protectors

But what’s even more insidious is that when Trump and other right-wing speakers invoke the “threat” posed by dark-skinned immigrants, he’s tapping into many white men’s sense of themselves as protectors.

Of course, this is a very old narrative that goes back to the early days of colonial America, when white male European settlers were the protectors of white womanhood against the dangerous Native American “savages.”

“Offensive linemen, they’re protectors, they’re healers, they’re forces for good.”

It was men — these “protectors of women” — who later wrested control of women’s health and reproduction from women themselves.

The idea that women require masculine protectors derives from a legal system that presumed their submission to men and their inability to assume an independent legal identity.