand it transnationally and cross-culturally, regardless of my own identity. Take it from this third-culture kid: In this globalized world, it should be all feminists’ inclination to do so, too.

But I notice an urge to silence when reading someone who is direct about whiteness and names it as an ideology, whether it be its presence, its tenets, its customs, or its impact. I notice the desire not to acknowledge whiteness as a culture which shapes its carriers, in the same way we might discuss someone’s experience as a Latina or an Arab. Let’s be serious: Have you ever read an article about Elyanna that doesn’t mention the fact she’s Palestinian? What about Doechii? Kali Uchis? Raveena? Mitski? Their race, ethnicity, even skin color are represented as relevant to their womanhood and brand because of their uniqueness in the white-dominated music industry. We don’t do the same to whiteness because it is the norm.

Silencing is a very effective tactic to keep a norm in place; even intones like “white people have no culture” don’t do much for coalition politics (for anyone who cares), and distract from an actual, cultural problem of hegemony. It’s not that they don’t have culture and we bring it; we all bring our culture to the table. It’s that we’re all forced to play according to white rules.

As a mixed person, I break them from time to time. As a white person, I know it’ll take my lifetime—and hopefully a revolution?—to live beyond them. I speak of these things plainly because I’ve lived them, I’ve seen them, and I believe it’s threatening to the system itself for a white person to break ranks and be direct, as white culture consistently tells us never to do.

I’m happy to be that person—and hey, I’ve already got a foot out the door. No skin off my back.

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I’ll close here by encouraging my readers, across race, ethnicity, and nationality, to delve deeper into their discomfort.

The luck in a) being a writer; and b) having a Taurus Mercury is that I live almost entirely to understand. Discomfort, while (duh) uncomfortable, is my first signal that there’s something you just don’t get quite yet. Defensiveness, silencing, and comfortable lies can be even more revealing than the truths we tell, to paraphrase my nonfiction professor. Good writing reveals, takes risks, and is fundamentally vulnerable. I won’t cast myself to the wolves by regarding my own writing as good in public—I’ve been a comment moderator for long enough—but I’d say there’s something pretty vulnerable in toeing the Logic line. (Thank god, unlike him, I got my eyebrows from my mommy.)

Any twinge of fear I have only convinces me to go deeper. I hope it does the same for you.

1. I touched on this a bit in my essay, but Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book” is a great text to turn to if you’d like a deeper look into how and why this is.

The ladies at the Smart Brown Girl Book Club on Youtube also have a multi-part series breaking down this incredible read, which I highly recommend.

2. SWANA is a decolonial and geographical term that represents the various communities located in Southwest Asia and North Africa. Members of the diaspora and those aligned use this term instead of “Middle East” or “Middle Eastern,” which is both nonspecific and colonial in origin. SWANA encompasses Arab individuals as well as Persians, Egyptians, Turks, Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Mizrahi Jews, and more of the countless ethnic groups the Southwest Asian and North African regions are home to.

3. I often refer to Frantz Fanon as my academic imaginary friend. “The Fact of Blackness” from Black Skin, White Masks was my introduction to him, and it was my theoretical introduction to the point I make here about this kind of reflexivity.