3Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How we can Help Dismantle It
Dr. Jessie Daniels, Professor of Sociology Hunter College and CUNY
About the Book
White women’s protection is central to American culture, and it is killing all of us. Whether driving their children to their deaths in minivans or summoning the police to visit “death by cop” on Black people or simply passing on the myth of whiteness and the reality of white wealth to their children, nice white ladies are actively participating in a system designed for their comfort and the destruction of others.
So writes sociologist Jessie Daniels in her new book NICE WHITE LADIES: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It (Seal Press; October 12th). Daniels pulls no punches in connecting the recent historical research documenting the cruelty of white women slave owners in the antebellum South to those behind the effort to establish monuments to the Confederacy, to the majority of white women who consistently vote “against their own interests” and for the GOP. But the damage that nice white ladies do is not easily cordoned off as an issue on the right.
Perhaps even more pernicious are the nice white ladies who advocate for feminism or simply embrace the “light and love” ethos of yoga culture, all while continuing to reproduce systemic racism. From the fairytale wedding to the all-white families that become a way to hoard resources, this book is a searing glimpse at the integral role white women play in cocreating economic advantage that they pass on to their children. The rising “deaths of despair” among white women—deaths from alcohol, opioids, suicide—are an indication that something is wrong that wellness culture cannot fix. There is, this book suggests, a kind of narcissism and sadomasochism at the heart of whiteness.
Daniels, a white woman herself, excavates her own life for deeply personal stories of failing, learning, and evolving. She finds inspiration in the radical white women who put their bodies on the line in the streets, who challenge all-white spaces from workplaces to schools to neighborhoods, and who give away generational wealth and donate to racial justice causes. She closes the book with a roadmap for other white women with practical steps for how to affect much-needed change.
Ultimately, NICE WHITE LADIES, shows how white women can be more than allies—they can be trusted accomplices in a shared mission of liberation for us all.
About Dr. Daniels
Jessie Daniels, PhD is Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is an internationally recognized expert on internet manifestations of racism, and the author of several books, including White Lies (Routledge,1997) and Cyber Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), which examine white supremacist ideology on either side of the rise of the popular internet. Recent articles on this topic include, “The Algorithmic Rise of the Alt-Right,” (2018) and “Twitter and White Supremacy: A Love Story” (2017).She is at work on a new book (as yet untitled) that focuses on those combatting white supremacy in the streets, online and around the world.
She has been called a “pioneer in digital sociology” (Contexts, 2014). She has co-authored two books, Being a Scholar in the Digital Era (with Polly Thistlethwaite) and Going Public (with Arlene Stein), about how digital technologies are changing the work academics do.
She is also the author of dozens of peer-reviewed articles in journals such as American Behavioral Scientist, American Journal of Public Health, Contexts, Gender & Society, Media, Culture & Society, New Media & Society, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Youth & Society. Some of her writing for a general audience has appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, and in literary magazines. In 2022, she became a regular columnist for DAME magazine.
Daniels is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute (2020-present), a Faculty Associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, and a past Faculty Fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute (2018-2019). Her work has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.
Her latest book is Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It (Seal Press 2021). The book received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and was included on their list of Best Nonfiction of 2021.
