Why I’m Scared Of White Women

By Jayy Dodd

White women have weaponized their fear, and Black men suffer for it.

Living most of my life as a Black boy, raised by Black women, I was instilled with an appreciation and respect for women. I was never taught there was something a woman could not do, nor was there anything I should not be expected to do as a boy. Gender equality never felt like a hard thing to wrap my head around. But in the popular conversation, gender equality and feminism are so geared toward white sensibilities that people like me are not only marginalized as allies, but actively endangered.

In short, though I’ve always supported gender equality, I find myself scared of white women.

In her book Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, Black feminist scholar Beverly Guy-Sheftall writes: “The history of American feminism has been primarily a narrative about the heroic deeds of white women.” The Suffragettes, some of American feminism’s first historical icons, found coalition by excluding Black women from their movement in order to make their demands for justice more appealing. In a contemporary context, notable white feminists are consistently absent when Black women face misogyny under the public gaze (see: the white cast of Ghostbusters staying publicly silent…