White Women.

For the clicks.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a white woman but if someone asked me what it’s like to be a black woman, I wouldn’t know what to say at first. I’d probably be cheeky and say something along the lines of, “Well, I’ve got both a left ear and a right ear. Isn’t that neat?” or, “If I don’t drink water, I’ll die.” If I were to be serious and get more regional in my specifications, I might bring up some of the things I mentioned in Token to break the ice. I might begin with my household and how African-American culture manifests within it. Or I might speak genuinely of my humanity, something not tied to race and (in theory) relatable to all, to show them that I am, in fact, human. Because oftentimes in these conversations that seems to be forgotten or intentionally suppressed in favor of some kind of spectacle.

At the height of 2020 race tensions in the United States, the part when military helicopters flew overhead at my part-time pandemic job, armored vehicles surrounded key government landmarks, and the police took buses typically used for public transport and turned them into cop transport, I saw an article written by a black woman presumably around my age where she speaks of her personal lifelong “agony of waking up each day in black skin.” Even with the sky falling all around us in a bit of a slow-motion practice armageddon, it struck me as a highly unusual thing to say. Mostly because I couldn’t imagine hating myself that much. In the ongoing gender circus, I’ve even heard fully grown, educated, professional black women voice this idea that their blackness excluded them from womanness. Because to be a woman was to be feminine and to be feminine was to be a white female. 

Pause.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a white woman, but any serious discussion I have had or observed about women based on race had me embarking on the yellow brick road of male culture. And this Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain to continue this metaphor, is very concerned about which men preside over which women. It’s almost like a humanity-spanning game of “Fuck, Marry, Kill.” That’s to say: Which men get to fuck which women? Which men get to marry which women? Which men get to kill which women? And what are the righteous men to do about the thieving men who break the rules of this sacred practice? Who determines the righteous from the thieves? 

It is not often I think about white men. If I am speaking to them, there is a commonly understood and typically brief agenda to the conversation. Usually, it is the case that we find ourselves working together at the same job. Who is the production contact? Are we out of XLR cables? Is catering set up? But they have never had a role in any casual setting. They were not at my church. They were not in my home. They were some of my athletic coaches. They, nor any other type of male, were ever my friends. Save for two rather timid (by comparison) instances, they never stepped forward to make their sexual ideas about me clear. They were very prominent during my grad school experience - both as classmates and teachers - which felt a little like being in the company of a different species at times. The biggest obstacle is that up until a few weeks ago in a decade of nonstop freelancing, I had never been hired by a white man. Coincidence? Maybe. 

I don’t know what it’s like to be a white woman, but when women showcase their loyalty to men - and in practice, this typically means white men if you’re a white woman - I see them as espousing a key component of male culture. Another term for this is the state of being male-centered or male-identified. Some might go as far to say that this is their natural, logical, biological imperative. Humans are tribal in nature, after all. They stick to their own. That’s the science and so it must not be questioned. The existence of the white race is contingent on the continued birth of white babies and the preservation of the white family. Thus, white women… perhaps a little more notably than other races of women given those who, in the male world, are deemed to most commonly preside over them… are the most high profile woman-product on the market in the power struggle among men. 

It might disturb many to frame it in this way. After all, it is only the neo-Nazis in their khaki pants and Trumper hats who tend to not sugarcoat the reality of the otherwise whispered goal: No one will fuck their women except them, no one will marry their women except them, and no one will kill their women except them. But of course, to do all those things to all the other races of women is fine and dandy too. To deny them choices in this way is oppression. And just like other races of women, I imagine many white women think their proximity to white men gives them power but it does not. Not over themselves, at least. The Great and Powerful Oz won’t stand for that. Over others? To an extent, if they wield the blade strategically. And it gives them lots of publicity. Both historical and present day publicity. 

I sometimes wonder about the women thousands of years ago who successfully fought off their male attackers and, as a result, did not reproduce. That time long before the notion of romance that has captured so many imaginations today was retconned to the dawn of time to keep the primary sex class feeling righteous and the secondary sex class in order. That is, to be fucked, married off, and killed on schedule.

The rights of women in the great melting pot of the United States - ground zero for how race relations are framed even in regions where it really shouldn’t translate the same way - have really taken off over the past century. But after those thousands of years of rape, it’s difficult to know which way is up. This has easily careened quite quickly into the positive promotion of prostitution and pornography (especially for women of color), the Looney Toons Chekhov's anvil strung up over our heads more formally known as abortion rights, panic about overpopulation most often drowned out by panic about underpopulation, distress about the state of the nuclear family and men who aren’t fucking, marrying, and killing as much as they have a right to by divine (yet always logical and thus unquestionable) decree, anger at men coming in from other countries to further disrupt that scientific natural order, all made messier and sometimes unspeakable by the proclaimed bigotry of “human female” as a definable category to begin with. That’s a whole wide healthy spectrum of landmines. Coincidence? I think not. Photograph me in my tinfoil hat. It’ll last longer.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a white woman, but more than a few black women I’ve encountered have a tendency to bring up a study that states that white women are the most desirable woman-product and black women are the least desirable woman-product. The black woman-product, of course, currently has a few trendy parts that can be used as spares to enhance the overall visage of the white ideal. This often ties into ideas of femininity and masculinity, also a core tenet of male culture with a great many yellow bricks dedicated to it.

My mother laments each time a black male celebrity unveils his white girlfriend or - even worse - white wife. My sister angsts over all the weddings and baby showers she is invited to for her white sorority sisters while the white men she desires only want to fuck her and leave. The YouTubers use their crystals and energy-balancing cosmetic routines to unlock their divine feminine energy no longer impeded by their blackness. Whole communities of black women proclaim their divestment from black men and cross the male culture warzone to “swirl” and “level up” in the trenches with men of other races. The preacher’s voice turns raspy from yelling at us to look at ourselves, look at the state of the black family, look at the result of the emasculation of the black man by the white man, telling all of us black queens to not abandon our black kings because then the white man will win. “Black love,” he shouts, “and god’s love will see us through to our salvation.” 

Pause.

Most women - even most feminists - don’t want liberation from men. Most women don’t see men as people they need to be liberated from. Most women are male-identified and spend their energy making their cages as comfortable as they can be within the confines of the global male culture, the very air we breathe. They look at their mental habitats in satisfaction and mistake it or train themselves to see it as power and control over their personhood. They bond over the mental illnesses they are prescribed as a direct result of assimilating into their environment. I can’t blame them. Not really. Not deeply. But if even in the United States, essentially the center of an empire, the programming proves that hard to shake… what can I even say? And in the midst of all that I am asked, by a white woman, what I think about white women. 

“I don’t know what it’s like to be a white woman, first of all,” I write to the academic. She’s working on something for grad school. “But if I had to stir up something, I have a very loose hypothesis that would go something like, from an American perspective, white women have the least incentive… but maybe most room… to make the uncomfortable choice. I’d need to think about it more though.” She asks what I mean by that. 

“In the male hierarchy of race, I suspect they consciously or unconsciously think that somehow they are significantly different from other women and that their men are significantly different from other men. This is regardless of political leanings, by the way. But when it comes to something like women’s liberation… those who are the most comfortable have the least incentive to rebel. And if I had to guess along racial lines which, to be clear, I think is generally a very male way to look at things… white women feel the most comfortable because of the status of their male counterparts or… overseers… compared to other types of men.” She asks if I don’t think white women have the ability to be racist.

“Of course they do. And many are to varying intensities. I think we all have racial biases that get amped up or toned down depending on our personal experiences. Male culture is the air we breathe. It’s hard to shake. Black women die because of and at the hands of black men every day and if you talk about that to anyone on the outside some will call you a race traitor. Keeping that kind of stuff close to the chest I think is a staple of the minority mindset in the US. ‘Don’t give the whites an excuse” and all that even if the very same thing is happening in white homes it doesn’t matter because, like I said, they might think they’re somehow different. That this stuff is primarily an issue amongst the others in that neighborhood or country over there. And if most women think there’s nothing to shake in the first place then everything I’ve said up until this point would probably sound very bizarre.

“Obviously, race issues and discussion of it are not going to go away anytime soon. But from where I’m sitting it seems that when it comes to women, the root of those discussions will always have a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to which men get to fuck us, marry us, or kill us with little to no consequence or - more often - with praise. I could say that about other categorizations too. Like economic class. Rape is intersectional. And even thousands of years from now when we’re all brown and halfway across the galaxy it’ll be something else so long as we remain women in a male world.”

She asks me to clarify the “uncomfortable choice” that I said women could make.

“Separatism that goes further than bathrooms, sports, and prisons for starters,” I said. “But nobody likes to talk about that.”

“So you think it’s on white women first to choose to be alone.”

I back away from my computer screen and gouge my eyes out.

Pause.