A webinar meant to help other women got her called racist online

Glennon Doyle argues that being a genuinely good person and still carrying racial bias are not contradictions, they're simply both possible at once, in the same way a person can be a committed feminist and still, in some unguarded moment, judge a heavier or older woman as worth less than a young, thin one. She makes the comparison directly. She's spent a lifetime working to detox from the misogyny she absorbed just by being alive in a culture that pumps it out constantly, and she still catches herself stepping on a scale to check her own worth. No one calls a woman a misogynist for admitting that. It's understood the poison came from outside her.

Doyle argues race deserves the same framework, and that most people resist it precisely because admitting to racism, unlike admitting to internalized misogyny, feels like a moral verdict rather than a diagnosis. She proposes three categories instead of two: people poisoned by racism who actively spread it, people poisoned by it who are actively trying to detox, and people poisoned by it who simply deny it exists in them.

She learned this the hard way. After organizing a webinar meant to help other white women confront their own racial conditioning, approved in advance by the women of color leading the broader activist effort, thousands of comments called her a racist for taking up space that belonged to educators who'd been doing the work for years. She calls it her rock bottom. Rather than retreating, she stayed with it, remembering a scene from her own childhood: her father, decades earlier, standing up at a community meeting after a racially motivated massacre and refusing to just assemble care packages, admitting instead that he'd absorbed racist ideas growing up and wanted them out of him.

Doyle's conclusion is uncomfortable on purpose. Getting the poison out isn't a matter of proving you never had any. It's a matter of staying in the room once someone tells you the truth about what's still there, and choosing, again, to keep working instead of walking away defensive.

Start by assuming the poison is already in you somewhere, rather than spending your energy trying to prove you're the exception. Deliberately change what you take in each day, follow voices and stories unlike your own instead of only the version of the world your usual feed already agrees with. Expect the discomfort that follows, the shame and defensiveness and exhaustion, because those are the same feelings people describe in early sobriety from anything, and they usually mean the truth is finally landing. And when someone corrects you, resist the urge to leave the room wounded. Stay, listen, and keep working. None of this ends with a certificate that says you're finished.