It comes as no great shock that Ivanka Trump is completely out of touch with most working women. Though she is supposed to be marketing a brand that speaks to all women who work, it is most definitely geared toward a specific kind of woman who works—white, supremely wealthy, educated, business owner, etc. But this isn’t necessarily Ivanka’s fault. To some degree, it is understandable that a woman of her incredible wealth and privilege can’t help but be woefully out of touch with what life is like for most women who are not blessed with the resources that she has. Given that, it complete makes sense that her new book would be out of touch as well.
Trump's new book shares a name and a mission with her company's marketing campaign: Women Who Work. Organized into sections with titles like "Dream Big" and "Make Your Mark," Women Who Work is a sea of blandities, an extension of that 2014 commercial seeded with ideas lifted ("curated," she calls it) from various well-known self-help authors. Reading it feels like eating scented cotton balls.
It’s doubtful that Ivanka has had to work, really work, for much in life. Sure, she’s run aspects of her daddy’s businesses. But it appears that most of what she’s done and been good at is taking other people’s thoughts and ideas, repackaged them as her own and made money off of them. And this book appears to be no exception—with one major flaw. She couldn’t even be bothered to get it right. She’s basically a plagiarist and a con artist. Hmm … wonder where she got that from?
"I've curated my best thinking, as well as that of so many others, in the pages of this book," she writes (wordsmiths?), and what she means is that she rehashes her previous writings and borrows heavily from lifestyle gurus and corporate feminist authors like Sheryl Sandberg, while simultaneously claiming Women Who Work offers something radically new, "a hopeful, more authentic alternative to the way work has worked previously." Though there is an extensive bibliography, she's often vague about exactly how much she has taken. But almost any idea, upon investigation, has someone else's work behind it.
But what’s really telling is her penchant for taking black women’s words and misapplying them to fit into her own shallow, out of touch advice. She quotes greats like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou speaking on slavery and racism, only to convert their deep thinking into pithy, meaningless sayings that are better left in her head than taking up space on actual paper.
Trump's lack of awareness, plus a habit of skimming from her sources, often results in spectacularly misapplied quotations — like one from Toni Morrison's Beloved about the brutal psychological scars of slavery. "Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another," is positioned in cute faux-handwritten capitals [and tagged #itwisewords- which stands for “Ivanka Trump’s wise words”] before a chapter on "working smarter." In it, she asks: "Are you a slave to your time or the master of it? Despite your best intentions, it's easy to be reactive and get caught up in returning calls, attending meetings, answering e-mails ..." [...]
For instance, on the subject of asking for a raise, she quotes another black women writing on racism, Maya Angelou: "Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it."
But the real, very different line is from Angelou's memoir The Heart of a Woman, and it is a piece of advice about living in a racist world. "Ask for what you want," Angelou's mother tells her, "and be prepared to pay for what you get."
Yes, she was actually clueless enough not to understand the references to actual human bondage and racism or just chose to willfully ignore them to make cute points about working smarter and asking for raises in the workplace and then put them in a book. We could ask how much more bizarre and out of touch can this family get but we already know the answer, don’t we?
The election of Donald Trump has been a nightmare. And a number of us held out some small hope that Ivanka Trump might be the slight moral compass that would hold her father accountable and stop him from doing some truly horrible things that would mean complete disaster for the country and world. But by the looks of it, Ivanka isn’t anyone’s moral compass. Let’s hope that when they start burning books, restricting freedom of speech and completely destroy society, this book doesn’t become required reading.