The damsel in distress so often turns into the damsel in defense of white supremacy. Remember 2016? When more white women voted for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton, many feminists reacted with shock and anger at this perceived flagrant betrayal of the “sisterhood.”
An outpouring of emotion from liberal white women blasted Trump’s female voters as gender-traitors and “foot soldiers” for the patriarchy.
This shock resurfaced when Amy Coney Barrett became the fifth woman to serve on the Supreme Court, replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s liberal feminism with religious conservatism. It seems surprise is still the go-to reaction whenever white women’s investment in the status quo comes to light, as if there is a literal cultural reset button.
Academic Sara Salem refers to this as “white feminist shock”: a performance of innocence that “demonstrates a detachment from the ways in which race and gender constitute one another in the American imaginary.” In other words, it’s a tool that permits white feminists to claim ignorance of the realities of race and imperialism by hyper-focussing on gender and patriarchy.
I am increasingly of the opinion that patriarchy discourse is obstructing our understanding of how power operates in the West. This will have disastrous consequences if we do not address it now. By isolating sexism as its own system of oppression, “patriarchy” not only neglects issues such as class; it places white women on the same rung as other women and elevates non-white men to the same status as white men. This is simply not an accurate reflection of reality.
Like Salem, as a non-American (albeit one with permanent U.S. residency), I am keen to place U.S. politics in global context. The truth is, as I explain in my book White Tears/Brown Scars, white American women along with their counterparts across the former British Empire have always been heavily invested in maintaining white power structures, even if seemingly to their own detriment. What’s more, they often did this by not merely neglecting, but actively throwing other women under the proverbial bus.
Patriarchy discourse is obstructing our understanding of how power operates in the West.
In They Were Her Property, historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers debunks long-cherished myths that white women were largely innocent of the crimes of Antebellum slavery. By corroborating the testimony of formerly enslaved people with newspaper records, court documents, and other written records, Jones-Rogers uncovers how for white Southern women, “slavery and the ownership of human beings constituted core elements of their identities.”
The memsahibs, British women in colonial-era India, also defined their womanhood in opposition to the colonized women surrounding them. In either dismissing local Indian women as sex-crazed simpletons or pitying them for their perceived inferiority, British settler women constructed a false binary. Positioning themselves as more enlightened and emancipated, they asserted both their own female superiority over Indian women and European cultural superiority over India.
And in White Mother to a Dark Race, historian Margaret Jacobs charts the central role white women played in the removal of Indigenous children from their families in Australia and in the American West from the 1860s to 1940s. “We are trying to solve the problem with the natives,” wrote Australian missionary Annie Lock to her sister in 1929. “The only thing I can see would [be] to get the children right away from their parents and teach them good moral, clean habits & right from wrong & also work in industries that will make them more useful.”
Throughout the global imperial project, it has been clear that the “White Man’s Burden” Rudyard Kipling referred to in his infamous poem was not only a masculine enterprise. What is it that we talk about when we talk about the White Man? If we recognize the term “Man” as a stand-in for the human race as a whole, then so too should we understand that in the context of colonial history, “White Man” denotes all white people.
This is not to say white women are equally privileged to men in the system — although they are certainly becoming more so. Nor is it to deny that some are more complicit and therefore more rewarded. It is to say that pinning all culpability on white men means white supremacy continues to be misunderstood as a problem of patriarchy rather than one of paternalistic and maternalistic racial supremacy.
This is why we are surprised when white women act in complicity, even though they are, as Kyla Schuller notes, simply “performing their roles as white women.”
I call this role Strategic White Womanhood. White women can oscillate between the role of the helpless damsel in distress who needs the protection of white men to the role of the enforcer of whiteness: the damsel in defense.
To see this dual role in action look no further than the ubiquitous “Karen.”
The “Karen” meme is increasingly criticized by white feminists who complain the term is sexist because it is sometimes used mockingly by white men, lacks a male equivalent, and because white women often are and have always been the victims of white men. Although I am not particularly a fan of the term because of the first objection, the remainder of these critiques frustratingly miss the point by again isolating gender when the rest of us are emphasizing race.
Yes, we are well aware that white women have been oppressed in Western society. In fact, that is the very reason why there is no male equivalent. “Karen” typifies the role of white women in white society: a lesser member of the dominant class who ingratiates herself to those above her by sacrificing those below her. She is, by her nature, a secondary power: If “Karen” is the one metaphorically calling the cops, then those figurative cops are white men.
Liberal feminism’s emphasis on gender over race means white women are able to temporarily distance themselves from white power structures — the very structures that so many of them vote for again and again, and that benefit them at the expense of others. Ask a Black or Brown woman how many times she has been accused of “dividing the sisterhood” and “doing the work of patriarchy” whenever she has attempted to assert herself with her white feminist peers.
I was dismayed, for instance, to see so much blame pinned on Latino voters for Trump’s stronger-than-expected showing in 2020. And yes, it is true that early exit poll analysis indicates that Latino men in particular voted for him in greater numbers this year. However, as a group, Latinos, like all other non-white voters, voted as they have always done: overwhelmingly Blue.
To say Latinos gave Florida or Texas to Trump is to say that white people are free to vote as they wish but people of color are obliged not only to vote Democratic, but to do so in such emphatic numbers as to make up for the persistent tendency of white people to vote majority Republican.
If white people voted the same way as other racial groups — and I do stress as a group since democratic processes function on the basis of “majority rules” — then Trump would not only have been resoundingly defeated, but Republicans would struggle to ever win an election.
These stark graphs by Nate Silver breaking down the 2016 election show how white men and white women work together to maintain this system. Those who feel shock at these images have to accept that for many white women, their gender identification with other women ends where threats to their racial privilege begin.
The equality that white feminists have fought for is one that merely gives them the same status as white men. If liberal feminism stays on this path and achieves parity between white men and white women, this will not result in an end to racial oppression but in a consolidation of it. Take away the “patriarchy” and we are left with a white supremacy more unified than ever.