The Photo: How a Girls’ Getaway in Joshua Tree Became a Symbol of White Supremacy and Why I’m Not Here to Do Better
⏱19 min read
UPDATE: I’ve told others involved that I completely understand if they need to publicly disavow me. I wholeheartedly support anyone else, especially public figures in the religious deconstruction space, who feel the need to do the same. I hold dear that we must all live in integrity with our own conscience. We must act in accordance with our own truth, however different or unpopular it might be to others.
Photo by Sophia El’Rae
DISCLAIMER: I will not be naming all names or directly showing the photos referenced in this blog post. This is because many of the women involved have been harassed, bullied, and had their livelihoods threatened over the photo in question. I have no desire to bring more harm their way.
The reason I am publicly addressing this topic at all is that its criticisms widely being affirmed as valid are too significant for me to ignore. They also touch on broader themes I’ve been meaning to explore here for a while. In many ways, this blog post has been a long time coming. I’m deeply saddened that it was a beautiful experience that finally impelled me to write it.
Lastly, I am not a safe person and do not endeavor to provide a safe space. I am an honest person and endeavor to provide spaces that honor subjectivities of truth, especially my own. You are in my space now. Consider yourself trigger-warned.
This isn’t the post I thought I’d write about this trip.
I thought I’d tell you about how much fun I had, how incredible these women are, and how much growth I discovered in myself as I ventured nervously into a women’s group for the first time in years and found myself smiling for days and days afterward. Then one woman posted a photo of us from that trip that sparked an onslaught of backlash essentially accusing us of upholding white supremacy in post-evangelical spaces. Accusations of racism, ableism, colorism, featurism, fatphobia, and more soon followed.
Some of the women accused think these criticisms are valid. I do not. This blog post is a public response as to why.
The photo. . .
It wasn’t this photo. It was this one. It wasn’t our pajamas, onesies, and sweatpants that made people say, “They’re causing harm.” It was our nakedness, our beauty, and our sex appeal.
The irony is that the photo was a very reclamation of our sex appeal. Brenda’s platform (she gave me permission to use her name and to link the post) primarily focuses on recovering from the harm of evangelical Christian purity culture. She shared the image with this initial caption providing context for our various states of undress:
“Purity culture parents, be warned: indoctrinating your daughters may cause religious trauma, deconstruction, wild self-acceptance & naked frolicking through the desert.”
Most people loved the photo, expressing that it made them feel encouraged to celebrate their own bodies and eroticism. Yet there were several people who felt harmed and excluded in more ways than one. Here are some of their criticisms:
“It’s really harmful when folks in deconstruction spaces don’t decenter themselves, particularly if they hold multiple privileged identities.”
“If there isn’t a Black woman, a fat person, a disabled person...how did this group come to be and why were others not welcomed in.”
“All I feel is anger looking at this picture and its upholding of the skinny, conventionally attractive, young, white woman.”
“This is why you don’t find many BIPOC people in these deconstruct circles…it’s basically another version of white feminism.”
As I pondered responses like these and discussed them in a private group thread with the other women, not all of whom chose to participate in the photo, it became clearer how and why Brenda’s post caused such an effect. It was intended to be a beautiful picture of friends together in the desert, stripped as they wished to be, some of whom have known each other for years and others who met for the first time. Not everyone who was invited came on our trip, and it would feel cruel to say whether or not they might have made our group photo diverse enough for others’ comfort. Regardless, the consensus seemed to be that the impact of our photo mattered more than our intent.
Does impact matter more than intent?
Not to me and I’ll address why. But first…
An acknowledgment. . .
Before going further, I would like to acknowledge that I understand why the photo drew criticism. American Christianity has an ugly history of upholding white supremacy. Evangelical purity culture emphasizes the ideal of a beautiful, yet modest, white and able-bodied woman. Most former evangelicals are keenly aware of their need—and desire—to reprogram the bigotries they learned implicitly and explicitly about race, gender, sexuality, and more. Many refer to their crisis of faith and examination of harmful doctrine as deconstruction.
The women in my group are all public figures working in the online spaces of religious deconstruction—particularly the deconstruction of evangelical purity culture. That we are conventionally attractive, light-skinned, and standing implied to some viewers that our photo sent a silent message: You must still be a beautiful, white, and able-bodied woman to represent an ideal of deconstructed purity culture. In this way, our photo symbolized the continued upholding of white Christian supremacy in post-Christian spaces.
What I’ve gathered from digesting the critical feedback our photo elicited—feedback shared both in public and in private—I have attempted to summarize in three points:
The photo communicated signals of being unsafe to some people who saw it. That those of us pictured appear to be white, thin, able-bodied, and conventionally beautiful made some who may not identify with these traits feel less-than. The visual of us together triggered the feelings of erasure they once felt in the church, and feel in society at large. This is understandable.
A photo like this was not expected in a post-evangelical deconstruction space. Many people, particularly marginalized people, never felt safe or welcome in the church. Many of them have sought safety and inclusion in post-church spaces. That our picture did not include all colors and body types was an instant symbol of exclusion in a place they’ve hoped to expect inclusivity. This is understandable.
The photo appeared to be a promotional image without enough context. It was taken professionally by someone in our group and featured women with larger platforms. This made some people think we were communicating that, just as within purity culture, conventionally idealized bodies are the only ones worthy of holding leadership positions and being presented as beautiful. This is understandable.
There is a difference between understandable and valid.
valid adj. 1 sound; just; well-founded 2 producing the desired result; effective 3 having force, weight, or cogency; authoritative 4 legally sound, effective, or binding; having legal force 5 logic (of an argument) so constructed that if the premises are jointly asserted, the conclusion cannot be denied without contradiction 6 robust; well; healthy
—Dictionary.com
I think feelings are valid, excepting the definitions of the word for legal purposes. No one knows what it’s like to be someone else. No one can presume how or why an emotion may be very well-founded and completely logical to a person’s own life experiences. Criticisms are different than feelings. Were the presumptions and resulting accusations about our photo just and well-founded? Did they produce the desired result? Did they have cogency as well as weight? Were they legally sound, or robust and healthy? Were the criticisms so logical that their conclusions could not be denied without contradiction?
No.
Blind assumptions, gross inaccuracies, and meritless accusations are not valid. Colloquially, valid is often mistakenly interchanged with understandable. Some of you may be thinking, “You’re getting hung up on semantics, you know what was meant.”
Words matter, right?
Two of the women in our group held an Instagram live event to welcome the criticism received. The key takeaways were that we should have never posted the photo, that it was inherently harmful because people were hurt regardless of our intentions, and that we should have known better than to publicly share our companionship if it didn’t include all bodies. Some in our group agreed these criticisms were valid.
No.
I don’t think holding people accountable for moral crimes they didn’t commit is valid. I don’t think demands for an explanation followed by accusations of defensiveness are valid. I don’t think the expectation of a public apology accompanied by a scolding to “do better,” when nothing wrong was done, is valid.
Attempts were made in the Instagram live event to validate the feelings of jealousy some people expressed. These attempts were met with flat-out accusations of white supremacy.
“To say on live that dark-skinned and/or disabled and or/fat folk…raising concerns makes us jealous of you—” which, for the record, is not what was said— “...[is] diminutive, disrespectful and in alignment with white supremacy, fatphobia and ableism.”
No.
This misconstrued assertion is not valid.
Now. . . Are you ready to hear the uncensored version of my thoughts?
The women in my group thread are so kind—so very, exquisitely kind. The depth of their compassion allowed them to soothe each other’s hurts with tender reminders that our accusers are hurting people themselves, traumatized by evangelicalism as we too were traumatized. The wells of their wisdom looked inward to see how others’ insecurities might be bringing up our own. Amid tearful voice messages and screenshots of public slander was forgiveness, for the bullies knew not that they were bullying. Even as accusations kept rolling in, their capacity for goodwill extended empathy for the cruelest of commenters. They are angels whose falls from grace have only made them more gracious. I am humbled to learn from their clemency.
But someone needed to point out another side of the truth.
“We posted a photo celebrating a liberation from the shame of purity culture,” I wrote. “That others have tried to shame us for that in so many ways, basically saying that we’re not dark enough, fat enough, or disabled enough to be beautiful and naked and friends, is in and of itself fucking shameful. And I am not here for it. I will back any of you to my CORE and I’m gonna. This is disgusting, I don’t care how traumatized or wounded or jealous people are. They’re fucking low and I’m fucking DUN. End rant. For now. (Yes I have whiskey in my veins. 🥃 #Cheers.)”
I was relieved to see the laughing emojis affirming some levity was needed.
But I ached. Not for myself, but for my friends. I knew how much courage it took some of them to be in front of a camera, to strip down in front of other women, to bare their beautiful souls and bodies in an act of liberation every one of them felt exhilarated by. Some have struggled for years with body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and crippling sexual shame. Others have suffered chronic ailments invisible to the eye but debilitating nonetheless. Being naked was my idea, thrown out as we discussed what to wear for the group picture. My first nude photoshoot was a powerfully healing experience. The shame of purity culture fell off me like a slip. I’m heartbroken that for some of these women, whose first nude shoot may have been the one we did together, what should have been a safe and beautiful experience turned into a public shaming.
Another point worth restating: The American evangelical church is predominantly white. Does it not make sense, then, that the people speaking up about the harm of evangelical purity culture are also predominantly white? This is a sheer observation of numbers to me. While there are plenty of people in the evangelical deconstruction space who meet criteria of diversity outside of the white, able-bodied norm, it would seem obvious to me that the majority would reflect those very norms we left. It is not logical to think that Americans who once participated in our country’s most segregated hour, the hour of a Sunday morning church service, would suddenly desegregate in post-church communities that speak to our uniquely different experiences. It is not reasonable to expect the ratios of these demographics to flip or reflect a different truth.
There is a conscious effort within ex-evangelical spaces to integrate. There is still a long way to go and it is not because white ex-evangelicals are trying to maintain supremacy. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 alone provoked the deconstruction of countless white evangelicals who disagreed with Trump’s racist and sexist rhetoric and were baffled by the evangelical church’s embrace of him. Every white ex-evangelical I know in the deconstruction community goes out of their way to highlight voices more marginalized than theirs. I am honored to work alongside them.
That one gorgeous group photo brought into question the character of my comrades pictured and not pictured, comrades who have devoted years of their lives to helping others, too often for free, on their own dime and at their own expense; that these comrades have a public record of boosting the stories and platforms of other ex-evangelicals who do not fit the white, straight, able-bodied evangelical norm; that these comrades were publicly blasted as racist, ableist, white feminist supremacists is nothing short of ghastly to me.
How did the photo even come about?
First, I’d like to address the accusers who will say I’m being defensive in the following explanation. Yes, I’m being defensive. You’re being offensive. That’s how this works.
Let’s start with how the trip to Joshua Tree came about. When Brenda invited me on a girls’ getaway to the desert with other women working in the field of deconstruction, I blinked into my glass of rosé for the splittest of seconds. “My gut says yes,” I blurted to my own shock.
I didn’t know who else Brenda had invited and I still don’t. As the hostess of our vacation, it was her prerogative to invite whomever she wanted. I do know Brenda to be nothing if not inclusive of diversity—diversity of body, background, and belief. Her YouTube podcast God Is Grey is a public testament to her purposeful expansion of these. While I worried I might be the only atheist going (I wasn’t) and that I might feel the need to censor myself out of politeness (I didn’t), I felt excited about my decision to go.
The group thread of attendees grew and eventually appeared to be finalized. I noticed there weren’t any visibly Black, Middle Eastern, or South Asian women going, and to ask Brenda if any were invited would have felt like a wrongful accusation of who I know her to be. This wasn’t a speaker summit we were selling tickets to. It was a private retreat among friends and acquaintances that we happily paid for. If this was the group Brenda put together, I trusted her, despite my palm-sweating fear of women’s spaces that’s lingered with me since Christianity and unsuccessfully been self-treated by exposure therapy to witchy new moon circles (shudder), empowerment circles (barf!), and body positivity groups (never again!!). I know what it’s like to feel unsafe in certain spaces. Brenda has never made me feel unsafe in hers.
As our getaway neared and ideas for activities were discussed, one of the women who happens to be a professional photographer generously offered us a photoshoot. We could take group pictures, individual pictures, whatever we felt comfortable with. Now, Sophia El’Rae is one helluva photographer. If she was offering, I was taking her up on it. (Yes, she gave me permission to use her name and to link her site.) Empowering women to release shame and reclaim their sexuality is also what drives her passion. I felt there couldn’t be anyone safer to proffer the idea of nude photography with and I was right.
We brought headbands and costumes, rhinestones and feathers. We sparkled in the desert like mirages haloed by twilight. We disrobed, asked for consent, and cheered each other on through emotions of freedom and release and the power every single woman should feel.
You are wrong. You who accused us of racism, fatphobia, ableism, and other cruelties, you are in the wrong. Not us. You are wrong for the presumptions you made, for the unkind ways you expressed them, and for the conclusions you’ve come to about our character and integrity. I will not kowtow to your egregious blame, or your jealousy disguised as concern, in some self-flagellating display of public apology and doing your idea of better. I don’t exist to do better. I exist to do me. [Click to Tweet]
You don’t like it? Unfollow. It’s the little button on the left.
Why not just take the photo down?
We thought about it. Everyone in the photo told Brenda they supported her choice either way. A woman who did not participate in the photo invited us to consider removing it not because we did anything wrong, but because it would mean a lot to some people. Would it be a kindness to remove it so that others, especially the marginalized, might not feel triggered by its presence?
I could not in good conscience encourage Brenda to take our photo down. To take it down not only felt like saying our sacred time together was a mistake. To take it down not only felt like saying the choice to share our joy was wrong, implying that everyone who liked it was also wrong. Taking down the photo would have felt like giving into shame.
We were shamed for being light-skinned. We were shamed for appearing able-bodied. We were shamed for being attractive. We were shamed because I am not curvy, because Brenda is not Black, and because Sophia is not visibly disabled. If we were these, the shame would not have been hurled our way.
Of course, they don’t call it shame. They call it accountability. So did the church.
My experience in Christianity is that shame was always called love. It is loving to point out another’s sins. It is loving to expose their sins to the whole community if they disagree that they sinned. It is loving to treat them with contempt if they still disagree that they did anything wrong. Cancel culture is a secular version of a Christian sin circle. It’s only recently been rebranded as accountability—we don’t cancel people anymore, we hold them accountable. It’s the same thing. I know many will disagree, including some women who went on the trip with me. I have yet to hear an argument convincing me otherwise. When accountability is held in public for subjective moral sins that are not crimes handled in a court of law, this is how I see it. The Woke brigade is no different from the accountability groups of the evangelical church. The Woke brigade is a morality mafia.
Telling the truth of one’s story is different from demanding the apology of another you hold accountable. Sharing one’s own journey and naming people who were involved is different from insisting on a response that they’ll do better. One approach stands firm on its own, empowered by personal responsibility and credit. The other puts power outside themselves, waiting for an acknowledgment that may never come. This is the difference between the sovereignty of storytelling and the futility of accountability in a morally relative world.
Oh, and a note on race. . .
…since comments about our group’s perceived whiteness were among the most-liked accusations made—excuse me, accountabilities held.
One of the women pictured is half-Chinese. Another woman is of Native American and Mexican descent. I am as Korean as I am French, with so many other ethnicities mingling in my blood that to name them all would be boring. I will write more in the future on the topic of being mixed race and ethnically ambiguous. For now, my personal reckoning with my racial identity is still too fresh to share. Yeah blah yeah, light-skinned privilege and all that, go ahead, school me like I haven’t heard it before. Go ahead and miss my point so you can gain points for virtue signaling. Go ahead and think you’re the one who’s going to give me an aha-moment where I bow down to your idol of anti-racism. Know what I think you really hate us for?
Beauty privilege.
Yeah, I said it. If the three of us in the photo who are of mixed ethnicity were fat, unkempt, and conventionally unattractive, would the bronze of our skin be more visible to you? Would we have ticked enough of your diversity boxes to spare the other women your whitewashing blame? Would the kink of my coconut rug curls and the almond crescents of another woman’s eyes and the umber undertones of another woman’s décolleté be more apparent if we hadn’t enhanced our natural beauty with hairstyling, makeup, and lotion?
Maybe. Maybe perceived disadvantages would have been enough to qualify us as brown. But we’re light-brown and pretty. Our intersectionality carries multiple privileges, so our races don’t matter. Except that they do when you accuse us of not being racially diverse.
Your calls for racial diversity are calls for Blackness. Let’s be plain. There is nothing wrong with asking why a Black woman wasn’t present in our photo, even though it’s still problematic to assume a handful of women pictured are representative of every woman invited on our trip, never mind representative of our other friend groups. But. When you don’t specify that Blackness is what you are calling for, you whitewash the diversity already present. You are guilty of the very erasure you think you’re calling out. Yes, it hurts.
Even so…
I believe intent matters more than impact.
This is why I forgive you. I forgive you for your misinterpretations, your hurtful accusations, and your damning conclusions. I forgive you for your presumptions, your slander, and your bullying. I forgive your ignorance. I know you truly believed you were doing a good thing and standing up for inclusivity as you saw it. I know you and your loved ones have genuinely been hurt by society’s upholding of white supremacy, ableism, body idealism, and so much more, both in and outside of the evangelical church. I know your motives were to give us pause, to help educate us on what we may not know, and to call out what you saw as privileged oversight at best and malicious messaging at worst. I know you meant well. So I forgive you, even though you may not be sorry, and even though some of you will no doubt come after me for writing this blog piece. I forgive you anyway.
Valuing intent more than impact is how I’ve also been able to forgive my parents, pastors, and others who have inadvertently hurt me. It’s how I’ve been able to heal and want to live. I do not negate the importance of impact, but I find it far more empowering to hold grace for intention over impact because it puts the power of restoration into my own hands and no one else’s. [Click to Tweet] If I wait for justice, I would wait forever. I am here to live, and to live beautifully, richly, and wholly. Not wait in anger.
Purity culture first taught me that impact mattered more than intent. It taught me that it didn’t matter how unintentional the crossing of my legs was—if it caused the man next to me to look at them with lust, I was the one who needed to be held accountable. Not him. He was harmed by my naïveté. He was caused to sin and it was my responsibility to guard his eyes, and I failed him. I should have known better. So therefore I should do better and anticipate the myriad of ways my body, my laughter, my clothing, my voice, and the expressions of my face would be perceived.
This was an impossible task.
I was shamed repeatedly for inadvertently causing harm. My intentions never mattered—it was the impact of my actions and lack of actions that mattered more. It would be understandable for you to think it’s unfair of me to compare the “harm” of causing a man to lust to the “harm” of sharing a photo with idealized bodies in it. I am not here for your cherry-picked exceptionalism to my own principles. They are mine, not yours. You conduct your principles as you wish. I don’t need yours to make sense to me, and this is simply me offering to make mine more sensical to you. You don’t need to agree and I don’t need you to understand.
You may accuse me of privilege, defensiveness, and colorblindness for this piece. You will be right. I am privileged. I will defend my loved ones and the integrity of my principles. I do endeavor to look beyond color because if I focus on your color, or on your bodily ability or lack thereof, or on your conventional ugliness or attractiveness, I dehumanize you. That is what happens in my heart. I know calls for doing better are not meant to have that effect, but that is my honest response that I work doubly hard to overcome. And I do work at it, for I believe your intention matters more than your impact. I believe your intention is to be seen, validated, and valued in a society that doesn’t do these. That your impact, on me, reduces yourself to demographics, is my problem. Not yours. Therefore it is within my power to overcome.
The church and the Woke both teach that impact matters more than intent. They both focus on helping the outcast, the marginalized, and the poor. They both turn people into projects and mankind into missions. Without meaning to, they both erase the humanity of individuals in their quest to uphold an ideal of what is humane. Both trade nuance, complexity, and autonomy for broad categorization, demographical socialism, and identity politics. Both are harmful.
This is what I see.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with impact mattering more than intent to you. It becomes wrong when you think that yours is the only perspective that is right.
Lastly, an open letter to those who criticized The Photo.
I’ve already been accused of centering myself in my replies to the criticism of Brenda’s post. To that, I say: You centered yourself in my group photo. You weren’t there. It wasn’t about you. And you’ve gone and made it about you.
Allow me to share with you the impact of your intent…
The impact of your intent is the re-triggering of body dysmorphia, sexual shame, and self-deprecation. The impact of your intent is the painful reminder that purity culture still exists outside the church—it’s just called accountability culture now and demands unambiguous racial purity (but go ahead and keep calling it “diversity”). The impact of your intent is the lost sleep, ill health, and burdened relationships we have all experienced over this—our loved ones witnessed the aftermath of your self-centered accusations for days on end, resisting the urge to blast you on social media for the hurt you’ve caused and holding back only because we asked them to please not make it worse.
Perhaps the most grievous impact of your intent is the dissolving of what were blossoming friendships among this uniquely beautiful and yes, diverse, group of women. The most painful impact of your intent is the fracturing of sisterhood, the betrayal of trust felt to be violated, and the divides some feel can no longer be bridged. The hurt is too great, the feelings of shame too familiar.
I know these were not your intent. But since you think that impact matters more, I felt I needed to let you know.
Other impacts are not mine to share. They are magnitudinous, career-changing, and relationship-costing. They are unfathomably far-reaching in ways you may never know. I do not blame you. I will not hold you accountable or publicly declare your names and ask you to do better. That would put power into your hands instead of keeping it in our own. We will heal without you.
I would also like to share with you the positive impacts of your intent.
Some of us are stronger than ever. We are closer than ever, wiser than ever, and fiercer than ever. We are clearer than ever in our purpose, integrity, and self. A fire you hoped to dampen was poured on with fuel. You held the match, not me. Not us.
I have never felt more clear or calm about a decision than the one I will share with you now: I am leaving the cult of Wokeness. (And it does indeed meet the criteria of a cult.) I never fully belonged anyway, cowardly skirting around its edges as I earnestly tried to make its dogma make sense to me, questioning whether my resistance was my own social conditioning and examining how my privilege might be blinding me to a greater truth I only had to keep educating myself to understand. I am so very confident that I now understand. I understand completely. I just have the audacity to disagree.
This is the impact of your intent.
I am deregistering as a Democrat and re-registering as a Libertarian. I am going to be more vocal than ever about my disaffiliation from the Left, about the grotesque hypocrisies and harms of the Woke, and about the cycles of harm perpetuated by people bullying in the name of anti-bullying. I always planned to speak more openly about these. Your reactions to my group photo just gave me a clear enough reason.
This is the impact of your intent.
I am more secure than ever in my public disavowing of identity politics, in my sacred rebellion against cancel and accountability culture, and in declaring with calm confidence opinions like how I loved Dave Chappelle’s last Netflix special and that I think freedom of speech must include freedom of art, for art is the multi-faceted soul of humanity.
Art is what changes the world. Not politics. Art is what threatens dogma. Not shame. Art is what tells the ugly and beautiful truth of our history, no matter how morality mafias have tried to destroy and stifle and censor it. Drama, comedy, paintings, photographs, music, literature, inventions, dances, and countless other expressions of creativity are what give our lives meaning. I will advocate for art’s right to exist and for artists’ right to create, however threatening you or I may find it. Art is a human necessity I will fall on a sword for. So art, among many other qualities I consider basic human rights, is what I will defend. It was your reaction to an artistic photo that helped me arrive here.
This is the impact of your intent.
I know you didn’t mean for this to happen. I invite you, as you’re so fond of inviting others, to sit with that.
Thank you for your impact.