Considering Brené

A Case for White Vulnerability

I’ve been a little worried about Brené Brown. I listen to her podcast as I run. It feels close and comfortable, like she knows me and I know her. We’re just two white women out for a run, trying to do our best, trying to make the world a little better. This morning, she told me that she’s stepping away from her podcast, Unlocking Us. It seems sudden, but I’m not surprised. I’ve been following the criticisms of Courage Culture, its push toward vulnerability, and the criticisms of Brené in particular.

Dr. Carey Yazeed’s Criticism

Dr. Yazeed explains that the whole idea of embracing vulnerability is really a thing for white women. Black women have little safe space to do this. She argues that when people jump to defend Brené and well-intentioned whiteness, they are closing the small spaces that are available to Black women for thoughtful communication, vulnerability, and courage —the courage, for example, to criticize an icon like Brené. She says,“We can’t do what Brené Brown does, because it’s people like you [Brené defenders] who don’t give us the space, who don’t give us the safe space, to truly be vulnerable and courageous in this country.” (You can access Yazeed's complete article through the link to the right.)

While Dr. Yazeed helps us to contextualize vulnerability and its problematic demands on black women, white women might need more vulnerability. Those of us who feel defensive of Brené and Courage Culture must consider how we fit into its demands.

Brené is speaking to me. I know I must embrace vulnerability against the forces that suggest a safer, quieter approach.

When my school system proposes messed up but well-intentioned DEI activities and policies, it doesn’t directly hurt my white children. Speaking up can feel embarrassing and aggressive. It’s vulnerable because I know that many people will dislike me if I put myself in the middle of things. They’ll dislike me a little. They might think that I’m saying the wrong thing or that I’m arrogant or that I’m acting like a “Karen,” especially in the sense that “Karen” has been co-opted to mean “snowflake.” But I must do it, even though and because everything for me is so personally safe. Good allyship often feels terrible. But it also feels right and long-term good. It makes a better world. Brené wants me to speak up.

The problem, though, is that Brené Brown and Courage Culture proponents aren’t explicit enough about the varying stakes. I hope I have it right: Black mothers have everything to lose. Their children suffer disparities in education, subtle acts of exclusion, racism, and violence. And if Black mothers speak out, they and their children may suffer more. Those mothers run the risk of jeopardizing the security that is critical to their livelihoods. They might place targets on themselves and their kids for the bias that is everywhere. And, just walking around this world of unconscious bias and overt racism involves vulnerability and courage every minute. To suggest that everyone needs to inject the same dose of courage into their daily lives doesn’t make sense.

Dr. Yazeed is NOT saying that Courage Culture and Brené are bad; she is saying that the prescriptions are insensitive in that they assume everyone has the same needs, that everyone has the same responsibility. Dr. Yazeed IS suggesting that Black women read Black women to strategize their power and their security. This makes so much sense. And further, capitalistic forces give white women and white men more money and reach. We should all be reading Black women because we’re missing the great stuff, undervalued as it is.

Courage Culture Is Important for White Women

White women might need some Courage Culture though. We must embrace vulnerability, precisely because so many of us are so safe. We quiet ourselves so that we can maintain that security and in so doing, we sacrifice our power, our advocacy, our agency, and our ability to be good allies. We must not allow ourselves to disappear and we must not be disappeared.

Disappearance is seductive though. Quiet submission leads to quiet approval. I feel the power of disappearance in my white life. I am, despite my best intentions, absorbing some of the standards of white, middle-aged, middle-income, middle-American, heteronormative, binary personhood. I know how to clear my world of the mess of me, leave things simple and peaceful. It takes a lot of work to get there. One must straighten the house, dust and wipe clean, put everything in its proper place. A body must be healthy, small and unobtrusive. It should fit comfortably into a crowded world, out of the range of judgment. Once children are tucked away at school, one should take a meditative breath or two and clear some worry, clear the complicated thoughts that give an edge. I can get to that almost disappeared place.

This is what we are trained to do, us white women. Our culture and current moment insist that we disappear our mess of stuff, flesh, and thought. While we are primed to acquire through our capitalistic forces — items that will make our children smarter, our friends closer, our domestic processes more productive, we are ashamed for those items as soon as they cross the thresholds of our lives. They become clutter, items on our counters, dirt collectors, excess. Our obsession with food and our repulsion with fat have created a tempted and torn land of uncomfortable dieters. Our brains wildly flit here and there, failing to stay long on the most stable of perches; we focus, we breathe, we pop bubbles of thought, finding our brains empty but hoping we didn’t clear out the wrong content.

I exist with some abundance on my farm in Maryland. I have so many children, so much plastic, so many groceries, projects, processes all multi-tasked. I certainly want less stuff, less sugar, less distraction. I desperately want to reduce for the health of the environment and my children, for the beauty of my surroundings, and for calm in my brain. But, I see the dangers too.

Where I live, the houses are lovely with so many mudroom cubbies that catch kid coats and backpacks. On social media, the children are beautiful and well cared for and their partners all seem so good. But I know that shoes, gloves, and school folders sometimes leak beyond that cubby area, that husbands are known to travel a day-too-many per week. That order is not sustainable, precarious. As it slips so easily away, it sloughs off self-esteem, another little bit of identity. We feel ourselves missing the standard and we renew our efforts to the point of exhaustion, dedicating ourselves almost entirely to our own disappearance.

I suspect that even in our comfort, some of us aren’t as satisfied as we project when we post our photos and tell ourselves stories. If we haven’t disappeared from the larger world, some of us have become too small. We are leaving it up to others to be fierce and loud, others who might have less of a choice. If white women join the struggle and add our volume, rather than disappear, we will find our own continuance. We must embrace our fits of complaint — no more shame. We must build up to a fiery rage!

A Menopause Case Study

Menopause is the last stage and perhaps ultimate force in the disappearance that us women, Black and white, may need to work around. Humans, aside from some genetically similar primates, are the only species that produces females who regularly outlive their reproductive stage. Evolutionarily, our purpose is done. I quit my powerful job to dedicate myself to the task of keeping my children alive. Standing in front of the sink, matching socks, finding sesame oil, I wonder where I have gone.

Though I’ve only recently finished having babies, I started so late and spread them out so far that I am also beginning to go through menopause. I think. Women’s health is under-discussed and unexplored. The processes of menopause are opaque. I’m not sure which part of me is just older and scared about the disappearance of life, which part of me is biologically shifting, and which part of me is losing grasp of realities that used to hold me content.

Yesterday, I went to the doctor to understand the process of menopause. I can’t sleep, my skin and my body are changing, I can feel my mind drying out. I can almost hear my synapses becoming these brittle little twigs, snapping off from the tree that pumped life into their solidity and their branching. I am scared of death. I’m scared of my dissolution.

My doctor is a brown-skinned single mother who seems to have a special set of knowledge reserved for my situation. She understands, both personally and medically, what women feel when they go through menopause and begin to disappear. Also in the room was a younger white woman, a new doctor at the practice. I spoke quickly. I corrected when I felt misunderstood. We considered Fluoxetine, Prozac.

I could use it. I worry so much. There is a lot to worry about: my children, my marriage, the dissolution of democracy, climate change, inequity.

My doctor said that I should consider the Prozac in the same way that I might consider a broken leg: “You’d use crutches, wouldn’t you?”

“But my leg isn’t broken?”

“Okay, sprained,” she adjusted.

“No,” I said. “It hurts. As if someone has been throwing bricks at it, maybe, but it’s not broken or sprained. Perhaps overuse?”

She paused. She got my point. Our culture is insisting that I should adjust to its messed up ways and I’m frustrated and mad because women should not be forced to submit to problematic structures. No one should be content when so many in our world face injustice, exclusions, and violence.

But maybe I am “broken.” How are we going to fix this culture in time to save us from losing our minds? How will we fix it in time to save others who are less safe? We aren’t. We have to try, but shit isn’t going to change fast. So we may as well drug ourselves, just a little bit. 10mg? If the insurance will cover it? Which it certainly will. Because we don’t want women out there losing their minds, with all the anger and talk it creates.

The young white woman noticed my “spinning.” She said that she is like me. She spins too. Which makes me quiet myself. I don’t want to be a spinner. It feels so like me, so white woman, filling the world with my emotion.

I notice that my doctors are becoming a little impatient. Of course, they have so many patients to see and they’ve been with me more than my allotted time, I am certain. I quiet myself for those other women, who need me to fit into the allotted space.

I haven’t started the Prozac.

I want to embrace how awful it can feel to be big and loud and vulnerable. I challenge Brené to start a new podcast. To be even more clear about who it benefits and how. To call white women up and into their more practically situated anger and out into the world. Being marginalized in any way, creates empathy for all forms of marginalization. White women must push beyond their comfort to do their part in creating space for all women.