You can't call the racism of some white women anything other than what it is: something that is ugly and personal

 

Four black Army soldiers are having a meal at an IHOP in Virginia. A “nice” white woman puts $30 on their table as a gesture of “appreciation” for their service, which was said to be not uncommon. But then the woman came back and took $24 off the table. She left, but then came right back. She tells the soldiers “Just so you know, I came back in to give her the rest of the cash from my wallet, because you people are shit bags”:

The soldiers ask her to leave them alone, but instead woman parks herself in their booth, preventing one of the soldiers from leaving. None of the soldiers can understand what is going on here. A white man, who is a retired airman, steps in and asks her to leave. She asks him if he is a “wrestler” or works for IHOP; he is obviously as befuddled by the woman’s behavior as the soldiers are:

The woman finally gets out of the cubicle, but not before telling the soldiers what is really on her mind: “Are you the thin blue line? I get confused. Are you BLM? Are you Antifa?” Witnesses reported that they heard her referring to the soldiers as “lying cock-sucking nig**rs,” and to one person who was telling her to shut-up, “Motherfucker, I will drop you. You wanna go? You wanna go?”

This white woman was probably feeling unhappy about all the white “guilt” she was being forced to endure, and it was more out of spite than generosity that she offered to pay for the soldiers’ meal. Perhaps she thought they were not “appreciative” enough of her “gesture”; not all white people are racists, after all. The problem was that this woman’s action had nothing to do with the men being soldiers; she so clearly had race on the brain, and was probably so discombobulated by being confronted with people who could not easily fit in her stereotypical view of blacks, that this fake show of “appreciation” was a way of expressing her belief that blacks were “undeserving” of any empathy from her regardless of circumstance or occupation. Or maybe I'm being too "nice" to her in trying to ascertain her "motives."

We have been seeing a lot of this behavior in the past few years from white women, no doubt “inspired” by Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. Why should we be surprised about this? Why should we ever have been surprised? What do you think of the women in the picture below? They are shouting menaces at a black student that “integrationists” are “forcing” into their previously lily-white William Franz Elementary School in Louisiana back in 1960:

Here are white women parading in Washington D.C., circa 1925; they must be wearing the latest fashion:

You hear the excuses being made for plainly racist white women like this from the “liberal” side; the feminist “explanation” is that they are being “brainwashed” by a “patriarchal” society. But that is just being disingenuous. Feminist Eleanor Smeal complained about “racism against white women” in USA Today back in the early 1990s; she was upset about the “optics” of media attention on Pamela Smart, who murdered her two children. Smart was white—why wasn’t the media equally fascinated by black female crime? It wasn’t “fair” to white women; after all, black women committed more crimes, right?  Of course today, white female victims are all the media rage.

Let’s be honest about this: the racism of white women can be much more “personal” than that of white men, and more deeply felt. That is why you continuously encounter such sickening incidents like the one above; white female racists not only tend to use uglier language, but they also seem to be much less self-conscious in an expressing their racist beliefs. So-called “progressive” white women might make a show of being “tolerant,” but this more often than not is a “feel good” gesture that they expect something in return, like the kind of “unconditional love” they expect from a dog. If their motives are questioned, or it is pointed out that they are only acting from a position of patronage, they abandon the pretext and return to their defensive white privilege shell.

We must also remember that white women are far from “naturally” altruistic. People tend to be “empathetic” toward the less privileged if their own positions are not “threatened.” We only have to watch crime shows to know that white women are the favored “victims” even though in real life they are the demographic least likely to be a victim of a crime. This is not just a function of gender victim politics in this country as a whole, but of the whole history of racism in this country; this is an off-shoot of the “sanctity of white women” of an allegedly “bygone” era in which “virginal” white females had to be protected from bestial “colored” men—and even the “rumor” of such happening usually led to lynchings or the burning down of “colored” neighborhoods and ensuing massacres. For radicalized gender advocates, this kind of thing “intrudes” on their agenda; racism is something other people are guilty of. The fact that a discussion about white female racism angers and frustrates them shows that they can’t abide by self-examination or the “competition” for “victimhood.”

I remember exchanging an email years ago with a Seattle Times op-ed writer who was a black woman. She told me that she and another black woman in attendance at a women journalists convention were asked if they thought it was their race or their gender that hurt them more. She said that she and her companion looked around the sea of white faces and the fact they were the only blacks in attendance, and answered that their “race” was a bigger problem for them. She observed that the white women in attendance expressed “shock” and “disbelief” by her answer. These white women were simply blind to the benefits of white “privilege,” and that these two black women were just “tokens” to their questionable “generosity.”

The late sociologist Ruth Frankenberg had the audacity to discuss how white privilege aided white women, as opposed to the disadvantages of being a non-white woman in this society. Frankenberg found that educated white women—especially those who regarded themselves as “feminists”—tended to evade or discount race. They even pretended not to think of themselves as “white.” They claimed not to think in terms of “race.” Race was the “problem” of nonwhites, and being “white” and what it meant being so in this society was not worth their time examining. Frankenberg found that white women tended to be “full of contradictions” about racial matters, and used evasive terms while discussing race, especially in how it benefited themselves personally. Many white women she talked to didn’t want to discuss racism in this country at all because it “discomfited” them, and made them feel “guilty” about being white and from a “dominant” social group.

Of course in this muddled society we live in with competing “victims” there must be some “allowances” made. In an article in Race, Ethnicity and Education in 2002, Diane Gillespie writes about a teacher who “mistakenly” discomfited a white female student by talking about her own belief that she benefited from white privilege. The student, Mary, felt that the teacher had “betrayed” her and did not recognize her belief that everything she had was from “hard and honest labor,” and people seeing her as white played no role in it. The teacher decided that she needed to change the way she taught race in class so as to find a way to make white women like Mary feel more “comfortable” in their skin and reduce their “discomfort,” and make them “feel cared for as human beings when they voice unpopular opinions”—like Mary, who told the teacher that now she felt she had to “watch what she says” when she defends her whiteness.

The photo of the taunting white women above was from the cover of the book by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. McRae writes that although white men engaged in the more “physical” aspects of racism, white women were the “constant gardeners”—meaning it was they who “nurtured” racism and the segregation of the races in the home, in the schools and in their children. It was through the efforts of white women which accounted for the “endurance and shape-shifting capabilities of white resistance.” And all the time, McRae notes, these women claimed not be racist—but were just “protecting” their children and their schools. Their opposition to integration as a “moral”—not racial—issue, was obviously disingenuous to say the least.

McRae also observes in her book that white female racism is also a function of their perceived “gendered” and “class-based” status in society. White women who are racists act the same way as “poor whites” did (and still do), by having a need to be “superior” to someone, that naturally being nonwhite people; demeaning them in ugly verbal ways, and finding “creative” ways to discriminate against them. White women in the early days of school desegregation in the South who felt they lacked “political capital” because of their gender instead sought to make their opinions known by engaging in harassing behavior of “integrationists” and nonwhite students—even encouraging their  own children to “bully” white students who dared to attend integrated schools.

McRae goes so far as to insist that white women’s racism is just as much a “women’s movement” as the feminist movement is. When we see incidents like the one above occur over and over and over again—not just against blacks, but Hispanics as well—it has gone far beyond even that; in the era of Trump, it is just another truth that was waiting for that box to be kicked open to release the full measure of it.