White Femininity and Conspicuous Shame

Abstract As Elizabeth Spelman insists, “the history of woman’s inhumanity to woman is shameful” (Spelman 1991). If experiences of shame often function as a moral hinge between past and future, integrating the past in ways that motivate creative self and social revisioning, then this affective acknowledgment is crucial for social justice in feminist futures. As I argue, it is also made fraught by the specific ways that women experience the intersections of privilege and oppression in relation to shame. This paper provides a close reading of Elizabeth Spelman’s 1991 essay on shame “The feeling of virtue and the virtue of feeling” as a vehicle for outlining a moral and social problem: how displays of racial shame by white women, while ostensibly a mode of moral attentiveness and responsibility, sometimes function to deflect moral responsibility and assert moral privilege. Engaging with scholarship in feminist philosophy and affect theory, this article examines how white women learn to convert shame into displays of power in the form of racial innocence, masochism, and vulnerability. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that public displays of shame strip its political potential and risk further entrenching this form of unearned moral privilege.