The Women Behind White Power - The New York Times - 1 views
www.nytimes.com/...te-supremacy-forgot-women.html
white supremacy women history US culture grassroots
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Few Americans know the name Cornelia Dabney Tucker, but the Jim Crow South would not have been the same without her.
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An element of surprise still animates discussions about white women supporting white supremacist politics. In part, it’s because the narrative of white supremacist history in the United States is not immune to the same sexist forces that have shaped so many of our national historical narratives: It has left out the women. And that has consequences for how we think about these politics today.
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As is the case with so much of history, stories about the nation’s racism have focused on the dramatic, not the daily, on the speechifiers, not the low-level campaigners
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While men debated in legislative chambers and listened to challenges on the bench, women headed to school cafeterias, playgrounds and PTA meetings, doing the bulk of the behind-the-scenes work of supporting the politics of segregation.
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The suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt in the early 20th century argued for women’s voting rights in Southern states on the basis that “white supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by white women’s suffrage.”
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The point, here, is neither to catalog nor to celebrate white women’s contributions to white supremacist politics. Instead, their work should change how we understand history.
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If we begin to consider their staying power with seriousness rather than surprise — a surprise not shared by black women — perhaps we can more effectively prepare to counter this strand of American politics.