The New Republic’s Chloe Angyal: Let’s Blame the Charleston Massacre on the “Concept of White Women”

Leave it to the new New Republic to come up with the weirdest take on the Charleston massacre ever:

We cannot talk about the violence that Dylann Roof perpetrated at Emanuel AME last Wednesday night without talking about whiteness, and specifically, about white womanhood and its role in racist violence. We have to talk about those things, because Roof himself did. Per a witness account, we know that he said: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.” “Our” women, by whom he meant white women….

There is an important distinction between white women, a people, and the concept of white womanhood—one that holds that a white woman is the best thing you can be in America after a white man, and that it is the responsibility of white men to protect your virtue at any and all costs. This white supremacist and benevolently sexist ideology depends both on the subjugation of white women by white men, and on the subjugation of all people who are not white—by white people (including white women)…..

We must not ignore the role of white womanhood in this act of white supremacist violence, or in any other. We must not find a way, yet again, of avoiding talking about whiteness. And until white women decide that we will no longer be used as an excuse for violence, until we decide that we will no longer tacitly condone and benefit from the violence, we will continue to have blood on our pale, “perfect” hands.

The unbearable white-woman-ness of being!

It's hard to figure out what author Chloe Angyal, who says she has "a Ph.D. in pop culture" is trying to say here. How exactly do white women "benefit" from Roof's murder spree?

And what are white women supposed to do about it? Write Roof a letter in jail saying, "Quit using us as an excuse for violence!"?

Please, Dr. Angyal, explain!

It's usually fun to watch feminists try to drag feminism and carping about men into everything. Except that sometimes–such aswhen it's about the pointless slaughter of nine people gathered together in prayer–it strikes me as being in just plain bad taste.