For over a hundred years, reactionaries, racists, and imperialists in the Western world have been cultivating the image of a white woman in peril as a means to an end: maintaining white privilege and supremacy. In 2004, the late Gwen Ifill from PBS coined the term “Missing White Girl Syndrome” (www.theguardian.com/...). The military term for influencing people through perceptions or propaganda is called PSYOP (Psychological Operations). In America, this well-worn PSYOP tactic of white women in peril was used to justify the ethnic cleansing of indigenous people, seizing land or overseas possessions, and promoting Jim Crow laws.
This year to energize their white electorate, the GOP is cynically castigating dark-skinned foreigners or immigrants as murderers of white American women and only by voting Republican can they save the country (please see the 31 March 2024 diary of Mel Leonor Barclay and Barbara Rodriguez, The 19th). Similarly in 1988, the GOP had unleashed the notorious Willie Horton ads against Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis: www.history.com/...
This fear- and hate-mongering meme has been effective with a large portion of the American population because the incessant, permeating, subtle (and not so subtle) trope of the “Other” has been vigorously and sub-consciously reinforced in the minds of white people for well over one hundred years: Non-whites present a danger to white women and only white men can save them.
To gain public support for the 1898 Spanish-American War, Uncle Sam is depicted as a knightly Cyrano de Bergerac protecting white helpless Cuba from dark, dastardly Spain. (Public domain image circa 1898)
A screenshot from D.W. Griffith’s epoch “Birth of a Nation” (1915), a film which lionized the Ku Klux Klan as the saviors of white American women from the threat of dangerous, emancipated blacks.
To encourage enlistment into the US military, this propaganda poster portrayed the Imperial German Army as a dark, savage ape-like threat to America and white women. (Artwork Harry R. Hopps, circa 1917)
In the 1933 classic film “King Kong”, a gigantic dark ape loves a blonde white woman who is eventually rescued from this taboo relationship by a white hero. Some historians contend ‘King Kong’ was an allegory to the saga of Jack Johnson, the world’s first black heavyweight boxing champion. In the 1910s Johnson had the “temerity” to marry a white woman and so the government persecuted the pugilist through the Mann Act. In ‘King Kong,’ the pitiable gorilla is similarly beset by the government (US Army Air Corps biplanes) atop the Empire State Building. Both Jack Johnson and King Kong, larger than life black characters, were toppled from celestial heights and the white establishment successfully separated the white women from the “evil clutches” of their dark paramours. (Public domain image, circa 1933)
(Imagery: OWI, circa 1941-1945)
As if Americans weren’t angry enough by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 Dec 1941, the US Office of War Information (OWI) produced hundreds of inflammatory racist posters portraying Japan as a simian danger to white women, as well as a vermin-like threat to the US. This horrendous meme facilitated the massive FBI detention of 120,000 innocent Japanese-Americans into concentration camps.
During the Second World War Fascist Italy used a similar meme. This propaganda poster combines several elements relevant to the Italian psyche at the time. The Regio Esercito had mixed military experiences in Africa (Libya and Ethiopia), including a crushing defeat to Abyssinia in the Battle of Adowa (1896). The all-black 92nd Infantry Division deployed against Italy in the summer of 1944. Here, a barbarous gorilla-like American soldier is depicted endangering Italian women through the iconic Venus de Milo, complete with a $2.00 price scrawled on her navel. (Artist: Gino Boccasile, circa 1943-1944)
The unofficial American counter-cultural response to ‘white woman in danger syndrome’ came from a comic book in 1941. DC Comic’s Wonder Woman symbolically demonstrated that white women were not helpless but capable of fighting criminal gangs, combating the Axis Powers, or defeating nefarious supervillains. Created by Charles Moulton, this pioneer also invented the polygraph machine. In 1973, DC Comics would introduce their first black female superhero Nubia. (Artwork by Harry G. Peter, January 1941)
In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist.
Angela Davis
