Essay: Trump, Rape, and Racist Fuckery
Essay: Trump, Rape, and Racist Fuckery
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Donald Trump, a white supremacist who has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by multiple women, is once again vowing to protect white women from Black and brown men. But who will protect white women from the savagery of white men, specifically their own husbands?
Trump is a racist and misogynist fuck who has yet to meet a low to which he will not stoop. And he is tapping into a long and shameful history of white supremacist political rhetoric that paints Black and men of colour as rapists in order to terrify and control white women while painting the latter as fragile beings in need of protection and saving by white men–the very men who are most likely to hurt white women.
His fear mongering will become increasingly hysterical and dangerous now that his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is a woman of Black and South Asian heritage whose entry into the U.S. presidential race is positioning women, who comprise the largest group of registered voters in the U.S., as a pivotal group in deciding the country’s next president.
Trump, and Republicans, care specifically about white women voters who in their majority have voted for the GOP candidate in every presidential election over the past 70 years, with the exception of Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton’s second term. In 2016, when he beat Hillary Clinton, 47 percent of white women voters chose Trump. In 2020, when he lost to Joe Biden, 53 percent voted for Trump.
Soon after Biden stepped aside in favour of his vice president as the Democratic nominee, a slew of Zoom calls drew support and millions of dollars for Harris. A record-setting "White Women: Answer the Call" session with more than 160,000 participants raised more than $11 million. Earlier this month, a poll showed the gender gap widening in favour of Harris.
(This is not an endorsement of Harris, about whom I wrote this)
Much of the female-male change occurred among white people. White women went from +13 points for Trump pre-convention to a virtual dead heat (Trump +2), said ABC News polling director Gary Langer.
Trump knows that. And he knows exactly what he is doing by igniting a race war targeting the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio. Seizing on a fake story that was quickly debunked by authorities in Springfield that members of the Haitian immigrant community had stolen and eaten the predominantly white population’s pets, Trump has said that locals in the town faced "20,000 illegals" who were "destroying their entire way of life."
"Nobody knows where they come from. I'm angry about young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens," Trump added.
I’m angry that a sexual predator is weaponizing the “stranger danger” false trope to further his racist fear mongering targeting Black and men of colour when we know that 8 out of 10 rapes in the U.S. are committed by someone known to the victim, according to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the U.S.
The majority of children and teen victims of rape also know the perpetrator. Of sexual abuse cases reported to law enforcement, 93% of juvenile victims knew the perpetrator: 59% were acquaintances, 34% were family members, and only 7% were strangers to the victim.
Who will save “young American girls” being raped by people they know?
And, again from RAINN: the majority of sexual violence perpetrators are white.
Remember, the former president who is once again the Republican candidate for president in November’s election, launched his first run on June 16, 2015 thus: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
From calling Mexican’s “rapists,” to using so-called honor crimes and misogyny (which he ascribes to Muslim men) to justify his Muslim ban, to creating the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement office during his first term, to co-opting and weaponising sexual violence against white women by men of colour, to his latest outrageous and unfounded statements against Haitains in Springfield, it is transparent what Trump is doing.
Who will save “young American girls” being raped by people they know?
As Charles Blow wrote, “Particularly in the post-Civil War era, when slavery had been undone, white male politicians used the fear of rape of white women by black men to codify racial terror.”
And to spur white men into action.
Several schools were evacuated in Springfield on Thursday and Friday following threats and the head of the local Haitian community said the FBI was investigating threatening phone calls to the organisation.
Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who shot dead nine Black worshippers in 2015, told FBI agents he “had to do it” because “Black people are killing white people every day on the streets, and they rape white women, 100 white women a day.”
He is but one of many murderers of Black people ostensibly avenging white women from Black men. The United States is steeped in the bloody history of lynchings and other types of murders to “protect” white women and their “purity.” Many of those murders were a result of claims by white women that Black men had raped, assaulted, talked to, whistled at, or merely looked at them.
It matters little that there is no evidence that immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. Perception and optics are paramount.
Meanwhile, white women are posting ways to hide their vote from their husbands on social media.
From social media posts instructing white southern women how to hide their vote from their husbands to fact sheets assuring them that there is no way for anyone to know who they voted for, it is telling that the call is coming from inside the house.
Via @jallen1985
This is not to absolve white women from their storied role as Footsoldiers of the White Supremacist Patriarchy. White married women especially, unlike their single and Black counterparts, have been stalwart Republican voters due to their own racism and because they see their economic interests as directly connected to those of their white husbands, who vote in their majority for the GOP.
In their book The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing white Voters in the South Changed American Politics, political scientists Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields write that it was not just race that Republicans in the South have used as a wedge issue to draw white voters, but also religion and gender were at the core of that strategy.
Central to the ways that Southern Republicans have used gender is the construction of their ideal of womanhood, an archetype that grounds white supremacist patriarchy. That ideal is constructed, as Maxwell explained to Salon, as “morally superior but fragile.”
Finding themselves on such a tenuous pedestal, Southern white women understood that their power was gleaned through fragility; a fragility that required the protection of white men but that also required that white women protect white men, on whom they depended financially and economically.
It is a dynamic that connects Southern white male elites from the days of enslavement, through the civil rights era, through the election of Trump.
“Here are these Southern White elite males who have to justify their brutal treatment of African Americans, either as slaves or as free men, with riots and lynchings and violence in the early 20th century, by saying, ‘We have to do this to protect these fragile Southern White women,’” Maxwell told Salon.
But who will save white women from white men? And more importantly who will save us all from the hypocrisy of a misogynist former president who fans paranoia about the violent sexual threat he claims that Black and men of colour pose to white women and who himself has been accused by at least 26 different women of sexual assault or misconduct dating back to the 1970s??
“Several women have described Trump forcibly reaching under their skirts, others said he kissed them without consent, and a handful of beauty pageant contestants claimed Trump inappropriately walked in on them in changing rooms,” reported the independent, non-profit 19th in its investigation of sexual assault allegations against the former president.
Again, who will protect white women from white men?
Who will save them from the savagery of white men? Who will save them from Donald Trump? Donald Trump is a bigger threat to American women than Haitian immigrants.
The authors of the book, Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election, found that Republican women were just fine, thank you, despite being well aware of where the danger is coming.
“The notion of benevolent patriarchy allows conservative women to feel that if they submit to their husband’s wills, they can benefit through their husband’s protection and economic care. This may influence their political choices as well,” they wrote.
Remember:
–63 percent of white women’s vote went to Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama Senate race, despite the sexual misconduct allegations against him.
–Republican women were the only demographic that increased its support for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during the hearings of sexual assault allegations during his confirmation process in October 2018.
And more white women voted for Trump the second time around.
When I hear white women assure each other that their husbands won’t know who they’re voting for, it reminds me of life under a dictatorship, where people cannot freely choose who they vote for and their lives are endangered if they don’t vote the way the dictator wants.
That dictatorship is white supremacist patriarchy. And at its head, is Donald Trump.
It is a dictatorship for which white women too readily submit their gender in return for the benefits of proximity to white men and the protection of white men from the “savages” of Trump’s race war.
Who will save them from the savagery of white men? Who will save them from Donald Trump?
Donald Trump is a bigger threat to American women than Haitian immigrants.
Thank you for reading my essay. You can support my work by:
Hitting the heart button so that others can be intrigued and read
Upgrading to a paid subscription to help keep FEMINIST GIANT free
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
FEMINIST GIANT Newsletter will always be free because I want it to be accessible to all. If you choose a paid subscriptions - thank you! I appreciate your support. If you like this piece and you want to further support my writing, you can like/comment below, forward this article to others, get a paid subscription if you don’t already have one or send a gift subscription to someone else today.