After a column in which I explored the growing tendency of writers from the left to use the term “white women” as a term of opprobrium and wondered whether it was wise to treat white women in general as deplorables, a few writers have replied. The general tenor is sarcasm — look at what this genius wrote — followed by concession: White women really are bad.
At The Root, under the misleading headline “A Requiem for ‘White Women,’ Which the [sic] National Review Says Is a Disparaging Term,” — no, I don’t think it’s a disparaging term, I think others are using it as such — writer Michael Harriot dubs white women “the second-place finishers in the white supremacy Olympics.” He adds, “There has never been a moment in the history of this country where white women have collectively stepped out of the cozy shade provided by white supremacy to stand up for anything other than their own whiteness. Not during slavery. Not during Jim Crow. Not yesterday. Not a single time.”
In my essay, I pointed out that it was probably unwise to lump white women into a pro–President Trump bloc given that only a bare majority of them — 52 percent — voted for Trump. Many of these voters might be persuaded to vote Democrat if they felt welcome in the Democratic party. The response? Of course we should lump them into bloc. Harriot: “It was not an inconsequential percentage of white women who hid behind the opaque safety of voting booth curtains to hand our country over to a man who openly and loudly displays every variation of racism. It was 52 percent. It was most white women.” Most white women, says Harriot, stand guilty of having “stiff-armed” black victims of sexual misconduct and of being the major beneficiaries of affirmative action while hating it. He builds up to this assertion: “‘White women’ is not a slur. ‘White women’ is an apt description of those who benefit from the historical privilege white womanhood affords while still using the perceived purity of their femininity as a new millennium deflector shield.” Oh.
At The Grio, writer Blue Telusma takes a similar tack. Telusma imagines I said something about the “purity” of white women (I didn’t) and calls this purity “the prized jewel of white supremacist ideology.” After I noted that it would be unfair to chastise white women as a group because some of them have called the police on black people, Telusma says this isn’t unfair at all because “white women seem to call 911 operators, on Black kids especially, as regularly as their BFFs.” Telusma suggests it is important to “hold [white women] accountable to their access to white privilege.”
I think my point is made.