Bill Burr monologue on SNL - rants about white women

Having seen the clip I think his point is that white women have been complicit in racism and they don’t get an “out” because sexism also exists.

It’s not true for all but there are some white women who have tried to centre themselves in the struggles facing black and immigrants in America, which is wrong. If they really were concerned about sexism they’d at least try to amplify the voices of black women in regards to the racial discussion. Not suck all of the oxygen out of the room themselves.

His delivery I didn’t like though.

I've been told innumerable times that it means nothing in terms of my privilege, and raising mixed race kids gives me zero insight into anything.

I disagree with whoever said that. My friend is married to a black guy and often tells me of the disapproving looks she gets from white middle class women when she goes shopping with her clearly mixed race children. It gives insight into the inherent racism that many people in our society have.

In it, she argued that if women are truly oppressed by virtue of being women, then even that most pampered, effete, bon bon eating creature - the 'white woman' must be oppressed also.

I think the issue is that it's a different story for different groups of women, which is a nuance that disappears when you only use 'men' and 'women'.

I think a lot of people believe that white women are second only to white men, which means they are almost at the top of the tree.

His Black wife is not cover for his misogyny.

I spent 25 yrs with a black man; I've been told innumerable times that it means nothing in terms of my privilege, and raising mixed race kids gives me zero insight into anything.

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gender.

For some reason over lockdwn when I was stuck at home and falling into youtube rabbitholes I kept getting recommended Aba and Preach, I had block their videos I found them really disturbing.

It worrys me this increasing and easy access to casual misogyny.

Bill Burr is a hopeless pig. I quit excusing him when I heard his podcast where he's being serious. He's a proud misogynist.
My impression is that he doesn't care about Black people's problems because of his wife's race. He's disrespected her plenty, and made her look very bad in public.
He's one of those insecure types that gets all his confidence from men approving of him, and women getting fed up with him. Makes him feel like an alpha, I guess.

I've been in a rage at him before, as well as two Black male you tubers Aba and Preach, who are gaining popularity and think just like him.
They also attack white women a lot.
Looks like the thing to do now nowadays is for black and white men to form a narcissistic bond by uniting against women. American men have to be hurting someone or putting some group down, or they don't know know who they are anymore.

When audiences don't laugh it can simply be because they don't find it funny, rather than something more complicated

It’s fair enough. It definitely won’t be to everyone’s taste and I don’t think he read the audience. Also, it really seemed like the material on SNL needed some more polish, like he hadn’t worked it too much.

I love his Netflix specials but was fairly disappointed in the material he had that night.

@HelloToMyKitty Had a look at the set you recommended. Huh. Not funny to me at all, despite his reassurances that we're not all 'whores.' But if you dig it, great. From the comments below the video, reckon I'm not in his target audience demographic. When audiences don't laugh it can simply be because they don't find it funny, rather than something more complicated. They turned up to a comedy gig - they want to laugh. However, despite his complaint of 'It's not fair,' he's not entitled to their laughter.

Was calling women 'bitches' a laugh line?

Yeah, it’s not surprising. Of course they didn’t laugh and probably felt uncomfortable. Some of Bill’s best bits are like that though.

His set on gold-digging whores was some of his best work (imo), but there was so much shocked silence there. Like, the audience wasn’t sure if it was okay to laugh or not

Good rant @WeeBisom - I saw a bit of SNL and was so disheartened. I don't know Bill Burr's work (for a heart-stopping moment, I thought they'd booked the odious William Barr, the U.S. Attorney General, which would really have been mind-blowing - in a bad way.) In his monologue I thought there was one potentially good bit - about Black History month getting a short and crummy month and how that could be changed. I know people online were saying the audience wasn't laughing because they were the sort of liberals he was having a go at, but I thought it was pretty hard to locate the jokes. Was calling women 'bitches' a laugh line?

I don't know if its relevant to his train of though but he's married to a black woman.

He's a male chauvinist.

Black women shouldn't be too heartened by this type of man, and the glee he takes in trashing white women. This type will turn it on Black women too, particularly if they don't want his sexist brand of paternalism.

The dynamics between white and Black women are for us to sort; it's women's business. Men need to take their sadistic pleasure in being able to denigrate a female demographic far away from women.

@DreadPirateLuna I agree completely. If Burr's Black wife (sorry, don't know her name) said similarly to me, I'd listen and not be offended at all. But it wasn't her, it was the white man claiming white women were equal partners in it. He punched down.

It's possible to be both the oppressed and the oppressor. A white plantation wife had no political power, but she had domestic power over her slaves especially the female ones. And people who lack power in one area can be particularly vicious in wielding the power they have in another, almost as compensation. Oppression doesn't usually make people nicer to those even further down.

[quote mummysquasher]I've not read it yet but this book apparently disputes the idea that white women were all passive bystanders during slavery:

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie Jones-Rogers.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/40887375-they-were-her-property[/quote]
I am sure that there where active white slave-owning women. Slavery was part of the economic framework of the American South at the time. There was even a small number of black slave-owners.

Helen Lewis in that Atlantic piece on Karening makes the general point that a demographic group can be both oppressed and an oppressor because people are located on different rungs of the various oppression axes. So very poor men belonging to religiously oppressed minorities in some countries can still oppress women in their communities, white women in the West can oppress black people etc.

I've not read it yet but this book apparently disputes the idea that white women were all passive bystanders during slavery:

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie Jones-Rogers.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/40887375-they-were-her-property

And yes, the assumption that all white women are wealthy (the Gucci boots reference) is a very odd one.

Worth pointing out that it also seems like an assumption that all white women are able-bodied.

It's almost bordering on an assumption that all white women are Paris Hilton! "Live from New York" indeed. Someone needs to extract the Burr from his ass.

Most women suck it up and go back to work full time when their baby is just a few weeks old

Bit of an exaggeration. Most go back around the three-month mark, which I know is still considered terribly short in the UK

As far as American history goes, the white women bitches Burr refers to were either the property of their father or their husband. They did not vote nor govern when America men enslaved black women and if white women were raped by any man, they often weren't believed. If a white woman had a consensual relationship with a black man, it was a crime, written by a law she did not make. If a white woman loved a black man and had a child by him, she had no rights to that child if their father or husband wanted to separate them from the child.

Of course, there were women apologists for slavery and discrimination and there are white women today in America who vote for racism. But until very recently, white women did not hold any formal political power. White men did and continue to tell white women what to do ALL.DAY.LONG.

Burr can fuck off with his white mansplaining.

The big take home message for me is that the USA are completely fucked up as a culture, a lot of their (rather extreme) social norms and social dynamics don't even translate in other parts of the world, and just because we speak the same language doesn't mean we're talking about the same things. So perhaps we should stop listening to what Americans have to say, because it's really not that relevant to us...?

This is very true. I was on a US-centric Facebook page today, and a load of US women of different ethnicities were talking about domestic violence and how they wouldn't call the cops about it. There was a massive distrust of the police, and a lot of women said they would never, ever call the police on a violent partner, especially if he was Latino/black and they genuinely feared the cops would come in and start shooting. Many of them had had negative experiences of the police in the past.

I mean, I know the UK police can be shit in many respects, but I couldn't even imagine not being able to phone the police if my violent partner was in a rage because I was also scared of the police. That sounds like something that would happen in a third world country.

Also, my US relatives think I'm wealthy/lazy because I got a full nine months of maternity leave. Most women suck it up and go back to work full time when their baby is just a few weeks old. Those who get the most basic things in life like maternity leave are seen as being massively privileged. There's such a massive divide there.

I thought it was a funny sendup of the type of liberal and wealthy American white woman who gets involved in woke shit but really hasn’t a clue.

It’s not about teen brides/poor Appalachians/working class women. They are understand to be pretty fucking far from woke culture.

He has a black wife too, and I think she’s been very influential in his comedy as of late. I think he takes pains to direct his jokes at specifically white women because of her.

Neither of them sound like good people from his standup (but then again, most comedians are terrible human beings)

[quote SisterCellophane]**@AntiSocialInjusticePacifist* Men of colour incessantly retreat into their own sense of of victimhood as a shield against being held responsible for misogyny, both against women of their own ethnicities and racialised misogyny against white women, and it WORKS for them and is completely accepted, they are never called out for it while white women are constantly shat on, degraded and dismissed as an oppressed class. "Intersectionality" only ever* cuts one way, against women, against acknowledging sex as axis of oppression its own right.[/quote]
I agree that intersectionality seems to be increasingly used to argue that one of the oppression axes doesn't really exist at all so that nobody can be oppressed on the basis of sex alone.

That is of course not what the creator of the term intended.

And yes, the assumption that all white women are wealthy (the Gucci boots reference) is a very odd one.

It's also worth thinking about the fact that where white women successfully silenced when sexism is discussed the negative effects of that would affect all women in all the countries where whites are the numerical majority. Not just white women.

Gucci booted feet

Poor white women and rich black women apparently don't exist in this guy's world.

@AntiSocialInjusticePacifist Men of colour incessantly retreat into their own sense of of victimhood as a shield against being held responsible for misogyny, both against women of their own ethnicities and racialised misogyny against white women, and it WORKS for them and is completely accepted, they are never called out for it while white women are constantly shat on, degraded and dismissed as an oppressed class. "Intersectionality" only ever cuts one way, against women, against acknowledging sex as axis of oppression its own right.