Go After the Privilege, Not the Tits: Afterthoughts on Alexandra Wallace and White Female Privilege

• Can benefit from their association with white men as a wife, daughter, sibling, and mother.
• Have all their faults and flaws into perfect imperfections.
• Easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring women like them.
• Can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer any communications without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of their race.
• When told about our national language or about “civilization,” they are shown the people of their color made it what it was.
• Can turn on the television, open a newspaper, or go online and see people of their race widely represented.
• Can remain oblivious of the language and of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in their culture any penalty.
• Are feel free to exhibit a wide range of emotions, from tears to genuine belly laughter, without being told to shut up.
• Can use the “sheer fear of tears” to their advantage. (Sarah Jaffe calls this “White Lady Tears.”)
• Are not compelled by the rules of their gender to wear emotional armor in interactions with most people.
• Are allowed to be vulnerable, playful, and “soft” without calling their worthiness as a member of their race being called into question.
• Are seen as the embodiments of value and purity and, due to their phenotypes (especially if it’s close(r) to the blonde-and-blue-eyed ideal), be considered worthy of protection—including having nations go to war over this purity and piety–and instantly become the objects of universal desire.
• They are seen as the default and the ideal embodiment of physical beauty and sexual attractiveness.  This idea(l) is replicated, despite the efforts of visual diversity, in all form of media, from paintings to plays to porn.

But don’t just take my word for it. As a couple of people pointed out on fauxpologize with some nonsense about “not knowing what possessed her to do it.” To that, I’ll say here what I said in a comment section regarding this: “At some point, even the Devil would roll up and say, ‘That one’s on you, homie.’”

And what’s on her is her unchallenged white female privilege.  To me, Wallace’s tirade pivots on Jaffe calls the Sarah Palin Thing, “where you can say more outrageous shit because you’re a pretty white lady.”  Wallace visually presents as the physical and sexual ideal of the “all-American” blonde white girl-next-door doing something so not-PC, the “pretty white lady” who thinks she can get away with this verbalized racism—which Wallace attempts to get across as some sort of racial “truth-telling”–because it would be more “palatable.”  I also wonder if she thought—since she seems to deeply believe in some anti-Asian stereotypes, like they function in “hordes” bent on “taking over” her beloved UCLA with their familial “ways”—that Asian Americans wouldn’t push back because of the stereotype of their being “quiet.”   (She found out quite differently.)

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