The Crappy White Women We Make
I went on Rising this morning with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti to discuss Amy the White lady VP siccing the police on Christian the Black bird watcher. I had written out my comments, but I didn’t get to everything so here I go:
This is going to be triggering, and I want everyone to know that I kind of adore Krystal. While I’m not a feminist myself, I think there is room in the world for them, just preferably not an overwhelming number in a room with me if we are trying to get serious justice work done.
When Amy the finance manager gets frustrated, angry and lashes out by fabricating a story to sic the cops on Christian the bird watcher, because Christian gets in the way of something Amy wants to do, is Amy Cooper an exception? If yes, then figuring out an individual punishment may be the way to keep people safe from her.
If the answer is no, then dealing with Cooper as if she were a bug and not a feature of the system is actually a form of ANTI-politics because we aren’t going after the politically controlled formative institutions that predictably churn out Amy Coopers. The appropriate political response, if we are serious about securing the rights of Christian the Bird Watcher, is to figure out where Amy Coopers come from.
We make crappy White women. Everyone knows we make crappy White men. You can put that on a T-Shirt, sell a million copies and get a book deal. But we make crappy White women, too, and their crappiness is expressed differently from the way that crappy White men express their crappiness. In the same way that breast cancer and testicular cancer are different diseases, but both cancers will kill you, Amy Cooper and Richard Spencer are White supremacists, they just express the trait differently. We grow Amy Coopers the way Iowa grows corn.
There are probably more asymptomatic Amy Coopers than there are asymptomatic Covid-19 patients, and we need to figure out a way to inoculate them before they become fully blown problems for my freedom as a Black male.
In fact, for a lot of folks, Amy Cooper is the aspiration. She has a degree from the University of Chicago. She thrives in a racist economy. Who knows how many Bs she has ever gotten, and she was probably taught not to ruffle too many feathers on her way to winning at her very nice job. Because it’s an open question, whether you can change the system while climbing in it as is. Now, I have three kids, if any of them become VPs a Franklin Templeton, I’d feel like I will have failed as a parent, but I’m what you call a good parent, so I teach my kids that America doesn’t need more finance professionals. But I do know worse parents who would consider her a successful daughter.
If you, like me, think that she is less of a bad actor and more of the predictable product of deficient institutions, we need to look at her formative institutions: family structure, schools, churches, and the media she imbibes. Dreama Moon, in a wonderful piece she wrote in 1998 called White Enculturation, argues that White women learn how to be white at home. It’s a lovely little piece. It’s only about 12 pages long, but it gets REALLY GOOD in the middle. We need an intervention in the White family.
In the 1970s, we had the Moynihan Report on the Negro Family, and it guided public policy for a generation. Poorly. But we need a better report on the White family, and the stakes of their hypocritical attitudes around race. We need to actually study the alarming success with which the White church thrives in producing white supremacists and is feckless in dismantling White supremacists. We need to talk about feminism.
But if you stand in enough spaces, you know that when it comes down to racial and labor justice, if we ever get on the cusp of racial and labor justice, mainstream feminism is going to be the biggest stumbling on the other side. So if you aren’t gearing up for the inevitable fight against the folks on Emily’s List, you don’t know the fight. Because we are not all on the same side.
There is a way in which Central Park Amy’s behavior is different in degree, but not really in kind, from Warren’s lie to sic the media on Bernie Sanders for calling her sex, and how feminists reacted to Warren is how they would have reacted Christian the Bird watcher, had Christian not had a camera. I’m supposed to believe that Bernie Sanders, the guy who was literally slapped for endorsing Jesse Jackson in 1988, and delivered Jackson delegates from the New Hampshire primary, told Elizabeth Warren, “You know, a woman can’t win the Presidency.” Or more likely, Warren, who has a documented history of lying when it’s favorable for her, lied to sic the media on Sanders.
How deeply do you scratch before you see that feminism in practice, and even in theory, supports Warren’s right to lie and sic the media on Bernie like he were a dog.
Feminism has its origins and ground in the White supremacist project of subjugating lesser people, with the argument that White supremacy is more effective with the eager, empowered participation of real women. Lydia Marie Child was pretty cool, and the Grimke sisters weren’t bad, but the rest of your favorite first feminists were trash because gender as its been historically received is itself a fundamentally classist notion. In the colonial imagination, there are three different types of humans: men, women, and genderless beasts of burden (that’s the poor and working class) who happen to come in males and females, but they have sex differences the way that dogs do, but not real genders. As beasts of burden, they may need to be tended to, but mostly just disciplined and kept out of power.
So when you are advocating for the rights of women without changing the classism with which we’ve embedded gender, you are advocating for the rights of women to rule over lesser animals. And since she is a woman and not a man, she has a naturalized morality and innocence such that her feelings have the authority of God and Nature. That means when she is mad, someone else did something wrong. Whereas when some other people are mad, they are dangerous and need to be controlled.
Amy Cooper handled that situation and took out a hit on a bird watcher in a way that only a White woman can. This happened to Jonathan Ferrell. He died a few years ago because a White woman called out a hit on him after he had gotten into a car accident.
Amy Cooper was calling on her power as a woman to have her way with Christian the bird watcher. You have to ask yourself, are feminists REALLY marching to surrender that power or add to it? Or do they want it both ways?
I think I know the answer, and they aren’t marching to give up the power to sic.
Edit: People like to say that Black feminism and WOC feminism is different. No. Feminism, as feminism, presumes and naturalizes the moral superiority of women, as women, and the superior power Black men are granted as men. Neither of which are true. Women are not morally superior, and Black males are vulnerable because of their maleness mixed with blackness. In terms of institutional power, women’s tears level all manners of institutional bureaucracy, and they are just as punitive.
Anytime you talk about Feminism and White Women, you have to bring a ton of receipts, so here are a list of books by White women that concern how White women advocating for womanhood are a problem for racial and labor justice:
White Women’s Rights by Louise Michele Newman
Mothers of Massive Resistance by Elizabeth McCrae
White Enculturation by Dreama Moon
Empire of the Mother by Mary P. Ryan
Measuring Manhood by Melissa Stein
From non-White women scholars: