Black Lives Matter reveals a generation of damaged straight, white women

By Andrea Widburg, AMERICAN INSTITUTE

The Black Lives Matter movement and the subsequent riots by Antifa, the Democrat party’s domestic terrorist arm, have shown Americans what leftism is — an ugly combination of social and government coercion, racism, violence, and anti-Americanism. It’s also revealed that the American left has been using American blacks as a vehicle for political power without any regard for actually improving black people’s lives. Instead, the left destroys their communities and doubles down on damaging policies.

What few have pointed out, though, is the way BLM protests have revealed the damage that decades of leftist messaging have visited on straight, young, white women. To set the stage, here are some videos of the hysterical, young, white women who keep showing up in the front row of the Black Lives Matter movement, whether screaming at police, arguing with black people, rioting, or groveling:

Those videos are just a fraction of the footage showing frenzied white women taking the lead in BLM. They are deeply involved in this movement and in the ugliest way possible – and therein lies a sad tale of the leftist takeover of straight, white women.

The root problem is that these women are receiving mixed messages that would make even the strongest person go crazy. Beginning in high school, or even earlier, they’re told endlessly that they’re both victim and oppressor.

These mixed messages make straight white girls distinct from other students. White boys are told that they’re evil, toxic oppressors of both women and minorities. It’s an ugly message, but a consistent one. Boys lucky enough to have countervailing influences shake it off and become the men they should be. The boys who don’t have better influences, interestingly enough, become feminized, even if they’re not gay, as if trying to escape that awful toxic masculinity.

Meanwhile, everyone who is non-white and/or non-straight, whether male or female, or something else, is told that he, she, or it is a victim. White privilege, racism, homophobia, transgenderism, misogyny – all of them define how non-white and/or non-straight people suffer endlessly at the hands of straight whites.

And then there are the straight, white girls. On the one hand, they’re . . . well, white and straight. That means that they are evil oppressors who have benefitted unfairly from white privilege. In the morality play that is leftism, they owe the world bigtime. On the other hand, they’re women, which means men have victimized from time immemorial to the present.

That relationship with men is made more toxic by the fact that the young women are told simultaneously (a) that, as liberated women, they should be part of the hook-up culture and (b) that, as biological women, they’re the victims of all men’s rapacious, rapey sexuality. Given these mixed messages, it’s no wonder that these confused young women willingly sleep with the guy at night and then accuse him of rape in the morning. Others avoid this confusion by embracing a trendy lesbianism.

These same women are also betrayed by the leftist culture’s refusal to accept that motherhood is (a) biological destiny, and (b) worthy insofar as creating and raising a human being does give meaning to life.

Once upon a time, women had no life choice other than motherhood. In a pre-free market, pre-industrial world, if one ignores the infinitesimally small number of wealthy women, any search for meaning in life was overwhelmed by the endless struggle to survive. Women didn’t have time to compare their lives to men, especially because the men were also fighting for survival against the untamed forces of nature and other men.

With the industrial era and the development of free-market capitalism, though, things changed. In the West, ordinary people had time for leisure, contemplation, and the search for meaning.

That fundamental change led to the post-industrial, pre-modern cult of motherhood. Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, who lived in Rome in the Second Century B.C., leaped into prominence. People in the 18th and 19th centuries loved that, when catty friends asked why Cornelia wasn’t wearing jewels, she pointed to her sons and said, “These are my jewels.”

Today’s young women are told to focus on a career. In college, though, they take liberal arts classes that don’t prepare them for anything useful but do reinforce their status as both victims and oppressors. They leave college, uneducated and unskilled, which leads them to unfulfilling jobs. At those jobs, they work hard while dating frantically. When they find the right man, they get pregnant, drop out of the job market, and resent their husband’s careers. They take all the energy that was meant for their professional success and pour it into hyper-motherhood and activism. (See those raging Portland moms, above.)

None of this is healthy; it is, instead, tragic. Straight, white women hate themselves for being white; hate their men for being oppressors; hate their meaningless careers; and, even though they love their children, they hate the seeming meaninglessness of motherhood. This profound cognitive dissonance has finally found its most disturbing outlet in their shrill, existential screams on the streets of the Black Lives Matter protests.