It's no secret how deeply I believe in the power of a syllabus. Part navigation system, part treasure map, and part intellectual training program, a truly great syllabus is something to which you can return, follow again, and still gain new insights. A great syllabus helps to structure our engagement with a topic, idea, person, or event and draw together seemingly disparate fields. Candice Benbow's Lemonade Syllabus is a favorite in this regard. I suspect the Melissa Harris-Perry Show was one of the few (maybe the only) cable news show that regularly produced a syllabus as a companion to our weekly broadcast. I used something like a multi-faceted syllabus approach in my book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, to shed light on the creative ways black women navigate the political world. I am not certain, but it just might be that a great syllabus will save the world.
The week after the presidential election I joined professor Blair L.M. Kelley, Buzzfeed's Tracy Clayton, and Wake Forest University sophomore Erica Jordanfor an election conversation between and among black women. Afterward we decided to pull together a syllabus to guide those interested in reading more about the issues we discussed.
Part I: Understanding White Women as Voters
In the weeks since November 9, many observers have expressed shock and dismay to learn that a majority of white women cast their votes for Republican nominee Donald Trump. During our ELLE.com Facebook Live conversation, I said this result was completely predictable and normal. Indeed, it would have been extraordinarily abnormal for a majority of white women to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, because they haven't in more than three decades.
Unfortunately it is hard for most people to discern this fact, given that reputable, nonpartisan research and polling organizations routinely report voting data as though all women are of the same race. Take this 2012 headline from Pew: The Gender Gap: Three Decades Old, as Wide as Ever. This is technically true. Women, as a group, are much more likely to vote for Democrats, but this is only because black women and Latinas are overwhelmingly more likely to do so. White women continue to be Republican voters. A majority of white women voted for McCain, for Romney, and, yes, for Trump.
The truth is this: There is race gap of enormous proportions and a gender gap of very slim margins in this country. Presidential elections are primarily determined by the proportional turnout of the relevant racial groups, which increasingly map onto partisan and geographic identities in ways that make electoral vote counts a fairly simple task. Gender politics is a secondary game, not the main show.
It is one thing to state this as an empirical and strategic reality. The goal of this syllabus is to try to understand why. Here are some texts that are great starting points for responding to that question.
Ruth Frankenberg. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
A foundational text in the academic field of "whiteness studies." This book uses nearly three dozen interviews to explore how white women were able to come to gender consciousness without having to question or confront racial identity. A valuable, early contribution to the scholarly understanding to the racial attribution of white feminism.
Suzanne Lebsock. Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town 1784-1860. W.W. Norton, 1985.
Petersburg is just an hour east of Farmville, Virginia, the site of the 2016 vice presidential debate, where Senator Tim Kaine name-checked Civil Rights activist, Barbara Johns. Petersburg is also the city where historian Suzanne Lebsock tells the stories of black and white women in the decades prior to the Civil War. This is not a book about sisterhood or solidarity. It is not about cross-racial feminist alliances. It is about the stories no one ever tells. Women whose names we never learn. People we think are utterly unimportant to our history. Yet the women's stories Lebsock uncovers in the emerging urban South remind us how policies of race and gender and class exploitation are deeply intertwined in our understanding of property, slavery, autonomy, labor, and the self in complicated ways.
Micki McElya. Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in 20th Century America. Harvard University Press, 2007
Put down The Help. Seriously. That book and movie are probably why so many white women were weeping on election night and why so many donned safety pins the next week. That kind of terrible, no good, very bad, sentimental, false history will get you nothing but grief and confusion. If you want to understand the ways that white women exploited black women's domestic labor and how Hollywood and Madison Avenue went on to make billions marketing that exploitation, this is the text to read. McElya's book clarifies why we should not expect simple or enduring political alliances based on gender unless and until we have some very serious, difficult, and sustained conversations around class and race. As soon as you finish McElya's book, pick up Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo's Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence.
Barnes & Noble
Alice Blackwell Stone. "Why Women Should Vote" Part of the National American Women's Suffrage Association Collection of the Library of Congress.
This primary document from women's suffrage advocate Alice Blackwell Stone makes the case for a national right to vote for women. Stone is a shero of the movement for women's equality, capable of envisioning a future radically unlike the world in which she lives. Stone wrote that the right to vote " would increase the proportion of native-born voters" and "would increase the moral and law-abiding vote very much."
Mary Douglas Vavrus. "From Women of the Year to 'Soccer Moms': The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Women." Political Communication. 2000. Volume 17. Issue 2.
I assign this article in my "Women in U.S. Politics" course to students too young to remember that 1992 was declared "The Year of the Woman" because women were so pissed by the treatment of Anita Hill during the Supreme Court confirmation hearingsof Clarence Thomas that they responded, in part, by running for office. (By the way, Hill is still waiting on an apology.) This article traces how mainstream media stopped covering women as candidates vying for power and instead reduced them to swing voters identified primarily through lifestyle choices or commodities.
Arlie Russell Hochschild. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The New Press 2016.
This is not specifically focused on women voters, but it is a profoundly insightful contemporary text addressing the political worldview of the American right. This book is a reminder that Donald Trump's supporters are not deplorable humans writhing in a basket of racial intolerance. They are Americans with deep historic and emotional connections to a country that now feels painfully unfamiliar. With empathy and dignity, this text reveals the stories of ordinary citizens seeking to regain a political stake in their nation through the Tea Party movement. For those of us who live in the South, it has long been a truism that Donald Trump's supporters are our neighbors.
Part II: Understanding Black Women as Voters
Even if we understand the deep historical connection of white women to Republican nominee Donald Trump, it still doesn't fully explain this election. Barack Obama vaulted into the White House twice over the preferences of white women because black women's electoral enthusiasm in 2008 and 2012 translated into unprecedented voter turnout. In 2012, African American women accounted for 8 percent of the electorate, in 2016 they accounted for just 7 percent. The percentage of black men and Latino/as remained steady between 2012 and 2016. The difference seems small, but in crucial states like Ohio, Michigan, and North Carolina, it makes all the difference
Ari Berman. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. Macmillan, 2016.
To understand voter turnout in this election we must begin with the structural realities in which Americans cast their votes and especially understand the constraints facing African American voters. No one more clearly and simply traces this history and shows the contemporary impact on the 2016 election than Berman. Berman's near weekly reporting on the continuing effects of post Shelby v. Holder suppressive legislation is a syllabus in itself, but this book is a place to begin. Before we blame Hillary's campaign, Hillary as a candidate, or black women as voters, we need to make a clear-eyed assessment of the system of elections in the United States.
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920. Indiana University Press, 1998
One of the earliest accounts of the history of African American women and suffrage. This text is the beginning of the historical cannon on the subject.
Ann D. Gordon and Bettye Collier-Thomas, eds. African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965. University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.
An indispensable collection of black women and historical luminaries exploring the question of black women and the vote.
Rhonda Y. Williams. The Politics of Public Housing; Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality. Oxford University Press, 2005.
This text challenges the narrative that low-income housing was a failure and instead demonstrates how public housing was a site of black women's grassroots activism, political organizing, and class mobility. I met with Dr. Williamswhile in Cleveland for the RNC this summer and visited her Social Justice Institute at Case Western Reserve. We discussed the need for community-based institutions to help black voters overcome the hurdles left in the wake of voter suppression laws. Few think of public housing as such an institution, but Dr. Williams' research shows the ways it can serve to build social and human capital and encourage political participation.
K. Sue Jewell. From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy. Routledge, 1993.
Social constructions and myths about black women symbolize their worthiness. They also express the ideas that black women don't deserve to enjoy America's resources because they are in fact not genuine Americans. Jewell helps us understand this unjust reduction.
Hillary Clinton's role in passage of the 1994 Crime Bill and her use of the term "super- predator" were held up as reasons black Americans were less than fully enthusiastic about her candidacy. Both are gendered—a policy and a public utterance seen as harming black men specifically. With some exceptions, the media did not substantially engage in sustained discussion about the 20th anniversary of welfare reform. On August 22, 1996 President Bill Clinton fulfilled his campaign promise to "end welfare as we knew it" by signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. The effect was devastating for women and had disproportionate impact on black women, by pushing millions into poverty, hunger, and cycles of insecurity. For black women voters, welfare reform may have blocked enthusiasm for the Clinton candidacy at least as much as the crime bill. Three texts are useful for our understanding of black women's politics relative to welfare reform.
Ange-Marie Hancock, The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen.New York University Press, 2004.
Hancock argues how stereotypes of African American mothers and politically motivated misperceptions about race, class, and gender were effectively used to instigate a politics of disgust that drove the passage of welfare reform in 1996.
Sandra Morgen, Joan Acker, and Jill Weigt, Stretched Thin: Poor Families, Work, and Welfare Reform. Cornell University Press, 2010.
This book draws on in-depth interviews with poor families and welfare workers, and survey data tracking more than 750 families over two years, to question the validity of claims that welfare reform has been a success.
Kathleen Coll, Remaking Citizenship: Latina Immigrants and New American Politics. Stanford University Press, 2010.
This book covers Mexican and Central American immigrant women's grassroots activism in San Francisco in the aftermath of immigration and welfare reforms of the mid '90s. I found this book an interesting parallel to an argument I made about Clinton's race problem with African American voters. I claimed Trump was trying to create a landscape devoid of meaningful electoral choices by pointing out the ways Clinton shared his racial shortcomings. This text illuminates how the policies of Bill Clinton's administration negatively impacted Latino communities as well.
Part III: The History of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Resistance
Many of us were deeply affected by the grief Professor Kelley expressed during our Facebook live conversation. She framed her sadness as maternal disappointment for her son and daughter who would have to spend part or the remainder of their childhoods in a country gripped by nativist, racist, and sexist backlash. At the same time, Professor Kelley reminded us that she is a scholar of the early twentieth century American South, and therefore familiar with a moment marked by stunning similarities.
It was after the hotly contested 1876 election between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes that federal Reconstruction following the Civil War came to an end. Barely a decade had passed since formerly enslaved people had begun to experience the promise of citizenship, but in that short period, black men voted, held elected office, formed labor rights coalitions with white workers, and began to migrate into urban areas in the South and North. Change was uneven and incomplete, but discernable. After 1877, the imposition of Jim Crow legislation and the rise of state-sanctioned violent white supremacy was swift and brutal. Black communities resisted at every step. In her grief, Professor Kelley was reminding us of these troubling histories.
Patricia Bell-Scott. Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice. Penguin Random House, 2015.
I consider this the best book of 2015. Bell-Scott traces more than a quarter century of correspondence between a first lady committed to progressive social change and a working class, queer, black woman, political activist. I came back to this book repeatedly during the 2016 campaign, wondering who was the Murray to First Lady Obama and to Secretary Clinton.
Blair L.M. Kelley. Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson. UNC Press, 2010.
Professor Kelley's text allows us to reimagine the turn of the twentieth century. This is a period historians once considered "the age of accommodation," but this book clearly demonstrates how utterly inaccurate that characterization is. African Americans in the South pushed back against segregation in myriad ways, and although they often lost, even their failures laid the foundation for future Civil Rights success. It is a reminder of the necessity of constant struggle for those of us who find ourselves at a crossroads.
Deborah Gray White. Too Heavy a Load: African American Women in Defense of Themselves 1894-1994.W.W. Norton and Company, 1999.
A deep dive into the political work of black women from Jim Crow to the 1990s.
Paula J Giddings. Ida: A Sword Among Lions. Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching. Harper Collins, 2008.
Wells was an anti-lynching advocate who employed social science evidence, journalistic advocacy, and strategic political organizing to resist decades of racist terror in the United States. Giddings' text is widely considered the definitive Wells biography.
Finally, in this section we have included several texts dealing specifically with the lynching of 14-year-oldEmmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. I mentioned Till during the Facebook Live discussion, in part because the Mothers of the Movement were fixtures on the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton. Like Till's mother, Mamie, they lost a child to racial violence, received no justice in a racist system, and chose political activism as a response to grief. The Mothers of the Movement sought to assure black women voters that Hillary Clinton's experience as a mother and as an advocate on behalf of women and children ensured she would empathize with black mothers, their struggles, grief, and the pain of injustice they face.
During our discussion I argued the Till case stood as a long historical counter-example. The murder of Emmett Till was not the first or most egregious Southern lynching, but it was definitive because Till's mother refused to be silent in the face of injustice. Instead, she became an activist, and her work helped launch the modern Civil Rights Movement. But Till's mother did not have the support and solidarity of white Southern mothers. In fact, the wives of the men who murdered her son were often seen smiling and laughing in court, despite the fact that they too had young sons. The images and stories associated with the Till case are part of a historical residue of distrust which remains thick in the discourse and understanding of many African American women as they discuss and understand their potential political alliances with white women. (This is something I discuss at length in Sister Citizen.)
The Mothers of the Movement were on the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton but rarely with Hillary Clinton. In small auditoriums of black colleges and from the pulpits of black churches, they told moving stories of her personal connections to their loss and pain, but Hillary did not stand on stage with these women. She did not mention their children in her stump speeches. The Mothers of the Movement did not appear in national television commercials or even in urban radio spots. It was never clear the Clinton campaign understood the depth of the historical distrust they had to overcome in order to convince black women voters to be fully enthusiastic about Clinton's candidacy and to believe that she saw their children the way they believe First Lady Obama sees their children.
Mamie Till-Mobley with Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. One World Book, 2004 and Devery Anderson's. Emmett Till: The Murder that Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement. University of Mississippi Press, 2015.
These two texts tell the story of Till from dramatically different perspectives, but each is necessary for understanding who Emmett was as a person, who he became as movement martyr, and how this moment was experienced historical marker.
Devery Anderson's Clarion Ledgercolumnafter the death of J.W. Milam's widow, February 2014.
Anderson's brief column on the occasion of Juanita's death in 2014 is a reminder of how incurious we tend to be about the women in this story. Understanding the role they played, what motivated them, and how those motivations are connected to race, gender, class, and politics may prove informative.
Confession by the murderers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam in LookMagazine, January 1956
Remind yourself that white supremacy is so bold it published confessions of child murder in national magazines. Harbor no illusions.
Part IV: Understanding Political Media
The last major issue we raised during our conversation was the role of political media during the 2016 election. Obviously, this requires its own syllabus! But I wanted to provide a few useful places to begin. Echo chambers and have been implicated in what seemed to be a large-scale failure to accurately predict the election outcome. Set aside for a moment how stunningly meta it is to critique Facebook as a news source during a Facebook Live conversation. Given "Facebook's (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine" and the apparent inability of some of Facebook's most frequent users to distinguish quality sources from "fake" news, critical media literacy seems a more urgent political skill than ever. Here are a few places to begin reading.
Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar. Going Negative: How Attack Ads Shrink and Polarize the Electorate. Free Press, 1996.
The Clinton campaign chose to argue Donald Trump was inherently unfit to be president. This message went beyond arguing he was unqualified or his policies were less robust, it was an attack on his character, temperament, intellect, and psychological stability. This 20-year-old book predicted that the Clinton strategy would work against the campaign. Ansolabehere's research shows negative ads tend to reinforce voters' partisan predispositions rather than persuade them to change their views. Campaigns characterized by high levels of negativity result in higher cynicism and stress and decreased voter turnout, which tends to favor Republicans while harming Democrats. Remember how Obama won? Hope and change not fear and stress.
Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless. Women on the Run: Gender, Media, and Political Campaigns in a Polarized Era. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
I routinely teach Lawless' first book, It Still Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office, because of her empirical finding of how rarely girls and women are encouraged and recruited to for office. I am likely to assign this new book as frequently as her first. Lawless and co-author Danny Hayes challenge many of our assumptions about gendered coverage of politics and find polarization rather than conventional gender bias at the root of women's difficult path to office. Using this lens of polarization is a useful tool for understanding how many voters in 2016 were responding to cues.
Chris Hayes. Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. Random House, 2013.
No elite institution more fully demonstrated its utter irrelevance during this election than political cable news. This smart little book indirectly reveals why Trump's candidacy was unharmed when party and media elites openly vilified and rejected him.
