I have white women in my life whom I like and love but, for some white women, a predatory element lingers just under the surface of their smiling faces. Because in many ways, white womanhood is the secret weapon in the perpetuation of white supremacy: When a white woman feels “unsafe”—particularly in situations that involve a Black woman conscious of an injustice or a Black male simply existing—whatever solution that follows cannot be questioned.
White women, who cry wolf when they feel threatened (or bored) and accuse Black people of nonexistent infractions, are often called “Karens” today.
Take the case of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy who in 1955 went on his first long trip away from his home in Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi and never returned. He was the only son of Mamie Till, who would later help spark the civil rights movement.
Emmett had a stutter that developed after an early childhood bout with polio. Mamie, who would go on to be a renowned educator in Chicago, realized that his stutter faded when Emmett recited passages from memory. And when Emmett would falter in his recitations, or become nervous while he spoke, she encouraged him to whistle, which often helped get him back on track.
This detail is relevant because, while in Mississippi, Emmett and his cousins went to a local market owned by the family of Carolyn Bryant Donham. According to Mamie, after purchasing bubble gum and exiting the market with the door open behind him, Emmett was asked what he bought by children on the front porch; at some point, he faltered in his response, so he whistled.
That whistle would lead to his murder several days later, when Donham (at the time Bryant) would tell her husband Roy Bryant that Emmett whistled at her, grabbed her, and said lewd phrases.
Within a few days, a mob of angry white men came to where Emmett was staying with his extended family. They arrived unannounced in the middle of the night, armed with a shotgun and a flashlight to whisk the boy away. Several days later, Emmett’s body was found weighted down by a seventy-five-pound cotton-gin fan tied with barbed wire around his neck in the Tallahatchie River.
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Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till, at his funeral.
Emmett’s body had been brutally beaten and partially dismembered. The local police wanted to bury him as quickly as possible to suppress the truth but, when Mamie Till heard about her son’s death, she rallied local support and managed to return his body to Chicago. She decided to hold an open-casket public funeral, which was attended by 60,000 Chicagoans, to “Let the people see what they did to my boy.”
In 2017, historian Timothy Tyson published The Blood of Emmett Till, in which he spoke to Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who had accused Emmett of assaulting her, only to admit that she lied. “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” she told Tyson.
This was a far cry from Donham’s testimony in 1955, when her husband and brother-in-law were arrested and tried for Emmett’s murder, which was so outlandish that it was deemed inadmissible by the court. Nevertheless, the story served its purpose to emphasize the violation of a white woman’s virtue for an all-white jury who acquitted the killers after less than an hour of deliberation.
White women like Donham, who cry wolf when they feel threatened (or bored) and accuse Black people of nonexistent infractions, are often called “Karens” today. This has become a popular shorthand that serves to highlight an alleged violation of white women’s virtue or safety, which then permits white men and/or police to commit violence in response to such spurious claims.
This dynamic reinforces white supremacy by providing a primal heteronormati ve framework for both white men and women to play a role in asserting authority over Black bodies. Although we as a culture spend a lot of time talking about white men and the violence they cause, white women do the same thing. And it stands to reason that Black women like Mamie Till are the closest adversaries to this white supremacist dynamic, because Black women are either the subject of these accusations or their friends and family are.
Though there has been a wave of “Karen”-esque incidents in recent years, the phenomenon of policing Black bodies at the behest of white women isn’t new.
One such “Karen” incident happened in 2018, when two Black women, their Black male friend, and a fourth guest, a white woman, rented an Airbnb in Rialto, California. When they began to check out of the home, one of the guests, Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, noticed that a white female neighbor was nervously watching them from her lawn.
“Look over at that lady over there,” Marshall said to her friend, Donisha Prendergast. “She’s probably going to call the police.”
The group of friends were filmmakers visiting from Canada (Donisha is also the granddaughter of music legend Bob Marley). And in fact, Marshall’s suspicion was correct: The “Rialto Karen” did call the police, saying she was “scared” and that the three guests appeared to be stealing from the Airbnb (they were actually moving their luggage).
Marshall, who later depicted the experience in her 2020 short film Black Bodies, said that, once the police sergeant came, “the mood and the energy changed completely. He didn’t believe anything we were saying, he didn’t believe the Airbnb app that we’d shown, and he didn’t believe the landlord that we had called.”
Although they were eventually released “without incident” the group was detained for a prolonged period, ordered to put their hands in the air, asked if they were stealing and told a helicopter was tracking their movements before the ordeal ended.
Though there has been a wave of “Karen”-esque incidents in recent years, the phenomenon of policing Black bodies at the behest of white women isn’t new. Near the turn of the twentieth century, legendary anti-lynching activist and journalist Ida B. Wells led an ingenious campaign to pressure recalcitrant white suffragists to protect the lives of Black people being indiscriminately executed across the United States, particularly in the South.
In 1892, after three black businessmen were lynched in Memphis, Tennessee, Wells was spurred to action to confront an epidemic that accounted for 161 lynching deaths in that year alone. Wells had lived in Memphis for sixteen years, working as a teacher, co-owner, and writer for The Free Speech and Headlight newspaper.
Wells, however, was driven out of Memphis for demanding justice for her friend Thomas Moss, who had been lynched along with two other black businessmen, Calvin McDowell and William “Henry” Stewart, killed for opening a popular grocery store. Local white residents wanted to rid the city of “the black wench” for her publications against the lynchings. This is when Wells’s anti-lynching crusade began and, by 1893, she made her first trip to Britain in an attempt to put pressure on Americans. Wells felt that moral pressure from English-speaking Europe might influence the United States to seriously work to end this terrible pathology.
Though the majority of lynching victims were Black men, we also know from the work of Rosa Parks in the 1940s that Black women were often sexually assaulted without recourse. And through Bryan Stevenson’s Slave Memorial/Legacy Museum today, we also know that many Black women were lynched as well.
Unsurprisingly, the most common reason given for a lynching was the false accusation of the raping of a white woman (meanwhile, Black women were actually being indiscriminately raped by white men). In this climate, though an advocate for the vote herself, Wells found herself at odds with white women in the suffrage movement, because by the 1890s, many prominent suffragists were actively courting white Southern women, using inflammatory racist language to persuade them to join their cause after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 that gave Black men the right to vote ahead of women.
In particular, Frances Willard, the hugely influential president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (the largest women’s organization of the nineteenth century), regularly used racist tropes of marauding and lewd Black people to seduce her Southern audience toward the cause of women’s suffrage. Wells knew that Willard was her main obstacle to gaining traction in her anti-lynching crusade, and actively challenged her views that the vote shouldn’t extend to Black people.
In 1893, while both women were in Britain campaigning for their respective causes, Wells arranged to have a damning article quoting Willard in an 1890 interview with the New York Voice republished in the British journal, The Fraternity.
In the piece, Willard says “The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog shop [tavern] is its centre of power. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment.” In a response published days later, Willard elaborated “the best people I knew in the South [say Black people menace white women and children]. It is not fair that a plantation Negro who can neither read or write should be entrusted with the ballot.” A months long war of words in the press ensued.
In the United States Willard was framed as a woman of renown while Wells was painted as professionally incompetant, or a literal harlot, for daring to out the most famous woman in America as an unabashed racist. Despite numerous attacks and death threats, Wells won the battle once British Parliament sided with her cause alongside prominent editors, ministers, and professors launching the London Anti-Lynching Committee in 1894. But the struggles for Black women seeking both racial justice and voting rights would continue well past their white women counterparts gaining voting rights. Black people didn’t effectively get the right to vote until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. (The same Voting Rights Act that today has been systematically gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court ruling.)
The pitting of white women against Black people literally costs lives—whether through willful deception as with Carolyn Bryant Donham, or through the unbridled self-interest evidenced by Frances Willard, or anything in between that denies human dignity. As we look at this nation today, divided and fragile, white women must unequivocally decide whether they want a democratic republic alongside Black, brown, and Indigenous people, or a conspiracy-riddled country committed to maintaining white supremacy at all costs.