It was a Supreme Court appointment. It wasn’t a trial. It wasn’t a review of his professional ethics, or of his fitness for his current job. He wasn’t risking a demotion or unemployment. He wouldn’t have had to register as a sex offender or give up his membership in any of the exclusive and elitist clubs to which he no doubt belongs. There was no talk of revoking his passport or initiating civil litigation. He wouldn’t even have had to do community service. The question at hand was simply, of all of the judges in the country, should this be the one who gets the job they all want?

By the time the hearing began, no one seemed to remember that there had originally been 25 candidates under consideration. That list was eventually cut down to three. Amy Coney Barrett and Raymond Kethledge were also thought to be highly qualified. But there was some measure by which Kavanaugh was the best. And then …

Two stories. No proof. Nothing to confirm or refute. Only the accusation that the current nominee to the Supreme Court had once attempted to rape a young woman at a party. What was there to do?

On the one hand, if he was innocent and this accusation was allowed to derail his nomination, it would mean that a man who had done nothing wrong would be denied the professional dream of his life. He would never sit on the highest court in the country. On the other hand, if he was guilty and appointed anyway, it would mean that 165 million women, including 40 million present and future assault survivors, would have their sexual rights subject to the pronouncements of a known abuser for a generation or more. Those were the stakes.

Those of us who saw some part of ourselves in Christine Blasey Ford looked on from odd, uncomfortable vantage points. Brittney Cooper (@professorcrunk) remarked on the “perverseness” inherent in the truth that she, like countless other black women, had “never wanted so badly for white women’s tears and humble white damsel-in-distress femininity to mean something so bad …”. And for a little while, it seemed that it had. And then …

There is much that has already been written about the manner in which now Justice Kavanaugh presented himself. There is much more that should be written. I will only point out that, in the wake of that presentation, nearly every professional organization responsible for his rise to the bench publicly questioned or denied his fitness for the Court. The present and former deans of Yale Law School, Yale Law students, the American Bar Association, more than 2,400 law professors and a former Supreme Court justice all openly expressed skepticism of Kavanaugh’s judgment, temperament and partisanship. None of it mattered.

Instead, it took two more women opening their wounds and bleeding on camera to convince an outgoing senator from Arizona to do what nearly every relevant professional organization had already asked: delay the vote to allow for an additional investigation. Six days later, having found “no additional corroborating information,” the path was cleared for confirmation. We should note that no “corroborating information” is not the same as exoneration. It simply puts us back where we began, with two stories and no proof. We should also note that, according to several sources, the false reporting of rape is fairly rare. It turns out that being accused of rape is actually strongly correlated with being a rapist. But I digress.

So Brett Kavanaugh is a Supreme Court justice. And in the fight over his confirmation, the always raging conversation about feminism and intersectionality seemed to take on special life on Twitter, Facebook, MSNBC and other places where women and people of color sometimes speak freely. For weeks, the central issue appeared to be white women as the fulcrum on which America pivots between equality and patriarchy. If Brett Kavanaugh could have his career derailed by an unconfirmed accusation, no white son or husband was safe. White women worried for their loved ones, and the president remarked how happy they must have been to see everything work out alright.

This was enough to enrage. And then Jemele Hill informed us that white women weren’t the only ones worried by what was happening to Brett Kavanaugh. Black men somehow managed to see themselves in him, too.

Sigh.

If shit rolls downhill, it seems hope is always looking up. This, I imagine, is how white women persist in believing that their whiteness might someday be as privileged as their husbands’ whiteness. It is how, shockingly, black men can believe that the freedom of their black maleness is tied to the freedom of white maleness. This is how patriarchy survives, by feeding on the hopes of those closest to itself. It is how an already successful white man’s pursuit of one of the most powerful positions in the country, and the effort to deny him that position, produced a mind-boggling clusterfuck of sympathetic bedfellows: White women worried for their sons, because who’s more vulnerable in America than white boys? And black men worried for themselves, because black men’s and white men’s fates have always been so similar.

Between, behind and beneath these two, there are the rest of us. Neither white nor male. Seeing no part of ourselves in the man whose public spite, anger and outright defiance we would have no hope of being forgiven. Those of us who, seeing not enough and still, somehow, too much of ourselves in Christine Blasey Ford, dry our tears and emerge to find our sisters fretting about their sons, and our brothers, apparently, afraid for themselves. This is how angry black women are born.