White feminism and the racial capitalist protection racket: from #MeToo to Me, Not You

Posted by Chris Hart - Friday, 7 May 2021

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On May 25th 2020, Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, an act that precipitated a powerful wave of Black Lives Matter protests across the world. May 25th 2020 was also the day Amy Cooper (a white woman) called the police on birdwatcher Christian Cooper (a Black man, no relation) because he asked her to leash her dog in Central Park. Her use of the phrase ‘there’s an African-American man threatening my life’ was a threat to get Christian Cooper killed by a cop.

These incidents are linked by more than just a moment in time. White women are deeply, and often deliberately, complicit with white supremacist violence, and our complicity usually takes the form of victimhood that appeals to the punitive power of the state. And although her allegation against Christian Cooper was false, Amy Cooper has something in common with mainstream feminist movements that coalesce around genuine victimisation and trauma, such as the recent viral iteration of #MeToo. The focus of these movements tends to be naming and shaming perpetrators and calling for institutional discipline or criminal punishment to get these ‘bad men.’

My book Me, Not You describes the political dynamics of mainstream white feminism in the core Anglosphere and parts of Europe. It makes a difficult and uncomfortable argument: that this movement, exemplified by #MeToo, not only centres bourgeois white women but also treats other groups as disposable. This is not just about inclusion and representation, but about the ideologies and attachments that undergird our politics; it is not primarily about individuals, but about the systems and structures that shape our world.

In March 2021, marketing executive Sarah Everard was allegedly murdered by a serving Metropolitan Police officer after disappearing from London’s Clapham Common. The previous June, members of the same police force were suspended for taking selfies with the bodies of murdered sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry in a different London park. A vigil for these three women, and almost 200 others who have died in police custody or prison in England and Wales, was subsequently led by feminist group Sisters Uncut and violently broken up by police. Yet mainstream demands following Everard’s murder promised more power to the carceral system – calls for the criminalisation of street harassment and for misogyny to become a hate crime.

The demands themselves were unsurprising, but that such carceral feminism persists even after a white woman has allegedly been murdered by a cop shows how deeply mainstream feminism is mired in white supremacy. We are happy to say ‘Black Lives Matter’, but we do not put our own interests on the line and act with an understanding of exactly what police and prisons are for. Abolitionist thinking tells us that carceral systems preserve state and elite interests, protect private property and resources, dispose of economically surplus populations, and ultimately ensure that racial capitalism functions unabated. While we say, ‘Black Lives Matter’, we legitimate the very systems that demand, and deliver, Black demise.

White women’s experiences of sexual violence enter a world in which ‘protecting white womanhood’ is really about protecting racial capitalism and white supremacy. Because of this, we claim protection that has always been predicated on Black death and the deaths of other marginalised people. Furthermore, although bourgeois white women are not usually subject to state violence, the same white men who purport to protect us from the Others do reserve the right to abuse and kill us themselves.

This is true of Sarah Everard’s alleged murderer, and countless other law enforcement officers worldwide who have harmed girls and women. It is also true of the far-right politicians who profess concern for ‘women’s safety’ in their campaigns against immigrants and trans people, while harassing and assaulting the women they know. This is the patriarchal protection racket writ large – the threat of stranger rape that makes women seek safety with our male partners and family members, who are actually more likely to abuse us. At systemic levels, this protection racket mainly targets class-privileged white women. And it is fundamental to the preservation of racial capitalism.

Acts and threats of sexual violence impose bourgeois binary gender and facilitate the free and low-cost social reproduction capitalism depends on. Sexual violence keeps women in our place, and punishes anyone who does not conform to dominant gender and sexual norms. Acts and threats of sexual violence also support historical and ongoing colonial systems in which commercial and caring labour is extracted from Black and other racialised communities for little or no reward. Rape is a practice of terror used to subjugate colonised, displaced and dispossessed populations in war, occupation, settlement, enslavement and theft (including their neo-colonial forms).

At the same time, the pretext of ‘protecting (white) women’ constructs communities, cultures and nations as violent to justify colonisation, border regimes and military-industrial projects, and to dispose of unwanted populations. Black feminist historians have exposed the widespread brutalisation and killing of Black, enslaved and other racialised and colonised men in response to allegations made by or on behalf of white women. The spectre of sexual danger is still deployed to vilify, abuse and kill Black men and other men of colour, and to construct queer and trans people as threats and make it impossible for us to survive. It facilitates the demonisation and deportation of migrants, the invasion of countries, and the ‘putting away’ of racialised and classed groups deemed surplus to capitalist requirements.

In all these ways, sexual violence is a pivot for the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism. The acts and threats that keep us afraid, that make us docile subjects of capitalism, also drive us into the arms of the carceral-colonial state and enable many other kinds of violence in the service of capitalist accumulation. By pulling the levers of carceral systems, white feminism is a willing participant in this racial capitalist protection racket. In the process, it trades freedom for the illusion of safety and treats more marginalised groups as disposable. This is how #MeToo often ends up becoming Me, Not You.

Me, not you
The trouble with mainstream feminism
By Alison Phipps

ÂŁ8.99 paperback – order your copy Manchester University Press – Me, not you

‘This is a book I will be carrying everywhere, eager to share, excited to have Phipps’ words fighting alongside me.’
Mona Eltahawy, author of The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls

‘Me, not you is an essential book for this historical moment. For anyone interested in anti-violence, anti-racism, and anti-criminalisation organising, this book is required reading. I’ll be coming back to it often.’
Mariame Kaba, organiser, educator and founder of Project NIA

‘This is the book I will give to those who still don’t get it and keep next to me for when I forget it.’
The Sociological Review

‘ Me, Not You is essential reading for white women everywhere.’
the F word

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