Law Wanxi has been my news-on-the-street guy lately, and sent a link to an article on Salon about how black girls and women are often brutalized and dehumanized while white women are allowed to function as rabid racists with little or no repercussions.

The author highlights how a cop took a barely 100-pound black girl (a BABY. She is 14) and treated her like an old rag doll with the expressed approval from everyone except for the two brave boys who tried to stand up for her (Kudos to those boys–they rock. Got to give credit when I see black boys stand up for black girls.)

Some gems from the piece…

Few white people have stood up and called out the white adult women who harassed a fellow neighbor having a pool party with her friends, and with her mother’s permission. But many white people have watched the video and concluded that the officer’s treatment of the 14-year-old girl was justified. The gender dynamics in this moment are interesting. There is no universe in which a police officer would drag a young white girl in a two-piece bathing suit by her hair, demand she put her face on the ground, and then kneel for several minutes on top of her adolescent body. If such a thing occurred, it would elicit massive moral outrage on the part of white people (and Black people, too).

And in regards to these “delicate flowers” of fat, racist, fire breathing white women…

Moreover, the violent incivility of the white women who harassed and physically assaulted these teenagers who had every right to be there escapes notice. White women have been some of the worst perpetrators of racial aggression and racial indignity in this country, but their aggressions frequently escape notice, precisely because white womanhood and the need to protect it animates the core of so much white supremacist aggression toward Black people. The domestic sphere, much to the chagrin of my fellow feminists, has long been considered the sacred domain of white women. Many a Black man was lynched in service of protecting white women’s domestic sanctity and sexual virtue. Meanwhile, white women have been emboldened by such a system for centuries to police, demean and humiliate Black people, and Black women in particular, within domestic spaces.

I have to admit a bias. God I hate how (particularly Southern) white women are able to get away with the most repugnant forms of racism. It makes me sick. I literally have to have self-talk with myself not to categorize and assume that all white women are racist, privileged c*nts, because intellectually, I know they aren’t. But…it does get hard, especially when I see that no matter how disgusting, hateful, ugly (inside and out), foul mouthed, and pock marked they are, they’re still put on pedestals by people who are invested in white supremacy. I thank the heavens that the white women in my life have been willing to walk through fire for me and my family. And the white men in my life have helped catapult my  career. Still…I seethe with anger that a 14 year-old little girl was flopped around and manhandled by a crazy cop because some white woman sneezed and farted at the same time. 

And this quote makes me want to kiss the writer on the mouth for a long, sloppy 60 seconds…

But you won’t see white feminists contextualizing or calling out this long history of white female bullying of Black women with less social, political or economic power than them. They leave that work to Black feminists. Meanwhile, I hope that Black men begin to understand that they don’t have a monopoly on being violently mistreated by police. Black girls are brutalized, too.

Yep. All you’ll get from white feminists are crocodile tears and outright SHOCK! SHOCK! from folks who think only black men corner the market as poster children for police brutality.

And to anyone who wants me to stop talking about this because it makes them feel uncomfortable, I will kindly request that you go suck an egg. A really, rotten one.