Though the term unarmed black man may be literally accurate, it doesn’t tell the whole story in most cases. In a number of cases, if the victim ended up being unarmed, it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. Grabbing an offi -cer’s gun or using other equipment to beat the police doesn’t give you a free pass. Oh, but heaven forbid someone be critical of this movement . . . For someone who wants equal rights, it sure sounds like you’d prefer special treatment. It sure sounds like you’d like a gold star at the end of the day, just for being born. Get over yourself. You’re not a humanitarian. You’re not a unifi er. You’re not teaching black children to go forth and conquer. You’re teaching them to feel sorry for themselves. Nice work, and how ’bout you sit down. Those are my fi nal thoughts. God bless and take care.1
–Tomi Lahren
Political commentator Tomi Lahren has built a career around sharing her
“fi nal thoughts”—a segment that blends the temperament and tone of popular white male political commentators like Bill O’Reilly with an Anne Coulter-esque taste for controversy. Joining the ranks of other conservative media fi gures who see themselves as bravely transgressing the taboos of political correctness, Lahren refl ects a form of white frustration and aggres-sion that codes any challenge to white normativity as a threat to the nation’s wellbeing: Colin Kaepernick’s protest is anti-America; Black Lives Matter supports black supremacy; Jesse Williams perpetuates a war on cops. “It’s not white people working to divide America,” Lahren asserts, “it’s you!”2 You. You people. Black people. It’s not hard to hear how the refrains of white supremacy punctuate Lahren’s outrage.3
In light of these refrains, critics have given Lahren the (dis)honorary title of “White Power Barbie”—a name that, all at once, connects Lahren’s indignation to anti-black racism. The adjective “white power” gestures to the white supremacist sensibilities which bubble just beneath the surface of Lahren’s appeal to national unity and the nation’s wellbeing. Moreover,
“white power” speaks to how Lahren’s outrage conjures blackness as the
“real” threat to America, refl ecting how the threat to white dominance returns, reverberates, and resonates as a threat to the nation. To then add
“Barbie” is to pair this type of white aggression and moral outrage with the popular image of the famous blonde-haired plastic doll, known best for her anatomically impossible measurements and her controversial role in shaping young children’s understanding of ideal womanhood.4 Thus, Lahren’s moniker “White Power Barbie” asks us to consider how the out-rage of white women, particularly those considering themselves patriotic and pro-working class, plays a role in the production and sustenance of white (supremacist) America.
In this chapter, I argue that Lahren is emblematic of an ongoing tradition of angry white women who defi ne and negotiate their gendered experiences as white women affectively through, rather than against, white supremacist and anti-black sentiments. I argue that the reception of such women both generates and is mediated by the fi gure of the Angry White Woman: a woman whose anger is read as attributable, positive, and morally correct. Such a fi gure, I argue, is rooted in the historical association of white femininity to moral authority within white supremacist thought. This strong link between white womanhood and morality has a twofold effect: on the one hand, it subjects white women to the responsibility of protecting the goodness of whiteness; on the other hand, it enables whiteness to be “good” through the supposed moral superiority of white women. This twofold effect hinges on affect.
Anger, specifi cally morally infl ected anger, indexes the role of white women as guardians of America. As protectors of the nation’s morality and wellbeing within white supremacy, white women’s anger functions as a defense against moral decay, which often is code for the imagined encroach-ment of blackness. In this way, white women’s anger operates as a switch-point in the larger affective economy of white dominance, inciting and amplifying an affective investment in white America. While this relationship is made explicit within communities holding a desire for and belief in the social and political superiority of white people (white supremacy), the fi gure of the Angry White Woman also circulates in supposedly neutral and even anti-racist spaces. In the latter, the fi gure operates to uphold the normativity of white women’s experiences and histories, such that whiteness operates
unmarked (white normativity).5 Thus, white women’s anger often serves an indispensable role in the generation, circulation, and sustainment of white supremacist sensibilities, even if unconscious, unaware, or unintended.
Figuring Angry (White) Women
The white supremacist potential of white women’s anger arises from the specifi c way that the fi gure of the Angry White Woman confi gures, disfi g-ures, and transfi gures white womanhood. Modes of fi guring can organize bodies and affects (confi guration) as well as take them apart (disfi guration) and can always move beyond or across them (transfi guration). To focus on fi guration of white women is thus to draw attention to the construction and consequences of specifi c iterations of white womanhood and anger. Cer-tainly white women who become angry or express anger can also be exposed to charges of irrationality, hysteria, and other forms of entangling women with the source of their anger.6 My point here is not to erase those histories or accuse white women’s anger of always intentionally contributing to the maintenance of white supremacy and white normativity in the U.S., but to consider those moments where white women’s anger, particularly in the form of moral outrage, is capacitated by and capacitates whiteness. To this end, this chapter serves as genealogy of the Angry White Woman, tracing the sociocultural and affective connections that form the grounds through which the fi gure is both legitimated and drafted to serve the whims of white normativity and white supremacy in the United States.7 To accomplish this, I draw from Sara Ahmed’s work on emotion and fi gures.
In her interrogation of happiness, Ahmed, a feminist philosopher and cultural critic, asks us to consider what fi gures and emotions do, what asso-ciations they secure, what things they stick together, and how they shape the ways that specifi c bodies show up. She argues, for instance, that the fi gure of the Angry Black Woman can shape the ways that black women are received and experienced by others in feminist circles:
You might be angry about how racism and sexism diminish life choices for women of color. Your anger is a judgment that something is wrong. But then in being heard as angry, your speech is read as motivated by anger. Your anger is read as unattributed, as if you are against x because you are angry rather than being angry because you are against x.8
In this example, black women are encountered by their white feminist interlocutors as killjoys of feminism. The fi gure organizes the silencing of black women’s anger by securing a history of associations that enable black
women to not be heard as angry about something, but only be received as angry.9 Thus for Ahmed, anger does not emanate from or belong to a per-son, nor does it reference a subjective or psychological state of being, but rather “is produced as an effect of circulation.”10 Similarly, albeit with a dif-ferent trajectory in mind, this chapter considers: what does the fi gure of the Angry White Woman do? What work does the circulation of white women’s anger do? What associations do such fi gures of white women bring with them? How do these fi gures and emotions shape bodies? And from what historical landscapes do they emerge? Rather than centering on psychologi-cal states of specifi c women or providing a historipsychologi-cal account, this chapter links with Ahmed’s scholarship to consider the ethical and political work that the Angry White Woman and her anger do.
The specifi c confi guration of white womanhood that animates the Angry White Woman is articulated through the fi gure of the True Woman. In her famous analysis, Barbara Welter argues that the True Woman upheld four virtues: purity, submissiveness, domesticity, and piety. “Without them, no matter whether there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was ashes.
With them she was promised happiness and power.”11 This promise to power came as a set of contradictions about the role women should play in securing the nation’s future. On the one hand, she was something that demanded male protection. On the other hand, her proximity to those four virtues meant that she must “uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand,” acting as protector of the nation’s wellbeing.12 Thus, the True Woman offered a path for some to lay claim to a legitimated role in the nation-state’s development as guardians of the religious, moral, and famil-ial spheres of American life, even if such a role demanded that these women transcend their humanity to become an angel in the house.
True Womanhood was a white patriarchal demand on women, but this very demand provided some women with the potential for political and social access within a white-dominated society. Operating within the same logic that argued for the necessity of True Women, a white woman could make exacting criticisms of white men as threats to the nation’s wellbeing. Within this logic, such criticisms would need to be responded to tactically by white men, given that they were argued through a set of values central to arguments of white superiority. To disagree with a white woman mediated by the fi g-ure of the True Woman could potentially disrupt the authority of whiteness, if one yielded to the assumption that white femininity was a crucial pillar in upholding a white-dominated society.13 For this reason, historian Nancy Hewitt argues that while some women resisted True Womanhood, “many more women manipulated the ideals as a means of expanding their sphere and their infl uence.”14 The True Woman afforded a viable strategy for some
white women to critique white men and patriarchal society, negotiating their position within whiteness through the very arguments of white superiority.
While the True Woman is not the only model of womanhood in the nineteenth-century United States, I use the term in this chapter to name a specifi c confi guration of white femininity, moral authority, and respon-sibility to the nation that resurfaces repeatedly throughout the twentieth century. From Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Gore’s quest to protect American children from “dangerous” music with “Parental Advisory” labels to Miley Cyrus’s repudiation of the hip-hop scene as too sexist, the same sensibilities that facilitated the True Woman’s authority can be felt animating the con-temporary ways white women enter into discussions about morality. While neither Gore’s nor Cyrus’s criticisms of historically black cultural produc-tions like rap and hip-hop were particularly angry, the True Woman nev-ertheless provides the grounds of possibility for the Angry White Woman, legitimating those moments when moral criticism turns to moral outrage by casting more aggressive emotions as reactive, attributable, and morally correct, and by playing off the gendered logics of white superiority. Thus, a morally infl ected anger would come to shape two of the more popular fi gurations of the Angry White Woman: the Suffragette and the Handmaid.
The Suffragette
To every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights . . . It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.15
–Patricia Arquette
In 1978, white suffragist Susan B. Anthony was chosen as the fi rst represen-tation of an American woman to be minted on a U.S. coin. Refl ecting on the choice, President James Carter wrote:
The life of Susan B. Anthony exemplifi es the ideals for which our country stands. The “Anthony dollar” will symbolize for all American women the achievement of their unalienable right to vote. It will be a constant reminder for the continuing struggle for the equality of all Americans.16
Yet for many, Anthony is hardly a symbol of “all American women.” The choice to mint the Anthony dollar derives from an ongoing racial coding of the suffragist as white within the U.S. sociohistorical imaginary that erases
the labor, presence, and infl uence of women like Sojourner Truth, Ida B.
Wells, and Mary Church Terrell while occluding the white supremacist grounds upon which many white suffragists made their claims for enfran-chisement. This continual fl attening of the diversity of historical actors within the suffrage movement transfi gures the suffragist to the Suffragette—
a white woman, often bourgeois, whose outrage at the plight of women forces her to speak out and march in the name of equality.
As seen with the True Woman, the Suffragette circulates with a set of assumptions which it emerges from and upholds. The most enduring of these is the perpetual masquerade of “white woman” as “woman.” This col-lapse of woman with whiteness coincides with the covert and overt use of anti-black sentiments for the negotiation of women’s suffrage, particularly after emancipation. As Angela Davis argues, the issue was not the emancipa-tion of slaves, but the sense that giving black men the right to vote would elevate them in society, making them superior to white women.17 Thus, a number of white suffragists argued for the necessity of women’s suffrage (read: white women’s suffrage) for maintaining the wellbeing of the democ-racy in a world where black men could vote.
The arguments of white suffragists were contradictory, simultaneously evoking both the power and vulnerability of white women while posi-tioning blackness as weak and also threatening to the nation’s wellbeing.
Anthony’s collaborator and fellow suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton did precisely this in her response to abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s claim that women’s rights needed to wait:
The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro, and so long as he was low-est in the scale of being we were willing to press his claims; but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see “Sambo” walk into the kingdom fi rst. “This is the negro’s hour.” Are we sure that he, once entrenched in all his inalienable rights, may not be an added power to hold us at bay?18
Stanton resented the suggestion that women, especially white women, should not receive the vote if white men were willing to extend it to “a degraded, ignorant black one.”19 Negotiating within white supremacist sentiments, Stanton evoked the goodness of white women as a necessity in the face of the defi lement and endangerment of U.S. society from “a vile and festering mass of voters who degrade the ballot.”20 Thus, Stanton exemplifi es how the Suffragette’s impetus to agitate for the vote and for
equality arises from and, as discussed later, carries forward white suprem-acist sensibilities.
If Stanton exemplifi es the historical context from which the Suffragette emerges, Rebecca Latimer Felton shows us how such fi gures can affectively censor and amplify the expressions of frustration and moral indignation of the white women from which they emerge. Felton, the fi rst woman to serve in the U.S. Senate, was even more violent in her deployment of black-ness as threat than Stanton. Playing into the racist assumptions of “black men’s uncontrollable sexual desire for white women” through the fi gure of the “black rapist,” Felton’s 1897 address to the Georgia Agricultural Society justifi ed extralegal violence precisely this way, appealing to the image of a vulnerable white, rural working woman:
When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue—if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts—then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.21 While the larger context for Felton’s justifi cation of lynching included an indictment of Southern white men for corrupting the democracy, society would only return to order, she argued, as soon as white men extended civil rights to white women and ended their mistreatment of black men.22
Felton’s critiques of white men, however, would be drowned out by her own words. Then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary. I say lynch, a thousand times a week. Lynch a thousand times a week. What had been a call for equality within white communities circulated in newspapers as a call to lynch from a respectable white woman, amplifying the pervasive feelings of threat and vulnerability looming in many white Southern communities post-emancipation. Thus, the Angry White Woman disfi gured the complex-ities of Felton’s address for equality within a white supremacist America into a fl at call for violence against black men.
Despite their differing and complex relations to black equality, what sutures Felton and Stanton together as suffragists is their appeal to democ-racy as a salve for the nation’s troubles. The Suffragette inherits this faith in the possibility of the democratic nation-state, albeit in a different register.
The white supremacist sentiments that enabled the simultaneous portrayal of
“white women suffragists as victims of male privilege on the one hand and inheritors of white privilege on the other—as both oppressed and oppress-ing”23—resonate in some present-day evocations of the need for gender equity by white women. The refrains of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s frustration about
“the negro’s hour” are uncannily heard in Patricia Arquette’s Oscar accep-tance speech one hundred and fi fty years later. Like the Suffragette, Arquette is incensed that women continue to be unequal in a supposedly demo-cratic nation-state. Yet Arquette’s evocation of “our” is revealing of the ways that women’s equality translates to a heteronormative, cis-gendered, white women’s equality, as non-white, trans, and queer women stand in the vast space between “women” and “everyone else.” Arquette’s speech upholds the unmarked association of whiteness (white normativity) with womanhood by calling forth an image of the compassionate, selfl ess white woman who protects the goodness of the nation for others, tapping into and maintaining the affective connection between white femininity and the moral uplift of the nation. Thus, the Suffragette, even without the explicit white supremacist sentiments of suffragists like Felton and Stanton, functions to uphold and
“the negro’s hour” are uncannily heard in Patricia Arquette’s Oscar accep-tance speech one hundred and fi fty years later. Like the Suffragette, Arquette is incensed that women continue to be unequal in a supposedly demo-cratic nation-state. Yet Arquette’s evocation of “our” is revealing of the ways that women’s equality translates to a heteronormative, cis-gendered, white women’s equality, as non-white, trans, and queer women stand in the vast space between “women” and “everyone else.” Arquette’s speech upholds the unmarked association of whiteness (white normativity) with womanhood by calling forth an image of the compassionate, selfl ess white woman who protects the goodness of the nation for others, tapping into and maintaining the affective connection between white femininity and the moral uplift of the nation. Thus, the Suffragette, even without the explicit white supremacist sentiments of suffragists like Felton and Stanton, functions to uphold and