The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  Journalists such as Kara Swisher claim that Sandberg is just following the rules of Big Tech and that targeting her, instead of Facebook CEO and principal shareholder Mark Zuckerberg, reeks of misogyny.32 Yet Sandberg isn’t just playing the Big Tech game. She is one of its key inventors. Zuckerberg didn’t recruit Sandberg for her good skin and crush-worthy smile. He recruited her in 2008 precisely because of her role in developing surveillance capitalism at Google.

  “Surveillance capitalism” is scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s term for the Big Tech–driven neoliberal economy we live in today. The most potent form of capital—that is, assets that produce value—has become data that capture individual behavior. The year Sandberg became the general manager of Google’s business unit, Google executives had finally figured out how the company could make money. Every search on its site produces data in excess of the search itself, such as information about a user’s location, how they phrase queries, and where they click. Zuboff reveals that in 2001 the company transformed such information into “behavioral surplus”: surplus data that could be used to create predictive products it would sell to advertisers. The AdWords team, led by Sandberg, immediately changed its strategy for selling ads. While in the past Google sold ads based on keywords (e.g., if a user searched for a recipe for a cake that looks like a litter box, ads for litter boxes would populate the margins of the page), now it started selling ads based on individual profiles it assembled and deduced from the entirety of a user’s experience on Google and the web at large. Search words were no longer the raw material that powered Google. Instead, users themselves became what Zuboff calls “human natural resources,” mined to make bets on what kind of people we are and what we can be convinced to do. While Sandberg did not conceive of these ad-targeting innovations or write the algorithms that made them possible, as the head of online sales she oversaw the company’s efforts to turn its engineering acumen into an unprecedented source of capital. In the process, she grew her sales team from four people to four thousand, swelling the parking lot in the process. By 2007, her unit hauled in two-thirds of Google’s $17 billion annual revenue.33

  Zuckerberg hired Sandberg to bring surveillance capitalism to Facebook and turn the company’s first profit. No company has a bigger treasure trove of personal experience than Facebook—data that were waiting to be made profitable. The site is built to solicit disclosure of your daily grievances, what you ate for breakfast, what your kids wore on the first day of school, whether or not you voted and whom you voted for, who came to your birthday party, and who was brave enough to touch the kitty litter cake. “We have better information than anyone else,” she boasted after her move to the social network. “We know gender, age, location, and it’s real data as opposed to the stuff other people infer.”34 Facebook is a network of human natural resources.

  But the information that powers surveillance capitalism goes far beyond self-disclosures, and access to these details isn’t merely benign, Zuboff argues. Big Tech’s information results from ongoing “digital dispossession” in which the daily emotions and texture of our lives, both online and offline, are extracted and transformed into highly valuable data bought and sold on a market in which we have no control or any share of the profit. The data Google and Facebook mine are not used to benefit the public good—they’re used to shape our behavior without our knowledge, building the wealth of the 1 percent in the process.35

  The vulnerability Sandberg shares and the intimacy she cultivates in the Lean In brand are more than humility and a way to make her own outrageous success acceptable. Personal details are also the raw material of the new kind of capitalism she has helped create: they are the resources she mines, in both her feminist agenda and her corporate career. Emotion, connection, sharing, and friendship now power the engines of surveillance capitalism, the logic that has built Google and Facebook into two of the fifteen most profitable companies in the world.36 And while Sandberg might defend women’s rights to a seat at the boardroom table, in practice she uses gender as a key prediction factor to improve the bets Facebook makes on our future behavior. The irony of Sandberg’s Lean In platform is that the more successful she becomes as a capitalist, the more ruthless she reveals white feminism itself to be.

  Yet while I disagree with the claim that holding Sandberg at fault for the predatory nature of Big Tech is an act of misogyny, the particular anger directed at Sandberg does fit a longer pattern of sexism. Facebook CEO Zuckerberg is generally portrayed as a shrewd, if overly restrained and calculating, boy-genius-turned-businessman who is guided by rationality. It’s hard to imagine an alliterative New York Times lede trumpeting his emotional state akin to “Sheryl Sandberg was seething.” But white women and white feminists, in large part through their own attempts to gain social power via alternately civilizing, cleansing, or optimizing the status quo, often take the fall when public opinion turns against those same unequal systems.

  White women have long been assigned the task of stabilizing society, playing housewife to the entire public sphere. Since at least Elizabeth Cady Stanton, white feminists have expanded that role into one of redemption. They gain access to white supremacist capitalist structures in part through promising to rehabilitate the structures of inequality through their presence. When that project inevitably fails, and settler colonialism, corporate capitalism, or electoral politics remains as brutal as ever, it is white women who absorb much of the blame and outrage—and white men who largely escape notice.

  Sandberg’s corporate brand of white feminism has long helped cover Facebook’s exploitative practice, giving it a palatable sheen, just as her story of vomiting into the toilet renders her fallible and thus, in the misogynist logic that influences all of us to one degree or another, more likable. But as the atrocities of neoliberalism become more and more apparent in the hundreds of thousands left to die in the COVID pandemic while billionaires have doubled their wealth; in the rising seas, raging wildfires, and newly incessant hurricanes plaguing our shores; and in the state’s reliance on mass incarceration and police brutality to protect private property, more and more people look instead to a feminism that tries to halt capitalism’s death march rather than one that empowers careerwomen to claim it for themselves.

  On the second hundred-degree day in a row in July 2020, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez climbed the steps on the east side of the US Capitol. As she ascended toward the building, she crossed paths with two Republican colleagues with whom she’d never spoken, Representative Ted Yoho of Florida and Representative Roger Williams of Texas.

  “Do you really believe that people are shooting and killing each other because they’re hungry?” Yoho called out at her, wagging his finger toward her face. “You know, you’re unbelievable. You’re disgusting.”37

  Ocasio-Cortez had recently held a virtual town hall about police brutality where she recontextualized New York’s summertime rise in crime as the result of poverty and hunger exacerbated by the pandemic, not planned minor reductions to the NYPD budget in the wake of anti–police brutality protests. Clips of her comments that “crime is a problem of a diseased society, which neglects its marginalized people,” spliced in as if in response to a specific question about gun violence, had dominated the conservative news cycle.38

  Yoho pressed on. “You are out of your freaking mind,” he berated the congresswoman.

  “You are being rude,” she informed him, and the pair kept walking. But Yoho wasn’t finished.

  “Fucking bitch,” Yoho muttered as he and Williams continued down the stairs.39

  A reporter overheard the entire exchange, driving yet another news cycle revolving around Ocasio-Cortez. Williams’s office issued a denial. Two days later Yoho made a brief statement from the House floor apologizing for “the abrupt manner” of his conversation with the congresswoman, while denying that he had hurled insults her way. “Having been married 45 years with two daughters, I’m very cognizant of my language,” he insisted.40 It’s a familiar script, when a man accused
of misogyny claims his role as patriarch-protector renders his sexism impossible—when the role itself is part and parcel of the power that sexist cultures grant to men.

  Incensed by Yoho’s and other men’s use of “women, wives, and daughters as shields and excuses for poor behavior,” Ocasio-Cortez turned the individual attack on her into an opportunity to expose the ubiquity of misogyny. Though her initial response was to ignore the entire incident, the other Squad members insisted that her treatment was unacceptable—that she had the right, and perhaps the responsibility, to fight back. With their encouragement, she requested her own floor time to address their colleagues two days later. Despite the high-pressure context, she took her usual, confident approach to public speaking, scribbling a few notes in advance and making up the speech on the spot. She donned a red blazer and red lipstick, which Ayanna Pressley immediately knew meant Ocasio-Cortez meant business.41

  “Representative Yoho’s comments were not deeply hurtful or piercing to me,” Ocasio-Cortez divulged. “Because I have worked a working-class job. I have waited tables in restaurants.” She was not shocked by his language, nor was she seeking his personal apology. Instead, she wanted to unmask “the entire structure of power” that accepts “violence and violent language against women.”42

  Philosopher Kate Manne explains that the common understanding of misogyny as a personal hatred of women fails to get at the true effects of male power, which is structural rather than individual. Sexism, Manne clarifies, is an ideology that dictates women owe dominant men attention, affection, and care—and, as Pauli Murray would add, a structure that sequesters power and capital in the hands of men. Misogyny is the behavior that results, and it enforces the structure of sexism by rewarding women who submit and punishing those who don’t. Yoho unleashed misogyny by swearing at Ocasio-Cortez on the Capitol steps—and rather than solicit his apology, she determined to expose how his actions reinforced the larger system of sexism. His slur “was not just an incident directed at me,” she elucidated, but part of a structure that expects women to submit to men; “what Mr. Yoho did was give permission to other men to do that to his daughters.” The C-SPAN video of her speech instantly became the most popular clip from the House floor in the network’s history.43

  Ocasio-Cortez brought intersectional feminist politics to the House of Representatives with the speech, reframing an act of seemingly individual harm as evidence of the broad structure of gendered power, and it drew an audience of millions. Her remarks were quickly touted as evidence of another AOC triumph. “AOC’s speech about Ted Yoho’s ‘apology’ was a comeback for the ages,” announced a Washington Post column, while the LA Times TV critic declared her speech “the best TV I’ve seen in years.”44 Once more, Ocasio-Cortez became an icon and a showpiece for feminists, her vulnerability turned into evidence of her ceaseless prowess.

  Ocasio-Cortez, it seems, continues to win the impossible game, articulating structural analyses of power that seek change from the bottom while generating the video views generally reserved for celebrity clips or animal antics. Meanwhile, her coalition approach to progressive politics deflects attention away from her alone, and the alliance with Pressley, Omar, and Tlaib is expanding to include Ferguson activist Cori Bush and former schoolteacher Jamaal Bowman, who, like Ocasio-Cortez, hails from a Bronx-area district. Where the public expects individual, iconic women of color figureheads, these politicians respond instead with a working alliance that foregrounds class, race, climate change, and gender simultaneously.

  Yet when the standards have become continual work, continual availability, and all with extraordinary skill, no one can live up to the pressure. There is no way to win the optimizing game, as an individual or as a squad. Success means an ever-increasing grind that rides the razor’s edge dividing wild success from vicious backlash. Ocasio-Cortez nailed her rebuttal to Yoho, but it begs the question. What if she had been ill that day, not up to her usual impromptu eloquence? Whether or not those who hold Ocasio-Cortez in the highest esteem allow her the space to be imperfect, to stumble on her words, or to feel too vulnerable to push back against an extraordinary insult remains an open question.

  Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, conveys a deeply grounded approach of “non-attachment” to her position that allows her to focus on her policy priorities, not securing her congressional seat or maintaining her reputation.45 But for many of her fans, who range from liberal wine moms to Democratic Socialists, AOC represents a flawless feminist savior/Goddess. Her supporters expect her to knock it out of the park in each and every speech, even when she’s calling out a colleague on the House floor for harassment. Ultimately, it is us, not Ocasio-Cortez, who fall into the optimizing trap, awaiting perfection on the House floor, Twitter, and Instagram Live. Chances are, we likely place a similar demand on ourselves to maintain flawlessness—though perhaps with just the right amount of endearing vulnerability.

  The solution to the trap of optimizing feminism may look a lot like the most promising—and also the most difficult—approach to slowing the carbonization of the atmosphere. Trying harder, trying differently, trying to outgame the game will not work, even with a leader as skilled as AOC. Similarly, producing millions of electric cars, filling the sea with wind turbines, or dimming the sun will not change the cycle of extraction and overproduction upon which the capitalist economy is built. If we stay in the terms of the system, we end up merely reproducing that system.

  The solution instead may be simply doing less. Producing less, buying less, working less, demanding less of ourselves and our leaders. In a world primed to accept women’s public role in society—whether as a white feminist or intersectional feminist—when she comes to redeem it, the most radical thing of all might be to insist on the individual and collective right to rest, joy, and pleasure. Pleasure may sometimes take the form of engaging with social media. But it may also take other forms altogether, solitary or communal, that retreat from the digital stage and from any commodifiable form of value. It may look like a walk in the woods, nine hours of sleep a night, or full weekends off from one’s jobs and side hustles and the screen. Tricia Hersey, founder of the Atlanta-based Nap Ministry, advocates for the liberatory potential of sleep and breaks for Black women and for all. “Rest is a spiritual practice, a racial justice issue and a social justice issue,” she argues, a cornerstone of the good life long denied to the racialized poor.46 Rest, tuning out, and logging off are radical demands in an economy in which not one but two jobs are often required to stay afloat, when sleep has become a middle-class luxury.

  Even as we face astounding collective political and economic struggles in the 2020s, to reclaim our energies and our spirits we will need to uproot capitalism’s most toxic legacy from within ourselves: that our lives and our movements consist of nothing more than work, and that the best way to navigate the unequal structures of power is to outhustle them.

  CONCLUSION

  TWO FEMINISMS, ONE FUTURE

  Our movements can’t only be composed of the people who are most disenfranchised. Our movements also have to be composed of people from across the class spectrum and people who also have power.… If we want to compete for power, then part of what it means is we have to amass our power as a unit. And it also means we have to take some of theirs.

  —Alicia Garza, How We Get Free

  There is no reasonable excuse that remains for white women to continue to betray women of color. White women have a choice. It is a choice they have always had to some degree, but never before have they been in such a strong position to make the right one.

  —Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars

  How many more must die before we internalize the message of our fundamental interdependence—any disease of one is a disease of the collectivity; any alienation from self is alienation from the collectivity?

  —M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing

  WHEN I BEGAN WRITING THIS BOOK IN THE SPRING OF 2018, I WAS TEMPORARILY LIVING IN Palo Alto, California
, a few miles from Facebook headquarters. Inside, I combed through research I’d been gathering for nearly two decades on the history of racism and sexism in the United States. Outside, yard signs sprung up from the artificial grass and manicured lawns around me advertising a single message: Recall Judge Persky. Persky was the adjudicator of Brock Turner’s sexual assault case who famously sentenced the defendant, routinely summarized as a Stanford swimmer and future Olympian, to only six months of a possible fourteen-year prison term. The survivor’s riveting courtroom statement on the impact of Turner’s assault on her life, vulnerable in its candor and knifelike in its precision, had captivated millions of people around the world. Moved by the statement and outraged at the leniency Judge Persky had granted Turner, a child of privilege, feminist legal scholar Michele Dauber launched a campaign to recall the judge from his post. “We need justice for women now,” she argued, and justice looked to her, as it did for many others, like suitably lengthy prison time. While some protested that firing judges for handing out short sentences would backfire, inevitably greasing the racist gears of the world’s largest mass incarceration machine, Palo Alto voted overwhelmingly that June to recall Judge Persky.1 Feminism seemed to demand it.