During a recent House Oversight Committee meeting, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga) once more revealed herself morally unfit for office, taunting colleague Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tx) with the quip: “Your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.” After Greene refused to apologize, Rep. Crockett raised a point of order, inquiring whether House rules would permit a member to refer to a colleague as having, say, “a bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body”?
Greene’s eyelash jab was perceived by Crockett for what it is—racist. As Rep. Crockett noted later, Rep. Greene was quite clearly “amplifying” a longstanding MAGA practice of demeaning Black women using a “ghetto” trope.
The eyelash comment was racist. But does that justify using the homophobic epithet “butch?” in return?
Let’s get this out of the way at the outset: alliteration is fun, but it’s no excuse.
But to put Crockett’s word choice in context, the episode on the House floor points up a broader politics of femininity that places race at the center. Increasingly, white women doing normative femininity are recognized as flexing their privileged relationship to womanhood itself, conferred by white supremacist ideology. Black women doing normative femininity are engaging in something different and more complicated. Because ideal beauty standards have been defined in the image of the idealized white women, Black women doing femininity can be understood not simply to be reinforcing these ideals but simultaneously, subverting them.
Whiteness constructs the feminine ideal as one to which women-of-color may aspire but never authentically embody. Riding this racist logic, Rep. Greene mocks Rep. Crockett’s femininity as artificial, as put-on, as fake as her eyelashes.
Against this background, Rep. Crockett’s “beach-blonde, bad-built, butch body” comment says: if she can call out my femininity, I can call out hers. But how? Up against a white woman wrapped in racial privilege, Rep. Greene reached into the bag of epithets that have historically been used against white women who violate the gender norms dictated by white supremacist ideology. The figure of the “butch”—a woman who challenges norms of masculinity and of heterosexuality—poses a double threat to the patriarchal investments anchoring the white supremacist worldview.
We all know that two wrongs don’t make a right. In an ideal world, Rep. Crockett would have stood up for herself without putting down anyone else. Knowing what we do about Rep. Crockett, I’m confident she won’t make a habit of this. For the rest of us, let’s hope this proves a teachable moment.
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