thinking about how my mom spent like 2 years getting downright vicious about the houseless folks who were camping in the woods past her house (to the point of getting a BB rifle that looked like a real fucking gun to threaten them with when they crossed in front of her house??) and justifying it with White Lady Fear a la “what if one of them does something to me! I am but a helpless white woman living all alone!!” and like…
y'all, she terrorized those people. every single time she saw someone outside, she was riling her dog up to bark, waving a gun in their faces (that for all intents & purposes they certainly thought was real), yelling at them, calling the cops (thank god the 2 rural-ass cops didn’t actually give a shit), etc.
and she justified it with fears of womanly fragility & inability to defend herself, and I believe how afraid she was! she talked about fearing they would break into her house at night and sexually assault her, and I believe she was legitimately afraid of that. she’s been victimized in many of the ways she was afraid of being victimized by them.
the thing is that it doesn’t matter how real the fear is.
nothing ever happened, nobody ever tried to threaten her, nobody tried to break in, nobody even approached her. she initiated every single interaction. when she told them not to go through her yard, they did the best they could to respect that without giving up their camping spot; which was on someone else’s property, who didn’t mind them being there (not to mention one of them is actually indigenous to this specific land!)
she was a thousand times more threatening to those people than they ever were to her, but her fear of them was still real. and that’s exactly what made her so dangerous.
I need cis women to internalize this ASAP. your fear is real, and it can and will hurt others. your fear is real, and it is harmful. your fear is real, and your hurt is not deserved, and you still need to grow & heal & prevent it from causing harm.
this is starting to get notes, so I just want to add:
this woman is bright & bubbly, she’s pretty and young-looking, she’s charming & charismatic. she’s smart! she’s successful in tech! she’s got a nose ring and tasteful tattoos and she dyed her hair blue, she had an undercut for a bit, she’s fashionably androgynous, she’s got queer friends and she’s An Ally™! (hell, she’d likely be queer herself, if not for the gen X “I don’t like labels” brainrot and internalized misogyny)
I worry that when I describe this side of her, people are envisioning a very unsympathetic caricature of a rural woman who lives alone and waves guns at trespassers. I don’t want yall to picture a stereotypically Bitter Old Hag and distance yourselves from the possibility that you could know someone like this, or that you yourself could ever be this person to someone else.
my mother is on feminist tiktok, she asks me questions about puberty blockers so she can defend trans people to her friends, she shares tiktoks about ADHD with me (and has even shared her adderall with me when the pharmacy has run out of mine. in minecraft.)
she is also deeply conservative in many, many ways, and her fear- which, again, is often justified by her real-life experiences- lies directly at the root of that bigotry.
your fear is not better, purer, or less harmful than hers is.
I would like to add that it is okay to be afraid when the unknown is pressing against your safe space. And it is okay to make your space safer by adding more locks, alarms, etc.
What is not okay is going out of your way to terrorize others because you think that makes you safer. It is not making you safer. You are putting others (who are actual victims of shitty circumstances) in danger.
I appreciate the sentiment & attempt to help folks understand, but I think you missed my point. This post doesn’t outline a “this is okay” and “this is not okay” for a reason. I did that on purpose!
What I want people to take away from this is that they should interrogate their fear. Their fear may be valid, their fear may be acted upon in benign ways, but that doesn’t mean it’s morally pure or above scrutiny.
My mom doesn’t think of her fear as “fear of homeless people”, but that’s what it is. There was no good reason for her to feel differently about her homeless neighbors than she did her housed neighbors who, if anything, lived closer to her home. There was no good reason for her to think differently about her homeless neighbors walking past (often not even really through) her yard than she did the rich guy who walked through her yard to mow the grass of the property he owned that bordered it.
But she thought of it as “fear of the unknown near her safe space”, even though those other people were just as- if not moreso- unknown to her.
We all have blindspots like this. All of us. And learning how to avoid acting on our feelings in ways that harm others is a great first step, but that’s not the point of this post.
Fear is a core tool of white supremacy. It is a core tool of all bigotry. Your* fear might be entirely justified and based on real experiences, and it isn’t my place to tell you how to feel. But you still need to interrogate it. Even when it comes from your own experiences of oppression, it is still dangerous. You need to be aware of that, and you need to pay attention to it, and you need to tend to it.
I’m not telling anyone what to do; it should be obvious that waving a gun in a homeless person’s face is fucked up. I’m telling you a story about a woman whose fear of strange men harming her led her to threaten marginalized people with violence because I want you to think about how your very real, very justified fears might drive you to do harm and perpetuate systems of violent oppression, even without realizing it.
No, it’s not hurting anyone to lock your doors, and oftentimes it’s the correct and reasonable thing to do. But if you’re stoking your fear when you do so, you need to take a step back and interrogate that feeling. I don’t care if you keep locking your door or not. I’m not asking you to stop; if anything, you should keep locking it. I’m asking you to be introspective, and I’m asking you to grow.
*“You” is the royal you here, I’m assuming you’re on the same page generally & just kinda missed my point up top!