“These White [Wo]Men Are Dangerous”: A Brief Look at White Women’s Violence in Entertainment

There is a line, it seems, to discussing racism in pop culture, and for many years, the line has been drawn around white women.

While watching Awkward Black Girl in 2011, aghast at the white Boss Lady wearing cornrows, I started thinking about the representation of white women’s racism in media. It, like white women ourselves, is often protected. This is evident in the real world, of course: white women are pros at deflecting accusations of racism with profusions of “we’re all women,” and somehow the face of racism ends up as an elderly man with few teeth. White women — particularly young white women — almost always tend to come up clean, as innocence and white womanhood are perceived as being synonymous, and this specific phenomenon of whiteness has traditionally been reflected in mainstream television and film. Obviously this is the case in white-created stories — we could start at Gone with the Wind and work our way through nearly a century of representations of benign white womanness, but it would be a tome — but also in media geared toward Black and Brown audiences. There is a line, it seems, to discussing racism in pop culture, and for many years, the line has been drawn around white women in a Hocus…