Okay, folks—let’s have an honest talk. We’ve all seen pictures of the torch-carrying angry white men at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protest. These images, with nary a woman in sight, make it easy for us to assume that only men were involved. But white supremacy is not just a man’s game. While white men seem to do the lion’s share of upholding a system designed to maintain their racial superiority, the truth is they cannot do it alone. White women have long been willing participants in white supremacy—particularly because they benefit from it too. And contrary to appearance, there were women in Charlottesville standing on the side of oppression this weekend, too.
On the front lines of Friday night’s “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virgina, at the University of Virginia, angry white men with torches flocked to a statue of slave-owning Founding Father Thomas Jefferson. By Saturday afternoon, members of the KKK, neo-Nazis, and other armed militia groups were rallying full force in the streets adorned with Confederate flags and in full Nazi regalia.
Behind them, smaller in number but no less present, stood white women. [...]
We often do not to associate white women with this kind of hate, given how white womanhood is so passionately defended and protected in our society. Throughout history, white women have always been seen as virtuous and pure and their value have been associated with their ability to reproduce children. While this viewpoint subjects white women to sexism and patriarchy and wholly objectifies them, it also considers them pure because of their whiteness and ability to preserve the race—qualities which are deserving of protection at all times. This has often been used to justify racism, specifically anti-black racism, which posits that black men are the biggest threat to white racial purity. Aligning themselves with white men has generally provided a pathway to privilege and comfort for white women.
So it comes as no surprise that many white women have long been willing to support and uphold white supremacist ideologies and behaviors.
There were active women branches of the Ku Klux Klan. The white woman who accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of crude sexual behavior ― resulting in his gruesome murder in 1955 ― recently admitted she’d lied about what happened. As recently as Nov. 8, 2016, 53 percent of white women who voted, voted to support the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, despite his use of racist and sexist rhetoric.
White women were there in Charlottesville. And they weren’t all innocent bystanders or counter-protesters.
Here’s how we know.
Because someone somewhere will want to play “devil’s advocate” and suggest that this video proof doesn’t mean there were lots of white women present, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Even if there were no white women there, who do we think raised these men? Who are their aunts and sisters? Who are their girlfriends and wives? There are jokes running rampant on social media about how these men are single losers who live in their parents’ basements and have no social lives. But that’s just fantasy. And frankly, it absolves white women of any role in white supremacy. These men don’t exist in a vacuum. They most certainly have white women around them—plenty of whom are tacitly or overtly supporting this kind of behavior and thinking.
Let’s ask ourselves why the story of white women’s participation and complicity in hatred and white supremacy is being erased and what purpose it serves. Better yet, we could talk about how radical it was that Heather Heyer, as a white woman, gave her life in the fight against white supremacy. But for clarity, we should remember that Heather is not the main story.
While it’s beyond tragic and disgusting that her life came to an end in this way, we should also remember that white women are not the intended victims of white supremacy. Though of course they are impacted by it, they very often act in ways that keep it going. A fitting tribute to Heather would be for white women to speak out against racism and radically align themselves with people of color and other ethnic minorities and take an active role in deconstructing white supremacy.
If white women are considered the “keepers” of the race, they certainly have a part in undoing this awful legacy of violence and oppression.