ABSTRACT
White women’s relationship with racial violence is a pertinent point in understanding White women’s role in maintaining White supremacy. White women are removed from cultural affiliations with racism to maintaining racial purity and perpetuate the victim ideologies of White womanhood. Holding a theoretical lens of Whiteness to the cultural enactments of two prominent Karen figures, this chapter explores the past and present acquisitions of power granted to White women to aggressively assert racist accusations toward men of color with no dire consequences or accountability to their actions but rather granted a cloak of Whiteness protection. What this chapter demonstrates is that the White woman’s racist rants of today mirror the racist aggressions of our past. Instead of denying these historical mannerisms, White women need to acknowledge our historical roles in racism and White supremacy. We must acknowledge White women’s contradiction of liberation and indentured servitude to heteropatriarchy and how this historical contradiction results in rage. White women follow rules as a coping mechanism through this faux sense of liberation, and here in this rule-following-practice, we are protected by White heteropatriarchy. Thus, in our servitude to White heteropatriarchy, we embody our eliteness, racist power, and Western “liberation.”
