I’ve written on the topic of fear in a previous Substack and the ways that it indicates our distance from harm, even if we perceive it as being an immediate threat. As a person socialized into White womanhood, fear is a feeling I learned to be entitled to, one that empowers me to demand my safety with the reasonable expectation that I can find security and reassurance. These days I find myself regularly muttering agnostic prayers for my own reassurance that everything is going to be okay, even when I know there is none to be had. But I ask anyway with the demanding petulance of a two-year old because I am used to being alright, to having what I need, and feeling that I deserve those things.
To be fair to myself and everyone else working over-time to manage their heightened anxiety right now, there is a lot of reason to fear for our personal and our collective well-being: mass deportations, refusal of due process, the assassination of political leaders, and so, so much war. My reservoir of empathy is deep, but sometimes my need for personal safety is deeper. I’m learning to discern between the imagined fear I’ve been conditioned to cultivate as part of my gender and racial formation and the concrete, daily realities indicating a Democracy under significant stress. For so long, I believed that my emotional state needed to match my sphere of concern, that somehow my personal fear connected me to all the local, national, and international crisis that I was trying to bear witness to. But most of the time my desire to be part of a public feeling leaves me in a puddle of hopelessness because I fail to de-center the personal in favor of the collective.
In her book Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich builds a compelling argument about private well-being and the public good. Neo-liberal wellness culture has taught us that our well-being: emotional, mental, physical, are personal concerns we alone are responsible for. This, despite the fact that access to the health care needed to sustain well-being remains difficult to access due to a culture of greed that allows insurance companies to value profits over people. Maybe, Cvetkovich asks, what ails us isn’t a personal problem, but a legible response to daily encounters with white supremacy, misogyny, homo- and -transphobia, systemic forms of oppression that inform how we feel about being in a world that constrains empathy and rejects the common good.
Cvetkovich’s emphasis on “public feeling,” which I understand as a collective sense that “something is wrong” re-arranged my own ideas about depression, anger, and fear. Yelling at my television when an elected official poo-poos her constituents concerns about cutting Medicare and Medicaid doesn’t do much for me. But marching with a few hundred of my neighbors in my small town and yelling, “THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” now that shifts some energy.
Fear works the same. We *should* be very afraid of the abuses the current administration is meting out. Families, neighbors, co-workers are being disappeared by a federal agency with no due process by nameless and faceless enforcers who have a hefty quota to fill. While this is not the first time the US has teetered on the brink of fascism, the deep end is getting closer and closer every day. My instinctive response is to personalize this moment and my feelings around it, rather than acknowledge it as a shared burden. I do this because it is easier to regulate my own emotions than it is to take on the work of active resistance and sit with the enormity of what we are facing. The result is a litany of my own hopeless despair. How can I keep MY world the same? How can I keep MY peace? How do I assert MY need for safety?
Because I do not hold many of the identities of people who are currently targeted by the administration, I am able to wallow in despair and isolate myself from public engagement. My identities have been shaped around entitlements of physical safety and emotional well-being. At the same time, my vulnerability to gender-based discrimination and harassment (of which I’ve had plenty) and sexual violence (a fear inculcated in me from an early age) mark me as worthy of protection. As I argue in my forthcoming book After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America (Beacon Press, 2025) White womanhood is more than the experiences of White women. It is a cultural trope that has used the presumptions of White women’s vulnerabilities to justify excessive violence, including racial-terror lynchings, racial segregation, the colonization of Indigenous peoples at home and abroad, and more recently the targeting of transgender people and immigrants.
In her recent essay for The Flytrap, Nicole Froio interrogates the rhetoric of women’s safety and dismantles the myth of White women’s vulnerability. (The full article is behind a paywall, but if you value independent, feminist media, I highly recommend taking the plunge.) Froio’s analysis demonstrates how this tactic is used by authoritarians to empower law enforcement and the carceral state, “without actually solving the issue of women’s safety.” She goes on to say:
“But the issue of women’s safety, and white women’s safety in particular, has historically been coopted to destroy communities rather than transform them; to tear them apart before accusations of sexual violence and deviancy are truly investigated or verified. These moral panics around sexual violence almost always direct the public to look to places where violence is not actually happening.”
Between 1877 and the 1940s, over 4,400 Black people were murdered in public by White mobs celebrating of racial solidarity and supremacy. Yes, celebrating. It took only a rumor that one White woman was threatened by one Black man to summon the vigilantes. Ida B. Wells named this rumor “the lynching myth” because her investigation revealed that if an alliance between a White woman and a Black man existed during this time, it was most likely consensual. White racist fears of race mixing and Black political enfranchisement overwhelmed more logical explanations as to why a White women might be in the presence of a Black men.
In 1922 rumors of a Black man sexually assaulting a White woman precipitated the the destruction of the financially successful Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Though details of the encounter between Dick Rowland and Sarah Page were never confirmed, the rumors of her assault were enough to spark vigilante outrage when the incident was reported in the local newspaper. Within 24 hours a White mob had flattened 35-blocks of the once-thriving Greenwood neighborhood, while the Oklahoma National Guard apprehended 6,000 Black citizens. Over the course of the twentieth century, Tulsa became of town of racialized, economic disparity, with Black neighborhoods unable to recover from the destruction. Only this month, June 2025, has the city of Tulsa proposed reparations of $105 million to offset the damages which have continued to accumulate over decades of silence and neglect.
All because of a ubiquitous belief that sexual and physical threats to White women demand a violent and immediate response.
As a White woman who experiences sexual and physical vulnerability this gives me pause. As a researcher who studies sexual abuse in White churches, it raises questions. How do we responsibly assert the need to protect women, to believe women, and seek justice for women when our vulnerability has been exploited and used to justify this level of violence? How do we challenge the ways that our vulnerability is coopted by right-wing rhetoric and the carceral state to mete out violence in the name of protecting our freedom and security?
Froio offers some important tools for helping us address these questions:
“The use of women’s safety rhetoric to justify state violence does not cancel out that women’s safety is a very real problem. In fact, strengthening police powers makes violence against women objectively worse, since police routinely ignore red flags in cases of domestic violence, Black women are also victims of police brutality and police officers perpetrate domestic violence at a higher rate than the general population.”
The rhetoric of women’s safety is not about protecting women, but about furthering patriarchal, white supremacist, authoritarianism that thrives when women are forced into dependency by laws that restrict our right to escape abusive relationships, seek justice for sexual violence, and access abortion care. Froio’s analysis reminds me that even my own feminist commitments can be complicit in endorsing the carceral state that works against the thriving of Democracy and the safety of women.
“Abolitionist feminists have warned for years that liberal feminism’s support for incarceration and policing as a solution for women’s safety does not keep women safe; it actually makes society more unsafe for women. Incarceration and policing are often used to criminalize women’s attempts to escape their abusers, court proceedings to incarcerate perpetrators of sexual violence regularly retraumatize survivors, and now, an increasingly prohibitive legal landscape for seeking abortions is deploying the police and the state against people seeking reproductive health care.”
The feeling of fear in this moment is not a moral failure. And with historical and ethical grounding, we can know our fear with clarity and resist its exploitation by authoritarian leaders. Fear is not the only feeling having a public moment right now: anger, determination, and joy are regular features among the millions of people protesting ICE and a regime of intimidation that shows no signs of letting up. These public feelings are powerful, they elicit creativity and commitments to communal well-being that don’t just make me feel more safe and more empowered, but actually make us more safe and empowered. This is why we gather, why we chant in unison. We are casting a spell over ourselves and one another, fomenting hope for a time when fear cannot control us.
Notes:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/depression
https://afterpurity.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-about-fear-after-the-2024-election
https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america/