White Women, Get Ready

The book is here!!!

All donations moving forward will support travel expenses for the book tour. Click here for upcoming tour dates and locations.

And so is the book group! While this book may be read alone, it's designed to be worked with together. Your continued support will help me to travel, share, and discuss the book with people near and far.

This book is not just a book. It’s a tool for anti-racism.

We white ladies are everywhere. We are running non-profits and teaching your kids. We are sitting on school boards and diagnosing your illnesses. Even when we are not at the tiptop of the institutional ladder, we are the ones the majority of legislators, CEOs, and officers roll into bed with at night. Yet Roe has been overturned, climate change threatens, guns remain more protected than our children, and known sexual assault has not kept those perpetrators from becoming senator, president, and supreme court judge.

There is a deep cognitive dissonance that keeps white women from realizing our collective power and also from recognizing our collective stake in ending the violence of racism. White Women, Get Ready: How Healing Post-Traumatic Mistress Syndrome Leads to Anti-Racist Change tells the story of how we white ladies have been groomed to uphold these overlapping systems of oppression, the harmful multigenerational impact, and how we can use our unique white lady positioning to help upend these violent structures.

This book is a resource for all of those who contend with white womanhood.

It is my hope that this book will help equip those of us who have been conditioned as white ladies to engage with the complexities of our identities, traumas, and harms. I want us to know that our fight for gender equality is not separate from the fight for racial justice. I want us to realize that we have a responsibility to heal from and to transform the legacies of whiteness in our communities, workplaces, and homes. I want us to understand that compassion does not necessitate comfort, that commitment does not mean martyrdom, that health and well-being for us is not separate from the health and well-being of us all.

I dream that white ladies will read this book alone and together, that it will spark mobilizing conversations, that it will help us to change and to heal. Likewise, I dream that this book will serve as a resource for those who have been most impacted by the violence of white womanhood. For every Black woman and femme who has asked me to talk to their “white lady,” I dream of a stack of these books for you to hand out.

Hi, I'm Amanda!

I was born in the heart of Atlanta, Georgia, to two white Mennonites. Raised in the social justice legacies of Dr. King and my Anabaptist ancestors, I was also raised to be a good little white girl in a system built for my advantage.

For the past two decades, I have committed to the life, study, and embodied work of social justice. I have studied Restorative Justice, Conflict Transformation, and Sociology. I have apprenticed with YogaRoots On Location’s Anti-Racist Raja Yoga School and the People’s Institute for Survival & Beyond’s Undoing Racism Workshop. I have organized with Youth Undoing Institutional Racism, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Black Girls Equity Alliance.

In 2014, inspired by this anti-racist organizing and an introduction to Dr. Joy DeGruy's Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, I began to more deeply investigate my own relationship to white womanhood through the lens of Post-Traumatic Mistress Syndrome, or Mistress Syndrome for short. What began as a blog, evolved into a body of artwork and then collective affinity-based organizing through White Women’s Groups, and ultimately resulted in this book project, White Women, Get Ready: Healing from Post-Traumatic Mistress Syndrome.

Your donation will help this manuscript become a published book and help me to share this tool for collective anti-racist liberation with more people.

This book has been my labor of love for over eight years and I need your support to help complete it. After seven years of pitching publishing houses and agents, I have been reminded of one of the book’s core messages—that no one is coming to save us. Instead, those rejections have encouraged me to think like an organizer, vision like an artist, and co-create like a Solutionary, a la Grace Lee Boggs. The change that I want to see includes us white ladies getting a sense of our individual and collective power and then using it accountably, to further collective liberation for all beings.

Your contribution will not only help complete the editing and publishing process for this important book, but will also ensure creative control that a traditional publishing route might censor. This summer I began contracting with Otterpine, a local Woman-of-Color-owned small business that provides full service support for indie authors (like me!). After over eight years of work and 7,000 hours of research, reflection, writing, and editing, I’m asking for your help to bring this work to publication.

What your donation will support:

$30 = Edits on one page of the manuscript

$75 = 1 hour of layout support

$225 = Print production for one chapter

$500 = Compensate collaborators for administrative and communications work

$950 = Edits on one chapter

$1,200 = Producing the E-Book

$2,500 = Designing the cover

$3,300 = Edits on one section of the manuscript (~4 chapters)

$4,500 = A round of edits for the full manuscript

Tiers + Incentives

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