Step down, step back, step up: an anti-racist aerobics class for white women

cw: racism and white supremacy, intimate violence

White women think it’s our job to make sure a subway ride goes smoothly for everybody.

This summer alone, I’ve seen several of us become unbelievably disgruntled when no one will sit in the empty seat or move towards the middle of the car.

Especially if those someones are black and brown teenagers.

The other day a black man was walking down the track yelling something about God, and I watched a white woman across the tracks grow more and more terrified. She was genuinely so concerned by this man who hadn’t touched or even approached anybody. It was funny and then it wasn’t.

Two policemen came down to find that man, and, as I not so subtly followed them down the track, I watched another white woman approach them and say “he went that way.”

I thought: traitor!!

But then I realized she wasn’t, to her (our) group at least.

White women, we have a long history of appearing neutral or even as sympathizers with the oppressed, and then turning to (re)enact violence against black and brown people. There were female KKK members and even chapters. Hillary Clinton would have continued bombing countries in the Middle East. I know a white woman who wore Kanye’s confederate flag and posted a picture on Facebook , more concerned with her brand than the history of racial violence she had added to it.

In a few airports now, I’ve seen white women block Asian women from skipping lines to catch their flights. As if we control their bodies.

What’s more a lot of the violence enacted by white men is in our name; most lynchings during the Jim Crow era were justified with fabricated rapes of white women. The white woman who accused the 14 year old black child who was Emmett Till just recently admitted to making false claims.

Sometimes the violence between white women and black and brown people is more intimate. Because we are just that much closer to oppression. Because we move through the same spaces and structures, at times. Take the plantation house; the wife could and did not leave as frequently as her husband. She was stuck with the enslaved people, promoting misguided bitterness mixed with intimacy. And then there were the added injuries—watching a husband crave and rape his enslaved women. The jealousy of that. The violence of that jealousy.

An injury I think about often is when in the Handmaid’s Tale, a wife is known to stab a handmaid (a mistress, there to conceive the wife’s husband’s child) in her pregnant stomach with a knitting needle. I’ve reflected on how only another woman would conceive that injury, know how much it hurts, know where to hurt. Now, in The Handmaid’s Tale, we don’t know if this handmaid in particular is a woman of color. We don’t know if any of them are, really.

And that’s exactly my point.

Margaret Atwood is one of many white women who have committed injury to black and brown bodies by robbing a history. Atwood has said in recent interviews about her novel turned HBO Series, The Handmaid’s Tale, that she did not make anything in the book up. Everything in it has happened before.

And she’s right; some key parts of her story echo deeply of the experiences of black enslaved women in the US. And yet nowhere that I remember in the novel does she talk about race. She has taken just what she needs.

Atwood’s main character, Offred, frequently recalls when she was taken into captivity. She was in the woods, running away, with her husband and child. The frequency and blurriness with which she recalls being run down and pinned down ring of a runaway montage in a film about slavery. This is an American trope, but now appropriated for a white woman.

What Atwood keeps is the pain of losing a husband, a child. The authorities have ripped Offred’s child away and given her to another family. Offred dreams of her child almost every night. Atwood is right, this has absolutely happened before in our history. In our very own country, to the thousands of black enslaved women whose children were considered property of their master (sometimes also father). What does it mean to hand this pain over to a white woman, when few if any of us have had to live with it? When for black enslaved women, it was structural?

The methods by which the handmaids are regulated ring of the American slave system. Extreme violence, for example, is the method with which their whole system is maintained. The handmaids are also not allowed to read. Offred fears someone will know she read the one word printed on her pillowcase. The lengths to which white Americans went to deny enslaved people literacy were just as extreme.

And that violence extends to the home. Offred has to have sex with her master; in her state she cannot consent, just like enslaved women.

Atwood was writing just a decade or so after the Civil Rights Movement. Race was not not on her radar. What I read alongside the important feminist work done by The Handmaid’s Tale was an extreme appropriation of the experiences of black enslaved women.

Similarly, a renowned film this year, The Beguiled, just so happens to be a film about the Civil War without a single black person in its cast. A single. One. And this isn’t a simple oversight (as if that could logically occur). The original novel with this title included two black female characters. The former version of the film included one of them. Coppola cut both out, allegedly to focus on “gender in the Civil War.”

As if black women aren’t women.

The Handmaid’s Tale has made a host of readers and watchers reconsider gender and eye gender relations warily. What if it had highlighted race, as well? The Beguiled will be watched by many, especially after an Oscar nomination. How much further could our conversation have gone, on the gendered dynamics of slavery, on the intimate harm enacted by plantation wives, if Sophia Coppola had not violently cut important characters from her story?

White women, it’s time to step down, quickly, before we report another black man to a brutal police force, before we yell at another teenager on the subway. Step back and take a hard look at the omissions we are making and the violence they permit. And when we’ve done that, while we’re doing it, it’s time to step up. Give that man a listen. Give up a seat. Stop calling the police. Add more characters of color to our films, novels, shows. Step aside for a black woman to direct a movie about intimacy in the Civil War.

Talk to friends or family still harboring some racism. Push our sisters of color out from behind a car in Charlotesville. Show up to Charlottesville.

We exist at at time of heightened political excitement and engagement. White supremacists are killing people in the streets. We need to add a consideration to our feminism, quickly, urgently. Right now, intersectionality might mean getting out to face them. Let’s step to it, to the beat.