America's contract to protect white women has always been tenuous

[CousinIT]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/feb/01/white-supremacy-women-renee-good-ice-killing

ICE’s killing of Renee Good has revealed how the state will only defend those who uphold a white racial order. A 1915 film points to the origins of this social pact

. . .

White women’s victimhood holds sacred status in the mainstream American imagination. Cowboy westerns where white women were rescued from “savage” Natives spun the genocidal project of “manifest destiny” into a classic image. Across film and television, setting the scene for the dangers of inner cities relies on cliched encounters between young Black male street “criminals” and the lone unassuming white woman who is terrorized by them while walking at night. These made-for-TV mythologies are a bulwark of pro-law enforcement propaganda. Because of that, the right’s excessive assault on Good’s life and legacy was almost required. White supremacy demands that even white women be vilified if their deaths challenge the narrative that the government’s brute force is always deployed in the interest of whiteness. The state-backed messaging that Good was the wrong kind of white woman, therefore, was a foregone conclusion.

Good did not properly defer to the white male authority of armed agents occupying her neighborhood, nor was she adequately afraid of living in a multiracial inner city. (She was stopped by ICE just blocks away from the intersection where a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd.) Worse, Good was insufficiently grateful for the masked men in tactical gear sent there to defend her from Somali immigrant bogeymen. State violence wielded as protection for white women has long been a touchstone of white racial domination. The circumstances of Good’s death, then, complicate – and at worst, invalidate – that narrative.

In every epoch of the American project, the expansion of white state power, the justification of land theft, and the exploitation of Black and brown people have been given moral cover with stories about defending white women against the threat of outsiders.That narrative is foundational to the righteous tinting of white supremacist violence, and a decisive reason why the assault on Good’s character was so swift after her killing by the state. But long before this messaging about white women’s need for protection was hammered by Fox News talking heads and far-right streamers, more than a century ago, this propaganda was fueled by the silver screen. One of Hollywood’s most celebrated sagas – the blockbuster film that made white America fall in love with the movies – was the basis for this enduring racist iconography.

In 1915, white moviegoers in Minneapolis and hundreds of other US cities queued for blocks, having paid an unprecedented $2 for the theatrical release of Birth of a Nation. The Confederate-sympathizing silent drama was as much a landmark for cinematic innovation as it was for reigniting a reign of racial terror across the country. The picture fictionalized the outcome of the civil war to suggest what would have happened if the newly freed Black population seized government control of the reunited states. Based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, a former college roommate of then sitting president Woodrow Wilson, and directed by DW Griffith, the film laments the loss of what it deems the bygone halcyon days of slavery by dramatizing the horror and chaos of a country that allows Black participation in American democracy.

In this film’s alternate depiction of Reconstruction – the short-lived period between 1865 and 1877, in which Black freedmen were elected in record numbers to local, state and national office (including 16 Black members of Congress) – the federal government is overrun by rapacious, ravenous and uninhibited Black men. Portrayed in minstrel blackface by white actors, their political and social gains are motivated solely by their marauding lust for white women. The only white women featured as principals are daughters of a southern slaver family, and their character arcs are wholly motivated by their efforts to resist Black men’s sexual advances. In a culminating action sequence, one of the sisters jumps to her death rather than having her virtue sullied by the Black predator giving chase. The scene flashes to an intertitle that reads: “For her who had learned the stern lesson of honor … we should not grieve that she found sweeter the opal gates of death.” . . .

[JI7]

1. It's misogyny and more about protecting what they see as their property

from non whites.

This is why there is so much hatred against people like Hillary Clinton .

[CousinIT]

2. Yes, and all liberal women. They are not sufficiently..

....afraid of men, not sufficiently dependent, not sufficiently meek or obedient to the patriarchy.

I've always said the Republican Taliban view women as state-owned breeding livestock/male service units. NOT human beings but rather property - machines.