A moment forces us to reckon with our privilege and how to use it.

If Tina Fey is correct, I picked a crappy time to stop eating sugar.

In this lunatic point in history (recap: rapey megalomaniac in the White House; immigrants in hiding; skinheads, Ku Klux Klan and Nazis – actual Nazis! – marching in Charlottesville; white supremacist killing a counter-protester and injuring a dozen-plus others by running them over; the megalomaniac equivocating on whether Nazis are bad), Fey took to the airwaves as part of a Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” special, laid out the situation as she saw it and then jammed vast quantities of a flag-decorated sheetcake in her mouth.

It broke her heart, she said, to see the evil forces descend upon Charlottesville, where she attended the University of Virginia. And since she didn’t want to see any more good people hurt or killed, she suggested that instead of confronting white supremacists, those good people should seek out a Jewish-run bakery or an African-American-run bakery, buy a cake with the American flag on it and take their rage out on it.

“Who drove the car into the crowd? Hillary’s emails?” she said, shoveling cake in her mouth. “Sheetcaking is a grassroots movement. Most of the women I know have been doing it once a week since the election.” As for future white supremacist rallies, she said, don’t show up. Instead, eat cake and “let these morons scream into the empty air.”

My immediate reaction: Brilliant act of satire, stress-eating cakes is funny as hell and she didn’t really mean “don’t show up” when the KKK, Nazis and skinheads come marching through town or one close by, like the marches planned this month for San Francisco and Berkeley.

The reaction of some people I admire: Women – especially white women – not showing up to protest, to support, to witness and to vote in a way that keeps people like Donald Trump from becoming president is a huge contributor to the mess we find ourselves in right now and Fey’s bit smacked of white privilege.

“The vision of her ravenously eating cake while spouting her performative knowledge of hot button topics was awful,” writes activist Jasmine Banks. “She is doing the very least she possibly could with all of her power while wearing the facade of being disempowered. She is playing up white women’s innocence and their need to be rescued… Tina Fey’s skit protected whiteness.” And from Evette Dionne, senior editor at Bitch Media, Fey is “representative of scores of women – many of whom are white – who deem themselves ‘woke,’ but don’t have a grasp on oppressions as systems. It’s just ignorant of facts.”

I think I fall into that description. I’d like to think of myself as woke – I show up! I write about inequality! I advocate for progressive causes! I grew up in a working-class family! – but reality is, I don’t know much and I could be doing better.

A few years ago, when I was editor of this paper, I botched an opportunity to call out some objectively dumb racism. I was given a tip that as part of “diversity week,” Palma High School celebrated African-American day by serving barbecue ribs. For Middle Eastern day, they served boar sausage. (Pig for Middle Eastern day? What?) I assigned it out to someone to look into and then it completely fell off my radar. I can’t explain why, but we never followed through.

I had, in fact, forgotten about it until after the election, when I was talking to a non-white friend about racism in both subtle and explicit forms. He was angry that so many educated white women voted for Trump. He was angry that more than one ostensibly smart white person had told him racism didn’t really exist in Monterey County. And then I told him about the Palma story, expecting a weary chuckle or an empathetic, “See what I mean?”

What I got instead was rage. Incandescent rage at me personally and at the Weekly. Maybe being “woke” is an evolution. There was enough outcry internally at Palma that they rethought heritage week. There’s enough outcry now over white supremacists that a number of planned marches have been cancelled. Maybe knowing more means doing better, and doing better means showing up – with or without sheetcake – because burying our heads in the sand and pretending something doesn’t exist isn’t good enough. 

Mary Duan writes The Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com.