Headlines of top results for “white men”:

1. “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.”

2. “What’s Happening to Failing White Men”

3. “Race, States, and the Mixed Fate of White Men”

4. “Angry White Male - Wikipedia”

5. “White Men Talking”

6. “How to Show White Men That Diversity and Inclusion Efforts Need Them”

7. “Angry White Men: American Masculinity and the End of an Era” (Amazon page)

8. “White Men on Race: Power, Privilege, and the Shaping of Cultural Consciousness” (Amazon page)

9. “Despite what you may have heard, no one’s trying to make white men feel guilty for being white men”

Result #1 is a NYT article written by a black woman with a white husband. She is amazingly calm and empathetic in her interactions with the white men: “Did he understand I was joking about white male privilege? It didn’t seem so. The red crept up his neck into his cheeks, and he looked shy and pleased at the same time. He brought both hands up to his cheeks as if to hold in the heat of this embarrassing pleasure.” The next two links are both about how white men are in trouble (rising mortality, not doing as well as white women in education, employment, etc.)

Headlines of top results for “white women”:

1. “I hope white women will help us change America in 2020. But so far I'm not counting on it.“

2. “White Women: 3 Ways To Sustain Anti-Racism As A Lifelong Commitment”

3. “Are White Women Finally Waking Up?”

4. “How White Women Can Be Better Black Lives Matter Allies”

5. “White Women: We Must Stop Being Amy Cooper”

6. “Dear White Women”

7. “How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror”

8. “Working Class White Women Are Turning on Trump”

9. “When White Women Cry: How White Women's Tears Oppress Women of Color”

These links are all more topical for our current moment (no Amazon pages or Wikipedia entries). Result #1 is also an essay written by a black woman, but it is much harder on white women than the NYT essay was on white men. Not saying the author is wrong about the failures of white feminists, but it’s interesting to contrast the two articles, given that they are both the top search result for each query.

We are going through some very fast and dramatic changes right now. The conviction of Harvey Weinstein, the death of Jeffrey Epstein, and the choice to disbelieve Biden’s accuser and nominate him anyway - all of these events have brought the MeToo era to a close, or at least taken the media’s focus away for now. The coronavirus shutdown has driven many women from the workforce:

https://time.com/5851352/women-labor-economy-coronavirus/

Mothers are in particular danger of being forced to quit their jobs to supervise and homeschool children:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/working-motherhood-covid-19-coronavirus-1023609/amp/

These trends hurt women of color the most, but they affect women across racial boundaries. Yes, even white women.

White women should, as white people, be aware of their white privilege and fight racism. I’m not saying they shouldn’t get criticized. But when white women get singled out AS WOMEN, I notice all the old misogynist tropes come out to play. You can now be a good liberal and say “Women lie and ruin men’s lives,” “women manipulate people with their tears,” “we won’t make the world any better by putting women in power,” “women need to shut up and get out of the way” - as long as you put “white” in front of “women.”

Who is benefitting the most from making white women the face of white supremacy? I’d say white men. Most white people have entirely white social networks. Even 78% of white Democrats! That’s not much better than white Republicans (81%):

https://www.prri.org/research/poll-race-religion-politics-americans-social-networks/

So the average white guy spends a lot more time associating with white women than he does with people of color. Wouldn’t it be convenient for him if he could call these women “Karens” and “white feminists,” and basically take advantage of their newly lowered spot in the progressive pecking order?

I feel like there’s nowhere I can ask these questions without getting dog piled, and I’m really nervous in case I’m just being a defensive white person and trying to claim a slice of victim pie. I hope I’m not. I started thinking about this stuff after a liberal white man butted into a conversation I was having with a female friend and called me a Karen.

Check out this Medium article attacking Lean In feminism:

https://gen.medium.com/the-end-of-the-girlboss-is-nigh-4591dec34ed8

And this similar Atlantic article about the demise of the “girlboss”:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/613519/

The Medium article observes (mostly approvingly) that “feminism is out, anti-racism is in. Journalist Phoebe Maltz Bovy observes that the culture pivoted from championing a self-empowerment mode of feminism that’s all about assertiveness and persistence, to deriding Karen, a meme that can stand in for a racist white woman, an entitled white woman, or really any “woman who makes too much of a fuss, or makes a fuss for an inappropriate reason.” The Atlantic article also takes a huge dump on female ambition under the guise of chiding white privilege: “Slotting mostly white women into the power structures usually occupied by men does not de facto change workplaces, let alone the world, for the better, if the structures themselves go untouched.” And more brazenly: “Making women the new men within corporations was never going to be enough to address systemic racism and sexism, the erosion of labor rights, or the accumulation of wealth in just a few of the country’s millions of hands”. Note that it’s just “women” now, not even “mostly white women.” So women are not supposed to sully their pure hands with capitalism or power until the world has been remade. Men can keep running everything until that happens tho.