The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  The runaway corporate profits that characterize neoliberalism and that underpin Lean In and GirlBoss success are extracted from the poor, largely in the form of undercompensating workers for the value they produce for their companies. Neoliberal policies create millionaires and billionaires, rapidly shrink the middle class due to falling wages and disappearing union protections, and swell the working class by replacing living wages with retail, service, and other low-paid work. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said, “wherever there is affluence, there is an underclass. There is a service class.” Under the ethos of “personal responsibility,” the poor themselves are tasked with solving the problems created by the rapidly shrinking public sphere and the deregulation that has concentrated half of the world’s money in 1 percent of the world’s population. At no time has this been more brutally apparent than during the first ten months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when essential workers risked their lives for poverty-wage jobs and an estimated one in six Americans went hungry, while US billionaires increased their wealth by nearly 40 percent.16

  Meanwhile, in search of new markets and new sources of profit, neoliberalism has turned to the body and to the self as relatively untapped sources of revenue. These modern industries encourage the wealthy enough to not only thrive, but optimize. The optimized consume food only of superlative taste, appearance, and nutritional value; they polish their teeth, skin, hair, and muscles until they glow; they surround their bodies with minimalist design and maximum performance in the kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom and broadcast it all on social media. The optimized streamline their productivity by removing inefficiencies like cleaning their own house, making their own lunch, or shopping for their own groceries—or sometimes, even chewing at all. Through the constant pursuit of the best, the individual allegedly reaches her full potential. The optimized self becomes the ultimate source and producer of social value.

  Feminism in neoliberal times makes similar moves. In “the postindustrial economy,” journalist Susan Faludi has observed of Sandberg’s brand of empowerment, “feminism has been retooled as a vehicle for expression of the self, a ‘self’ as marketable consumer object.” White feminism has become a trendy way to develop a brand, a side hustle, or at least a compelling social media feed. And while billionaires are rapidly falling out of favor, the trope of the optimized feminist whose politics are inclusive and whose makeup is flawless remains a powerful lure. As a blatant attempt to join the status quo, white feminism is increasingly suspect, but as a lifestyle ideal, the optimized woman shimmers forth from Barre class, Instagram scrolls, protest marches, and even, in the Trump era, the White House.17

  The optimized life presents further contradictions for many women, even as white feminism mandates they achieve it. While Silicon Valley men like Dave Asprey of Bulletproof and Jack Dorsey of Twitter biohack their way into three hours of sleep and twenty-one hours of performance mastery per day, even acolytes of the maximized self are highly suspicious of women who appear to do it all. Success, Sandberg emphasized repeatedly, is negatively correlated with likability for women. Sandberg’s white feminist genius lies in understanding that when white women optimize, that doesn’t mean programming away all imperfections. For white women, bugs are perceived to be a feature.

  “[I] speak openly about my own weaknesses” at work, Sandberg tells the reader, ostensibly to open communication channels with her employees and solicit their critical feedback.18 But there’s a larger effect here, too—it dulls her edges, renders her palatable through the narration and display of her shortcomings. In order for highly successful women to be likable, Sandberg intuits, they must be visibly flawed, embodied, emotional, and non-autonomous. To optimize while white and female requires deliberate displays of vulnerability and admitting that you can’t be superwoman; “The Myth of Doing It All” reads the title of one chapter. Like the animated character purposely drawn askew to avoid the uncanny valley, the optimized white woman performs her fallibility to avoid provoking discomfort, filling her pockets all the while.

  And so the Sheryl Sandberg one meets in Lean In is a self-made, soon-to-be billionaire who brings her emotions into the office, pukes into a toilet from morning sickness before an important pitch, and inspires other women to join her in the ranks of an elevated life. Above all, she had to be convinced to own her role among the “world’s most powerful women” when the title was first bestowed upon her. When Sandberg speaks of rushing out of the office to tuck her kids into bed or hosting monthly women’s networking events at her home, the reader hardly imagines the 11,500-square-foot mansion with a home theater, gym complete with steam room and sauna, and multiple laundry rooms that she and her husband called home, or that the dinner parties she hosted included $38,500-a-plate Obama fundraisers.19 Instead, the optimized woman CEO comes across as the richer girl next door, whose charmingly apparent humanity inspires her to help lift up other women to join her at the top.

  While the optimized man runs barefoot to the office with his water bottle filled with activated charcoal, the optimized woman cries in the executive suite. When shed by the CEO, white women’s tears become a commodity, an asset, and a safeguard—proof that capitalism can have a heart. The emotional, feminist CEO secures her own likability and cleanses the means of production at the same time, sanctifying runaway profits with the humanity streaming down her face. This “feminism of the 1 percent… supplies the perfect alibi for neoliberalism,” the authors of Feminism for the 99% observe, for executive feminism “enables the forces supporting global capital to portray themselves as ‘progressive.’”20

  One hundred sixty-five years earlier, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had launched US white feminism as a project that would civilize the nation. Now, its task was to elevate perfectly imperfect white women leaders to validate the brutally exploitative economic system that underpinned their success. This was less the future that Stanton had in mind than the result of the specific politics white women adopted. For nearly two centuries, white feminists have set lifting white women into the nation’s structures of power as the ultimate goal, and they’ve framed that rise up the hierarchy as the very meaning of equality—even when it requires, by definition, lifting up some through pushing down many others.

  Displays of emotion and vulnerability are not only keys to rendering corporate women likable and masking capitalist brutality, however. Sandberg is among the executives who figured out how to turn intimate confessions, personal disclosures, and private communications into the economy’s newest frontier. As neoliberal capital penetrates ever deeper into the body and self, feelings have become bytes of data that leave algorithmic trails. In the data-mining scheme she built at Facebook that turned her into a billionaire, the intimate details of our relationships and our politics become raw resources ripe for extraction. The question now is not if we will lean in to Sandberg’s vision of capitalism: it’s whether anyone will retain the genuine option to back out.

  In August 2008, as Sheryl Sandberg was adjusting to her new role as Facebook chief operating officer and the US stock market was veering toward an impending meltdown, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got up to leave her father’s hospital room. Though forty-eight-year-old Sergio Ocasio was struggling with a rare form of lung cancer, and she was closer to her father than to anyone else she knew, it was soon time to return for her sophomore year at Boston University. She began to intuit that this would be the last time she would see him, and that her father perceived her realization that he was dying. She said her goodbyes sadly and carefully. But as she passed through the doorframe, her father called out, and Ocasio-Cortez turned back toward the hospital bed. “Hey, make me proud,” he charged his oldest child.21

  Sergio Ocasio passed in early September, cutting off a connection to the person who knew her “soul better than anyone on this planet.” Ocasio-Cortez felt unmoored and alone. A premed major who hoped to become an ob/gyn, she opted to study abroad in Niger, West Africa, and began working alongside midwives to gain experience from practiced hea
lers. She found the women’s strength and the way their lives revolved around the joy and fellowship they sought every evening to throw into relief that, in the United States, “work is the sun that your whole life is organized around.” She also witnessed the dire consequences of poverty—the stacked deck that cuts life short, sometimes all the way back to the moment of birth: instead of delivering life, some patients’ labor ushered in death. With her father’s high hopes for her future ringing in her ears, Ocasio-Cortez began to envision a different path, one that didn’t set about healing symptoms on a case-by-case basis. She excelled at science and had placed second in the world’s largest high school science fair; her prize included having an asteroid named after her. But a new goal materialized, one more fundamental than treating individual patients: “healing sick systems.”22 The goal was of suitable ambition to relieve her father’s high expectations she felt continually pressing on her chest. When she returned to Boston, she changed her majors to economics and international relations and studied in the Black radical tradition to gain the tools to analyze power at the systemic level.

  The world then felt full of promise to Ocasio-Cortez—time stretched out luxuriously in front of her generation and those that would follow, opening ample space to radically transform the way humans relate to each other, socially, politically, and economically. From the podium at Boston University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration during her senior year of college in 2011, she told the audience that “the world is young” and thrilling advances were under way. “Five hundred million people are all connected to one virtual social network,” she enthused about Facebook’s recent user milestone. “This is what the dawn of an era looks like. These are our victories.” But she saw profound defeats as well, such as “Bronx children who cannot count by coincidence of their zip code,” the result of a stratified class system in which “the ideas of Plato and Jefferson become as [un]attainable as the items in a Park Avenue window.” It is up to us individually to make wise choices about how we contribute to the world we live in, she charged. “Every day we must ask ourselves the question, ‘Today, how will I be great? Tomorrow, how will I be great? In this very moment, how am I being great?’”23 Social change, she imparted, requires a tireless commitment to defying the status quo and reaching for a higher plane.

  Ocasio-Cortez, however, would soon feel that she was not choosing greatness. After her father’s untimely death, her mother Blanca struggled to afford the mortgage on the thousand-square-foot suburban Westchester house the Bronx couple had bought to give their children access to a better school system. To help pay these bills, she helped her mother clean houses when she was on breaks from college. Upon her graduation she refused to join her fellow economics majors in their rush to lucrative paychecks on Wall Street. Instead, she worked as an education director for the National Hispanic Institute teaching storytelling skills to children. But her mother faced an impending foreclosure, despite working two jobs, and Ocasio-Cortez’s nonprofit salary was insufficient to help stave it off. She resigned her position and took a job waitressing and bartending at a Mexican restaurant called Flats Fix near Union Square. The pay was higher, but she nonetheless found herself in “agony.” Restaurant work was certainly not what her father had in mind. She had broken her promise. Day by day, self-disappointment pierced her. She was failing to climb to the level of greatness; therefore, she was “nothing.”24

  Ocasio-Cortez realized that she needed to make a choice: “I am either going to destroy myself or I am going to be good.” And she realized that meant defining good on her own terms, something that would require her to adjust her “understanding of the world.” The problem was not that being a waitress was inherently demeaning. The problem was that mapping her life in terms of “stature” and “achievement” was making her miserable.25

  Ocasio-Cortez began to root out something just as toxic as women’s tendency to underestimate their own leadership capacities—the constant self-pressure to become the best possible version of themselves and to achieve career positions to match. She thought back to what her parents had instilled in her: that the question is “not what do you want to be, but how do you want to be.” And how was a matter of day-to-day ethics, spirituality, and self-acceptance, not status and standout accomplishments bulleted on a resume. She began to throw off the neoliberal demands for maximum performance she had internalized and then promoted to others from the MLK Day stage. In its place, she embraced the how, finding a daily rhythm enabling her to “attempt to lead a moral life.” This change pulled her out of depression and launched her into high spirits at Flats Fix. While the “capitalist economy would say, you should want better than that,” she relates that during her many years as a waitress and bartender, “I was happiest because my how was in harmony with who I wanted to be.”26

  On a personal level, Ocasio-Cortez identified the optimizing logic that was destroying her and replaced it with a philosophy focused on day-to-day morality and joy. From that strong base, she launched her career in politics, ironically soon reaching a higher prominence than likely she had ever dreamed. Her mission, she explains, is “to advance a better world,” not to hold on to the congressional seat she needs to defend every two years or to achieve “social acceptance in [the] small class of powerful and wealthy people” to which her colleagues belong.27 For her, feminist leadership entails being accountable to the social justice movements that powered her win.

  In November 2018, two months before they were even sworn in, Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, a fellow Democratic Socialist, trumpeted their calls for systemic change from the Hill. During their orientation as new members of the House of Representatives, they joined the youth activists of the Sunrise Movement calling for a Green New Deal resolution on the floor of the House—Ocasio-Cortez even joined the sit-in in Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office.28 It was a striking debut that underscored their commitment to alliance-based movement organizing instead of individual success.

  Yet while Ocasio-Cortez had released herself from the demands of self-optimizing, that same expectation of a continual grind and continual excellence is baked into the role of the highly visible twenty-first-century feminist. To many of her fans, she is less a leader than an icon. A secular world still needs its goddesses, and that burden falls onto women like AOC. “Feminist prayer candles” are adorned with her face, authors name her one of the “queens of the resistance,” and magazines from Time to Vanity Fair graced their covers with her image less than two years into office. Hers is a precipitous success, driven by collective glee at her apparent ability to be a fierce radical, glamour girl, and astute, snappy communicator all at the same time—and that imposes its own kind of optimizing trap.

  Self-optimizing white women secure their likability through maintaining visible flaws that temper their success, but a more cutthroat standard generally applies to women of color. Optimizing even allows room for a certain amount of mediocrity for white women, though it is white men who by far have the widest berth.29 Whiteness is so overwhelmingly understood to be capacity itself, that mounting evidence of failure and lack of qualifications often don’t hinder white men’s careers or reputations—instead, they fail upward. Meanwhile, white women can turn their weakness into reassuring assets, defusing the threat they pose to white men.

  But for women of color, a different standard applies. To be racialized is to be seen as innately incapable, at best in need of a helping hand, or, at worst, as a threat to the social order. While tears remain a form of white women’s authority, for women of color, the expectations are nothing short of perfection. There is no margin for error, much less for ineptness to masquerade as mastery. Flawlessness and nothingness become the binary options, and neither leaves any room for regular old humanity.

  Seemingly aware of these impossible demands thrust upon women of color leaders to be infallible, Ocasio-Cortez crafts an approach to visibility she calls “intentional vulnerability.” Cooking dinner while explaining congressio
nal procedure on Instagram at 10 p.m., she explained to scholar-activists Cornel West and Tricia Rose on their podcast The Tight Rope, she was bound to make mistakes. Broadcasting her imperfections would not only relieve her of the “messiah” expectations thrust upon her—it would indirectly knock all political leaders off their self-imposed pedestals. “I needed to break the mythology of perfection in people who hold power,” she reflected, so that Washington politics looks less like an impenetrable edifice and more like “human being[s] making decisions.” Her vulnerability and accessibility would both subvert the optimizing demands placed upon her and chip away at the barrier between congressional officials and the people they allegedly serve. The effect has been magnetic. Her 11 p.m., hour-long Instagram speech the night before the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump for the second time in January 2021 drew a live audience of over a hundred thousand; by the next morning, the video had more than 1.5 million views.30

  Intentional vulnerability is a dicey prospect on a mass stage, however. Extending her working hours until late in the night, Ocasio-Cortez’s attempt to reveal her humanity and educate her audience simultaneously risks generating further work demands in which she’s never truly off the clock. There’s a larger structure, too, that is difficult to sidestep despite radical aims. Emotion and vulnerability, especially shared by women, drive the contemporary social media economy. In a form of capitalism that commodifies performing and marketing the self, even late-night vulnerability can become another valuable asset.

  The day after AOC occupied Pelosi’s office with the Sunrise Movement, Sheryl Sandberg woke to a bombshell. The skies above her mansion were full of smoke from the most lethal and destructive wildfire in California history, the Camp Fire, burning 150 miles to the north. But this bombshell hit closer to home. “Sheryl Sandberg was seething,” began a story splashed across the front of the New York Times that documented the tactics of deflection, denial, and counterattack that she and Mark Zuckerberg wield to protect Facebook’s market dominance. The social network launched in 2004 as a way to stay connected to friends, family, and colleagues; its leaders quickly grew it into a massive media empire. Authoritarian governments in the United States and around the world use the platform to spread false information, a practice Facebook refuses to curb. In response, journalists have widely deemed the company’s imperative for unchecked growth and penchant for secrecy to be undermining democracy. Facebook had become for many, the Times declared, the symbol “of corporate overreach and negligence.” The article revealed Sandberg to sit at the helm of an aggressive campaign to lobby powerful decision-makers, discredit Facebook’s critics and detractors, and lie when confronted with her own corporate malfeasance. The exposé struck a powerful blow at Sandberg’s reputation that reverberated across the media landscape. “The Rise, Lean, and Fall of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg” read one particularly incisive follow-up.31