Is This Play About Us?

Yes, white women, it is.

I fully understand as a white woman I may be biased, but are white women the impossible demographic to bridge unity? build community? I am starting to think we are. I witnessed a white woman being drug out of a town hall in Idaho this week and it has me in my feelings. I watched it a few times and can’t help but notice the white woman in the background sneering and smirking. All the other white women that just sat there and looked on. The all too common feeling of walking away from a group of white women and knowing they’re all talking about you. One person made a remark about your looks, something you said in a conversation, what you were wearing, how you styled your hair, a facial expression you made, if your hair had been washed or your body shape. I know this is what they said because I have been a part of these conversations. White women conversations are vapid, shallow and self righteous. White women only see women as competition and not family. No one went to help that woman at the town hall because white women do not see white women as part of a larger community that we are all a part of.

You don’t see trends on social media with indigenous woman mocking the make up of another indigenous woman. You don’t see black women tearing each other down. This competitive, baseless superiority complex exists among white women. You will see trends of conservatives making fun of liberals and vice versa. GenZ white women bashing millennial white women on fashion trends. I don’t know if it is because I am neurodivergent or what, but I have always struggled to maintain stable friendships with white women. The friends I have maintained have been lifelong and are more like family. I have three of them. They’re probably neurodivergent too, to be honest.

I have learned from black women how to think more critically about the world around me and I have black women to thank for taking their time and patience to teach me these lessons. I am still learning every single day, but I assure you, once you begin looking at things more critically, racism is everywhere. I never once thought about racism in urban and city planning. Now, I can’t unsee it. The Trump administration is set to declassify records surrounding JFK and MLK Jr. Around the time of that announcement there was a trend on TikTok of videos talking about Rosa Parks being a government plant, because she had a car. There were often times a white woman at the helm of the video with their gotcha moment about how Rosa Parks wasn’t the first to decline a seat on the bus and she had a car. It’s always something with white women other than the actual obvious thing that it is.

They fail to see that Rosa Parks was acting as part of a community. White women do not know anything about action or community. Claudette Colvin was a 15 year old girl that declined a seat to a white woman on a bus 9 months prior to Rosa Parks. However, Claudette’s community decided due to her age, her being arrested for violating segregation law and later becoming pregnant that she could not be the face of their movement so they rallied behind a woman that had a different reputation. It did not matter if Rosa Parks had a car, she chose to put her community first by taking action. Those actions led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott which is one of the most successful boycotts and protests in the history of our country.

White women could never. White women only feel good when tearing other people down. We exist in echo chambers, hold institutionalized systems up such as patriarchy and white supremacy then fail to recognize that aligning with white men and their proximity to power is not power. If a black or a brown woman has a position in authority, holds significance and higher up it’s because she is a DEI hire. If a white woman has a position in authority, holds significance and higher up it’s because she slept her way to that position. Like, why are we ascribing to these same patterns as men do, when these patterns are meant to hurt us all? We, as in white women, need to start being the cycle breakers for white women.

In a world run by cosplay religious white men, a white woman is still just a woman. We are objects made to perform and that is what the world will always see us as. Stop performing, it hurts us all. In much the same way that the country is kept divided by constant news cycles and ideologies. That division benefits the powers that be by preventing society from organizing and aiming its efforts at the real source of its suffering. White women are kept divided by systemic institutions that we do not have to hold up, but choose to in a weak effort to make us feel relevant. Much like society under a dictatorship, white women are kept divided because the world knows if we ever found community, we would be an absolute force to reckoned with. But alas, here we are. We smirk and gaze as a woman is touched without consent and drug out of a town hall meeting held by a sitting member of our elected government. A clear violation of her first amendment rights. A breach of our constitutional civic duty as American citizens to defend our constitution.

The current climate of our society is in large part due to white women’s division. Hell, not even all of America is divided, it’s mostly white people. I have no solutions on how to attempt to bridge this divide. The meanest people I have ever encountered through out my life has always been a white woman. They are your first real hater.