Why do some white folks ask what we should do, to be an ally, when a Black woman is being abused in public by a Black man?

This post is in response to a discussion over to Crunk Feminist Collective. You can read that post and the comments there first if you want, but it’s not necessary. But to do so, click on the title of that post just below:

On Black Men Showing Up for Black Women at the Scene of the Crime

The reason it’s not necessary is because white folks are asking questions there that white folks ask far too often in the wrong spaces: What should I do to be a good ally to people of color? Usually this assumes people of color exist to educate whites about how to be anti-racist/anti-sexist. And usually in contexts where people of color are not there to teach whites anything. (I mean, like not in a classroom with bell hooks as the professor teaching a course to people of color and whites on how to support one another across various political struggles.)

Too often, in PoC spaces or in conversations led by people of color about something awful that happened to someone, white comments become a white-centered distraction from the main issues. 

But related to the post above, I wonder to what extent the Brecht Center is a white-majority or white-run space, an academic space. I wonder how that contributed to the lack of response from the audience to Crunktastic being abused at a progressive political panel discussion, by a well-known Black male activist. My experience of white and class-privileged academic spaces is that there is an expectation that audiences remain passive witnesses to what’s going on (or down) onstage. That to do otherwise is to break the unwritten cultural rules of (non)engagement. I wonder if that’s part of this story. But there are always plenty of explanations for why folks don’t intervene on violence against women, including racist misogyny.

I’m making space here, at a white person’s blog, for some of that discussion. A white woman at CFC left a comment, which I’m excerpting:

I can’t pretend that the dynamics of my interactions with black women aren’t colored by our different races. I do not want to presume to act or speak for a black woman who is perfectly capable of acting or speaking for herself. Nor do I want to appear to be attempting to exert authority over a space for black people based on my white skin. It can be difficult at times to decide whether my intervention in a tense situation would be seen as welcome support or as hijacking. In this situation, I think the answer is clear (both from my own judgment and from the message of the post), but it’s not always.

Obviously, how a white woman would have felt/what she should have done should not be the center of the discussion here. What happened should be. But there seems to be a substantial discussion going on around that, and thus probably room for a thread or two on this point: that is, how SHOULD an ally best respond in this situation? There may actually be a different answer for other black men, for white women, for white men, etc.

The reason I’m copying and pasting it here is because she acknowledges this is a conversation that maybe shouldn’t happen there and then. And I agree. Other whites on that comments page appear to me to be making this about white liberal guilt rather than about how we intervene when we witness violence occurring right before us in social spaces.

Should whites respond differently to violence happening when the aggressor is a Black man and the person harmed is a Black woman? Are the responsibilities of a white ally to a Black woman facing male supremacist hostility from a Black man different than the responsibilities of an ally to a white woman facing male supremacist hostility–from a white or Black man, or another man of color?


Beyond, “Don’t do something racist”, I don’t think so. 


But it is, unfortunately, the case that we whites can be confused about what it is to be racist.


One way racism shows up is whites thinking that intervening when a Black woman is being abused by a Black man is in and of itself racist. When, in fact, not intervening is the act of racism, and sexism.

This was going to be my reply at CFC but I’ve decided to put it here instead and link to this post over there.