In 1989, the same year that civil rights advocate and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term intersectionality to the feminist lexicon, anti-racism scholar and activist Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. Where Crenshaw’s intersectionality illuminated the many layers of oppression and identity (race, class, gender, etc.) that women face, McIntosh sought to expose the invisible set of securities that white people carry with them at all times, by virtue of living in a world where whiteness is prioritized and protected. McIntosh created a list of twenty-six privileges she saw (from her own experience as a white woman) she could rely on to protect her, which Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) could not. The checklist remains profoundly relevant today, particularly as—over the past six months—I began to introduce anti-racism work into my daily life as a white woman in the food and wellness industries.
Over the past year, immersed in the daily mania of the Trump presidency and the onslaught of white supremacist violence at every turn, I lost my patience with the inequity of representation I saw in social media, where I conduct most of my business as a (cringe) influencer. This disparity of opportunity, visual representation, and voice is no news to BIPOC, who wrestle with racism and the related challenges of tone policing and white fragility in all spheres of business and life on a daily basis. It wasn’t news to me, either, as I grew up in one of the United States’ more recently colonized territories, Hawai’i. More on my introduction to and current experience with anti-racism work below, but I want to get straight to the action.
If you are a white influencer, I’m calling on you to be a part of a sea change in representation in the influencer industry. Starting today. If we want to live in a different, better, more peaceful, more inclusive, less racist, less hateful, less terrifying, less violent world, if we want our voices—all of our voices—to be heard, there is no other way. Now is the time.
Here’s what you can do:
- ASK QUESTIONS: There are two primary questions I like to ask when approached by brands and event organizers. Please feel free to copy and paste these, or edit them to reflect your own words.
-
- “It’s of paramount importance that the projects I’m involved with include the voices of a diverse range of womxn and BIPOC (black and indigenous people of color). To that end, I’d love to hear about the other people participating in XX (panel, campaign, event, trip, podcast, etc.). Are the participants representative of a wide swath of backgrounds, sizes, and abilities?”
-
- “Can I support you in diversifying the participants on this XX? I’d be glad to suggest some extraordinary people who would be a great fit for the project.”
-
- USE THE INCLUSION RIDER: Vix Meldrew edited the original inclusion rider for use by influencers. Here it is:
- Download the Influencer Inclusion Rider here, and read through and edit as appropriate for your purposes.
- SHARE WIDELY & CALL ON OTHER WHITE INFLUENCERS: Do not rest idly and assume that your beginning to do the work is enough.
-
- Call on other white influencers you know to do this work, either via personal message or public request. Speak from your heart, be kind, and let them know why this is so important to you—and to the health and wellbeing of the world today.
-
- Share the link to this post, and to the work of the other people I’ve mentioned.
- Use Rabya Lomas‘s #InfluenceInclusivity hashtag to support and amplify awareness.
-
- CHAMPION PEOPLE WHO ARE DOING IT RIGHT: Here is an evolving list of resources, media outlets, and companies that I’ve seen do it right. Please comment below with others you believe are doing it right, and I’ll update accordingly.
-
- Equity at the Table: A digital directory for women and non-binary individuals in food, with a focus on POC and queer communities.
-
- The Thirlby and Camp Thirlby: Redefining wellness for the common good.
-
- Cherry Bombe: Sharing the stories of women in food through Cherry Bombe Radio, magazine, and the Cherry Bombe Jubilee.
-
As for the beginnings of my understanding of race and identity, as a white child on Maui I was hyper-aware of the color of my skin, and, in particular, conscious that my whiteness was seen as both uncool and as a signifier of some fundamental wrongness of being. For “local” people—any combination of native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Asian, Filipino, Portuguese, and more—whiteness was a reminder of the ways in which Hawai’i’s sovereignty had been wrested from its native rulers and people, of the agriculture and plantation industries which exploit BIPOC workers and their families, and of the ever-booming tourism industry, which perpetuates a cycle of looking to the comfort of white people at the expense of BIPOC’s wellbeing.
And so I learned early on to feel shame about my lack of melanin, and I watched as other white classmates dyed their hair dark or attempted to pull it back at the temples to make their eyes look more local. Anything but white. In Hawai’i, whiteness is seen as patently other, and often ridiculed. I was regularly teased for my whiteness and called haole, a word (and sometimes racial slur) that’s come to mean “white person” but translates to “without breath”. When the first white colonizers arrived in Hawai’i, they refused to engage in the Hawaiian greeting ritual of meeting forehead-to-forehead to exchange the vital life-force of their breath—and thus the term haole was born. But I didn’t want to be without breath. I wanted to be full of life. I didn’t want to be defined by the color of my skin, as we all, undeniably, are.
Yet I didn’t have the skills to understand what was really happening—that underneath the surface veneer of middle- and high school bullying there were deep conversations about race, identity, and power bubbling to the surface. Instead, I learned to appreciate and revere a diversity of skin colors and voices as normal, and to question spaces that were filled with mostly white bodies. Still though, neither children nor adults were equipped with the tools to name and introduce the concepts of white privilege, white supremacy, tone policing, and white fragility into the conversation. These days, I like to imagine what might have happened if we’d had those conversations starting at such a young age.
Today, I know that the minor discomfort and occasional teasing I experienced was a result of centuries of white supremacist, racist, and exploitative programs of government, agriculture, and tourism, which compound Hawai’i’s identity as both state and destination. I understand that I live in a world where white privilege and white supremacy is like water to a fish—it’s everywhere, but invisible to most until it’s taken away. Through hundreds of years of work from Civil War to Civil Rights leaders, from many waves of feminists to #metoo-ers, white people are finally beginning to wake up to the insidious nature of white privilege and white supremacy in all arenas of relationship, business, and life.
In 2009, I was fortunate enough to meet and begin studying with Rebecca Walker, co-creator of third-wave feminism and bestselling author of Black, White, and Jewish and Black Cool (among many others). Rebecca’s work on intersectional feminism transformed the way I saw the world. And while I know that true intersectional feminism remains impossible under the chokehold of systems entrenched in racist and white supremacist bottom lines, I also know that if there’s room to use my white privilege for change, I’m ready for it. Over the past year, I also began to study the writing and work of educators like Rachel Cargle and Layla Saad, whose presence on Instagram serves as a digital training ground for young white feminists eager to cut their teeth in doing the right thing.
View this post on Instagram
Which brings me back to 2018, when I began to introduce anti-racism work into the sphere of my business as an influencer. I live in Los Angeles, a city that Thrillist recently named in the top 10 most diverse cities in the US. Yet both in LA, and as I traveled the world on influencer trips, I saw many panels, conferences, and branded events and campaigns that failed to include BIPOC amidst a sea of white influencers. In 2018, I went on four or five influencer trips, none of which was attended by a black person.
As my blinders of white privilege came down, I started to raise questions upon invitation to talks, panels, podcasts, and campaigns. If I was invited to attend a panel discussion where all the participants were white, I’d often decline and politely share that I’d be more inclined to attend if the panel were more inclusive of a diverse range of womxn’s voices and experiences. And when I was invited to participate in a campaign, I would first ask to see the full list of participants, and then—if, as it often would be, it predominantly featured white womxn, I would ask if I could help the organizers bring in other BIPOC.
The response was interesting: I often heard from organizers that their requests to BIPOC were met with refusal, silence, or disinterest. This response, at some turns honest and at others deeply rooted in white fragility, immediately raised a red flag for me. If BIPOC feel they are being tokenized when they are invited to participate in something, it’s absolutely correct that they wouldn’t be interested in participating. And so many brands are (or should be) playing a game of very swift catch-up in order to create digital spaces that are visually representative of the kinds of diversity they know they need to hold as a bottom line to be financially solvent in today’s market.
In other words: Until BIPOC can go to a company’s website and social properties and actively see that this company is invested (financially and intellectually) in representing the voices, experiences, and images of womxn from all cultural backgrounds, sizes, abilities, and sexual orientations, they are absolutely right to decline. On the flip side, companies need to be actively hiring BIPOC both internally, and in market-facing influencer campaigns, at the same rate—and, it should go without saying, for the same rates—at which they are hiring white influencers. Which brings me to today’s subject, and what white influencers can do to make a difference.
Also in 2018, Frances McDormand became an overnight icon when she closed her Academy Award’s acceptance speech with two words: “inclusion rider.” In 2014, Stacy L. Smith of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative introduced the concept of (and template for) an inclusion rider that actors and actresses could place in their contracts, which would demand a certain level of diversity among a film’s cast and crew. In an era drenched with Time’s Up and #metoo sentiment, the inclusion rider struck a deep chord. Why couldn’t we apply the same principles to the influencer industry? White influencers could easily add on a modified inclusion rider to their contracts, it seemed—or at the very least begin asking the same types of questions I had begun to float.
This past weekend, I saw I wasn’t the only one with this idea. After stumbling across writer and fashion consultant Aja Barber’s Instagram page, where she recently conducted an experiment on how brands interact with BIPOC influencers (the results are, as you might imagine, devastating), I also discovered two bloggers in the UK who were onto a similar track. Just yesterday, Rabya Lomas of She Flourished penned a blog post called #InfluenceInclusivity, asking white influencers to do better by calling out brands and PR companies on their approach and work with BIPOC. And not twenty-four hours later, blogger Vix Meldrew went and did it: She modified Stacy L. Smith’s original inclusion rider for use by influencers everywhere.
This is an urgent call to action for white influencers to execute on each of the points above, and especially to share the message and enlist other white influencers in doing the same. The time is now. Go. Do. Share.
