They Sewed the Robes

White men wore the white cloaks and the pointy white hats, but white women sewed them, washed them, and ironed them.

This is not a metaphor. Historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers, in *They Were Her Property*, documented that white women made up about 40% of slave owners in the American South. They were not passive inheritors. They were active participants: buying, selling, managing, profiting. They attended the slave markets in New Orleans. They negotiated prices. They inflicted punishment. They built wealth on Black bodies and called it household management.

—

When Charlie Kirk was shot last year, I posted about the grift of Erika Kirk’s public grief. What followed was a flood of angry white women clutching their pearls.

She shouldn’t be judged. You’re horrible. She’s grieving. How dare you?!

A display of the only power conservative structures reliably offer women.

In a deeply patriarchal system, your options for identity are limited. The faithful wife. The devoted mother. The caretaker of the home and the mission. Independent ambitions — especially goals not aligned with the husband’s purpose — are dismissed or punished.

But there is one role that remains above criticism. One position that instantly grants moral authority, mobilizes resources, silences opponents, and turns personal suffering into political power.

The Exalted Victim.

When Erika Kirk became a widow, she reached the highest position a woman could attain in her world. Her grief was channeled by the movement. Her suffering became evidence that the enemy was real, the cause was just, and the fight had to continue. To criticize her was to attack a martyr’s widow. To question her was to reveal yourself as morally bankrupt.

That’s not grief. That’s infrastructure.

This is what white feminism has always done: take the language of liberation and use it to protect proximity to power. It centers white women’s comfort, feelings, and awakening while treating the experiences of women of color as secondary, supporting material, things to address later, once the real work is done. It is gatekeeping disguised as solidarity.

And it operates on the same belief as the Exalted Victim: that white women’s pain is the most visible, the most worthy of protection, and the most politically advantageous. Not because it’s true. Because the system was built to see it that way.

This dynamic isn’t just at the level of national politics. It’s a texture; how you move through the world every day. You practice patience until it costs you something.

All the while, you see yourself as the rational one, the balanced one, the one who made an effort.

You say, I just want a conversation. I’m just asking questions. You’re so angry. I’m being silenced!

You have constructed an identity entirely through the male gaze — and within that perspective, the Exalted Victim is the ultimate. She cannot be wrong. She cannot be held responsible. She is justified because of her injury.

The MAGA women now ‘waking up’—posting tearful videos about finally seeing Trump for who he is after voting for him three times—do the same thing. They center themselves. They perform their revelation. They describe their dawning awareness in the language of courage, as if the people who warned them aren’t still living inside the consequences they helped create. And they demand their arrival be met with warmth, welcome, and careful handling. They say, explicitly, they don’t want to be shamed. No reckoning with who got hurt.

Just: Witness my transformation, and be gentle.

The circumstances of white privilege change. The structure remains the same.

Speaking from personal experience, I am a first-generation immigrant. My family comes from Cuba. Before the 2024 election, I tried to make my closest white friends understand what was at stake — not just in theory, but for me, my community, and immigrants across the country. I shared the death threats I’d received. I explained what my work with women meant to me. I begged them to see that this was not just a rhetorical exercise.

They didn’t believe me. They parroted Russian talking points. They claimed both sides were the same. They called me too emotional, too reactive, like a misguided child who needed to calm down.

When I ended the friendship after months of honest conversations, they told me I was crazy, that I’d done something terrible, and that they were the real victims.

Of course they did.

When your sense of identity is filtered through the approval of power — when your worth depends on proximity to the right man, the right cause, or the right victimhood — losing a friendship becomes an attack. And the person who walks away becomes the aggressor.

Additionally, I don’t dye my hair. I’ve embraced my grey. I am a woman with opinions, presence, and a refusal to shrink to make others comfortable. Conservative white women often tell me I’m too much—too angry, too unlikable, too unrelatable. Why do you have to be so aggressive? They criticize my appearance, my tone, my volume—basically, they want me more palatable, more deferential, more like someone who knows her place.

They police what we cannot control. A woman who refuses to diminish herself is, in their view, a threat.

Those white women in the slave markets of New Orleans weren’t anomalies. They were participants in a system that empowered them by oppressing others. They ranked second, but not last. That reality has never gone away. It just changes disguise.

Today, that looks like voting to strip other women’s rights while calling themselves a feminist, like slick trad-wife marketing, and defending a grieving widow’s political pivot while ignoring what the movement she’s rallying for will do to her neighbors. It’s performing an awakening on social media and asking not to be judged for how long it took.

It’s sewing the robes and insisting they don’t know what they’re for.

White women have been the unseen backbone of white supremacy, not just in history, but now in their wine clubs, comment sections, friendship groups, and voting booths. You have carried water for a system that also seeks to diminish you. You have policed each other into compliance and called it love.

And when the cost finally arrives—when what you enabled turns against you, or when someone you couldn’t dismiss finally walks away—you reach for the only tool you’ve always had. You become the victim.

You’re really skilled at it. You’ve been practicing for a long time.

—

If you’re still reading, I’ll assume you want more than absolution, and you’re interested in what’s actually required:

• Stop centering your awakening. Your tears about what you finally understand are not the point. The people who tried to tell you — who lost jobs, relationships, safety, citizenship, and bodily autonomy while you were still deciding — they are the point. Your awakening isn’t an endpoint. It’s the beginning.

• Get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. The system you’ve relied on your whole life has given you a certain kind of social currency — being agreeable, reasonable, and non-threatening. Allyship will cost you that currency. You might be called a traitor. You could lose friendships. You’ll say what nobody wants to hear. That discomfort isn’t a sign that something’s wrong. It’s a sign that you’re finally doing something right.

• Stop asking for gentle treatment. You don’t get to determine the terms of your own accountability. When a woman of color, an immigrant, a queer person, or a trans person tells you that your silence, your vote, or your “both sides” rhetoric caused harm, you don’t get to negotiate how they deliver it. You listen. You believe her. You sit with it even when it hurts.

• Put your body into it. Not just a profile picture. Not a repost. Your real presence, your genuine resources, your authentic voice in the rooms where decisions are made. Proximity to white male power is the one thing you possess that others don’t. Use it to open doors, not to guard them.

• And finally: this is not about being a good person. ‘Good person’ is not the goal. The goal is whether the people most harmed by the systems you’ve upheld can trust you, not with your feelings, but with your actions. Trust is built slowly, in the opposite direction of every instinct the patriarchy trained into you.

You were taught to perform, manage perception, and make yourself acceptable to those in power.

Unlearn it.

Not for applause. Not for redemption. Because the world is on fire, and you’ve been standing close enough to the heat to matter, but only using that position to stay warm.