Our Dirty Laundry
Our Dirty Laundry
Mothers of Massive Resistance: Author Interview with Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Author interview with Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, author of 'Mothers of Massive Resistance,' a book examining how white women have systematically supported and engineered white supremacy. The discussion covers McRae's academic background, research insights, and specific women profiled in the book. It also touches on contemporary parallels, the importance of education in dismantling racial hierarchies, and how political discourses clouding political realities can sustain oppressive systems. The hosts emphasize the relevance of McRae's work in understanding current socio-political dynamics and the role of grassroots efforts in effecting change.
Hi, this is Mandy Griffin. And I'm Katie Swalwell, and welcome to our Dirty Laundry, stories of white ladies making a mess of things and how we need to clean up our act.
Katy:Hello? Hi. How's going? Hi, we. It's good. We've been talking, to a bunch of really fascinating people lately, and one of them is the author of Mothers of Massive Resistance. I still can't believe that we got to talk to her.
Mandy:I know. We say this all of the time, we are just people who decided to start. This podcast and we just do it, in our spare time. All this is not professional, it's not produced nobody would do it because we care so much about this and we are just always so grateful and also amazed that these people will extend their time so graciously and have such a passion to discuss this. And, Elizabeth Gopi Crave is like absolutely no different about that, just so. Great in the talk that we had with her so we were fangirling so much.
Katy:I, well, I think about all the authors that we've talked to, like Stephanie Jones Rogers, or Jesse Daniels. Like you read these books, they blow your mind. You all you wanna do is just tell the authors how grateful you are and pick their brain about something and you hope that they. Are as great as you've made them out to be in your head. Mm-hmm. And then every one of the cases that we've been able to talk to the author, it's like the greatest pleasure. And it's so much better than we ever could have even expected. They're just incredible people doing great work and important scholarship and it's just I feel very grateful that we have a space to offer them to share their work and hopefully reach even more people. Then they've already connected with, yeah, so we spoke with Elizabeth Gillespie McGray. For those who are not in the know, she is the author of Mothers of Massive Resistance, white Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. That book has won several words, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, given by the organization of American Historians. The Frank and Harriet Ousley Award given by the Southern Historical Association and the Society for Professors of Education, outstanding book Award. She's a historian interested in race, politics, and education and postwar United States. Her degrees are from Wake Forest University. That's her bachelor's. Her master's degrees, plural are from Western Carolina University and Marymount University in Virginia, and her PhD in history is from the University of Georgia. She's currently professor of history at Western Carolina University and is also the co-director of the Appalachian Oral History Project, which sounds like it's maybe taken a little bit of a break since COVID, but that. Sounds like a fascinating project that maybe we could follow up with her at some point. I think oral histories are so, so important and just having archives, like in Iowa right now, they're eliminating funding for archives that have women's collections, labor history collections, queer history collections, like there's who benefits when we delete those archives or when we don't. Document and preserve people's stories, especially people from the margins like the, there's only one group of people who benefits from that, and that's the. Bastards in power. Yeah. So we need to support all of those archives from the margins that we can, in her current project, she examines the role of school choice in American public education. We got to talk to her a little bit about that. Mm-hmm. Does anything stand out to you from the conversation that you wanted, shout out before we let people in on what we talked about?
Mandy:I think just in general's, just so approachable in the way that she, considers all of these ideas and how she researched this book and the way she thinks about these women She said that she wanted to make it very clear that this was like your next door neighbor. Mm-hmm. So that it would be something. That we can recognize in our next door neighbors, I think. Yeah. Um, and I think she did such a good job at that. And that comes across in talking to her too, that it's just a very approachable presentation. And she herself was the same. And it was just really great. Very lovely. It was
Katy:a wonderful conversation. Yes. I know. Listeners will be as delighted as we were. Yeah. Uh, if you don't have the book, get it. Mm-hmm. Gift it. Check it out. And enjoy the conversation we had with Elizabeth Gillespie McGray. Thanks. Hello.
Mandy:Hi. We're very excited to be here. Finally, we've talked about this on all of our episodes that we today have. Elizabeth Gillespie McCrae with us, and we get to ask her all the questions that we have been wanting to ask and just go over how this work came together and talk about how important it is right now. So we're very, very excited for this. But Katie, do you wanna give like a little intro
Katy:I do. I know we have questions. We've jotted some down and we've had questions in the margins that we've been keeping track of too. But I also think we just want to tell her all the parts we left so much and he
Elizabeth McCrae:Great.
Katy:oh, there's some like just little gems where we can see a little bit of like, snark is maybe not the right word, but just your human frustration with some of these people and every time it comes through, we're just so delighted. Anyway, we have just, so we're going to fan girl out here, but I am delighted to welcome Elizabeth Glassby McRay, a historian who is interested in race, politics and education in the post-war United States. So what is there to really write about? I don't know, that's just, I'm
Elizabeth McCrae:Small topic.
Katy:exactly, she is of course the author of Mothers of Massive Resistance, white Women and the Politics of White Supremacy that we've been reading for the. The past couple months here, Well, really just thinking about the awards your book has won and the people who have recommended your book to us, who we really admire and are inspired by that, I, I think it's safe to say, I will say that I think, your scholarship for me who works in social studies education, it's you, it's so important and it's, really just cutting edge scholarship about the history of white women. I really appreciate it so much, and you do just such a brilliant job of documenting not only how white women have supported white supremacy, but how they've engineered it, how they've been the architects of it. And I think like we at this podcast want people to know about all of that. But I think sometimes it's really just opening up to say, oh, women supported it too. But gosh, this book just made me understand that it's more than just supporting, it's way deeper than that. So we've got just a few questions that have popped up for us throughout this book, just about you personally. I hope it's okay to ask some of these questions, but, we're both white women, we're both mothers. I dunno how you identify, but I, I am wondering
Elizabeth McCrae:mother.
Katy:a white mother. All right.
Elizabeth McCrae:Other things. Yeah.
Katy:Of course, yes, we contain multitudes, but those are significant identifiers. So how, with that identity and being from the south yourself, how did you come to be curious about this topic? And even before being curious, how did you even become aware of it? How did it even occur to you to ask about these histories and to really take this seriously as a subject that is so important to pay attention to?
Elizabeth McCrae:I think like most things, it's both like personal and kind of an intellectual journey. Looking back, I would say I, was telling Mandy after I finished at Wake Forest, I moved to DC, I ended up teaching high school and I taught in one of the wealthiest public school districts in Virginia,
Katy:hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:In Northern Virginia as a teacher in training. And then I taught in one of the, poorest school districts, on the edge of the coal fields in Southwestern Virginia. And I guess the the question of sort of what is equal and equitable because the funding was so different, right? In the same state, the funding, the per pupil funding based on property taxes seemed like insane. And then that the students were competing, you know, to go to college, right? Without regard to that, one of them had received$1,500 from the state and the other one had received$3,400 for the state you, or whatever those numbers were. So I think like that experience on the ground sort of teaching school made me question the way we talk about equality and equity and the way that public schools can be this very liberatory institution, but also They've been designed to uphold, some pretty serious hierarchies, racist and class hierarchies in American society. So I think like that sort of experience, maybe put me on the path of sort of equality and I think growing up in the mountain south, and then going to graduate school and I was enthralled by the Civil Rights Movement and the women that worked in the Civil Rights Movement and the very first paper I ever wrote I was interested in the Holland Folk School, which was a labor and race kind of progressive institution in eastern Tennessee. And I went over there to their archives, but I kept reading about all these amazing people pushing for social justice. And then I'm like, well, of the white women that are in this cannon, which are not very many, right, but like of the ones that are doing like Constance Curry and Anne Braden and all these folks, I was like, I don't think I've ever come across anyone like that, right? Like, it's not been part of the conversations. I don't think I grew up with anybody that seemed particularly committed to like racial equality. I mean, it just wasn't, not that they were against it, but it just didn't seem part and parcel of sort of the white southern world that I had grown up in.
Mandy:Mm-hmm.
Katy:Hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:And so I was like, are these women, they're so fascinating, but are they really the ones, do they represent what was really happening on the ground? And so then when I think I got to working on my PhD, those questions of sort of how did we come to this place with inequities and education and then so much of the civil rights movement, not all of it, but had focused on the schools, right? And so, there's all these women working in the schools. And it's not a very elegant answer, but I think that that both sort of thinking about, public school and equities and then. Reading about all these amazing black and white women in the civil rights movement, way more black women than white women, of course, in the South, and then thinking, wow, it's nice that there were those white women, but is that really what all the white women were doing? And a sort of suspicion that that is not what was happening.
Mandy:Uhhuh Uhhuh. Yeah. We talk a lot about, you know, there's always the excuse that people give that individuals were a product of their time and a product of their upbringing and their experiences, which of course, but then also you see people who deviate from that. And you wonder, what's the difference between the people who broke out of that mold and the people that stayed in it. And I think of a lot of these women that you've written about were the ones who stayed there. And I think it's great that you, as an author like also came from that community of the South. It's not like you came down as somebody from the quote unquote north to hunt out these women and call them out on anything. Like seeing it from, from the perspective as someone who is also then just raised in the product of that and, and coming to all these conclusions and finding them. I think it just made the book so much more alive and well-rounded from that perspective. I appreciated that a lot.
Elizabeth McCrae:Yeah. Well, probably it allowed me to get some stories I wouldn't have gotten if I was someone else.
Mandy:For sure.
Katy:It's so true. I live where Mandy and I met and moved back to where I grew up in Iowa and I feel like a real deep, almost compulsion to do work here and to try to improve social studies education, especially as it connects to local history because I feel it's my family's history. It's my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents. I feel like I have a obligation, I have an intellectual curiosity, a professional curiosity, but when I'm here, it has a whole different meaning to me to do that work. And I wonder if you experienced any of that when you were either doing your archival research or when you were writing the fact that this is your home, to some extent whether it's regional or maybe even more local than that.
Elizabeth McCrae:Mm-hmm.
Katy:Did you feel any sort of connection obligation, you know?
Elizabeth McCrae:Where I grew up is pretty different than where I did a lot of the research.
Katy:Hmm,
Elizabeth McCrae:mean, maybe chapter one is about Lexington and Rockbridge County is not so far, but I'm in even like a sub region. Right. The sort of mountain south. But, I think what I did feel is, oftentimes doing this research when I was in the communities where I was talking to people and staying and go into the archives, outside of the sort of academic world, people made assumptions. By the way I talked and the way I looked, and I was pregnant twice during this research. So Right, okay. Here's this little lady
Mandy:Hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:work, right? But not really having to be taken super seriously in some ways. Right. But I think people pointed me in directions that they wouldn't have pointed everybody in those directions. I interviewed one of the characters in the book, Florence Stillers Ogden. I went to, speak to her nephew
Mandy:Hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:his wife. And, one of the stories they said is, oh, you've read all her newspaper articles? And I was like, yes. And they were like, we'd like to publish'em, but you know, we probably couldn't live here if we published them. We'd have to edit out some of the racial parts of them. And I was like, well, they're on microfilm everywhere. Right? Like,
Katy:Also, I'm thinking what would be left, honestly,
Elizabeth McCrae:Right. Right, right. But, but I was like, oh my gosh. You know? But I think that acknowledgement of what it meant to live in a place where she had done that work Right. In the delta of Mississippi
Katy:Hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:might have been a story that I didn't get if I was a woman of color. Right. Um, or if I didn't have as strong of an accent as I have. Right.
Mandy:Yeah. we were wondering that, I think that's one of a couple of questions there. Like one, how did these particular women emerge from the research that you did, and then how do you treat writing about individuals who still have like living relatives? And have you been contacted by some of them? Has anything come up with that?
Katy:Okay. Mandy's asking this question for a super specific reason, so I'm gonna out her right now. Her nickname is The Petty Detective because we'll be reading an article or a book and she always, figures out like, oh, who's this bastard? And goes even deeper to try to learn more about their backstory. We've concluded everyone needs therapy and history would be so different, but there's a woman, and now I can't remember her last name. Her first name is Mary, but as a teenager, she wrote this essay, Mary Heal. And of course Mandy's, like I got on her Facebook page, she's still alive and saw her post and I looked at it too. And you can see her grandkids and her kids and so that was one of the questions we asked, like, whoa, this, it's not even relatives, it's this person. And what would it be like to be her granddaughter in college reading this in a class And suddenly you turn the page and kabam, there's memaw and you're, like, what is going on? So the question of why these four women, how these four women, but also there any like ethical quandaries or how do you navigate when people are either still living themselves and have thoughts about how they wanna be portrayed or they're precious about their relatives and the way that people write about them.
Elizabeth McCrae:That's the one moment in the book that sort of gave me, I think pause only after it was in print, right? Like oh wow, it's finally out and here is this person, her face and the essay. And I didn't talk to her. I mean, it's in the archive, right? I didn't talk to her. I've thought about that since, if I should have said, Hey, what's up? But also for the readers, I don't presume to think how she would read this, but for the readers, I think the point was that so much of the society that she was in was normalizing that. And so when you're 17 or 16, why wouldn't you write that essay? Um, why wouldn't you? When you're ministers and politicians and maybe your parents and your school is advertising this and what's the equivalent of whatever patriotic American youth is saying, oh, write this essay and you can get$500 and that's a lot of money, then, um.
Mandy:Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:Like, I think it would take, have to be a pretty, sophisticated 16-year-old white 16-year-old in Mississippi in that time period to ignore all the reinforcements that this position is a legitimate position. And I think that's maybe what I hope that readers would see is that it's not that she was really unique or some early version of Marjorie Taylor Green, right? But that, that's what lots of messages in her society reinforced. And then as a parent, I'm like, if you get asked to write an essay contest, you better find out what that is. Right,
Mandy:Well, I don't know if you had heard any of that part where we talked about it. As I was reading this, I remembered that I, myself one a daughters of the American Revolution essay contest in the eighties. I do not remember what the topic was. I can't, like my, I asked my mom to look around and see if she could find stuff. I have the bond still from when I won the contest and I was like, I can't imagine.'cause I grew up in a very liberal family. I can't imagine it was anything overt like that my mom would've been okay with me writing about, but I would love. To have seen what it was to see.'cause you know, it's still embedded in it, even if it's not right out at the forefront. And so as we were reading through this and the DAR kept coming up and up, I was just like, oh my gosh. The embarrassment.
Elizabeth McCrae:I mean, I think, you know, that's, uh, yes. I think we've all done, I, I think I got a research, small research grant from the Colonial Dames and Grace Hale had gotten it before who had come through the same program or the same master's program, and she had said, I'm not sending my picture. Right. Like, the picture wasn't required. And so they had changed the application process, but she's like, why would you need a picture? Right. Um, but the same thing, I was like, it's$500. I need$500. Right. And it didn't seem overt In a way that now I might think even harder about that.
Mandy:Yeah.
Katy:You know, the, it's one of the reasons I love, love, love this book is you're painting such vivid portraits of these women, but you are also weaving together and the way their contexts are different, linked but different, unique. But you are also linking together the generational work and the overlapping generations and the systems and the structures and the organizational webs that are being built. It's really hard to refute and just how you've even positioned this woman now, who, by the way, her Facebook, I don't think she's moved that far off these, like just for, to make you feel better. Like, I don't know. But I, I do think there's that your answer like, oh, she is the symptom. This is like the manifestation is, of course there would be teenagers that would write this essay and publicly declare these things. That's the systemic result of all of this work. And I think that's what makes it hard. I'm sure people can try, but it's not like you are picking any one of these women. And saying here's why they're atrocious. Mandy and I will comment as we're reading things like she is heinous, we get so frustrated, but you really are trying to lay out like this web and this system. Just as an aside at Iowa State University where I was a professor for many years, there's, Carrie Chapman Kat was one of the graduates and it's, this long standing controversy over whether a building should be still named in her honor because of her use of white supremacist arguments, which she's not the only one and it, but very prominent suffragists who did leverage these arguments. And her great grand nephew floats around and shows up whenever there's a public critique of Ka to defend her or, you know, she, she had a black friend. You know, like all the kind of arguments that you make for like, why, and I always think that it's the encounters I've had with him even, it's just, it's missing the point. It's not. It's not even about what one person either believed in their heart of hearts, or they said this on Tuesday, but they said that on Friday. Or, it's about trying to understand how systems get built and sustained, and those individual actions obviously are a part of those things, but it's about trying to establish what the norm is even, and then holding that ground as hard as you can and doing all of these things and why people would do that, and why they're invested in it, how they're doing it. I appreciate that a lot, even though you can't read this and come away, like, the only thing that we maybe took away from these women, they're very smart and they're very tactical, you know,
Elizabeth McCrae:they read a lot.
Katy:And we laughed so hard about like how. They the time. Like what? Just the sheer commitment that they had. And the one letter, the lady who's said, I'm just eating potato chips and I'm never having sex. We're like, okay, the judge doesn't need that information. But, we, I think that we're really, curious about how you've seen people react to the book. What have been the responses from different, not just maybe the descendants of people, but just what has been the response? What surprised
Elizabeth McCrae:I mean, uh, the question on descendants right, is. Two of the women didn't have children, so, right. Yeah. Um, so I'm safe on those two families.
Katy:Unless there's a great grand nephew floating around.'cause he has a lot of time on his hands. I'm telling you right now. Yeah.
Elizabeth McCrae:Yeah. But I think there are, I mean, your point, there are producers of this and the four women that are, and there's more than four, but those four that are the sort of narrative threads, they knew what they were doing. And they were actively doing it, and they wanted to produce a white supremacist society. They wanted to make sure the hierarchies worked in ways that benefited some and didn't others. I think the pervasiveness of their message means that a lot of people consume that,
Katy:Hmm,
Elizabeth McCrae:and also perpetuate it, but not with the same intent that they did. and so. You talking about, like who you think you wanna talk to and try to change the needle? The producers aren't the ones that I didn't, right. I'm like, they're not gonna change.
Mandy:Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:But would the people that understood that they're receiving these messages and that it's this like really constructed multi-level work That, that they've just been absorbing without thinking about it. Those are the people that I hope that they're equivalent in the current climate we could change.
Mandy:just kind of those light bulb moments where they might read this and like, oh, I didn't realize that this was connected to this. That was then back to that. I think. Yeah. do you get feedback that there have been people who have had those awakenings, have you.
Katy:Hmm. I think some people in some audiences, right, will be like, oh my gosh, is this why I got sent to a academy? Instead of a public school? Or is this why? It happened to them, but they didn't understand the context, Like, oh, you're changing schools those have been light bulb moments for them. Like, oh, this is why my family, pulled me out of public school and sent me to a segregationist academy. Or this is why in the north we moved to a different neighborhood in Boston that wasn't being actively integrated. And so I think that has been light bulb moments for some people. There's also a lot of questions about from southern white women that grew up in households with black domestic workers, And they'd heard these stories about how they're part of the family, but then this clearly that they're not and so I think that's been moments. This may be too reductionist, but I was at a talk in Minnesota and it's probably the whitest audience that to, right? But they were like, oh my gosh, what kind of reaction do you get when you talk about this book in the South? And I was like they're used to like talking about race, right? And the sort of ways that they resisted the civil race movement. And I think interestingly in the southern audiences have been, I don't know if more receptive, but it's not like I'm the first person that's challenged,
Mandy:mm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:how Jim Crow worked. I think the problem and this is totally anecdotal. I think more people have had trouble seeing the Boston women as segregationist
Katy:I was just gonna say, I think, you know, you're talking to two Midwesterners here and the folks in Minnesota, I feel like they didn't read the whole book because that, to me, the most chilling part is the chapter that ends. I think it's maybe Francis Den naturally one of the women just saying, kind of chuckling to herself, like, just wait till it comes to the north and then, then, we'll see. Just knowing how deep it goes. Like they, they were, maybe we can call them cynical in that way, but I think they were absolutely accurate in their assessment of how superficial and thin. And, not interested really in civil rights movement. Most white people in the north were, I think it, it was chilling, and then you read the chapter about Boston and Detroit and, these other cities. And being from the Midwest ourselves, I think that that is one of the myths that gets perpetuated about US history writ large, but specifically the Civil War era, or civil rights movement era. That it's somehow North is the good guy, south is the bad guy. And just how that myth props up so much. It makes it so hard to see the ways that white women in the North are being really awful and not helpful at all, you know?
Elizabeth McCrae:When I think it tends to create a single Jim Crow regime rather than multiple ones in multiple places. That racial segregation and white supremacist politics doesn't have to work the same way. Every place. And I think it, I didn't make that point as forcefully as I think I've thought about it later, but There's different ways that that works. And the anti busing was a moment that sort of blew up some of those ways. That you could see into the deep investment that had manifest itself differently.
Katy:For what it's worth, I think you make that point pretty clearly. I mean, I thi, I mean, I, because I think you also make the point that if victory for them meant maintaining deur segregation, then they wouldn't have been so effective, but because they were able to be so mutable and portable that that's what has. Helped things
Mandy:There were victories everywhere.
Elizabeth McCrae:Right, right, right, right. Right.
Mandy:Yeah. That's one of the other questions we had is has it surprised you?'cause this came out in 2018, right? And we're now, seven years out from that, and I feel like this past seven years has just been an incredible resurgence of a lot of the same tactics that these women used at that point in time. Did that surprise you? Did you see. Did it stand out more to you or did it not surprise you where you were like, of course, this is like our MO.
Elizabeth McCrae:I think it, unlike Katie, it took me a long, like this, my book, I have it written another book, and I spent a long time on it and I, and I wrote a lot of it during the Obama presidency, right? Where a lot of the conversation was about a post-racial society when I was like,
Katy:hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:Oh my gosh, no one's gonna believe this. Like, we're moving on no one's gonna, and so then it comes out goes to press in late 2016 or whatever comes out in 2018. And I think the world's a different place. And I probably was more attuned. I mean, we had, a series of elections, even at the state level and the headlines kept saying 82% of white women voted for, voted didn't vote for Stacey Abrams, and X percent voted for Roy Moore and. And there's this notion of surprise, and I'm like, we have to stop being surprised, right? There's overwhelming evidence. I could still be doing research. I mean, I think I love doing archival research and every place I went, I found an equivalent of Florence Schillers Ogden, or Nell Battle Lewis, or Cornelia. I kept finding these people and at some point, how many of them do I have to find right before I, like, I'd still be in the archives,? And my dean's like, uh, write the book. Stop doing this. So I think, for me, probably doing that work, I'm like, how can we still be surprised? How can we still be surprised they've been doing this work? They've not been shy about it since the 19th century.
Mandy:Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:Well, and if we look at Stephanie Jones Rogers, even before that, right? Right.
Mandy:right. Yep.
Katy:think it is like a great ma, like a great, in a creepy sense magic act because, when you look back intentionally to look at it, it's so obvious and dense and thick, but it's like this thicket of weeds that it, unless you know to look for it, they're able to hide in plain sight and I leverage the sexism against them or whatever it is, that they're able to make it seem like there's nothing to see here, and yet it's like they're the dust that we think must mean there's nothing there is actually just being kicked up by all their energy and it's actually
Elizabeth McCrae:That's a really good metaphor.
Katy:Ugh. I, these women. I think about it a lot.
Elizabeth McCrae:Well, I think it's also who we imagine white supremacists actors to be.
Katy:yeah.
Elizabeth McCrae:And we imagine them as these sort of loud male public figures. The sort of George Wallace writ large or Bull Connor and Birmingham, and they've taken up so much space and not that they shouldn't, they're worth talking about, but I think they've clouded, all the work being done on the ground. And you, I mean, I don't know if you grew up in a, like I always tell my students, if you want something done at a church, do you go to the minister or do you go to the church secretary who's likely a woman
Mandy:Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:in the Protestant south? And um, and
Katy:Oh, it's so different in the Catholic North. Let me tell. Yeah.
Elizabeth McCrae:They're like, you go, you go to the church ladies. I said, politics works that way, right? They're talking, but these people are doing such. Critical work for segregation and white supremacy on the ground.
Mandy:Yeah. It even to the point where it seemed like they were frustrated with their male counterparts for not moving it along enough. They're like, okay, you guys are worthless. Let's
Elizabeth McCrae:Yeah.
Mandy:move out of the way.
Elizabeth McCrae:you're so less principled white supremacists, like, we're the real ones, we're committed and we don't get political perks for our principled stance
Mandy:thought that was a really
Elizabeth McCrae:I was really surprised by that, you know?
Katy:But I coming from a socialized education background. I think that's one of the consequences of the dominant narrative and the way it gets taught in schools is, again, it provides cover for these women because we're never talking about that. That's just not. They're not even characters in at all. And the way that, let's take us history is typically taught is by eras that are usually linked to wars or presidential administrations. And that if you're taking that lens too, it's almost impossible to see these stories emerge because they were intentionally not connected to political parties. That was fascinating to me how, they were so committed to the ideology. Right? And you know, we keep recommending this book to people over and over, like, if you want to understand this current moment, this is essential reading. Because one of the big takeaways for me wasn't that white women are shitty'cause that's what we're here for. And we understand like that part of it didn't surprise us. But what has confounded me recently is why this set of issues, like why is MAGA so against the UN and why are people really mad about fluoride in the water and what, I could not believe the bundle of issues that has confused me as to why is that the bundle? And of course the answer is white sre. You know, at the end of the day shouldn't be surprised that that's somewhere in there. But that was so illuminating to, to piece together this current political moment of, we don't trust the mainstream media where white Christian nationalists, we hate unicef, we hate the un, we like we all these things that seem disconnected or even like incongruent. But when you twist it to look at it through the stories of these women, it's like b ba, b ba pop. It just all lines up and it makes so much sense. It's,
Elizabeth McCrae:Yeah. And I didn't imagine that the UN would show up when I first started, right? Like I wanted to know. Why is it with all these amazing people working for a more equitable world, and racial and social justice, why is it we can't move? And my answer became white women on the ground. I mean, it's not the whole answer, but that was my answer, so I was surprised when the UN came up
Katy:hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:and then I was really surprised when the fluoride came back around was like, that seemed even a little fringe in the early sixties, and now I'm like, oh my gosh, really? That was unexpected for
Mandy:Yeah, there are questions. Katie and I sat in high school history classes right next to each other for our whole high school career. And
Katy:I wish we had the notes we passed back and forth. Still. Maybe you have
Mandy:great
Elizabeth McCrae:Oh, that would be awesome.
Mandy:It would be so great. And we had one history teacher that, oh man, was he a trip? We got in some arguments with him. But we look at each other while we're learning these histories and we're like, we didn't get this. Like this was, this was never taught. This was never part of it. So when we started doing, I can't remember which topic it was we were talking about, but one of the things we were really interested in is when did the allegiance to the Democratic party of that time then switch to the Republican party? And how did the Republican party of today become today's Republican party? Where did all of that occur? What were the cogs in the machine that turned that? And when we read those chapters in your book, we were just like. The answer, here's the answer. This like,
Katy:Mm-hmm
Mandy:is where things happened and it's was never taught in mainstream education. And that's why I think that piece and so many other pieces that we're just like, this really should be required reading. Like we want everyone, you can't go any further in any sort of politics, work, advocacy without understanding this history. It's so important, I think.
Elizabeth McCrae:Mm-hmm.
Katy:not be surprised anymore, like you said, because that's not useful. That's a waste of our time to be surprised by this. And then to also. Understand and anticipate and then learn how to disrupt the efforts like the Moms for Liberty group. That's basically just another iteration of these other ones. Or, you know, sometimes we aren't opposed to the technique they're using. We just hate the ends to which they're using this technique. But we actually think that, those of us who are committed to racial justice and, a more just equitable loving, sustainable world, like, okay, maybe we need us a contest, maybe we need, newsletters and all these things. And one of the things we keep saying is just how there, there's a certain built in advantage. To the work that these women are trying to accomplish. Because when you don't care about humanity, you can move faster. And when you are trying to advocate for exploiting people, you can exploit people in order to advocate that, and you don't lose any sleep over it,? So there are these shortcuts that they can take, and I think our systems are so entrenched that, it's hard to transform them or it's hard to even imagine what could look different when this has been, how it's been for so long. So I think there's some uphill battle, but like, no question which side of history, I want my great grandkids to open a book and not see me in like this
Elizabeth McCrae:Right, right,
Katy:chapter 12 of the edition of this book. Um.
Elizabeth McCrae:Yeah.
Katy:Do you ever find yourself, especially given the politics that we're currently living in thinking about lessons you learned or what you took away personally, I like, I guess in some way the question might be even deeper. Like, did this change you fundamentally to learn about this history and to write about it? Did it make you more cynical? Did it make you more committed? Did it make you mother differently? Like just you were in the thick of it for so long and still are
Elizabeth McCrae:I think, yeah, it changed me. I mean, I think the whole process of. I love going to school, right? And so I've just almost never left. So I think the whole process of learning for me and then learning this made me think so hard about how I wanted to support public education and what I wanted my children to, what overt lessons had to be taught But in a larger, am I cynical? Well, probably, but, I try not to be. Sometimes people say like, do you have any hope when you finish? And I was like, it took a lot of damn work to do this. they were working all the time. And they were policing the stories people told and the schools and local politics and the garden club and like they were at it. So there's so many places, I think to intervene to disrupt it. And you don't have to have a national
Katy:hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:did it where they were and they made national networks. But are you using the tools of the oppressors? if we do some of the thing, same things they do, but disrupt it. If it takes so much work to sustain it, how much work do you actually have to do? How many cuts do you have to make before it falls apart?
Mandy:Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:Um, and that is probably rose colored glasses,
Katy:But it's worth trying. You know, it, it's worth, it's worth remembering that I think, especially for white women, like you talk about being a white woman who's pregnant. I mean, that's like, oh, the paragon of virtue walking in somewhere, and just the like, what, what power that has to kind of incognito, enter spaces and fuck'em up. Like what would it mean to show up? Like I, I thought for a second about Mandy, maybe I'll remember this part, where there were women who would like go undercover to the progressive groups and like write down everybody's license plates. And I was like, God, can I stomach sitting through a Mom's for Liberty meme? But I kind of wanna do it, I think really important to remember that the lack of resistance or people not calling out like, you can't do that anymore, clerk. That's not your job. You can't fill that form out that way. Or
Elizabeth McCrae:Mm-hmm.
Katy:All, those little moments of pushback are certainly not going to help their project. Maybe it won't derail it entirely, but if it's death by a thousand cuts that that's how they're having their success, then that has to be
Elizabeth McCrae:Right.
Katy:what's on the resistant side.
Elizabeth McCrae:Yeah. I mean, I think the other things it's made me suspicious of any organization that has like constitution in it, like the women for Constitutional government monster. I mean, I tell my students, I'm like, when you see a title like that, you have to start looking
Mandy:Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:because it doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. And so I was wary of that. And I'm also, I think, wary or conscious of when motherhood is deployed in ways that seem moral, but are really political. Like how motherhood, being a mom, performs a lot of political work for certain groups, and that the class dynamics and racial dynamics that are embedded in that are oh, I'm a mom. I'm doing this for the good of my children. Well, I think that's what bleeds into the next project on School Choice. Like how the deployment of certain rights for certain mothers or parents has overcome and clouded that there's a whole group who've been, are being denied those rights or multiple groups that are being denied. Certain parents' choices matter more than other parent choices. And that comes straight out of the Post Brown era? I mean, straight out of how are we gonna get around integrated schools. I'm not saying it's the same now, but I think the roots of it seem
Mandy:for sure. Like it's not
Katy:don't know that.
Mandy:It's really not. So is that your next project. Is it gonna be something similar? Is it another book you're looking at publishing?
Elizabeth McCrae:I hope I live long enough. But, um, I think, so I am really interested in sort of how school and parental choice has been shaped and deployed. I don't know exactly, I sort of started at the end, so I don't know what that will look like. And I'm also just now considering have I said this out loud? I don't think I've said this out loud. Go into a couple things this summer being a fan girl. Kim Crenshaw in the African American Policy Forum, and they've been talking a lot racial fascism and all the women I wrote about were not fascists, but I think Mary Dawson Kane
Mandy:Hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:was maybe, she comes the closest and when I was writing the book I wanted the sort of everydayness, and this is your neighbor doing this work to come through. These aren't like multi-headed white supremacist hydras, that you can pick out. But some of this stuff that Kane did was a lot further to the right than. Not necessarily her racial pal, but the world she lived in. Where she was in that, she was in a far right world then. So I've thought about like, is now the moment to think about doing something with her, given the sort of questions that we might ask about the political landscape today? I don't know. I don't know that I wanna spend that much time with her, but I That's just popped into my head, Over the past couple weeks thinking about how and this is not my idea. This comes really from Kim Crenshaw and Carol Anderson and. Talking about racial fascism and how it has manifested itself historically in the United States. And so I've been thinking about that since July. And she is a person that seems to keep looping back too.
Katy:We interviewed, Jesse Daniels, who is a sociologist who writes about nice white ladies, a really great book also. And she spent a lot of time online in far right, hate group like the Klan, but for ladies, kind of groups. And I remember us asking her like, oh, do you just, come home, take a shower, and just try to get your heebie-jeebies out. Like how do you try not get too close in a way that you are able to stay tethered and grounded, when you're reading through all these, but maybe that's not even the right question to ask because that is the malu that people have to live in and can't exit it ever. So it's just part of being in solidarity and doing the work that needs to be done. I wish we had more scholars doing the work that you and a handful of others are doing. If you could like, assemble a team or, or kind of direct people, like here are a whole bunch of other. Places that need excavating with this particular lens. What would you want to see people asking about studying in terms of deepening our understanding, our ability to document and witness and call out the work that white women have been doing for so long in the United States.
Elizabeth McCrae:I think there's certainly a lot of work to be done post 19 74, 75. And the landscape does change, pretty significantly with the rise of the religious right. As a political force. And so I, I'd be curious how that manifests itself. I mean, I think we see like a deep dive into that,? Among communities of sort of white women, I think there's a lot of local or geographically little tighter studies that could be done that paint is some broad brushes, but show how it works in places. I mean, Pasadena kept coming up in LA right? In this book, and Michelle Nickerson has written about this, some of those people in our earlier period, or right around World War ii. But I think. It's helpful to think about how those systems have been maintained at a sort of more local level. And how the resistance to the brown decision manifests itself in particular places. Because I wonder if we wouldn't find a group of actors that has then shifted the politics of that place in subsequent generations. If we could draw lines through, I'm not sure, but I think that's worth doing too.
Mandy:curious, kind of taking off from those lines, since you are a professor and you are working with students, college age students, I'm always wondering. What the youth of today are really thinking and doing and do we have like people coming up who care about this as passionately who want to get into that kind of thing? And especially being in the south,
Katy:Hmm.
Mandy:what, what do you see in your students? Like, do you have hope? Do you,
Elizabeth McCrae:Yes, I do have hope
Mandy:okay.
Elizabeth McCrae:if their brains don't disintegrate on TikTok. I have hope. I mean, again, I think there's, college age students doing amazing, things. I keep coming back to this summer in Nashville, the Democracy defenders, but like Justin Jones from Tennessee and the sort of youth that he has gathered, that are doing all kinds of work all over the place. And I was, sounds like I'm name dropping, but I was talking to, I had emailed Carol, I'm,
Mandy:Yeah.
Elizabeth McCrae:emailed, um, Carol Anderson the other day to ask
Katy:Hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:for some help. Like, I'm working on this class on reconstruction and I was like, can I come pick your brain? And she's like, my students are on fire. Right. So I do think that, there's a lot of hope and I think they're rightly so. They're pretty pissed that we've left them a world that. Seems, really problematic. So I think there is, and I find even across the political spectrum, I mean, not on the far ends, but like caring about things that our central to their lives and what they believe in that aren't really represented by the political discourse that we have today. So yeah. I'm hopeful.
Katy:I think there's something to be said too for when these things are, like all the quiet parts are said out loud kind of moment. That of course is painful and violent and hurting people and you know, that's needs to stop. But there's, there is something about that that actually can be empowering too. Like it's pretty obvious, there really isn't any subtlety to any of this right now. And I, I wonder as things. Escalate as those efforts, move even from far right into authoritarianism or
Elizabeth McCrae:Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Katy:and the ways, like I'm thinking about, Mandy and I talked about this a couple episodes ago, like the bargain that some of these women made to shift to a more colorblind, conversational approach
Elizabeth McCrae:This is strategy? I mean, a well articulated strategy.
Katy:and maybe this is me being naively like I am the more naively optimistic, one of the two of us and I have run since we were 12. But I, I do wonder if that decision bought them time, but if there isn't something in that decision to go that way, that also is exploitable because, at some point people bought in. Like I'm thinking people in my own family who. Are appalled at what's happening, but have voted Republican their whole lives and, are like really disoriented and kind of piecing things together. But they were lulled by that colorblind language and now they're recognizing that that's what it was. And they're, they are distancing themselves from that community. So I wonder as things get more explicit and get more on the surface and this agenda that's so extremist, although not the exception in the United States, it's like always been there. Um, again, maybe that's naively optimistic of me, but there's part of me that, hopes that like as they kind of commented their.
Elizabeth McCrae:Mm-hmm.
Katy:Power that that's sort of their undoing because people are like, no, not, not that, but may. Maybe again, maybe this is me, and she's chuckling from her grave like, oh, you are underestimating the white supremacy. That is
Elizabeth McCrae:I think, you know, there are people that are gonna work at it and are working at it, but you know, there's also, I don't know, I think about students like they think they should be safe when they go to school, wherever they are on the political spectrum, most of'em don't think you should go to jail for the possession of marijuana?
Mandy:Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:I think the racial politics are. Are more fraught for sure. Or the racist politics.'cause I think there, there's been so much work done to shape those. But, I don't wanna speak for, I don't think most of our students would say, oh, what really a segregated society is what we should return to. I mean, they could use some education, but couldn't we all I think we're no different than that. But
Mandy:Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth McCrae:I think the color blindness the mask has been pulled off of that, I think in this moment, I just can't imagine that discourse works. But I think we have to be careful of what discourse comes next.
Katy:Oh, you just gave me goosebumps and like,
Mandy:Yeah.
Katy:That was actually a question. We were thinking of each chapter as like part one of the horror movie, part two of the horror movie, and, maybe now is the grand final. Like again, maybe it's not, maybe it doesn't have that sort of buildup, but is there because you do such a great job at showing at how it doesn't evolve organically, but these mutations are being engineered to protect these systems. That's gonna keep, like people are gonna keep trying to mutate it to engineer. What would you have us watching for? Or knowing these women well, and their, what their legacies are, what would you be suspicious of or watching for?
Elizabeth McCrae:Well, you know, I like being a historian'cause I don't have to. Be knowledge, like super, you know, it's different than being a political s who's commenting on what's happening now. But I do think we both should reform institutions and also protect those that have democratic possibilities. When an institution comes under such fire that we gotta think about what's the story behind that, right? Do all institutions have problems for sure? But which ones can be in pursuit of democracy and humanity and equality and can be reformed. And I think sometimes the attacks are the loudest on ones that have that potential even if it has not been met. And then I think we have to look for political discourses that cloud political realities Which colorblindness did family values did. Um, that seem to be politically neutral and are not politically neutral.
Mandy:Yep. Great places to start. There's so much underneath all of those.
Elizabeth McCrae:Or we could retreat and binge watch, you know, whatever, something to like.
Mandy:we're leaning into the both and that's what we talked about earlier today, binge watch Netflix, go to your PTA meetings. You gotta, you gotta do both. Well, we're so thankful that you would spend time talking to us. We always say, we don't know why people say yes to us. We're so grateful that they do.
Elizabeth McCrae:well, I'm so grateful to be asked. Thank you so much.
Mandy:Anyone who's been listening, who's been reading along with us, if you were trying to think of, the next birthday present you get for your friend or, holidays, just push this book out to everyone, not even subtly. Just demand that people look into this history and know more about it. Start your own book clubs. I think it's really important. To discuss these issues, not just to read it and know it for yourself. Katie and I learned so much just talking to each other from it and, we love talking to all of the people that come on and it helps
Elizabeth McCrae:Well, thank you. Yeah.
Mandy:that.
Elizabeth McCrae:Thank you so much. Yes. And if you ever have other questions, I'm happy to answer emails from people, if you have questions or,
Mandy:Okay,
Elizabeth McCrae:and I'm so glad to know about you now, so I can put you on my podcast list. Yeah,
Katy:Well, we can't wait to read your next book or article or whatever comes out. I think school choice for me is definitely a place to fight and to be super aware of. That's one of those clouding language, like who's gonna be anti it just sounds like, oh, of course you want people to have choice or parental rights or whatever it is. But just how, how that's used into what ends And, um, just yeah. Appreciate your work so much and what
Elizabeth McCrae:you have ideas, either of you, please send them my way. Thank you so much.
Mandy:Thank you.
Elizabeth McCrae:you too. Bye bye.