WOMEN + POLITICS
How Some White Women Use Politics of Fear to Justify Harmful Policies
An essay about their efforts to stereotype minorities as deviant
Hearing about sexual violence can provoke a lot of feelings, such as sympathy, anger, and helplessness. But what happens when someone tells you a story about sexual violence to coerce you into supporting harmful policies? Then, they can turn your compassion into a political weapon. Unfortunately, we've seen this happen far too many times in America. In 1895, Ida B. Wells published The Red Record, the first statistical report on lynching in which she exposed a pattern of false-rape accusations used to manufacture consent for violence. This racist stereotype, which portrayed Black men as sexually deviant, was more than a cruel assumption; it became the justification to deprive these men of life, liberty, or even a fair trial. It's a myth that Ida B. Wells' journalism helped to shatter.
However, the wall of legitimizing myths was thick. This country's first woman senator, Rebecca Latimer Felton, said in 1897 that "if it takes lynching to protect women's dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week." As the last enslaver in Congress, Felton had no qualms about weaponizing this irrational fear of Black men to justify a harmful policy, in this case, lynching. Felton's political approach was nothing new, even then. In The Red Record, Wells wrote that the third excuse used for lynching was that "Negroes had to be killed to avenge their assaults upon women." And noted that these atrocities continued because "the world has accepted the story that the Negro is a monster which the Southern white man has painted him."
In 1921, Dick Rowland, a 17-year-old Black teenager working as a shoe shiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a 17-year-old White teenager, in an elevator in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After tripping into her, a store clerk notified the authorities, who arrested him. Historians suggest The Tulsa Tribune headline, "Nab Negro For Attacking Girl in an Elevator," inspired outrage. This resulted in the Tulsa Race Massacre, a nightmarish event where White Tulsa residents, including law enforcement, killed hundreds of Black residents and destroyed thirty-five blocks of Black Wall Street. Even though, when the dust settled, Page said that Rowland never caused her any harm, simply the accusation that he did inspired enough racial animosity to destroy an entire town and send the survivors to camps where they needed special permission to leave.
Fear is a powerful political tool because it can make people support policies and laws they would otherwise oppose. When we see the horrors of Jim Crow, we ask how this could happen, how Americans and the global community couldn't see the injustice, or as Billie Holiday sang, "strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees?" How everyday people could support the slaughter of other people. However, until we realize how fear played a role in justifying these senseless murders, we'll never truly protect ourselves from repeating this history.
As long as the vast majority of White people were willing to believe the lie that Black men are more dangerous and prone to committing rape, they would turn a blind eye to the brutality of these southern horrors. Indeed, Carolyn Bryant, a White woman, lied to her husband, claiming that Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy, whistled at her while working in their store, motivating her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother J.W. Milam, to lynch him in 1955 understood this culture. That White women only needed to hint at a Black boy or man crossing the line to manufacture support for harmful policies, practices, and behaviors.
Now that this essay has illustrated how White women have historically used the politics of fear to justify harmful policies let's talk about the modern manifestation. On Thursday night, after President Biden's State of the Union Address, we witnessed a poignant example as Katie Britt, a Republican junior Alabama senator, gave the Republican rebuttal. As a White woman dressed modestly in an emerald green button-up shirt, wearing a cross pendant around her neck while standing in the kitchen, speaking in a soft, baby-like voice, Katie appeared as the epitome of White Christian Nationalism. After asserting that she's most proud of her role as a wife and mother, she described a story about a violent gang rape to cast migrants as dangerous.
Upon hearing such a gruesome story, I couldn't help but reflect on America's long history of racial terror lynchings, not just the brutality of these crimes but the justifications that preceded these acts of violence. This type of rhetoric is still commonly found in American politics. In June of 2015, when Donald Trump was on the campaign trail, he characterized immigrants as rapists. "When Mexico sends its people… they're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." Of course, the majority of women raped in America are assaulted by American men, not immigrants, but conservatives seem to love this narrative. That outsiders are the problem. Dehumanize. Persecute. Rinse and Repeat.
Furthermore, the irony isn't lost on me that Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carrol, an author, in 1996. Here we have a White American man who sexually assaulted a woman, trying to frighten Americans into thinking that immigrants are the rapists we need to be afraid of. It's a theater of the absurd. The same can be said about White men in the Jim Crow era who constantly accused Black men of raping White women when historians show that they were systematically raping Black women throughout chattel slavery and the Jim Crow Era without legal consequences — the pot calling the kettle black. Oh, the caucasity of it all.
Besides Katie Britt's response video, which looks like a scene from the Stepford Wives, Johnathan Katz, an author and reporter, described some critical discrepancies in the story Katie shared. For starters, the woman in her story, Karla Jacinto Romero, is an activist who testified in front of Congress about her experience. It's not as if she shared this story with Katie personally or even recently during a trip to the border. Secondly, Romero testified that she was a victim of sex trafficking in Guadalajara and other Mexican cities from 2004 to 2008. This is an essential detail since Katie attempts to portray the sexual violence as occurring on American soil and suggests undocumented immigrants are to blame. Lastly, the violence Romero endured happened when George Bush, a Republican, was president.
Katie's statement, which misrepresented Romero's story, is an illustration of the way White women weaponize fear to manufacture consent for harmful policies. She wanted to fan the flames of xenophobia in Americans who fear immigrants in the same way that Rebecca Latimer did when she promoted lynching after accusing Black men were raping White women. If Katie cared about victims of sexual violence, she would drop the act and get serious — the uncomfortable truth is that the majority of women who've been raped or sexually assaulted were injured by men in their homes, their families, and communities, not by outsiders, newcomers, immigrants, migrants, or any othering terminology you want to use. A report showed that despite Gov. Greg Abbot's vow to "eliminate rape," in Texas, there've been an estimated 26,000 rape-related pregnancies in the state since the abortion ban he signed went into effect.
As a Black woman who is a survivor of sexual assault, it's triggering to hear White women like Katie weaponize these stories. Instead of using their privilege to speak about the actual threat of sexual violence, which is a lot closer to home, she's feeding into racist stereotypes that vilify Latinos. So, here's the truth. "1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime." Women are typically engaging in normal daily behaviors when sexual assault occurs. For instance, one study showed that 48% were sleeping or spending time at home, 29% were running errands, 12% were working, and 7% were attending school. Black and Latina women are more likely to be sexually assaulted compared to White women. Are we supposed to believe that the same political party that wants to take away women's reproductive rights, that pseudoscientifically declares embryos children, that passes laws that force girls and women to give birth to their rapists' babies, and elected a man, Donald Trump who thinks it's okay to "grab" a woman by the pussy cares about advancing women's rights or making us feel safe?
None of what Black women saw coming out of Katie Britt's mouth made us feel any safer, any more protected. Nor will putting more immigrants in cages, separating them from their families, or assaulting them on the border stem the sexual violence in this country. Because, once again, the call is coming from inside the house. Katie's message was that women should fear immigrants, and therefore, American people should support any policies that would limit immigration and make it more difficult for people to travel, relocate here, or become naturalized citizens. And this political playbook is eerily familiar with the approach used to justify mass lynchings in the South. To portray Black men as villains. First, they dehumanize a group by making them seem less civilized than other groups, and then they implement harmful policies, gaining social support by leaning into fear. This is more than a sloppy response; it's part of a long-standing strategy to stereotype racial minorities as rapists to justify harmful policies. It's incumbent upon Americans to grow wise to their intent and not be overtaken by emotion because it's at that moment that fear becomes a political weapon.
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