I cannot tell you how many times I've tried to write this blog post. With a desire to stress my support for #BlackLivesMatter and the current protests, my attempts have failed over and over again. Nothing I wrote rang true. None of the thousands of words I wrote resonated as offering up any new ideas, new thoughts. They felt like an echo-chamber of repetition.
It finally came to me that I should write what I know about: white women.
First, here's a story about me when I was about eight years old. Background: My dad was paraplegic and thus in a wheelchair. In those days, there was no ADA compliance. Even going to a movie theater was difficult -- in fact, we were sometimes asked to leave because he blocked the aisle. He was unable to go into many stores, because there no ramps. In short, life was hard for him and by extension for me as well.
Dad did have a car that was modified for all hand use, so he was able to drive which gave him some independence. One day when it was just dad and me leaving his house on Dwight Way, he was having trouble maneuvering himself into the car. I would have had to wrangle his very heavy wheelchair into the car myself, a Herculean task. As he was trying to get himself into the driver's seat while I could only watch, two young black men, dressed in jeans, black leather jackets, and black berets, stopped and offered to help. I was terrified.
I make zero excuses. I don't remember what scared me, exactly, but almost certainly it was their being Black. Bear in mind, I went to a school that was predominately Black. Dwight Way bordered the line between South Berkeley, a Black neighborhood, and Central Berkeley, which was predominately white. I had never had negative experiences with Black people at all. That I was afraid of them speaks volumes to societal learning, for somewhere I had learned that fear.
The outcome was that my Dad gladly accepted their assistance, they helped us get all packed up, they passed pleasantries, and they went on their way. Of course that's how it worked out.
The outcome was also that my dad bought the only books he could find for a kid my age in 1969, including this one, with his inscription on the preface page in his careful handwriting; "To Heather, so she will know the truth". This was the book, and I still have it, 50 years later.
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That's my anecdote. Now, I'm going to wrestle with a couple of white women who have recently caused some problems and who have been in the public eye.
Central Park Sally (Karen is getting way overused and tired. Let's come up with some new ones):
There are a few arguments supporting her, from what I've read: no one puts a leash on their dog in the Bramble. By feeding her dog treats without her compliance, he was threatening. It is an isolated area, no wonder she was frightened. Taping her on camera was also threatening. He had no right to be the leash police. If he had just left her alone, none of this would have happened.
Yeah, I'm not going to bother rebutting those because all they say is this: If Black people stay in their place, there wouldn't be a problem.
Central Park Polly did this:
1. Got mad that someone (a Black man) challenged her right to do what she wanted, in this case illegally walk her dog off-leash. This guy happened to be Black, all the more angering to someone whose inherent white right to do whatever she wants is challenged.
2. She first walks up in his face, finger pointed at him as if denying a demon, demands he turn off his phone camera. He declines her command. There is no fear in her at this point; who walks up to someone they are afraid of?
3. She backs up, strangling her dog, and then threatens not just to call the police but to call them and tell them an African American man is threatening her. She has figured out what to do, how to make this work for her.
4. She calls 911, while her dog strangles on its collar, but when the dog goes out of her control because it is choking, she escalates her distress and becomes hysterical. Now, she behaves as if in fear. She has convinced herself she is in danger.
San Francisco Sally did this:
1. Confidently challenges a man of color painting BLM on a retaining wall. Partner or husband, hanging back, is her back up.
2. When challenged, she lies and does an intriguing body posture assuring him of her assuredness: Index finger pointed up at her face, one arm slung across her back.
3. She feels she has an inherent entitlement to police 'her' neighborhood
4. When her victim doesn't comply with her demands, she lies -- she says she knows the person who lives at the property (she doesn't). She postures in a way of 100% certainty that she is safe to make this confrontation and believes this guy is an interloper who will run away from her. He doesn't.
5. She and her male partner are loathe to give him their names, stating that they're not the ones committing a crime. No, it is he who should identify himself.
6. When the person she challenges doesn't comply, she has no recourse but to back down and arrogantly promises her victim she will call the police.
So what are these white women doing exactly?
Central Park Polly: This woman lives a life where she gets what she wants and has never successfully been challenged. She has little or no experience with Black people on any personal level and she has no reason to believe they either are or are not a threat -- except by the implicit bias and deep-rooted racism that our system dis-serves us. She is racist by default because she's never had to challenge her own belief system. She is racist by action for what she did to Mr. Cooper.
I don't care if she's had a black boyfriend or has black friends, this woman knows what her privilege is and has zero issue blatantly calling it up when she needs it. She fully understands that the greatest tool in her toolbox is weaponizing his blackness. This is learned behavior, and not only that, it is our judicial system default. That our judicial system arrests and incarcerates Black people, particularly men, at a far greater rate than whites isn't surprising. It was built to do so. It was built to further enslave Black people after emancipation and it has never been revamped because it has worked. The stereotypes attributed to Black men for hundreds of years endure today; lack of intellectual acuity, early maturity, hyper-aggression, superior physical stamina, and sexual prowess are all that must be contained. These are the things perpetuated in our society and which every white person, to some extent or another, has been taught to believe. This is the design.
Amy Cooper used her privilege-code to garner assistance. But assistance for what? In an equitable Universe, she may have been mildly annoyed that someone community policed her, and might have snarked off a few comments. She might have walked off with her dog, possibly put it on a leash, and been irritated by the interaction. She could have mitigated him feeding treats by putting the dog on leash (which is what he wanted to happen). What she did, though, was criminalize his blackness for daring to confront her white privilege.
In this case, Amy Cooper planned to use the police exactly as they were designed to be used: to keep Black people in their place and to protect her white female fragility.
San Francisco Sally:
Boy, does this one get under my skin and it's in my back yard. Sally is the very epitome of white female privilege. She has had success as an independent female entrepreneur. She believe she of superior intelligence (or so she appears to think), she considers herself beautiful (if her photos are any testimony, and frankly, she just looks demonic to me) and she also does not consider herself racist. No, she is more an advocate, she would have us believe.
She's walking along in 'her' neighborhood but because she doesn't recognize a guy along her route, she determines he is breaking the law and defacing property. She feels it is her duty, and her right, to set things straight. But, she's not a racist. No, she doesn't want to call the police on this guy, because she knows he will get in trouble. She is doing him the favor of community policing because she is on his side. Black Lives Matter, she agrees, is a good message.
Arguments against her victim: Why didn't he just tell them he was the property owner? Why did he unnecessarily goad them? Why did he increase tensions by suggesting they call the police? He could have defused the entire encounter if he had only complied. Yet again, if this man had simply complied there wouldn't be such a fuss. I believe he wanted her to escalate, he wanted to be proved right, in front of the police. He owed her no explanation and he was like, "not today satan" and I get it.
I cannot interpret his actions, other than to say if that were me, I would have done exactly the same thing he did. I would probably have told them to fuck off in no uncertain terms and as a white person, that is my privilege coming out. As a person of color, he essentially told them to fuck off -- but that was not his privilege, and she knew it.
Here we have a white woman whose staggering sense of entitlement is embedded with so much privilege: she has a white male as back up. She clearly feels intellectually superior to her victim. She obviously feels that this is 'her' neighborhood -- she thinks knows who lives where and who has a right to do what. This is her space and she is safe in this space. She also is someone who feels she is benevolent; she is not calling the police. In fact, she is doing him a favor by not doing so. This is her white privilege. This is her design.
This is a white moralist. She is morally and intellectually superior and as such, has a duty to do the right thing. In this case, she is community policing while white, which is the privilege of speaking on behalf of the entire neighborhood without any qualms whatsoever. She does not want Black Lives Matter memorialized in a publicly viewable area as it's a blight but would never admit it, nor that it is the race of the person painting it. She almost implicitly states that if someone else (read that: white homeowner) were doing it, it would be okay. She does not believe she is racist, she believes she is behaving in a non-racist way.
But all of that is untrue. She made assumptions based upon the fact that he is brown and she has never noticed this neighbor before. He is so under her social radar, she has never even seen him before. She states she knows the homeowner -- and yet, the truth is, this guy is the homeowner, and is simply so beneath her she has never even noticed him before. Once he is on her radar, her white superiority comes to the surface. She treats him as intellectually inferior, tries to entrap him with her use of language. She attempts to trick him into admitting he is in the midst of wrong-doing because everything she has said is in euphemism and she does not directly accuse him. He falls for none of it, and ultimately she herself is tricked into admitting she does believe he is committing a crime. She is defeated because her male back up isn't coming to her rescue, and she doesn't appear to have a cell phone to call the police, which she likely would have done because here we go again -- She (by proxy, her neighborhood) is being abused by this man of color. On top of all of this, it appears that she fully expects the homeowner to be white, yet another racist assumption.
In the end, her white blindness, her eyes unable to see this man before he committed this 'crime' on her and 'her' neighborhood, serves as much justice as Central Park Polly. Fortunately, both are now facing public ostracization and loss of jobs.
In 1944, Emmett Till was tortured and murdered for daring to look at a white woman, and as it turns out, his accuser lied -- because, white female fragility and privilege. He is not the only Black man or person of color to lose their lives for daring to defy a white woman's power. We, the fragile lilies, pristine by birth have been the excuse for racial murder for centuries. White men have instilled in us, too, this notion that we are endangered by Black men. It was perhaps the one frail piece of power white women ever had by history. Yet, as we have and continue to be granted power by privilege, we continue to use this white privilege to wield power over Black and brown people.
If history has taught me anything, it's that white women are an insidiously dangerous group and as long as we have a judicial process that continues to cater to this white female privilege, no Black or brown man in this country is safe.
The truth is that there generally are no consequences for false accusations by white women (or men). We are believed no matter what the evidence proves. The system is insidious and we, white women, would do well to adjust our internal dialog about who we are and how we view our world.
As an absolutely egregious example - the woman who was brutalized in Central Park in the 1990's wasn't even able to ID her assailant(s), and it was the New York City's white female prosecutor who buried the evidence that would have exonerated the five men who did hard time for a crime they did not commit. In this case, a horrific crime against a white woman put the entire country up at arms. Even Donald Trump took out paid ads to thwart justice and vilify Black men. This again is not an isolated incident, it is only one of many hundreds. It is one for which fortunately, eventually, justice was done. Maybe a day late, maybe a dollar short, but the five Black men were exonerated.
What would have happened for the two case studies I chose if they had not been taped? In at least one of those cases, that of Mr. Cooper, would almost certainly have ended up with him in jail. For one thing, he is a bird watcher and would likely be seen at the Bramble again and thus would have been 'caught', but also that it would be his word against hers -- a professional finance counselor (nor formerly) with Franklin Templeton versus an Audubon Society Chairman and community activist. There is no doubt he would have at the very least been detained.
In the case of the San Francisco homeowner; he could quickly have proven his tenancy at the house where he painted the retaining wall. And yet, I would bet dollars to donuts, the SF Police would have at the very least asked him if he would be willing to erase his message on his own property so that "both sides" would be satisfied. His right to do as he wanted with his own property would have been challenged in contrast to her 'rights' as a white woman. The police would likely see this as community negotiation, not his rights versus her violation of his rights.
We are afraid of the wrong people, white people and it is time to look deep inward and root out the devil that lives within. We are the problem.
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