White woman syndrome

White woman syndrome or WWS is a pattern of social behaviour where racist and sexist factors typically intersect to create a narrative in which white women are positioned as damsels in distress who must be rescued above all things.

Particularly noticeable in American media is the missing white woman syndrome, where news coverage of missing persons lavishes fetishistic attention on white missing women or white female victims of crime, to the exclusion of other missing persons and crime victims, especially women and men of colour.

White woman syndrome in general can be observed in discussions of race and racism, where women of colour are not merely ignored in favour of white women, but the damsel in distress narrative also serves to completely detract from the subject of racism, replacing it with a racist narrative wherein women of colour are depicted as brutes for whatever they may have said or done, on the excuse that it has been hurting white women's feelings, regardless of context. The pretext of the white woman's hurt feelings can even be set aside to allow the discussion to be diverted to focus on the "problem" of women of colour's alleged rudeness and misbehaviour, thereby completely obfuscating racism as it pertained to the original discussion, and aggravating racist dynamics by making further attacks on women of colour's character and persons.

This tactic is part of the oppressive strategy of distracting from oppression by focusing on the oppressor's feelings and opinions. WWS unites racist demonisation of people of colour and idealisation of white people with the aspect of sexist ideology that glorifies weakness and fragility as feminine characteristics -- which only matter in white women.

The fetishisation of the white woman as victim is also directly used as a pretext for the oppression of people of colour and for the lynching of black men by white men; WWS serves the racist propaganda of the myth of the black rapist; whereas inversely the rape of women of colour by white men is underreported and accorded little to no importance.

See also:

• RaceFail 09
• white women's tears

References

External Links

• Missing white woman syndrome entry on Wikipedia
• Missing white woman syndrome entry at TV Tropes.org
• [1] discussion in the livejournal community Advanced Placement Racism

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