Reckoning with White Femininity and Anti-Blackness
A collaboration between Ellen Tuzzolo & Jen Willsea
This workshop can be offered in-person or virtually to organizations, networks, and teams. Please get in touch if you’d like to explore bringing this to your community.
Stay tuned for our 2026 public workshop dates!
Welcome!
We’re so glad you found us here.
We love to be connected with other white women, gender expansive people, nonbinary people, femmes, and people who’ve been treated like girls/women who…
long for liberation
seek grounded, generative places to learn and grow during this time of intense volatility, crisis, and overwhelm
know that race and gender cannot be separated
know that freedom from white supremacy, racial capitalism and gender as defined by cisheteropatriarchy are interdependent
know there are deeper layers of unlearning to do at these intersections in order to be reliable and trustworthy co-conspirators to Black people, and to Black women and gender expansive people in particular
We have been curating a body of work since 2021 that faces the interconnection between white femininity and anti-Blackness directly.
A Black woman at the helm of the Democratic Party lost the 2024 US presidential election. This has everything to do with anti-Blackness, misogynoir, transphobia, sexism, and racial capitalism. Eradicating anti-Blackness IS our work to do. Centering the needs, voices and safety of the most marginalized people in the days, weeks, months, years ahead IS our work to do. Severing our attachments to the projects of liberalism and the maintenance of the US empire IS our work to do.
We take Black women’s and Black gender expansive people’s consistent and extensive critique of white women seriously. We have taken in the feedback that Black women and gender expansive people we are close to have offered to us. Above all, the themes and patterns we notice, as a result of this listening, are the motivation for us to create and offer this workshop.
Over the last few years, there has been much talk about the problems with white women, the problems with white feminism,* and archetypes of white women like Karen and Becky who call the cops on Black folks who are living life. Second only to white men, white women are the reason we had a Donald Trump presidency 2016-2020, and why he won the popular vote in 2024.
You may be wondering what all of this has to do with you. You may be confident that you are not one of those white people. You may be mortified by the likelihood that all of this does have something to do with you.
What we continue to learn is that the traits of toxic white femininity wield violent power within nonprofit organizations, within social justice movements, within families, and within ourselves.
On the left and in the social sector, white women and white gender expansive people are consistently blocking Black women and Black gender expansive people’s leadership, while at the same time thanking Black women for “saving us,” and looking to them to “save democracy.”*
And of course, toxic white femininity fuels the growing fascist and white nationalist Right.
There are SO MANY MESSAGES commonly internalized by people who experience both racial privilege and gender oppression. By identifying those messages that are actually harming our ability to love ourselves and each other, and seeing how common they are, we free ourselves to show up more fully for the liberation of all beings. We find it easier, slowly, with practice, to express less and less toxic white femininity.
Some examples of these messages are…
I must accumulate and exert power the way white men do, in order to be safe and successful
I must be thin and pretty to be desirable and to experience pleasure
You’re familiar with toxic masculinity, for sure. But toxic white femininity? That’s not a familiar phrase. As we research the literature and pop culture, along with the patterns we are identifying across those of us who engage with this material in the workshop, we are playing with ways to get at the core of what toxic white femininity is.
Toxic white femininity creates and reinforces a sense of inherent supremacy over BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ people.
Our aim is to support white people, including ourselves, to heal and to transmute toxic white femininity. So that we can:
Disinvest in harmful white feminisms that justify (global) empire-building,* wealth hoarding, resource extraction, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, gender essentialism, and exploitation of the working and poor classes
Stop teaching, inviting, encouraging, enforcing toxic white femininity to young white people
Become more of who we need to be as a collective of pale skinned people who are cultivating and affirming the liberation of all beings
Here’s how we’re seeing toxic white femininity at its core:
A few questions that are alive for us about these elements are:
What if we let our attachments to goodness go? What if being “good” means nothing? What if we are no more good than anyone else, and this knowing frees us up to be more brave?
How is entitlement to receiving the best care, to getting our money’s worth, to being at the top, (in other words, priority) driving us away from the possibilities of giving and receiving collective care?
How is white (straight, middle and upper class) women’s innocence and purity being used now to justify the stripping of trans peoples’ rights? Am I internalizing any of these messages as true?
How are perfectionism and control operating within my/our work for social justice? Who does this benefit? Who does this harm?
* Footnotes
For example, see The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism by Kyla Schuller and Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We can Help Dismantle It by Jessie Daniels.
For example, see “Black and White Women Archetypes,” a panel hosted by Nonprofit Quarterly along with the NPQ’s whole issue on this topic.
For example, see the work of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and the resources they have curated in this toolkit.
Overview of the Workshop
this workshop is for…
white people of all gender identities who have personally experienced dominant culture's expectations of white girlhood/womanhood and/or white femininity
Costs
-
Please consider paying this amount if you are comfortably able to meet your basic needs, own the home you live in, have paid or pay for private education, travel recreationally, have access to financial savings and/or investments, have reliable work or do not have to work to meet your needs, have inherited wealth, and/or have increased earning privilege due to your race, gender, or education. This rate is a pay-it-forward rate that makes it viable for us to work with more people who need a lower rate.
-
Consider paying this amount if doing so would be an investment, but not create hardship for your household. You might choose this rate if you are able to regularly meet your basic needs and have some expendable income, can travel every couple years without burden, and have some debt but are able to pay it regularly. This is the rate we need most people to contribute in order for this offering to be sustained.
-
Consider paying this amount if you have limited expendable income, have little or no access to financial support from family, have significant debt, and little or no access to savings. This is a discounted rate.
Each time we hold a workshop series, we contribute 10% of the revenue to a Black feminist organization.
Your financial contribution to this body of work is what allows us to continue evolving it, and inviting more people into it.
White supremacy and racial capitalism have us trapped in transactional, consumerist exchanges most of the time. What we’re up to here is bringing financial, emotional and other resources together to co-create gatherings where we can experience a taste of liberatory culture.
Participants in our workshop series have varied class backgrounds and access to financial resources—let’s be honest about that, and account for it! Please consider what would be a meaningful and substantial contribution for you.
No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
2025 Live
Session Dates
This is a four-part, interactive workshop on Zoom. Participants will receive recordings following each session.
Wednesday, February 5 (12-2:30 ET / 11-1:30 CT / 10-12:30 MT / 9-11:30 PT)
Wednesday, February 12 (12-2:30 ET / 11-1:30 CT / 10-12:30 MT / 9-11:30 PT)
Wednesday, February 19 (12-2:30 ET / 11-1:30 CT / 10-12:30 MT / 9-11:30 PT)
Wednesday, February 26 (12-2:30 ET / 11-1:30 CT / 10-12:30 MT / 9-11:30 PT)
Our Intentions for the Series
Use our own experiences, as well as historical patterns to learn about anti-Blackness & toxic white femininity
Get honest about current patterns in our relationships with Black gender expansive people and Black women
Directly challenge the individualism, competition, purity, control and shame that are characteristic of toxic white femininity
Practice vulnerability and presence over perfection and performance
Un-learn by engaging wisdom of the body, mind, heart and spirit
Our Team
-
Jen Willsea (she/her) is an Atlanta-based and western New York-raised queer mama, garment sewist, quilter, and dreamer of a future beyond white supremacy. She has been honing her craft of antiracist facilitation for nearly 20 years, apprenticing with elder practitioners before launching her independent practice in 2018. Her awakening to what whiteness has meant for the last 400 years (and in her own life) began as a young activist in San Francisco in the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop (now known as the Anne Braden Program) in the early '00s. Since then, Jen has slowly and intentionally built the skills and relationships required to do antiracist facilitation in a deeply embodied and wise way, as a cisgender white woman. Jen is a facilitator of multiracial organizational transformation at Liberatory Power Consulting Group and VISIONS Inc., a student of what decolonization means for white antiracists at the Decolonize Race Project, and a coach/facilitator for white leaders who are committed to showing up as strong, reliable, trustworthy white antiracists. She writes From Whiteness to Wellness on Substack. Jen previously was the co-chair of the Board of Directors at Resource Generation, and one of the founders of The Black Mecca Project. She also finds joy in being wild and silly with her children, showing love through cooking/baking, and learning how to roller skate.
-
Ellen Tuzzolo (they/she) is a white, queer mama, of Southern Italian and Irish ancestry, based on Narragansett, Pokanoket and Wampanoag land. Ellen is most fired up by undermining systems of oppression and breaking down barriers that prevent people from seeing and caring for themselves, each other, and the earth. After growing up as queer and gender expansive in a tiny mostly white town in Massachusetts, Ellen was politicized while supporting organizing and advocacy efforts to end mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline in Louisiana and Alabama. After this experience, they realized it was time to expand capacity to work towards racial justice within their communities of white people. Their passion for working alongside other white people socialized as female, deepening into practices of solidarity and mutuality, grew through their involvement with the White Noise Collective. As a facilitator of multi-racial spaces committed to both popular education and outdoor education, Ellen has held space for thousands of youth and adults to understand and challenge systemic racism and other forms of oppression. Ellen is currently a consultant with VISIONS, Inc. and Partners for Collaborative Change. Ellen serves on the board of The People’s Port Authority, is a proud founding member of the Providence chapter of SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice), and loves spending time outside with their family, learning how to tend to beautiful and edible plant friends.
Sign Up
What to Expect
Is white femininity all bad?
This question has been coming up in the workshop I lead with Ellen Tuzzolo. We haven’t addressed it head on yet, and I want to try working out some of my thinking here.
To give you a sense for the experience, we put together a montage from previous virtual sessions.
“While the content itself was both powerful and deeply relevant, what most impressed me was the skillfulness of the facilitation, and the relational way we were invited to deepen our understanding of these interconnected themes through small group breakouts and 1:1 conversation. In this way the facilitators modeled the ongoing learning while holding space for authenticity, vulnerability, and learning in community. Highly recommend to anyone looking to deepen their journey as powerful accomplices in liberation of Black women and gender expansive folks. ”