(Director’s note: Erin M. Goss, Associate Professor of English, thinks and writes about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing by and about women, especially as it intersects with contemporary gender politics. She is finishing a book currently called Complicity and the Bargains of White Femininity, 1750-1850. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
So much has happened since the morning of Monday, May 25 that it almost seems beside the point to return to the moment when Amy Cooper, formerly employed by Franklin Templeton, was recorded demonstrating what white women’s entitlement looks like when it is aimed at a Black man attempting to protect birds and respect city ordinances while using an area of public municipal space designated for the purpose of nature preservation. Apparently unwilling to accept that anyone might challenge her right to break whatever rules she saw fit to break, she called the police “to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” Her premeditated lie demonstrated her very clear sense of the power she could wield, and her performance of vulnerability and need for protection showed just how far she would take the apparent affront to her dignity that was Christian Cooper’s request that she follow the law.
Amy Cooper later apologized, of course. She “would never have imagined that [she] would be involved in the type of incident that occurred with Chris,” she writes, speaking of a man she does not know by a first name that has not been given to her to use. Calling their interaction “a few mortifying seconds in a lifetime of forty years,” she chooses her words unwisely but well. Those seconds could indeed have been “mortifying,” in that, as so many have noted, there is all too often a straight line from a white woman’s phone call to a black man’s death.
Christina Sharpe writes in “Lose Your Kin” (The New Inquiry, Nov. 2016) that “Whiteness is a political project and it is also a logic, by which I mean it is a calculus, a way of sorting oneself and others into categories of those who must be protected and those who are, or soon will be, expendable.” Within what Sharpe calls the logic of whiteness, white women – second only, perhaps, to white babies – must be protected, and it is our innocence that generates the demand. Cooper shows that she knows how to embody both her apparent right to protection and her concomitant capacity to deny her own involvement in the violence necessary for that protection to occur.
In the same essay, Sharpe also identifies the “unmoral, unethical anger” that carries “the full support of the state.” I, likely along with many other well-meaning white people, have grown used to recognizing that anger in the white men haunting my computer screen and sometimes the streets of the town I claim as home; these men bear torches and Confederate flags and red hats. They are angry, these men, and their whiteness protects their rage from interrogation. They are angry, apparently, at an eroding sense of certainty, at the idea that they might someday have to share. They are angry that the rest of the world may be noticing that they aren’t actually very important. What I haven’t thought about anywhere near enough until more recently than I should have done, is the anger of white women. When we see today’s obviously angry white ladies, they are angry at absurdities. They are angry that Black people are cooking outdoors in spaces set aside for people to do just that; they are angry that Black people are sitting on park benches; they are angry that Black people are writing on their own walls. Amy Cooper was angry that she was being told to follow rules that exist in order to protect someone and something other than her.
As someone who has spent the past several years reflecting both personally and through my research on the centuries-long project that has created white women as we are, I am struck first and foremost by the claims a woman like Amy Cooper makes to innocence. She is surprised at herself, apparently, and she distances herself even as she claims to apologize. She also shows all the signs of someone tired of being told what to do. Add to the usual rules of white femininity those of quarantine and the ground is set for any number of ultimately meaningless acts of selfish rebellion. Hers involved leash laws. In the Ramble in New York City’s Central Park dogs are to be on leash at all times for the protection of migrating birds and their habitat, as I have learned from both Christian Cooper, the man on whom Amy Cooper attempted to set the police she imagined as her personal security force, and from Clemson Alumni Distinguished Professor Drew Lanham. To Amy Cooper, apparently, such a rule was a hindrance and a stifling of her right to do as she wished with the dog she would later hold in the air by its leash so that she could focus on the phone call she attempted to use to have a Black man removed from the space in which she sought to exercise her freedom from the law.
White women’s anger can be crucial, vital. Adrienne Rich called anger “our birth-pains,” and celebrated the possibility that “we are bearing ourselves” through our anger. White women’s anger, though, is also the twisted faces of the young women spitting on Elizabeth Eckford as she walks to her first day at a newly integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. As Audre Lorde reminded in her essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981), white women’s anger all too often “lies within them like an undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first woman of Color who talks about racism,” or, Lorde easily could have added, the first Black man to tell us what to do.
In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, often considered a sort of origin text for contemporary (white) feminist thought, Mary Wollstonecraft lamented the modes of power available to the bourgeois white woman, who learns to wield vulnerability as a tool to garner sympathy and produce desire in the white men who allow her no other means to power. Offered opportunities to be either, as she defines her fellow white women, “abject slaves or capricious tyrants,” white women too often choose the latter, and learn to find opportunities to push others into the role of the former. What Wollstonecraft did not recognize, what she could not see, was the way that vulnerability becomes not only a tool but a weapon. Her critique of instrumentalized femininity within heterosexual white relationship – as provocative as it still may be – failed to recognize what such femininity could do and be outside of that relationship and the way that it becomes both a weapon to wield against those outside the heterosexual white dyad and a shield from ever recognizing the weapon that it is. White femininity as Wollstonecraft identifies it in 1792 provides white women a means to power as long as we continue to perform as if we have none at all.
Amy Cooper has reminded me of a thing I already know too well. It is not anger that makes white women dangerous. Anger can provide a means to exceed the instrumentalized helplessness that Mary Wollstonecraft long ago identified as the primary mode by which white women achieve power and attention; anger can give us another way to be. What makes white women dangerous, harmful, deadly is the insistence on our protection. James Baldwin said of white people’s refusal to acknowledge the harm that American racism consistently enacts upon Black lives in this country that it is the innocence that constitutes the crime. If the innocence constitutes the crime, it is protection of that innocence that produces its violence. And nothing seems to make innocence feel more under threat than the eruption of white women’s undetonated and undirected anger.