Q: None of my ancestors ever owned slaves! So how can what White supremacy has done to Black people be my problem?
A: Whether any of our ancestors laid claim to ownership of other people or not, we have all inherited the persistent mess that the legally and socially sanctioned enslavement of human beings has left our country in, and we can either clean it up or go on miserably lying in it, in both senses of the “L” word. Who wants that?
Q: I’m a White woman, which is an oppressed group, and I’m busy combating sexism. Do I have to deal with White racism, too?
A: Well. Women of color in general and Black women in particular are dealing with sexism and White racism each and every day—hence the term “misogynoir.”
Within the kyriarchy, any of us may be assigned the role of victim based on one or more arbitrarily defined characteristics and assigned the role of oppressor based on others. We frequently see this playing out when White women act as enforcers of color-coded caste rules on other people.
As Charles Kreiner has said, these roles were installed on us without our permission—we didn’t ask for them, we didn’t want them, and we’re still expected to play them out as assigned. The role of victim may be way more morally comfortable than the role of oppressor, and yet White women may flip from one to the other where color is concerned: from identifying as victims of White men to being their accomplices and co-conspirators, to use the apt term of Stephane Jones-Rogers. Hence the frequency with which White women police White spaces, or any spaces they believe should be White, by calling the cops on Black people who are in them.
36