White supremacy isn’t just about normalizing racism, but when white women help to maintain the status quo in a society that is dripping with white supremacy, they give themselves more power. Furthermore, because white women have historically centered their own concerns in every movement, their priorities have largely revolved around keeping themselves intact, safe, and free. Though white women as a whole are far from politically homogenous, they do have families and social lives that involve heavy interaction with their political opposites.
For those who do feel oppressed by integration or immigration, they have repeatedly shown a deep willingness to actively participate in and even lead movements against equality. Whether it is joining the KKK or harassing Black children on their way to integrate a school, they can funnel whatever anger they feel about not having equality onto others. They can blame the Other for their lack of opportunity and access instead of their fathers, brothers, and husbands.
While it is easy to point to “those white women,” all white women are often part of the same communities. Conversations that can largely be summed up as being about national security, the economy, and upholding the standards of their community and religious institutions are tabled in favor of family unity. That means the same aunt who’s voting pro-life, anti-LGBTQIA, pro-guns, and anti-immigrant is spending the holidays prepping side dishes with her more progressive niece who is pro-choice, pro-LGBTQIA, and also pro–refusing to do anything to attempt to sway that aunt, or the children that aunt is raising.
It is not surprising that the things they care about tend to stem from those same family roots of white supremacy, even if they don’t think of it in that way. After all, they’re different from Aunt Susan, but they can get along with her. Why can’t everyone else? The fact that Aunt Susan is nice to them because they share skin color never completely penetrates. And as a result, white women are often willing to ignore that those who have been “othered” are in danger from the politics and social impact of white women who have different priorities.
This is not an argument that white women don’t care about others so much as it is that in many cases, they simply don’t care enough. The problem is that while they can see the danger in voting in support of building walls, discriminating against Muslims, and candidates accused of sexual assault, as long as they don’t feel directly threatened, they are less likely to confront or bring about any social consequences for the family members who do. They don’t realize how much their decisions will harm others, because generally even the worst policies will not hurt them the way it will hurt others, on account of the insulation that white privilege affords them. When you look at it that way, of course their primary focus is on protecting the patriarchal people in their lives. Those same fathers, brothers, and husbands certainly can’t be subjected to consequences for their racist or sexist behavior. After all, if they can’t access the heights of power to maintain the system of white supremacy, then white women are at risk of actually having to exist outside the bubble white supremacy creates.
Meanwhile for everyone else who is at risk, for those who will definitely be negatively impacted by white supremacy, they can’t afford to coddle the feelings of white women who are invested in not being held accountable. There’s work to do, and the patriarchy won’t break itself. So white feminism is going to have to get comfortable with the idea that until they challenge their racist aunts, parents, cousins, and so on, it is definitely all white women who are responsible.
RACE, POVERTY, AND POLITICS
I was sixteen years old and a senior in high school when Bill Clinton was first elected president in 1992. And even then, two years before I was old enough to vote, I understood that being better than the last Republican wasn’t the same as being good for everyone. Mixed in with his folksy everyman shtick, saxophone playing, and pronouncements about not inhaling, there seemed to be a tacit promise that President Bill Clinton would govern in ways that actually helped every American. Yet the first Clinton administration was almost as aggressively anti–poor people as Ronald Reagan’s administration a decade prior. Between Clinton’s “Welfare to Work” bill and the gutting of other social safety nets, it was clear that ending poverty wasn’t actually a priority for his administration. I wasn’t a fan of Bill Clinton as president, and to be honest, I wasn’t particularly enamored with the idea of Hillary Clinton as president either. I’m a peculiar specimen, someone who lives in a state where political parties don’t seem to matter when it comes to political corruption. I was poor in the wake of welfare reform, you see, and while there were programs to help, you could see already that welfare reform was more about punishing poverty than ending it.
Poverty is an apocalypse in slow motion, inexorable and generational. Sometimes a personal apocalypse, sometimes one that ruins a whole community. It isn’t a single event of biblical proportions, but it is a series of encounters with one or more of the fabled Four Horsemen. When politicians talk about the working class and the rust belt, we can hear that they understand the consequences of long-term poverty. They can grasp that it isn’t a moral failing or a personal failing, but instead the consequences of bad policy and limited opportunity colliding over time. But when it comes to the inner city, suddenly the morality of poverty must be debated. The idea that working-class people live there suddenly vanishes despite the city functions relying on those populations. Voter suppression collides with voter disinterest to further the disenfranchisement of residents. It’s this recipe that lends itself to the political landscape in America and elsewhere trending further and further to the right, where the belief in bootstrap logic dominates policy making even in the Democratic party.
There’s a blithe assumption that low voter turnout is about laziness or a lack of information or motivation. It almost never comes up in political discourse during an election cycle that for those living in decaying neighborhoods, the years of neglect have left the impression that party doesn’t matter, that no politician cares enough to try to stem the tide. Nor do we address the way that having a front-row seat to the brutality of poverty and neglect can impact a person emotionally. Yet millions of women live right there; they grow up on that precipice, raise children there, and have to navigate life in the shadow of potential destruction.
When we frame the working class as only being white people in rural areas, when we talk about the economic anxieties of that group as justification for their votes in 2016 and 2017, we ignore the very real harm done not only to inner-city communities of color, but to all communities of color here and abroad. From the way multiple American administrations have used deportation to force out immigrants to the way the Trump administration has used not only deportation but outright jailing of asylum seekers, the poor are suffering. Outside US borders, US foreign policy increasingly privileges the wealthy at the expense of the poor. American imperialism has always enabled dictators to access and retain power if it serves Western interests, and now under Trump we have stopped even paying lip service to the idea of the greater good.
When some bigoted white people heard the message of Donald Trump and others in the GOP that their concerns mattered, that the fear generated by their own biases had a target in Mexican and Muslim immigrants, many embraced the GOP to their own detriment. We talk at length about the 53 percent of white women who supported the Republican candidate for president, but we tend to skim past the reality that many white voters had been overtly or passively supporting the same problematic candidates and policies for decades.