scholarly journals “I had Missionary Grandparents for Christ’s Sakes!”: White Women in Transracial/Cultural Families Bearing Witness to Whiteness

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 130
Author(s):  
Willow Samara Allen
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Black African ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Bear Witness

White women have occupied a distinct position in histories of White supremacy. With the rise of White supremacist discourses in this current epoch, I posit now is a critical time to examine how White women can bear witness to their Whiteness and to ask what role they want to play in creating a more equitable future. I take up these considerations by drawing on interview data from a qualitative study of ten White women in transracial/cultural families with Black African partners to analyze how the participants conceptualize their Whiteness and how they can make connections between their subjectivities and histories of colonialism. The women’s articulations reveal that through new relational and spatial experiences across multiple forms of difference, White women can develop a changing relationship to Whiteness and what it represents in neocolonial spaces on the African continent, the Canadian settler colonial context, and within their own familial histories and relationships. Findings suggest that for White women to witness the historical weight of their Whiteness, forming linkages between their lives and broader political, economic, and social conditions of inequity is necessary. I argue White women need to create spaces of critical engagement, such as the spaces created in the study, where they can begin to imagine themselves as different racialized subjects.

scholarly journals Shield Maidens, Fashy Femmes, and TradWives: Feminism, Patriarchy, and Right-Wing Populism

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy S. Love
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Media Images ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Right Wing Populism ◽  
Images Of Women

Although media images typically present the alt right as a “manosphere,” white women continue to participate actively in white supremacist movements. Alt right women's presence as “shield maidens,” “fashy femmes,” and “trad wives” serves to soften and normalize white supremacy, often in ironic and insidious ways. In this essay, I examine the continued investment of white women in these traditional sex/gender roles espoused by the alt right. While feminism has done much to liberate women, I conclude that the images of women as Moms circulating in mainstream politics today suggest that white supremacy and white women's complicity in it has yet to be overcome.

scholarly journals Black Memes Matter: #LivingWhileBlack With Becky and Karen

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630512098104
Author(s):  
Apryl Williams
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Racial Equity ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Strategic Positioning ◽  
Black Bodies

“BBQ Becky” and “Karen” memes reference real-world incidents in which Black individuals were harassed by White women in public spaces. In what I term the BBQ Becky meme genre, Black meme creators use humor, satire, and strategic positioning to perform a set of interrelated social commentaries on the behavior of White women. By conducting a visual Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) of BBQ Becky memes, I argue that Becky and Karen memes are a cultural critique of White surveillance and White racial dominance. I find that memes in the BBQ Becky meme genre call attention to, and reject, White women’s surveillance and regulation of Black bodies in public spaces—making an important connection between racialized surveillance of the past and contemporary acts of “casual” racism. This meme genre also disrupts White supremacist logics and performative racial ignorance by framing Karens and Beckys as racist—not just disgruntled or entitled. Finally, in a subversion and reversal of power dynamics, Karen and BBQ Becky memes police White supremacy and explicitly call for consequences, providing Black communities with a form of agency. Hence, I conclude that Black memes matter in the struggle for racial equity.

Citizenship Education for a Segregated Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
White Children ◽  
The Public ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
A Site

In the 1920s from Athens, Georgia, Mildred Lewis Rutherford called on white southerners to ensure that the public school maintained racial segregation and the curriculum provided a white supremacist citizenship education. She encouraged white women, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the United Confederate Veterans to monitor public education and to make public schools a site for the reproduction of white supremacy. If Jim Crow represented the wisdom of the age, then educators were the political nurturers of the system, and children were the repositories of their efforts. White women did their job. They censored textbooks, promoted Confederate-friendly interpretations of the Civil War, conducted essay contests, offered programs to public schoolteachers, and lobbied state textbook selection committees. They also joined Margaret Robinson and other anti-radical women across the nation to promote Americanization. White segregationist women guaranteed that white children learned the lessons of Jim Crow citizenship.

Jim Crow Storytelling

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
White People ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Way

Nell Battle Lewis, a liberal white supremacist writing for the Raleigh News and Observer, did important political work for the Jim Crow world by translating everyday experience into stories that supported the segregatedsocial system. Lewis’s white supremacist politics took root in her beliefs in Progressive Era reform, modern science, eugenics, and women’s civic participation. Her writings offered lessons that gendered ideas about women’s citizenship, progressivism, and the Jim Crow order. She knew that the segregated order was never as secure as it might seem. White people needed instruction in how to maintain white supremacy, and white apathy or white misuse of racial authority threatened the very system that guaranteed their political, economic, and cultural authority. She criticized the way segregation as practiced departed from the way it should be, calling on fellow white southerners to live up to separate but equal, not abandon it.

A Wide-Open Town?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Sueyoshi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Order ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Men Of Color ◽  
The Status ◽  
The City

This chapter interrogates San Francisco’s mythical reputation as a town where “anything goes.” Pairings of men of color with white women occurred in the city press without the violent rage that it provoked in nearly every other part of the United States at the time. Homoerotic imagery and writings also proliferated with little to no controversy. While the acceptance of these activities might signal an embrace of the diverse people and lifestyles, it in fact pointed to the opposite. Precisely because of overwhelming and unquestionable dominance of white supremacy and heterosexuality, narratives of interracial mingling and same-sex love that might otherwise challenge the status quo served merely as entertaining anecdotes without any threat to the existing social order.

Deploying Jim Crow

2021 ◽  
pp. 297-343
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Home Front ◽  
The Other ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

Chapter 8 explores what happened to the US military’s black-white lines as American troops moved overseas. On the one hand, the US military transplanted these lines all around the world. While not identical to those on the home front, they also took multiple forms, involving everything from jobs and dances to courts-martial and minstrel performances. They also stemmed from the military’s paradoxical goals of winning a war for democracy while at the same time protecting white supremacy. On the other hand, fully achieving this latter goal became more difficult overseas because of locals’ warm relations with black Americans, the black-white comradeship of some American GIs, and the activism of black troops. Taken together, these developments chipped away at the black-white divide. At war’s end, Jim Crow in uniform was far from dead, but it lay moderately wounded just the same.

The Ku Klux Klan and the War on Poverty

2020 ◽  
pp. 72-98
Author(s):  
Emma J. Folwell
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Venereal Disease ◽  
White Men ◽  
Ku Klux Klan ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Antipoverty Programs

Chapter three traces the history of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi from Reconstruction to the 1960s, before exploring the wave of white supremacist violence that exploded across the state of Mississippi in 1967. This renewed wave of Ku Klux Klan attacks was directed at the state’s antipoverty programs, and in particular at white men and women involved in those programs. The chapter traces the rhetoric used in Klan literature in opposing the war on poverty, which claimed the programs were part of a move toward federal dictatorship. The language fused the core myths and fears on which white segregationists drew—miscegenation, the spread of venereal disease, interracial sex, the threat of black power, and liberal welfare policies that benefitted African Americans. It also illustrates how gender shaped both the Klan violence and its ideology, as attacks on white women teaching in Head Start classes intensified.

Baldwin’s Individualism and Critique of Property

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Turner
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Political Action ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
American Liberalism ◽  
Refusal To Participate ◽  
The Individual

This chapter cements the notion that Baldwin’s primary tool in combating white supremacy is recognizing the power of the individual to self-create and reshape systems and institutions. Jack Turner’s work is consistent with Baldwin’s challenging of the myths of American liberalism and brings Baldwin into conversation with some of the American Founders. Turner argues that Baldwin is in favor of individuals divesting from white supremacist institutions and ideology because participating in a racist economy implicates one in an unjust society. Voluntary dispossession is a political move par excellence according to Turner, signifying a refusal to participate in the impoverishment of African Americans. Turner’s work ties together Baldwin’s views on political action, religious thought, and individualism.

From Necropraxis to Necroresistance: Transgender Experiences in Latin America

2020 ◽  
pp. 088626052098039
Author(s):  
Sheilla L. Rodríguez Madera
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Management Strategies ◽  
State Policies ◽  
Sociocultural Context ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Small Doses ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Depth Interviews

Latin America is one of the deadliest regions for trans communities. Scientific research generated in the region has reported that trans people live through a complicated panorama shaped by multiple forms of oppression, extreme violence, and micro-aggressions. Although necropolitics, as a theoretical approach, has been useful to understand how State policies negatively affect trans individuals, it does not fully account for informal dynamics within groups and among individuals that are potentially lethal for this population in Latin America. To account for this gap, the author proposes two novel concepts: necropraxis (a pattern that manifest itself in everyday social interactions, through which gradual small doses of death are delivered to eliminate, symbolically and/or literally, trans people); and necroresistance (the ways in which trans people defy the threats imposed by necropraxis through “ordinary” acts manifested in their everyday life). The main objective of this article is to put forth definitions for these two concepts and identify how they apply in the context of trans communities in three countries of the region: Guatemala, Argentina, and Chile. To achieve the latter, the author relies on her ethnographic work in these contexts. Data were gathered through parcipant observation, in-depth interviews with trans persons ( N = 11) and informal conversations with individuals during the site visits. A deductive qualitative analysis was conducted. Results evidence how the manifestation of necropraxis and necroresistance were highly influenced by the historical, political, economic and sociocultural context of each country. This study provides valuable information to help both policymakers and other stakeholders understand the problem’s magnitude in the region and the ways necropraxis is experienced in everyday relations between trans individuals and others. Similarly, through the understanding of what constitutes necroresistance and its value, the proposed framework could help them outline prevention and management strategies to strengthen trans communities in different countries.

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