The news that Donald Trump had been elected president was shocking enough. But, as the exit polls rolled in, the saddest plot point was revealed: Most white women, 53 percent of them, had voted for the guy who vowed to grab Roe v. Wade by the pussy. Women of color did not make this mistake: 94 percent of black women backed Clinton, as did 68 percent of Latinas. Which raises the question, for white women horrified by this outcome, of how we got here, and how we can possibly clean up our mess.
Of course, not all women who supported Clinton were so shocked. "The idea that white women would have suddenly jumped up and voted some other way is the shocking and distressing idea," ELLE.com editor-at-large Melissa Harris-Perry said at a recent round-table. "White women have chosen their race over their gender as their primary voting heuristic for nearly 40 years."
White women, like all white people, historically vote Republican. That 53 percent margin is the same as the one by which white women supported John McCain in 2008, and smaller than the percentage that supported George W. Bush (55 percent) and Mitt Romney (56 percent). Hillary Clinton even made some gains: College-educated white women, whom Clinton targeted intensively, went for her by 51 percent to 45 percent. Romney won them by six points last time around.
Still: Those women were supposed to be a firewall, not a data point. Even if Clinton's explicitly feminist candidacy and/or Trump's overt misogyny moved some white women to the left, it didn't move enough of them—and neither, evidently, has feminist activism to date. "White women have historically been slow to engage and, when they do engage, have mostly served their own interests," says Heather Cronk ofShowing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), an organization that trains whites to confront racism. "White suffragettes fighting for the right to vote kept Black women out of their meetings, told them to march at the back of their parades, and seethed while Black women out-organized them." Dr. Cara Lisa Berg Powers of Press Pass TV, NARAL Massachusetts Political Committee, and Emerge Massachusetts, an organization that trains Democratic women to run for office, is even more explicit: White women, she says, "have been trained to believe that their whiteness will protect them from their womanhood."
At The Root, Amy Alexander has called the election "Miss Ann's revenge," an opportunity for quietly racist white women to strike back at people of color's gains. "I'm compelled to look more closely at some of the women I encounter," she wrote, "to regard them, not with fear or even stark trepidation, necessarily, but certainly with a far more cold-eyed assessment of what might lie beneath the smiles and words of bonhomie." Writing for Bitch, Margaret Jacobsen says that "Tuesday was a perfect example of how white women have coasted," focusing on white male sexism while ignoring the white female racism right under our noses. She calls for white women to take on the problem directly: "For too long, the emotional labor that comes with talking about race has been put on people of color. It can no longer be this way."
There is something satisfying in the notion of white women calling in our own; at the very least, it gives us something useful to do, and takes some of the weight off women of color. Still, there's the question of how to do it without becoming white saviors–and how we can take our own racism into account before rushing out to fix anyone else.
"We shouldn't just be talking to Trump voters in our lives, white woman to white woman," Powers says. There are more promising targets: the "white women who voted for Hillary and don't understand how this could have happened, but have never been comfortable uttering the words Black Lives Matter."
It's also important for white women who do this work to follow the lead of people of color, rather than swooping in as self-designated superheroes. So, some action points:
"The first step is to financially support people-of-color-led organizations," says Cronk. "That first step will help you begin to tear down the systems inside of you that insist that we know what to do in this moment. The truth is that we don't—a Trump America is bad for white women, but far worse for folks of color... and white folks across the board need to more deeply understand that we don't have all the answers for how to respond." She also urges white women to do the work in community, through an organization like SURJ: "Working alone limits your perspective, limits your creativity, and limits your accountability to people of color."
That creativity will be important. When outreach to white female Trump voters does happen, feminists may find themselves struggling. There's the difficulty of creating a sense of shared feminist concern with women who respond to Trump's sexual-assault allegations with "if women grabbed men like that, it wouldn't be a big deal. But if men do that to women, they blow it out of proportion." But then there are the less comprehensible voters, as well: the "gay millennial woman" quoted in the Washington Post, who "voted for Donald Trump because [she] oppose[s] the political correctness movement."
The racial divide in the 2016 election is also reflected, to some degree, in a geographic divide. Truths that may seem obvious to a white woman living in New York or Los Angeles may have no bearing on her cousin, who's living in an all-white, Trump-voting small town in Indiana or Wyoming. Though the Internet gives us the ability to reach past those divides—we'll always have Facebook arguments—it may not give us the language to do so effectively.
Then again, it would be a mistake to assume all white female Trump voters are uneducated or rural; the data is more complex, and more disappointing. At Buzzfeed, Anne Helen Petersen has explored the mindset of the "Ivanka voter" — well-off, often well-educated suburban white women, many of whom see themselves as "moderate," who nevertheless comprised a major chunk of Trump's base. She sees them as part of a heritage dating back to the "security moms" that helped elect George W. Bush. "They are a couple generations, or even just one generation, from immigrant parents," Petersen told me. "They have figured out a life that is solid for themselves and they want it to be solid for their children."
Class is one in a tangle of conflicting loyalties, including white resentment and internalized misogyny—and then there's religion. Powers reminds me that the overlap between evangelical women and white women is substantial; these women "fundamentally believe that women are not able to lead. They have a specific role, and it is not to make the decisions." Several anti-choice women have gone on the record to say that they voted for Trump on that issue alone. Getting through to any one white woman requires finding out where her individual levers are. We can't simply assume that an appeal to shared womanhood will do the trick.
Ultimately, Petersen says, many white female Trump voters are undone by their self-isolation – they're not necessarily lacking in empathy, but also not given much call to utilize it in their homogenous social circles. "If they don't know anyone who is queer or poor or Muslim or a person of color," Petersen says, "then it's hard for them to understand how they're being affected." Still, she says, many of those women created their own blinders: "They are responsible for siloing themselves. … You can make an argument that, oh, if you're of the working poor, you don't have time [to educate yourself]. These upper-middle-class women …there's time to expose themselves intellectually."
White women have exactly four years to figure out the right way to create this exposure on a broader scale — and to change a pattern that has existed for decades or centuries. That's not much time, and our success is uncertain, to say the least. The time to get to work was yesterday.
Jude Ellison Sady Doyle is the author of 'Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear ... And Why.'
