The Devil Wears Prada: A Metaphor for the Willful Ignorance of My Whiteness

The cerulean sweater monologue from 2006 blockbuster The Devil Wears Prada makes me think of all the ways my life was chosen for me by people I don’t even know over centuries of systemic and institutionalized racism. Let’s get a refresh on the dialogue between fashion mogul, Miranda Priestly, and lowly assistant, Andy Sachs:

Miranda Priestly: Something funny?

Andy Sachs: No, no, nothing. Y’know, it’s just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. Y’know, I’m still learning about all this stuff.

Miranda Priestly: This “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you.

You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic “casual corner” where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.”

As a white person, I didn’t understand that race and racism benefitted me. I thought I was exempt from race because we could buy anything we needed in the USA to be comfortable when in fact those exact things were a result of the exploitation of others, of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of capitalist culture.

As a privileged, upper class white woman, I certainly haven’t experienced racism directed at me, yet I was completely unaware how my whiteness put me at an advantage over BIPOC in our heavily skewed, white supremacist society. I was unaware that my sweater, the one woven with white dominance, patriarchy, and capitalism, had been selected for me by millions of people over hundreds of years who had set me up for a life of luxury because of my white, cisgendered, heteronormativity while others were barricaded from those same experiences based on their different social identities, race being the most indicative of encountering red tape.

Now, I knew my sweater was nice. I believed I was lucky to have it and that my father worked incredibly hard to get our family to the socioeconomic status we enjoyed. Through grit, determination, chutzpah, street smarts, and utilizing his connections, he was the “rags-to-riches” role model I always looked up to. The son of a factory worker turned NBA team owner. I was in awe of all he’d accomplished. I still am, and it’s not that he doesn’t embody those characteristics, it’s that if I tug at this thread in my sweater it unravels a whole other parallel and equally important truth.

My father’s father bought their first family home in North Philadelphia, a red lined neighborhood that still suffers as a result. As with all redlined communities across the USA, inhabitants of North Philly were not to be issued lifesaving and wealth-building government loans instated by The New Deal, and you guessed it, these neighborhoods were primarily inhabited by Black and Brown residents. My grandfather, being white (and male, Christian, cis-hetero and able-bodied), moved his family to Levittown, PA, where he was able to acquire a Federal Housing Act (FHA) loan to buy property. Levittown did not afford FHA loans for Black families. They weren’t even shady about it; they literally advertised it that way as being a perk of the neighborhood.

Once learning this truth about the history of my family and America itself, I realized my comfortable, soft, feminine, opulent sweater wasn’t exactly a choice I or my parents made. Part of the sweater I’m able to afford doesn’t even belong to me, because it is a result of circumstances implemented by oppressors seeking to keep the hierarchy of white supremacy intact for generations to come. Real estate is the biggest contributor to generational wealth. By disenfranchising Black and Brown citizens, the US Government and all who participated in these programs have a debt to pay. Once again, we have stolen to promote our own gain out of greed and the need to hold power over others.

This is only one thread of my story. If we pull at a thread on any of our sweaters, we’ll see where and how it was sewn and who decided it was supposed to end up in our closet.

That’s not to say that we white people are the devil. We are human and we are complex. I wanted to think I chose my sweater as an individual. I was unaware that the sweater I was wearing was unevenly interwoven with all of humanity — and many well-meaning folks are in that unaware place now. We have the opportunity to engage others who think they’re just wearing a lumpy blue sweater to have an empathetic and honest conversation. They may think they have a nice sweater and possibly, that they earned it. They may not know the complete story of how that sweater came to be. Or that some people have never had the opportunity to have a sweater at all.

I’ve been unravelling my sweater for a minute now. My intimate relationship with my Afro-Latina best friend, re-education of the history of whiteness, radically honest self awareness and loads of opting back in have become the antidotes to thinking my sweater was just something I choose to wear on a particular day. All the lumpy sweaters I wore in the form of my misinformed education came from a curriculum designed by the same people who chose which stories were taught out of the “pile of stuff.” The sweaters of white bodies have always been higher quality than anything accessible to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) and we didn’t learn anything about the persistence of white resistance to anyone else having nice sweaters. The truth has been repeatedly glossed over in order to preserve the pristine sweater of whiteness we have been conditioned to believe is the standard, the norm, whilst causing a violent and suffocating amount of harm for centuries.

As a white person, I am not my sweater AND I’ll probably never be without one, so it’s up to me to do better. As I’ve learned over and over again on this journey, the truth will set you free. It’s up to us to pull the thread and start unravelling.