White women as white supremacist political actors

This chapter interrogates the white supremacist politics animating white women’s activism from the 1860s to the present. Cavener begins with an analysis of the suffrage movement and school segregation campaigns, then white women’s Jim Crow era anti-integration efforts, and concludes with an examination of their use of social media to build the white nationalist movement and white women’s longstanding theatrical weaponization of their tears to limit Black people’s mobility, purge them from public spaces, or position themselves as innocent victims to reinscribe their privileged positionality. Cavener demonstrates how white women repeatedly leverage their presumed innocence, goodness, and maternalism to reproduce white supremacy—a dominant operating force in their political engagement.