They have been riding the coattails, real or perceived, for a long time.

Source: http://www.crazydaysandnights.net

This north of the border gossip monger is playing the victim card now?

Come on.

They have been riding the coattails, real or perceived, for a long time.

Elaine Lui – Lainey Gossip

Jessica Mulroney

Meghan Markle

Meghan Markle Was Reportedly Waiting to Cut Jessica Mulroney Out of Her Life for Good

Meghan Markle reportedly isn’t friends with Jessica Mulroney anymore.

Sources said the royal was waiting for a reason to cut off her former friend and stylist.

Lifestyle blogger Sasha Exeter said Jessica used “textbook white privilege” to try to damage her career.

Jessica has since lost her morning show and reality show gigs. – Source

What Happened to Sasha Exeter

On Friday, Kathleen wrote a piece at Refinery29 about what Sasha Exeter shared on Instagram last Wednesday and how certain media outlets have covered the story. Many of them, from Vanity Fair to The Telegraph to the Canadian Press, have been characterising Jessica Mulroney leaning into her white privilege against Sasha Exeter as a “dispute” and you know how loaded that is: the picture that emerges from these kinds of headlines reduce the egregiousness of Jessica’s actions to two women scrapping over Instagram, thereby minimising the racial inequalities from where white privilege derives its power.

A friend of mine, however, pointed out to me that there are other words worth examining when discussing what happened to Sasha Exeter – specifically the words that Sasha, herself, used in describing how Jessica bullied her. In her Instagram video, Sasha said that:

“Listen, I’m by no means calling Jess a racist. But what I will say is this: she is very well aware of her wealth, her perceived power and privilege because of the colour of her skin. And that, my friends, gave her the momentary confidence to come for my livelihood in writing.”

Notice how, during this part of her story, when she’s recalling Jessica’s threats, Sasha prefaces by establishing that she is NOT “calling Jess a racist”. She goes on to describe how racism works – the combination of skin colour with power and privilege – but she starts off by telling people that she’s not here to declare that Jessica Mulroney is a racist. Not unlike how Samantha Marie Ware described Lea Michele last week in her interview with Variety:

“Does Lea even know what a microaggression is? I don’t know. All that her apology did was affirm that she hasn’t learned anything. Am I calling Lea a racist? No. Does Lea have racist tendencies? I think Lea suffers from a symptom of living in this world in an industry that is tailored to white people.”

It’s an interesting choice, and whether or not it was intentional, Sasha Exeter’s eight words, “I’m by no means calling Jess a racist”, make the rest of her story more palatable to white people, the very people who need to be convinced that what happened to Sasha is racist. And this is because of white fragility.

In her book, White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo, who is white, identifies white fragility as one of the major barriers to confronting and eradicating racism because white people are more afraid of being called a racist than the work it takes to battle racism. As Robin told Nosheen Iqbal in an interview for The Guardian last year:

“I know my people really well, and we will do whatever we can to mark ourselves as ‘not racist’”.

Basically, the minute you call a white person a racist, or any non-Black or non-Indigenous person of colour conditioned in white supremacy, they shut down. They can’t accept it about themselves and they then center their fear – in other words, they center themselves in the situation, which further prevents them from empathising with the Black community. Sasha Exeter, whether it was deliberate or instinctive, cut this reaction off at the pass and by stating that she’s not calling Jessica Mulroney a racist, she increased the likelihood that white members of her audience would be more receptive to her story.

You could say that this kind of workaround in the end only accommodates white fragility, and you’re probably right, but my point is that even when a Black woman is right, even when she has been victimised by a white woman flexing her white privilege over her and threatening her livelihood, and can prove it (!), she still has to perform the LABOUR of telling her story in a way that she knows will best prove her case to white people. It’s a double injustice. It is yet another example of how frustrating – to say the least – it is to be Black in the world. That when the facts are on your side, when you are telling the truth, you still have to serve it up so that it’s presentable to the white world.

And yet, there continue to be those who would bend over backwards to call this a “dispute”, an argument that got out of hand, and not what it is: white privilege, and white privilege is “a legacy and cause of racism”. You cannot separate the two. One is direct by-product of the other.

Sasha Exeter told her followers that she’s “not calling Jess a racist”. But she did tell her followers that what Jessica Mulroney did is racist.

Of course it is. She is white and we live in a world built on the pillars of systemic and institutionalised racism. So for those of us who are not Black and not Indigenous, even those of us who are people of colour, shaped by the racist DNA around us, while we may not call ourselves racist, we have all done racist things. – Source