White women’s role in white supremacy, explained

[Sugar Cookie]

It’s tempting to think of the storming of the US Capitol on Wednesday as toxic masculinity run amok: a mob of mostly white men, carrying guns and wearing animal skins, trying to overthrow democracy on behalf of a president who once bragged about his ability to grab women “by the pussy.”

It’s even more tempting to embrace this narrative when, in a bizarre statement, that president’s campaign press secretary describes him as “the most masculine person, I think, to ever hold the White House.”

But focusing too much on masculinity obscures a crucial truth: Many women were either present at the riot or cheering on the insurrectionists from back home. There was Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old Air Force veteran and apparent devotee of QAnon ideology who was killed during the riot. There was the woman photographed with “zip-tie guy” Eric Munchel, now believed to be his mother. There was Martha Chansley, the mother of the widely photographed “QAnon shaman” who wore a horned hat and carried a spear to Congress. She wasn’t present at the riot but later defended her son in an interview, calling him “a great patriot, a veteran, a person who loves this country.”

And, of course, there were the women lawmakers who boosted conspiracy theories and false claims about the election being stolen, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon adherent who railed against Democrats and Black Lives Matter protesters in a speech on the House floor this week while wearing a mask reading “censored.” Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, meanwhile, described January 6 as “1776” before the riot began, live-tweeted from the House during the attack (including a mention that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been removed from the chambers), and this week, refused to allow police to search her bag after it set off metal detectors outside Congress. During her campaign, Boebert promised to bring her gun with her to the House.

White women have been part of white supremacy in America since the very beginning, experts point out, dating back to their role in slavery. “They were at the table when the system was designed,” Stephanie Jones-Rogers, a history professor at UC Berkeley and author of the book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, told Vox. “They were co-architects of the system.”

That remained true after the Civil War, through the birth and evolution of the Ku Klux Klan, and during the civil rights movement when white women were some of the most vocal opponents of school integration. And it remains true today, when women hold a key role in spreading QAnon ideology and sustaining white nationalist groups and movements. “Like other parts of our economy and society, these movements would collapse without their labor,” Seyward Darby, author of Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, told Vox.

And if we ignore the importance of women in the Capitol riot and the groups that backed and enabled it, we can’t understand white supremacy in America — let alone dismantle it. Trying to fight racism in America without looking at white women, Jones-Rogers said, is like “addressing only the right side of the body when the left side is still sick.”

White women’s investment in white supremacy is older than the United States itself and goes back to their role in the economy of slavery. Though white women have been seen by some historians as passive bystanders to the brutalities of slavery, they were in fact active participants, as Jones-Rogers explains in They Were Her Property. Before the Civil War, white women had little economic or political power, with one big exception: They could buy and sell enslaved people. And they did so, using enslaved people as a way of building up wealth that would not simply be transferred to a husband in marriage.

Slavery gave white women “freedom, autonomy, and agency that they could not exercise in their lives without it, so they deeply invested in it,” Jones-Rogers said.

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White women’s role in white supremacy, explained

Women at the Capitol riot are just the latest reminder of a long history.

www.vox.com

 

[VLGRDSPLY]

jesus christ, this divide over race they keep pushing needs to fucking stop! we get rid of segregation because it was wrong. Now they have all these people brainwashed to the point where they thing segregating is making a safe place for black people away from us scary white people... SMH we are moving backwards and people cant even see it

 

[Blizzard]

This article reads like a character assassination of an entire segment of the US population. Also, I think it is portraying 'white supremacy' as being more common today in USA than it really is.

My best guess at the short-term of this whole mindset that is being spread around now is to increase racial tensions. This article serves as an effort to both make what you would call not-white people hate white women more, and possibly, an effort to make white woman hate themselves.

Every article has an author, no matter the publisher.

photo credit: Vox

Anna North
Senior Reporter

I cover gender issues: reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, LGBTQ rights, masculinity, femininity, and more. I came to Vox from the New York Times, where I held several positions, including member of the editorial board. I'm also the author of three novels: America Pacifica (2011), The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (2015), and Outlawed, forthcoming in January 2021.

I kinda do not trust this kind of focus in someone's life. It is not balanced, maybe counts as extremist.

I for one refuse to listen to this attack on a singled-out ethnicity and sex, and refuse the racial hatred this article encourages. I will also not listen to an attack on black women, nor black men, nor white men, that singles them out as racial and sex classes. Here it is in 2021 and we're having a resurgence of this kind of shit. Isn't that just great.

 

[VLGRDSPLY]

sad that in just 4 years the media was able to make so many people think that trump and anyone that liked his policies are natzi extremists.... my bad, I like more money - less government, abiding by the damn constitution and guns! too bad im too much of a slob to wear my white sheet, guess my nazi outfit will have to do