February 2020
White racial violence in America has never been a random collection of individual or unrelated crimes of passion against minorities. It has generally been driven and justified through insidious ideologies that paint whites as innocent victims and nonwhites as threatening and aggressive.
In her posthumously published autobiography, journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells put it plainly: to justify the extralegal torture and murder of black men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, apologists for the violence had to brand all black men as “moral monsters and despoilers of white womanhood.”1
Mind you, slandering an entire racial group isn’t just a matter of casual racism. The ideology was articulated and refined by high priests from the finest universities. Brown University sociologist Lester F. Ward, for example, concluded that blacks were driven by the “imperious voice of nature” to rape white women and thus “raise his race to a little higher level.”2 In the meantime, the University of Pennsylvania’s Daniel G. Brinton, considered one of the founders of American anthropology, argued that white women had no “holier duty” than to guard the purity of their race, while white men had no higher duty than to protect white women.3
Through her investigations, Wells discovered that the rise in lynching in the South wasn’t about rape at all. The supposed mass phenomenon of black men violating white women was, she famously wrote, a “threadbare lie.”4 Lynching was just a new means of controlling blacks at a time when they were becoming more economically competitive with whites. The fragility of white women, it turns out, was the weapons of mass destruction of its day.
But that isn’t the only time in American history that whites have wielded female virtue and victimhood to justify aggression against nonwhites. The practice is exclusive neither to the history of lynching of black Americans nor to the American South. Indeed, it is integral to the way white supremacy has always been enforced in America.
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The first woman in American history to have a statue erected in her honor was a symbol of virtuous violence against nonwhites.
In March of 1697, a Massachusetts-born Puritan named Hannah Duston was taken captive by Native Americans a week after giving birth to her twelfth child. Marched north for two weeks, during which time her newborn was killed by her captors, Duston and two other captives were left with an Indian family on an island located in what is now New Hampshire. With help from her fellow captives, Duston then killed and scalped ten Indians—six of whom were children—while they slept, then escaped, scalps in hand, in a canoe down the Merrimack River.
Back home, the Massachusetts General Assembly gave the escaped woman fifty pounds as a reward for the scalps. Cotton Mather, the most celebrated of Puritan ministers, wrote about Duston’s harrowing story no fewer than three times, making her the most famous woman of her day. Mather’s stories made clear that Duston’s murder of Indian children was justified by virtue of her having lost her own child as well as by the fact that she was beyond the boundaries—and laws—of her community. He compared Duston to Jael, an Old Testament heroine who saved the Israelites by driving a spike through the head of a sleeping enemy commander. The comparison further demonstrated that Duston’s violent acts were committed not just in her own defense, but on behalf of her people. The story, now a legend, thus allowed seventeenth-century Puritans to see their own violence against Native Americans as not only legitimate but virtuous.
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I first learned of Hannah Duston two years ago at a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. The hostess at an old-fashioned steak joint swore to me that one of her ancestors was famous for killing Indians.
No more than a month later, I was in a rental car heading up I-93 in Massachusetts on my way to see the surviving monuments erected in honor of a Puritan woman who died almost three hundred years ago. As a voluble, six-foot-three-inch-tall Mexican American man, I’m no stranger to the ways in which the fears of white women are wielded against nonwhite men and wanted to the see the archetypal symbol for myself. It was a little like ma- king a trip to the Rosetta Stone thinking that it would re- veal some truths about being big and brown in America.
The legend of Hannah Duston quieted down sometime in the eighteenth century, but it came roaring back in the 1820s. For the next six decades or so, the story of Duston’s bravery appeared in everything from children’s books to encyclopedias, U.S. histories to women’s magazines. By 1874, The Ladies Repository, a national publication of the Methodist Episcopal Church, declared that the story of Hannah Duston was “familiar to every school-boy.”5 The likes of Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Greenleaf Whittier all published versions and interpretations of her story.
Between 1861 and 1879, three statues of Duston were unveiled. Her legend reached full swing at a time when the United States was expanding westward and its pioneers were increasingly grappling with what was so inelegantly called “the Indian Problem.” When Duston killed Native American men, women, and children, University of Northern Iowa historian Barbara Cutter writes, “she represented an innocent nation defending itself against an evil threat. Her story could be used to morally justify American expansionism—both onto Indian lands and into the nation of Mexico.”6
Two of three Duston monuments still exist, one in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the town where Duston lived, and the other on the island north of Concord, New Hampshire, where she had been held captive. I circled around downtown Haverhill a few times before spying a nursing home with the unfortunate name of the Hannah Duston Healthcare Center. It was a cold Sunday in early March, and I felt like I had the city center to myself. I found the nearby statue decidedly imposing and to the point. Dressed in a long formal gown, her hair flowing over her shoulders, the figure of Duston stands righteously and threateningly. Her right hand holds a tomahawk at the ready, while her left points her index finger outward accusingly. It’s clear that whomever she’s about to whack deserves it.
The man who donated the statue in Haverhill in 1879 explained that the monument was not only meant to remind Americans of Duston’s “courage,” it was also intended to “animate our hearts with noble ideas and patriotic feelings.”7
After grabbing a quick lunch in Haverhill, I drove another hour into New Hampshire, about fifteen minutes north of Concord. I got out at a Park and Ride lot along the highway, next to a historical marker that lauded Duston as both a “victim” and a “famous symbol of frontier heroism.” The statue was not far off, on an island on the other side of a railroad bridge. Made of granite, with her nose apparently having been shot off, this 1874 monument to Duston is starker and more terrifying than the one in Haverhill. Her hair is flowing in the same way, but her neckline is much lower, as if she’s wearing an under- garment, thus accentuating her femininity. In her right hand, she holds a tomahawk by her side. In her left, she’s grasping a fistful of scalps at her waist that at first glance I thought was an upside-down bouquet of flowers.
In her insightful 2008 journal article “The Female Indian Killer Memorialized,” Cutter argued that the legend of Hannah Duston helped Americans to envision their national identity as female and to understand that the violence committed in her name was “feminine, and therefore justified, innocent, defensive violence.”8
But what Cutter failed to add was that this symbol of virtuous violence was as much a white racial ideology as it was a national one. It was wielded to control nonwhites not just beyond America’s expanding borders, but also within them.
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As the U.S. fought its last Indian wars and the frontier closed, Hannah Duston faded away. But the belief that white female virtue could be wielded against nonwhites would live on, as America now needed to teach the peoples its growing empire was absorbing to behave by the rules of their new superiors.
For the most part, the work of “civilizing” Native Americans, Mexicans in the borderlands, newly arrived immigrant groups, and colonial peoples in Asia and the Caribbean fell to white women. It was a position that many relished, not least because it was a source of rare political power and freedom.
So successful did women become as urban reformers, special government agents, settlement house leaders, and missionaries both in the U.S. and abroad that “woman as a civilizing force” became a popular “rallying cry” for early feminists.9 Suffragists often pointed to white women’s new roles as ambassadors—and enforcers—of white Protestant American culture as proof that white women deserved equal political rights to those of white men. This newfound social status, however, required white women to uphold America’s racial hierarchy and treat both nonwhite men and nonwhite women as inferiors. Taking on roles as civilization workers, writes University of Florida historian Louise Michele New- man, therefore “limited the critiques white women could offer of the racism and sexism within their own culture because in the end they had to acknowledge that patriarchy had been key to their own racial advancement.”10
This dynamic allowed white women to comfortably advocate for equality of the sexes for themselves while still upholding white supremacy. For feminists, it also led them to deflect their criticism of the patriarchal aspects of their own culture and place the responsibility for the oppression of women on the nonwhite men they were trying to civilize. As Newman writes in her rigorously argued book White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States, “white women often scapegoated the purportedly less enlightened men of ‘primitive’ cultures as the worse perpetrators of abuse.”11
Their growing professional clout among white men notwithstanding, white women sometimes expressed fear of being victimized by the nonwhite men they sought to elevate culturally. That’s hardly surprising, given that Anglo elites routinely characterized nonwhite males as preternaturally aggressive, hypersexual, or both. And, particularly during the height of lynching in the South, white female civilization workers also projected their fear of black men onto other nonwhite men they encountered. Even as white women were lauded for portraying the gentler side of American imperialism, their fear of nonwhite men helped maintain the racial order.
The politics of virtue and victimhood are alive and well at the start of the twenty-first century. Indeed, for some feminist—and other minority—activists the two are one and the same. But not everyone enjoys equal access to the status of victim.
Given their place in America’s racial hierarchy—below white men but above both nonwhite men and nonwhite women—white women are, to say the least, first among equals when it comes to minorities. Whether real or imagined, their fears are not only much more likely to be heard than those of other women, they’re also more likely to be weaponized.
That’s what Donald Trump is doing when he raises the specter of Mexican rapists to rally support for his anti-immigrant measures. It’s why so-called BBQ Becky and so many like her have become viral internet memes over the past few years. She’s the woman who called 911 to report a black family having a barbecue at a park in downtown Oakland, California. Righteous and confident while confronting the family, the complainant broke into tears when she talked to the police on the phone, then accused those she was harassing of threatening her. At the very least, what this spate of videos shows us is that plenty of white women feel disturbingly comfortable calling the authorities to resolve their grievances, however small, with nonwhite men. What are the chances that a black or brown man would call the cops on a white woman and assume they’d get a fair hearing, or a hearing at all?
In her 2019 book, White Tears/Brown Scars, Australian journalist Ruby Hamad advances the minority feminist argument that white entitlement is often masked by female victimhood and that nonwhites generally pay the price. American history certainly bears her out. There’s no greater symbol of that uncomfortable truth than Hannah Duston.
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1. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 71.
2. Lester F. Ward, Pure Sociology: A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society (London: The Macmillan Company, 1903), 53.
3. Daniel G. Brinton, Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography (New York: NDC Hodges, 1890), 287.
4. Ida B. Wells, “A Red Record,” in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 79.
5. Barbara Cutter, “The Female Indian Killer Memorialized: Hannah Duston and the Nineteenth-Century Feminization of Ame- rican Violence,” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 2 (2008): 14.
6. Ibid., 26.
7. Ibid., 23.
8. Ibid., 26.
9. Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 53.
10. Ibid., 8
11. Ibid.
(Hannah Duston grasping a fistful of scalps. Boscawen, New Hampshire. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez.)
