Thoughts on the Amy Coney Barrett Confirmation Hearing
If ever there was a real time example of white women being complicit in our own oppression, Amy Coney Barrett is it. I don’t mean to say this as if she is only a victim in this scenario. She is making a conscious choice to participate in limiting reproductive rights. While she will surely participate in other decisions this (and the ACA) is her main platform for her nomination to the Supreme Court.
I know the environment where she comes from… that suburban religious world in the Midwest and South. She is playing out the fear, fear bred from messages of what it means to be a “bad woman.” A bad white woman, that is.
My Minnesota Baptist church youth group spent weeks on pro-life and anti-abortion. We even had a live ultrasound from one of our pregnant youth leaders. Coincidentally, this youth leader was also one of my mom’s former friends when she herself had attended that church youth group in high school. Her opinion of my mom changed when my mom got pregnant as she distanced herself from my mom’s predicament. She used to pull me aside for “chats” when she’d see me at church. She was sure that being the product of a rushed marriage and out of wedlock pregnancy meant I was super fucked up and distance from God.
Equating abortion to murder is really about threatening white women to not fail at our only valuable role in this world. The only thing we are taught to be valued for; producing more children. That’s why there’s no point in continuing to ask pro-life religious white people in the flyover country “well, if you’re pro-life then you must also care about kids at the border in detention centers, right?” Because they don’t. Well-being of children, even white children, is not the message or belief of the pro-life Christianity. It’s about making sure white women fulfill our role in the white supremacist structure and that’s it. And we’ve forgotten really how many people are raised in this world. The Midwest church crowd doesn’t drive the news stories or culture like New York or Los Angeles but this belief has been normalized in more communities than we want to acknowledge. Even my friends who have moved away from those beliefs still entertain the “shitty Trump Uncle” at dinner. It’s still an unquestioned normal that we have to tolerate that conversation; we whisper “they’re just crazy” while repeatedly dulling ourselves to the reality of what’s really being said and the violence of those beliefs. It is commonplace and part of our landscape.
Statements that appall us when we hear them on the news are just uncomfortable crazy comments when they come from our mother-in-law at Christmas dinner. I know that distance (and therapy) has given me the clarity on my early family life to be truly horrified when remembering the things the brainwashing that we laughed off as “weird” in church. Things like getting a live ultrasound in front of a bunch of awkward high schoolers to guilt us into hating pro-choice voters because they kill babies rather than examining the facts around abortion. But the reality is that most of those church mates grew up to align themselves with that crazy belief system, normalized in them after enough exposure.
