Reddit reviews White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States

Here is a very good book. It details the white racial foundation of feminism in relation to white supremacy and more. I highly recommend everyone read it.

Here is a link to the book:
https://www.amazon.com/White-Womens-Rights-Origins-Feminism/dp/0195124669

Liberal Dems had a narrative about black men, which is a lot like their narrative about all men today. it played a role in the "lynchings" of black men, which were really about stopping black men getting the vote.




>The brute caricature portrays black men as innately savage, animalistic, destructive, and criminal -- deserving punishment, maybe death. This brute is a fiend, a sociopath, an anti-social menace. Black brutes are depicted as hideous, terrifying predators who target helpless victims, especially white women. Charles H. Smith (1893), writing in the 1890s, claimed, "A bad negro is the most horrible creature upon the earth, the most brutal and merciless"(p. 181). Clifton R. Breckinridge (1900), a contemporary of Smith's, said of the black race, "when it produces a brute, he is the worst and most insatiate brute that exists in human form" (p. 174).

George T. Winston (1901), another "Negrophobic" writer, claimed:

When a knock is heard at the door [a White woman] shudders with nameless horror. The black brute is lurking in the dark, a monstrous beast, crazed with lust. His ferocity is almost demoniacal. A mad bull or tiger could scarcely be more brutal. A whole community is frenzied with horror, with the blind and furious rage for vengeance.(pp. 108-109)

During slavery the dominant caricatures of blacks -- Mammy, Coon, Tom, and picaninny -- portrayed them as childlike, ignorant, docile, groveling, and generally harmless. These portrayals were pragmatic and instrumental. Proponents of slavery created and promoted images of blacks that justified slavery and soothed white consciences. If slaves were childlike, for example, then a paternalistic institution where masters acted as quasi-parents to their slaves was humane, even morally right. More importantly, slaves were rarely depicted as brutes because that portrayal might have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

During the Radical Reconstruction period (1867-1877), many white writers argued that without slavery -- which supposedly suppressed their animalistic tendencies -- blacks were reverting to criminal savagery. The belief that the newly-emancipated blacks were a "black peril" continued into the early 1900s. Writers like the novelist Thomas Nelson Page (1904) lamented that the slavery-era "good old darkies" had been replaced by the "new issue" (blacks born after slavery) whom he described as "lazy, thriftless, intemperate, insolent, dishonest, and without the most rudimentary elements of morality" (pp. 80, 163). Page, who helped popularize the images of cheerful and devoted Mammies and Sambos in his early books, became one of the first writers to introduce a literary black brute. In 1898 he published Red Rock, a Reconstruction novel, with the heinous figure of Moses, a loathsome and sinister black politician. Moses tried to rape a white woman: "He gave a snarl of rage and sprang at her like a wild beast" (pp. 356-358). He was later lynched for "a terrible crime."

The "terrible crime" most often mentioned in connection with the black brute was rape, specifically the rape of a white woman. At the beginning of the twentieth century, much of the virulent, anti-black propaganda that found its way into scientific journals, local newspapers, and best-selling novels focused on the stereotype of the black rapist. The claim that black brutes were, in epidemic numbers, raping white women became the public rationalization for the lynching of blacks.

The lynching of blacks was relatively common between Reconstruction and World War II. According to Tuskegee Institute data, from 1882 to 1951 4,730 people were lynched in the United States: 3,437 black and 1,293 white (Gibson, n.d.). Many of the white lynching victims were foreigners or belonged to oppressed groups, for example, Mormons, Shakers, and Catholics. By the early 1900s lynching had a decidedly racial character: white mobs lynched blacks. Almost 90 percent of the lynchings of blacks occurred in southern or border states.

Many of these victims were ritualistically tortured. In 1904, Luther Holbert and his wife were burned to death. They were "tied to trees and while the funeral pyres were being prepared, they were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears...were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull fractured and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket." Members of the mob then speared the victims with a large corkscrew, "the spirals tearing out big pieces of...flesh every time it was withdrawn" (Holden-Smith, 1996, p. 1).

https://ferris.edu/jimcrow/brute/


And there is plenty out there on the racist history of white feminism.

https://www.amazon.com/White-Womens-Rights-Origins-Feminism/dp/0195124669

Louise Michele Newman
White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195124669/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_MXQYCbCR7FQ05

> So, right off the bat, your criticism of bias is pretty moot -- it is a feminist journal commenting on feminist issues. There is nothing wrong with intentionally examining an issue from a specific perspective.

You apparently miss the point of peer-reviewed research and repeatability of experiments in general - it's to account for personal and/or experimental bias. Having your study reviewed in a journal that shares your own bias is like having somebody repeat your experiment on your own equipment.

The journal didn't even catch the fact that the study's title opened with "Boys can do anything" but there were no boys in the study. What they actually studied was the perception girls had about boys as a gender vs. themselves as individuals, so really it was "girls think boys can do anything" which of course they didn't use. It was a shitty study and defending it makes me feel like you want feminist science to have a lower bar to clear than the rest of science, which perpetuates the idea that women just aren't capable of doing science on the same level as men. I think if feminists want to use the word science they have to earn it on the same level as men. That's equality.

EDIT: And the paper's available for free if you go to a university library, you can read it yourself if you want.

> Seriously: do people who make this statement recognize that they're perpetuating the same system of erasure? It denies the existence of a long line of Black feminists from Sojourner Truth to Alice Walker to the entire population of womanists. Lucille Clifton has barely been dead for two years. Saying "feminism has a problem with Black women" is literally saying "the Black women in feminism are not real feminists / real Black women."

I don't know, you could start with a book like this (I have no idea if it's any good) or an article like this. Yes, I view feminism as historically being a movement of mostly middle/upper class white women. Most feminists (and especially rad-fems) I've known come from money. Most poor women I've known have been actually disempowered to the point they'd never dream of shutting down a lecture for disagreeing with them - that level of entitlement is a sign of a childhood of privilege.