When Amy Cooper pointed her finger at Chris Cooper saying, with cell phone in her other hand, “I am going to tell them (the police) that an African-American man is threatening my life.”, a crystallization of decades and centuries of ghosts that have haunted this country came into sharp focus. The weaponization of white womanhood is so old. By both white women and white men. The “virtuous victim narrative“, that while largely created by white men, has been internalized and wielded by white women for so long against men of color. It was forged in the origins of this country with waves of genocidal expansion across the west and the popular literature of “captivity narratives” that presented white settler women as victims of Native American men, justifying the “defensive” violence and protective heroism of white settler men. Often the stated “reason” for lynching of Black men during the Jim Crow era was that they assaulted a white woman. The frame of “saving” white women from non-white men has worked to rationalize and perpetuate racist violence for centuries. 

This story is so entrenched, and refuses to die in the face of reality and history. So entrenched that it may come forth in a moment of fear or anxiety and seem like truth. Millions of people have watched the video of Amy Cooper completely in its grip, speaking through her, using her identity to bring down structural violence on Chris Cooper, knowing she would be presumed innocent and him presumed guilty in the eyes of the police. An institution that has its origins in slave patrols. To be immediately followed by the horrific murder, the lynching in broad daylight and on camera, of George Floyd, there is zero ambiguity about what the most nightmarish consequences are. The relationship between words and actions. Between identity and institution. Between history and the present. Between two people named Cooper.

How do folks who identify or present as white and female, (dis)identify with this one white woman, her words and actions? What is ours to do, in this moment and ongoing? How do we engage in the continual uprooting of this story, of white men saving white women from men of color? How do we work to dismantle the foundations of white female virtuous victimhood, so that it can no longer be wielded as weapon? How can we break down the othering polarization of seeing racist people “over there” and not avert our gaze from white liberal racism and its chronic harm? What can centered accountability look like? These are questions we keep asking and living into, with many answers. 

Some resources for reflection at this time:

• It looks like Amy Cooper is a liberal, That’s important.
• 5 Racist Anti-Racism Responses “Good” White Women Give to Viral Posts
  • This is a valuable and rough mirror to look into – a powerful breakdown that gets to the heart of the compulsion to respond in certain ways and what the problems are with those responses. 
• I’m White and I’m Outraged by Ahmaud Arbery’s Murder. Now What?

This annotation below of Amy Cooper’s statement is by Kelly Miller, with this invitation: “Dear White People – It is possible to engage in self-reflection and to be accountable when we cause harm. It is possible to shed our habits of white supremacy and colonization, our habits of domination, extraction, and violence, beginning with ourselves. Let’s reconnect to our spirit, to our own humanity and to the humanity of others.”