"Women Can Hold Their Own When It Comes to Violence"

"To some (let's be honest, probably mostly white) people, the fact that white women have the capacity to inflict violence and to cruelly manipulate the lives of others—to be what Jones-Rogers, in our conversation, called 'evil and dastardly'—is an eternal revelation. That's why we still get curious, 'look at this weird phenomenon' articles about white women at Unite the Right, or within the alt-right movement. Or why we need to be reminded again and again that white women gleefully attended lynchings, flocked in the thousands to form auxiliaries for the Ku Klux Klan, and avidly protested school integration in the South and the North. This history of slave-owning women's economic relationship to slavery, Jones-Rogers says, should 'remove the surprise.' 'If you think about the value, the importance of whiteness in their lives, being a source of power, being a source of empowerment and emboldenment, then throughout history these little things make sense,' she said."

Rebecca Onion at Slate reviews Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers's They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South.