We Shouldn’t Be Surprised by White Women’s Complicity
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…
