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Occasionally, we here at The Root take time out from debating the substantive issues of the day, like whether Power is better than Game of Thrones (which is like asking if Tyler Perry’s stage play Madea Goes to the Cookout is better than Romeo and Juliet), to post something educational. Today we present a short vocabulary lesson about the term “whitewomaning.”



whitewomaning: (verb) a term used when a woman of Caucasian descent complains after discovering her white privilege key doesn’t open every lock in the universe.


Let’s use it in a sentence:

“When Viola Davis gave her heartfelt speech after winning an Emmy, I jumped on Twitter and waited for the whitewomaning to begin.”


If you’d like a more recent example, early Thursday morning, Sean Combs , Puffy , Puff Daddy , P. Diddy, Diddy jumped on Twitter at 8:33 a.m. (which, according to TrumpPets, is now described as “acting presidential”) and tweeted this:

Apparently, unaware that his show of love to black woman could be construed as racist and divisive, Diddy probably got up, got dressed and continued his full-time job of raking millions of dollars into wheelbarrows and taking it to the bank. He was probably busy trying to land up at the top of the Forbes list of richest celebrities for the second year in a row.

That’s when the whitewomaning began. It started off slowly with a combination of “All Lives Matter” and “Not all white people”:


Well, that escalated quickly. Margaret Too-Many-Vowels-to-Type wrote that only 18 minutes after Diddy pushed “send” on his tweet. You have to give it to white women. They are prompt, if nothing else. Mostly nothing else.

But it didn’t stop there:


As if anyone following Diddy gives a fuck about Ed Sheeran. Wait ... which one is Ed Sheeran, again?

Note: I assume “Love Football” isn’t a white woman. This shows that whitewomaning is not limited to white women at all. In fact, just to show we are an equal opportunity displayer of whitewomaning, here is a black male who joined in on the whitewomaning festivities:


But we all know Black Twitter is like acute constipation—it doesn’t let shit go. Of course, it chimed in:



Here I should write something about privilege and the need to be included in all conversations. I should follow that up with a sentence or two explaining that whitewomaning is the origin of the phrases “All Lives Matter” and “Not all white people,” which you are sure to find a variation of in the comments section below. I could write all that, but someone summed it up even better:


End of lesson.