White women have historically benefited from white supremacy

The argument

White women have a vested interest in white supremacy because it benefits them. During the slavery period of continental Africans and their descendants in the United States, the household was the primary domain of white women who were married to white slave masters. Slave mistresses set out to “civilise” enslaved black women whom they forced to cook the family’s food, and act as handmaids for the white children. Black men accused of raping white women were often punished without ever going to trial. This includes the 1955 killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till where he was accused of whistling at a white woman - a fact she has since admitted to be a lie. Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacy during the first presidential debate fits into this pattern. Women who have benefited from white supremacy know that Trump does not condemn the belief.

Context

White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and should therefore dominate them. It has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and was a key justification for colonialism.

Premises

Counter-arguments

White supremacy, and white men in particular have stood in the way of gender equality. White men are twice as likely as non-white men and white women to own guns. Many white women in the past were defined by their relationship with men, and from the perspective of men and were taught only how to care for their husbands and raise (white) children.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The historical material is largely accurate — the household role of slaveholding women, and the accusation in the Emmett Till case since acknowledged as false — but it establishes that a system conferred relative advantage on a group, not that its present members hold an interest in preserving it. Group history does not transfer as motive to individuals, and the same record includes white women in abolition, in the anti-lynching campaigns and in the civil rights movement. [Rejecting P2] Reading a refusal to make a particular statement in a particular debate as continuity with a nineteenth-century structure is an inference across a very long gap. Other explanations were offered for the exchange at the time and the premise does not engage them; more to the point, it never connects the refusal to any policy that would deliver the benefit the first premise describes. [Rejecting P3] The final step attributes a motive to voters and then treats their vote as evidence of it, which is circular. Survey work on the actual voting of white women points to party identification, religion, education and marital status as the operative variables — and the counter-argument's point stands unanswered, that the structure being described also constrained the group said to benefit from it, which is a poor foundation for a claim about where their interest lies.