My First Experience with Weaponized White Woman Identity
I keep thinking about this and don’t really have an opportunity to bring it up anywhere. CW: racism, sexual abuse, domestic violence, police brutality
Back in highschool, one of my best friends and debate partner was demographically a white woman. (I was a suburban midwestern kid. These things happen.) We talked about basically anything, but I knew she came from a fairly conservative family in a very conservative community.
Trayvon Martin and the subsequent murder of black men and boys starting getting public attention. The difficulty of trying to get people to acknowledge the long-standing systemic problems of white judges and juries never seeing racially motivated violence by other whites, but easily seeing it from black offenders to white victims was challenging. (After all, it is hard to convince white people who never deal with white racism to believe it. While it is very easy to logically figure out why a black person would hate a white person. The history of the United States is justification enough for an oppressed minority to be bigoted toward a hegemonic demographic.)
This difficulty manifested as i tried to explain to my highschool friend (I was in college now) that the higher rates of murders of black men, and acquittals of white offenders, was not comparable to the simple law of large numbers that result in some police violence against white victims. How no one ever sees white on white crime as a racial issue, because white violence is just violence, non-racialized. She, debate students as we were, argued against me.
However, we were arguing about this on a public facebook post, and at some point dozens of her friends began to find, share, and comment on me personally. People dug up pictures of me in bathroom lighting to deny that I was black. (Being of mixed heritage, I don’t have prescriptive, racialized features.) People said I was a stranger harassing her, even though we had been friends for nearly 5 years.
When i confronted her about who these friends were, about how the company she keeps was actively being racist toward me to defend her, her only response was, “i’m not responsible for what they say.”
After that incident, I had to stop talking to her. Because anything we talked had a pretty high likelihood of getting harassed by her other friends. Like many people experienced on facebook, she remained on the list but interaction dropped to 0.
YEARS later, I discover that she had, at some point, changed her mind about police brutality and the race inequality issue. (A post about that is what had me thinking i could reconnect.) I also learned that she had become the victim of assault and imprisonment by a violent, inhuman misogynist whom she had tried to break up with. Her family found her after a week and forcefully removed her without the intervention of the police, who visited the man’s house once and left without investigation. I felt somewhat responsible, because years earlier I encouraged her to go to college rather than immediately jumping into the life of a married, air-force spouse. (I grew up in an airforce family, and I know about the politics of being married in the military.) I encouraged her to both get married and go to college, but that boy didn’t like the idea and the two broke up.
(I recognize that this is an irrational thought. But I was raise Catholic, and my brain likes to invent reasons for why everything tangentially related to me is therefore my fault.)
The thought I have been having recently is something of a warning to white women. Whiteness, the power and the privileges that affords, will not protect you from the violence of sexism. Nor will being Straight. Nor will being Cisgender. Nor will conforming to the standards of men, because patriarchy is inconsistent and self-serving. Those white knights who will protect you idealistically online will not be there to help you when you need it.
Family, friends, and community will help you, and those things are not fully realized if they are contingent on your conformity to sexist standards. You need family, friends, and community, as well as an understanding of violence and how to wield violence yourself in self defense.
There are many “communities” online that will try to turn your blame and your hatred to anything but the hegemonic power dynamics of our society. People will try to weaponize your vulnerability in the political world for their own ends. The answer is not to accept your vulnerability as the disenfranchised woman in society. The answer is to form community with all the other disenfranchised and minority people, to make society deconstruct the violent expectations placed upon your identity and destroy the source of that vulnerability.
It is strange to say it like this, but in this society, Blackness is synonymous with the history of oppression, not just the specific oppression of African Americans. Women, of course white women included, suffer oppression as well. You, to a certain extent, know Blackness. You know it in the way every racial minority knows Blackness. You know it in the way every LGBTQA+ person knows Blackness. You know it in the way that every man who is violently forced to conform to masculinity that doesn’t match their personality knows Blackness. You know it in the way every poor person who can’t afford food, school, healthcare, or a home knows Blackness. Blackness intersects every oppression a person can experience in the modern day, and there is empathy in Blackness. There is community in Blackness. So seek Blackness
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