Thoughts on Sexism within White Supremacy

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of sexism and its attendant understanding of women in the structures of white supremacy. This has been an issue nagging me sinceour first discussions of lynching justified on the basis of “protecting our women” (the possessive phrasing is really important here, I think) from the mythical spectre of the marauding, fiendish black man. Something about the idea that these murders were motivated in large part by a genuine desire to protect wives and sisters and daughters from the pain of sexual violence, particclarly that inflicted at the hands of black men, just didn’t ring true to me—there seemed to me to be an element of the dehumization fo white women as well, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I realized, however, that this professed motivation seems hollow precisely because white women often weren’t protected from sexual violence—as long as it was by a white man. I wondered how many members of lynch mobs or witnesses of spectacle killings had themsleves raped a white woman and whether this contradiction would have ever given them pause or even occurred to them. But I realized that if you view it through this lens, that the fundamental issue wasn’t the rape of a white woman, but the rape of a white woman by a black man—something of a theft of what rightfully belongs to white men—it casts the structures of white supremacy as a struggle between black and white men, with women (both black and white) as merely objects to be weilded as pawns. It becomes an issue of ownership—ownership, I think, of birthright, in which women functioned merely as incubators of that birthright, objects themselves. The rape of a white woman, then, is a usurpation of the white male right to white offspring—the theft of an object to be put to use by the “other side” (this seems consistent with the complete social acceptibilty of sexual violence toward black women and girls, because white men “owned” them as well). This dynamic is best illusitrated for me in the scene in To Kill A Mockingbird in where, rather than having been raped by Tom Robinson as was alleged, it became clear that Mayella Ewell had instead made sexual advances toward Tom and her father, catching her, had severely beaten her. It was never about Mayella’s protection from violence—her advances were entirely consensual, and it was her father who responded by beating her. Rather, this (at least in the mind of Bob Ewell) was a struggle between Bob Ewell and Tom, by white man against black men, played out on the bodies of women.