White women participated in racialized sexual torture, contradicting their exempt status.

Evidence

If we accept these premises, where are the women? In Claude Mackay’s poem about lynching, they throng to look, an eager part of the crowd. Women are the bearers of the white phallus’s meaning, Weigman explains, and Baldwin makes clear that the sheriff’s wife must answer his call. Women express white male power. They are its conduits. Black women must confirm with their bodies that it is white women who are the coin of the realm. … Optimistically and ahistorically, Pinar opines that the major difference between white men and white women was that the latter did not sexualize race: ‘White women were – are – often awful to Black women, but they didn’t track them, strip them, sexually torture and mutilate their bodies, keeping parts as souvenirs.’ They watched, however, as Black people were lynched in their name, made the picnic baskets, kept the photos and treasured the souvenirs, and, in slavery and its aftermath, developed their own gender-specific cruelties. At Abu Ghraib, they also tortured and sexually humiliated Arab men. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 181

Categorization

• XREF: Directly continues the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ and gender-role threads in the reader’s existing work on how women perform and police race.
• DEEPTHINKING: Undercuts the common scholarly framing that white women were passive witnesses to lynching by showing their active role in racialized sexual violence, dissolving a comforting historical exemption.