The Most Pernicious Trope

The Trope That Just Won’t Die: They’re After Our Women and Children!

On June 17th, 2015, Dylan Roof walked into the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina during the weekly bible study and murdered nine of its parishioners consisting of elderly men and women and small children. He was said to have told them before the massacre, “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country.”

In other words, he was killing to protect the sexual purity of white women, an example of “benevolent sexism” which claims the bodies of white women for the use and exploitation of white men only. This belief has been used as an excuse in nearly every atrocity perpetrated against a marginalized group in the US for the past four centuries and has often been used to erode their rights, as well. That men (and sometimes women, I guess) of marginalized groups are out to steal white women from white men and sexually abuse their children is one of bigotry's most pernicious tropes.

When Trump began his run for President in 2015, he started off with attacks on Mexican immigrants, claiming they were rapists, and that the American borders needed to be better secured to protect women. In 2017 sixteen states passed laws designed to restrict bathroom and locker room use, ‘…on the basis of a definition of sex or gender consistent with sex assigned at birth or “biological sex.”’

( https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/-bathroom-bill-legislative-tracking635951130.aspx )