Alison Phipps blaming women again
Alison Phipps wrote a blog post a month ago to air her smug misogynist shite about “white women’s tears” again. Nothing novel, just the same trendy smearing and hissing, not to mention victim-blaming.
She starts with the murder of George Floyd and Amy Cooper’s calling the cops on Chris Cooper in Central Park, then announces that they’re connected.
These incidents are linked by more than just a moment in time. White women are deeply, and often deliberately, complicit with white supremacist violence, and our complicity usually takes the form of victimhood that appeals to the punitive power of the state. And although her allegation against Christian Cooper was false, Amy Cooper has something in common with mainstream feminist movements that coalesce around genuine victimisation and trauma, such as the recent viral iteration of #MeToo. The focus of these movements tends to be naming and shaming perpetrators and calling for institutional discipline or criminal punishment to get these ‘bad men.’
Oooops! She totally forgot to say how the incidents are linked. Even if she’s right that “White women are deeply, and often deliberately, complicit with white supremacist violence,” she forgot to say what that has to do with the murder of George Floyd – which would have been difficult since the answer is absolutely fucking nothing.
Sorry. I get heated. She really infuriates me with this glib destructive careerist garbage.
My book Me, Not You describes the political dynamics of mainstream white feminism in the core Anglosphere and parts of Europe. It makes a difficult and uncomfortable argument: that this movement, exemplified by #MeToo, not only centres bourgeois white women but also treats other groups as disposable.
It’s not an argument though, it’s just an assertion. She’s a bad writer and a bad thinker and she doesn’t have an argument.
She cites the protests in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everhard.
Yet mainstream demands following Everard’s murder promised more power to the carceral system – calls for the criminalisation of street harassment and for misogyny to become a hate crime.
The demands themselves were unsurprising, but that such carceral feminism persists even after a white woman has allegedly been murdered by a cop shows how deeply mainstream feminism is mired in white supremacy.
Women should just put up with it, I guess.
White women’s experiences of sexual violence enter a world in which ‘protecting white womanhood’ is really about protecting racial capitalism and white supremacy. Because of this, we claim protection that has always been predicated on Black death and the deaths of other marginalised people. Furthermore, although bourgeois white women are not usually subject to state violence, the same white men who purport to protect us from the Others do reserve the right to abuse and kill us themselves.
This is what I mean – there’s no argument there. It’s just saying.
And what it says has now made its way into Oxfam’s staff training. Brilliant.
I just can’t follow her. I mean, is she claiming that non-white women are fine with being raped, sexually assaulted, harassed, demeaned, underpaid, passed over for promotion? Or is she saying they don’t like it either, but they’ll suck it up to prevent men of any colour from being punished because reasons?
I’d put good money on Alison Phipps not being at all sanguine about the thought of any of those things ever happening to her.
You just have to have a very special sort of contempt for all women to create and follow her line of ‘reasoning’.
Rob, that’s how I read it too, it seems insulting and backhandedly racist, mixed with victim shaming, under the guise of attacking the white patriarchy and capitalism in general. And as Ophelia points out, nothing behind it. Her interpretations of the incidents she cites doesn’t provide any justification for whatever opaque conclusions she is making. Just bizarre.
I’m not following the thread here
woman murdered by a cop would seem to be an entirely adequate reason for carceral feminism to persist.
How does this become evidence for some connection between mainstream feminism and white supremacy?
I guess I am skeptical about the “attacking of capitalisms” thing. Because I cannot imagine a world in which pompous, prissy, leftist ideologs like this person ruling things would in any way be better than our current flawed system. I can see her serving as a “Commissar” for an American Khmer Rouge in her certitude.
Nobody can follow her. There’s nothing to follow. It’s literally just assertion, and very malicious assertion at that. “White women’s tears” forsooth. She makes me want to throw things.
Steven, I think she’s saying that because it was a cop that murdered the woman, it proves carceral feminism is wrong, bad, stupid, because the cops are the ones who murder and rape. And…sometimes they are. Sometimes it’s the military. Sometimes it’s the truck driver. Sometimes it’s the college prof.
The only real key connection they have is…they are men.
This whole article smells of white guilt of the most odious kind. She will slam every other white woman to ensure that she doesn’t get smeared with whiteness herself, to prove she isn’t like “them” (us – GC feminists) who are, of course, all racists, all Karens…we are all not Alison Phipps, the white woman who is not inflicted by whiteness because she feels the pain so deeply.
I’m not sure what she means by “mainstream” feminism, 2nd wave feminists, or who exactly? Does she think white middle class feminists (is that mainstream for her?) are all “Karens” or “Nazis” because that’s the implication. I also wonder how she manages to disclude herself from those she is referring to.
Ikn @6 Thinking the same thing, you beat me by 2 minutes. lol… :)
Same here.
“Carceral feminism”. Ffs. I.e., the kind of feminism that thinks that violence against women should be punishable. As opposed to the cool kind of feminism, which thinks that we should just shrug off violence against women.
George Floyd, Harvey Weinstein. Nope, can’t see any difference there at all.
GW, haven’t you heard? Rape is kink. You wouldn’t want to kink shame, would you? /s
Okay, I’m going to lay out what I believe her logic is:
1:Police authority in the West in general, and in the U.S. in particular, has long been abusive towards communities of color, particularly indigenous peoples and those of African descent. In its earliest days in the U.S., this was often the deliberate function of the policing bodies–keeping slaves in line.
2: Despite various victories along the way, policing is still seriously and viciously abusive to those same communities. Disparities in arrests, sentencing and police misconduct against Black Americans is well-documented. Blacks are dramatically more likely to be falsely convicted, and convicted Blacks face much more punitive sentencing than White counterparts.
3: Because of this abusive situation, any action which increases the power and reach of the police (increasing the scope of the law to create more infractions, or funding more policing in general) will disproportionately affect the Black community.
4: When feminists call for increases in police activity and judicial punishment for sexist and misogynistic acts, without first correcting the issue of disproportionate policing, they are essentially accepting the idea that more Black men will be locked up, often for crimes they did not commit, in order to meet those goals, at least superficially.
Laid out like that, I don’t think it’s a completely unwarranted concern. While the term ‘intersectional’ gets a lot of guff around these parts, and for good reason, it’s fair to make a judgement that Western society is based on twin pillars of patriarchy and white supremacy (patriarchy is older, but only because early societies didn’t have a whole lot of ethnic differences from their nearest neighbors–racism only arises when you have different ‘races’ you regularly interact with), and attempting to reduce one by increasing the power of the instrument of the other is, at best, going to be a balancing act.
That said, it’s clear that she’s not making this argument effectively herself; rather, she’s parroting the conclusions of actual, sincere race critics without going into the substance of the underlying premises.
GW #10
That part about women calling the cops on men who HAVE COMMITTED CRIMES AGAINST US is giving more power to the carceral system…..yeah, I am fine with that. If we have to build fifty for prisons in every state to house the men who should be locked up for committing actual violent physical attacks on other human beings, so be it. If we have to build 500 prisons in every state, so be it. If we have to build 5000 prisons in every state, so be it.
If we need more prisons for violent women, yes, build those.
The alternative of just letting men murder and rape us with impunity is a non-starter. So, if we don’t want these men who commit violent physical attacks on other people being given long time-outs from society, then get used to mob justice and pre-emptive strikes making a big comeback.
I simply cannot believe what idiocy people like Phipps will spout to get their pats on the head from the Woke.
But… but… the guy alleged to have killed her, and who has pleaded guilty to her kidnap and rape, is white.
Say what you like about penal policy, but I’m struggling to see how that’s an indication of white supremacy.
“If we need more prisons for violent women, yes, build those.”
We’ll probably need more prisons for violent “women.”
This is how those of us alive in the UK in the 70s thought everyone in California spoke all the time.
I was under the impression that #MeToo was all about women speaking out about sexism and how it isn’t a rare thing. How does that exclude women that aren’t white?
I saw this argument used against Asian-Americans too: if they call the police when they’re attacked for being Asian, then there will be more police around, and police are especially mean to Black people, so then the Asian people who called the police will be complicit in racist aggression every time they try to protect themselves against racist aggression.
Freemage, I understand that argument. I don’t quite buy it, though, since the women who are raped should not have to stop and think that an innocent black man may be incarcerated somewhere else for some other non-crime before they call for help.
The argument is bogus. The system is broken, and I recognize that and do what little I can to fix it (which mostly involves voting, signing petitions, sending donations, and writing letters).
The thing is, women who do call the police after being raped are often subjected to sexist and misogynistic abuse for it, sometimes at the hands of the police themselves. So when a woman calls the police about her rape, she is more likely to be contributing to patriarchy in the form of abuse (of her) than anything else.
Fixing the system is not the sole responsibility of feminists, raped or otherwise. In fact, as usual, the main culprit (though of course not the only one) is white men. They created and set up the system, and have used it to control those that they do not like or that don’t look like them. It is a vicious, brutal system. There is no need to dehumanize prisoners, other than the desire to see them as animals. I would love to see the system fixed.
That doesn’t mean I think women (white ones, even) should STFU about being abused, raped, or otherwise harrassed or mistreated. It is not an argument that holds water, because it is another case of the rights of one group being taken away for another group. Unless someone can draw a direct line from women reporting rapes (most of which aren’t reported anyway) and police shooting innocent black men (or men guilty of only minor crimes), it is insufficient. At this point, I doubt that data exists, or ever will. It is not white women reporting rape that is getting black men killed. It is RACISM. White women not reporting rape will not change that one bit.
Freemage @ 13 – That could be someone’s logic, it could be a lot of people’s logic, but it’s certainly not Phipps’s. She didn’t come close to saying anything like that coherent. She just sprayed some slogans and metaphors and left it at that. If that is her logic then she needs to say so.
If you say “there’s a case you can make on this subject” then I would agree, but to say this is the case she made is just giving her way too much credit.
The trouble with this rubbish is that is so unfocussed & indiscriminate in its charges & assertions that it is both useless and dangerous. Simply by virtue of being a white woman, you cannot help being complicit in your thoughts, action and non-action with white supremacist violence and ‘racial capitalism’. So essentially there is nothing you can do to improve anything. If one wants to draw analogies with that kind of thinking, one might draw attention to the Leninist-Stalinist thinking that was behind the treatment of the kulaks, the fulminations against the bourgeoisie and Pol Pot’s reign of terror. Or even to Nazi thought, whereby being a member of certain ‘races’ (Jews, Romani) meant that you were incorrigible and therefore…
‘Me, Not You’ seems, I must say, to be an excellent title for a book written by a writer who seems to suppose herself in the happy and God-like position of not being implicated in any of the terrible things everyone else is implicated in. How superior she must feel! I wonder if the French edition of ‘Me, Not You’ , if there is one, will be entitled ‘Bagatelles pour moi-même’.