Divide & Conquer (No More)

History doesn't have to repeat itself. We could be the ones to make sure it doesn't.

Evvie Lionheart Habet

10/16/20264 min read

a person holding a sign with a fist drawn on it
a person holding a sign with a fist drawn on it

Divide and conquer along with brutality are two of patriarchy's primary M.O.s

Content Preview: Mentions of gender-based violence, and gender determinants of health

This is a continuation of a statement I made in a TikTok post about how patriarchy is the root of racism. If you haven't watched that one, I do recommend watching it first so you'll know what I am talking about. I also started writing this before I returned to Belize, which I have moved back now.

I had a few comments from black women and femmes pointing out we need to dismantle both patriarchy and racism, and I fully agree. However I have been noticing also that when we focus on racism to the exclusion of patriarchy, progress is very slow and in one short period of a couple years, decades worth of provisional civil rights gains can be undone. And that is because of patriarchy - particularly patriarchy having white women compete to gain more power-over black and brown women.

I am intentionally saying black and brown because in European colonization it was white Christian patriarchy that attacked and brutalized Indigenous matrifocal societies in the Americas, Asia, and Africa the last few hundred years. They did this by using the same strategies that worked to end matrifocal societies in Europe thousands of years before: capitalism, land theft, brutality and terror (lynching and flogging), family separation, painting indigenous spirituality as witchcraft, rape, and genocide.

White women have thousands of years of ancestral trauma of this kind of patriarchy, but many black and brown women have comparably less - a few hundred years of this trauma. Trauma lives in our bodies and gets passed down generation to generation - sometimes 3 generations at once through epigenetics.

White women sometimes don't recognize that they are so desperate to not be on the bottom of patriarchy due to their ancestral trauma, that they immediately assert dominance in a patriarchal way in women only spaces, and this is what white feminism is -- a tool of patriarchy to divide women. This is one of the most successful ways that patriarchy divided us and prevented us working together, by promising white women safety as long as they support white men.

This is true along the entire history of women's rights in the US. You can look it up -suffrage, enslavement, white woman tears, etc. White women have allowed patriarchy to make them the apex predator of black and brown women. So yeah, black and brown women have a good reason to be wary of white women because they have not been truly willing to dismantle patriarchy in themselves. What I hope happens though, is that we are all waking up - and realizing our enemy is the same --patriarchy-- and that by uniting, and especially white women learning to organize in a matrifocal way, by centering the most vulnerable, not seeking power and dominance over others, and recognizing that patriarchy has been using them, so to finally stop allowing that to happen so that we can liberate ourselves. White women finally realizing that they have allowed themselves to be used by the patriarchy and that ultimately they have not benefitted even as much as patriarchy has been promising them -- it has been gaslighting them too-- and then choosing to unite with black and brown women to dismantle the patriarchy within and without would be the biggest blow patriarchy has taken so far in the past 500 years. I am not too proud to say it would be game changing. One thing many white women have --that patriarchy is trying to take away from them now out of fear is access to financial and land resources, to powerful men, and to international mobility. These are resources that could highly benefit the Matriarchal revolution if it were to switch hands from patriarchy.

So many white women have been victims of coercive control in families and in groups --often with relgion being the justification, and increasingly now because of domestic violence for even non-religious households. It has led to generations of CPTSD, CSA, child abuse, homelessness, autoimmune diseases and other chronic health problems like stroke, dementia, heart attack, cancer -- things that cause married and partnered white women to live shorter lives and die earlier than their single counterparts.

If you look at the research around autoimmunity specifically, there is a huge overrepresentation of white women (these are the people comprising most of the studies in the US) who have high ACES scores. And ACES link directly back to male violence and patriarchal dominance through abuse, environmental destruction, poverty, war, economic oppression such as capitalism and technofascism, and lack of consent on state levels such as abortion bans, low to no punishment for crimes where women, people of color and queer / trans people are the disproportionate victims such as domestic violence and rape, and sexual assault. These things are not secrets. Even western science recognizes the harm that these things are doing to white women's health.

White women are suffering under patriarchy even for the few but valuable privileges they have access to. They have every reason to support Matriarchy, because they would be much better off in a Matriarchy and able to share power with women who have a more recent memory of Matriarchy in our cultures and in out DNA. There is no downside to white women joining forces with the global majority of women, and the only thing that is stopping them from doing this is brainwashing from thousands of years of patriarchy morphed into white supremacy.

White women are not usually my target demographic. I am mostly talking to other people like me: black and brown women, femmes and them. I don't often associate with people outside my BIPOC spaces for my own safety and wellbeing. However, via social media I have begun to see how many white women are talking about the same things as me, and that perhaps, periodically we can dialog about certain things. I also note I have been community organizing on a team of white European woman for 6 years and they are truly my "tribe" in an unexpected way. RAISE is the most trailblazing project I have embarked on with any group of people. So permitting we are on the same page about both patriarchy and white supremacy needing to be dismantled, I am feeling an opening however slight to organizing with women outside my traditionally BIPOC and so I am part of the Matriarchal Order, and I am also speaking about this with younger women of all ethnic backgrounds.

Matriarchy cannot be done "lite" while retaining supremacy of any group based on dominance, violence, coercion and control. That would not be Matriarchy at all. I hope what I am feeling will spread and we might be able to build bigger coalitions between women around the world of every ethnicity.


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