Source: The Troubling Trend of White Women Being White Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: January 27, 2026 | Archived: March 21, 2026

This person is literally Republican-coded now

We might all disagree on the specifics of which things were harmless melting-pot appreciation and which things were tactless appropriation, but I think as far as no-nos go, the Coachella girls wearing sacred indigenous headwear as a fashion accessory probably made the “offensive” cut for most reasonable people:

There were other less obvious examples—ones where even progressive people weren’t so aligned. A great one would be 2010s-era Ariana Grande deliberately attempting to seem ethnically ambiguous, to the point that my mother referred to her as “Latina” as recently as 2024. Some folks will dismiss this era as Grande being a tan Italian person, but there is ample evidence that she was deliberately putting on a “blaccent” for years—which she dropped randomly around the early 2020s, along with the tan.

This should terrify you.

Generally, when these women came under fire, it wasn’t them specifically who were being criticized (and the authors of these pieces always hedged to make that clear) but the fact that they were given disproportionate fame and acclaim for doing things that women of color did first. True, perhaps, but these women still remained the subject of the articles and ire. Sometimes, these critiques felt semi-reasonable, and sometimes they felt “I can’t think of any good listicles about bacon to publish today, so here’s this rant about racist butts.”

But the general vibe of the 2010s was that “being reasonable” was, unfortunately, erasing the lived experiences of oppressed people. Regularly, I would see “friendly reminders” on social media that just because some people from a marginalized group thought something was okay didn’t mean it was okay, because other people might be offended. Just because your Asian friend thinks it’s okay for you to make DIY sushi and blog about it doesn’t mean it’s really okay, because a different Asian person two hundred miles away might be mad. Ergo: you must always default to the most offended person of any marginalized demographic on any topic, even if you’ve never met that person or aren’t sure they exist at all.

For a lot of white women, this meant that anything that could resemble cultural appropriation was better off not done. Better safe than sorry. As a white woman who lived through the 2010s, I happily adhered to this guideline! There was no culture I wanted to appropriate badly enough to risk offending people.

If you were debating whether it was okay to go as Princess Jasmine for Halloween, it probably wasn’t okay, even if you weren’t going to change your skin color. If you thought it might be cute to get a nameplate necklace but briefly wondered if it was appropriating Black culture, it was probably better not to do it. When I went on a family trip to Morocco in 2013, I felt nervous and awkward whenever our tour guide instructed us to wear traditional Moroccan garb for photo ops, and begged everyone not to post the photos. At one point, I remember joking to a friend, “I guess we should just stick to white people stuff and walk around wearing dorky church girl denim maxi skirts.” And, then, in 2023:

Behold: the whitest aesthetic I’ve ever seen

So you can imagine my surprise when I started seeing headlines about how these things were also offensive because they “asserted whiteness.”

Perhaps the most absurd example of a “white” aesthetic being criticized for being too white was when a professor was interviewed for The Guardian on how problematic Dark Academia was, because it was white-coded without being ironic or attempting to ridicule England:

“I think the worrying thing is that Dark Academia revolves around symbols of whiteness, economic and cultural privilege, conservatism and nationalism,” says Dr Sarah Burton who is presenting a lecture on the trend on Friday. “It’s distinctly traditional and British in character,” she says. “If there isn’t a clear level of critique in this sort of aesthetic it ends up just as a reiteration of the status quo and ruling class power.”

You heard it here, folks—wearing a cardigan is a reiteration of ruling class power. It’s pro-Brexit. It might even be racist. Also, not that anyone would be surprised, but the woman who said this was white.

And remember big butts being racist and appropriative? Well, eventually, as all body-related trends do, the gigantic ass thing went out of style in mainstream culture. Of course, people still get BBLs, but many of the celebrities most famous for larger-than-life surgically enhanced asses got theirs downsized (including women of color). And what do you know…this new trend was also racist. Per two researchers quoted on CBC:

“Although it might be the year of the butt for white women or for non-Black women, actually all of the celebration of the butt hasn’t really been that helpful to Black women,” said Radke.

And now this new cultural shift away from big butts is just as problematic, Gaunt said.

Liking big butts was offensive and problematic, and eventually people “moved away” from big butts, which was just as offensive. Who knew!

The easy explanation here is that if you search long enough on the Internet, you’re bound to find some really crazy people saying crazy things. But what I found interesting about the new wave of articles criticizing “white aesthetics” (or the “troubling” move away from BBLs) is that they focused entirely on white women, not on white men, just like the entirety of the 2010s cultural appropriation frenzy.

Perhaps this is because aesthetics change more for women than they do for men, and most white men never had much interest in expanding their sartorial expression beyond “pants and a shirt,” let alone borrowing from other cultures.

But I also feel like the singular focus on white women (especially liberal ones who really didn’t want to offend anyone) came from the fact that women are just an easy target for guilt grifts. White women are more likely to feel guilty, or feel the need to perform some degree of allyship, than white men. Sure, you occasionally come by a self-flagellating white man, but the people really desperate to shed their problematic thoughts and deeds and atone for every quasi-problematic thought they’ve ever had are typically liberal white women. This is an ironically gendered double standard within a movement that was supposed to be progressive. Social justice conversations in the 2010s seemed to write white men off immediately and expect nothing from them—of course they’re problematic, what else is new, who cares? Yes, they’d tote around their “white male tears” mugs and joke about “mediocre white men,” but their low opinion of white men also excused white men on some level. It’s the same reason you wouldn’t get mad at a dog for not using the toilet. You’d joke about dogs shitting on the street, but you sure as hell wouldn’t expect more of them!

But white women, you should know better! White women were told it was problematic for us to feel anxious in the presence of mentally unstable, drug-addicted men threatening to assault us on the subways because we “weren’t actually unsafe,” (which, I should add, happens to women of color too!) and that we should simply stay safe by avoiding eye contact, while also being told that everything we had the potential to say was violence, but moreover, our silence was also violence (and yet: we should shut up, sit down and listen. Sounds like silence. Which is also violence.) There was no male “Karen.” When Trump won in 2016 and 2024, every demographic was blamed for his election except for white men, because of course they were going to vote for him, unlike Latino men and white women, who must answer for their crimes. I knew we really lost the plot when I saw a tweet admonishing white women for electing Trump…written by none other than a white man.

Guilting white women was a lucrative business too. White women showed themselves to be a worthwhile market to be tapped (some might also just call this an “easy mark.”) Antiracist activist Robin D’Angelo, a white woman herself, knew she couldn’t very well preach to white men, who were likely to ignore her. You know, the dogs shitting on the street. Your average reader of her book, White Fragility, was an already-progressive white woman who was terrified of being problematic by accident. Another white woman, Jessie Daniels, found great literary success with her book, Nice White Ladies, which describes itself as showing all the ways that white women’s “everyday well-meaning choices” harm people of color. In particular, she points the finger at white women for their unforgivable choice to send their kids to highly-rated schools. (Fathers, apparently, are absent from this decision.) Notably, these books did not focus on white women who were openly (or even covertly) racist, or even white women who voted for Trump. They aimed their ire at the 10% of white women most concerned with being good, non-bigoted people, whose niceness and politeness and desire to be good were part of the problem, actually.

White women fretted endlessly on Instagram and Facebook about how to effectively “do the work” to be a good ally, apologizing for all the ways they performed allyship incorrectly, agonizing over whether adding an activist slogan to their bio was helpful or slacktivism, and you almost never saw this sort of hand-wringing from white men. White women who attempted to show solidarity with activist causes on social media were accused of “performative activism” while the white men posting nothing at all other than their thoughts on the latest NBA draft were safe. Saira Rao and Regina Jackson (who also wrote an entire book about the evils of white women specifically) made a living hosting dinner parties where liberal white women paid $2,500 to \(5,000 to be yelled at over bowls of organic quinoa for how racist they were. These were not the types of white women who actually ever did or said racist things—in fact, one of the key hallmarks for “un-learning” their racism was to stop [denying being racist](https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/03/white-friends-im-not-racist/). There was no antiracist endpoint for these women other than endless groveling. To my knowledge, none of them ever actually ascended to a state of truly being unproblematic. The best they could hope for was a book deal about how racist they and other white women were, and even then, they wouldn’t get to claim moral purity. There was a reason that all of these guilt-grifting endeavors focused on women, and not men. It begs the question: if “well-meaning” liberal white women who desperately don’t want to be racist, and who are buying books to figure out ways they might be secretly racist, are *still* too impure for your movement, how are you going to build a coalition in a majority-white country where most people are significantly more racist than your average “nice white lady” (derogatory)? But honestly, I’m not convinced that coalition-building was ever the goal. There is usually no off-ramp to being an “unproblematic white woman.” In the fashion and beauty world, many of us believed the off-ramp was to stop culturally appropriating and stick to inoffensive aesthetics from our own heritage, without discrimination. Now, we are discovering this is just as problematic because it’s glorifying British nationalism, or something. There is no real way forward if you take this stuff seriously. Now, it goes without saying that *some* of this stuff might have come from a well-meaning place. Being a bigot is bad! It’s a noble pursuit to want to examine ways that you might be demonstrating prejudice without realizing it. But most of the white women who fell into this rabbit hole were the last ones who needed it. These were the women apologizing for Trump’s wins when they never voted for him. And again: it’s hard to imagine this many men doing this, let alone being the subject of countless books, workshops and masochistic dinner parties. A man isn’t going to pay a woman to humiliate him unless it involves his dick. All that being said: while I don’t think it’s necessary for cultures to “stick to their own,” and while I do think some of the cultural appropriation stuff got a little kooky, it’s probably good that white women are exploring aesthetics that don’t rely on cultural stereotypes other than their own (what is “frazzled Englishwoman” if not a stereotype? But it’s fine, *we’re* allowed to do it.) And the good thing about these aesthetics, from cottagecore to Clean Girl to ironic clown to depressed chardonnay aunt or whatever else is coming next…is that they’re not *really* white. They’re for everyone! I guess the question is…do any people of color *want* to dress like this: s_!9VTD!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffd284cc0-ab66-4710-9833-5384fd360b65_2000x3000.webp)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I hope that we can eventually settle on some degree of common sense. People enjoy aesthetics that are interesting and fun! It’s a good idea not to directly profit off of things from cultures outside your own, or use sacred symbols as fashion accessories. Not that anyone asked me, given that this is not my “lived experience,” I feel like that’s a worthwhile thing to remember. But please just let the white girls wear their floral sun dresses and chunky “English ruling class enabling” sweaters.