Those of you who have clicked my “About” button above can see that I’m a white woman. There are about 120 million of us in the U.S. We’re a pretty heterogeneous group, race and gender aside. When it comes to our identities, our opinions, our faiths, our families, and our lifestyles, we are anything but a monolithic group.
White women’s experiences in life are just as varied. Many of us have experienced the joys of partnership and motherhood. Many of us have felt the searing rage boiling within us when confronted with misogyny and sexism. Many of us have struggled our entire lives to dig our way out of the quicksand of poverty. Many of us are engineers, artists, teachers, and scientists. We are Protestants and Catholics, Democrats and Republicans, affluent and working-class. As a group, we traverse the entirety of many different spectra.
Fifty-five percent of white women voted to re-elect Donald Trump in 2020. I can only imagine that the ostensible reasons behind those votes are as varied as we are. For some, no doubt Trump’s racism is a selling point. But for the rest, the ones who claim not to have a racist bone in their body, there is something more subconscious underlying this confounding willingness of white women to vote for a man like Trump. It’s something that we white women, every single one of us, all have in common: we don’t know what it’s like to be Black in America.
As a group, we white women have experienced a great many things, both good and bad, both wonderful and terrifying. But being Black in America is not something we have ever nor will ever experience. And until we do the work to listen, to empathize, and to understand the Black experience, we will continue to allow our own self-interest to influence our voting decisions at the expense of our Black neighbors, friends, and family members.
A good place for white women to start is to consider the fact that ninety-one percent of Black women voted for Joe Biden. Ninety-one percent. The next step is to ask yourself why. Black women are no more a monolithic group than we are, yet they resoundingly rejected Trump. Why?
I would imagine that the reason is this: racism is a deal-breaker for Black women. They don’t have the luxury of living in blissful ignorance of the Black American experience like white women do. They live it every day. They cannot, and will not, pretend that racism doesn’t matter when they cast their votes. For them, their safety and humanity, and that of their loved ones, is at stake.
White women can – and do – ignore racism when choosing leaders. But we must do better. We must hear and take in experiences that are different from our own. We must understand the privilege we enjoy by being white in this country, even though we may struggle in other ways. We must understand the impact of our decisions and votes on people who are not like us. We must stop being complicit and do our part to end racism in this country.
When we do that work as white women, when we look beyond our own experiences, my hope is that we will stop giving ourselves permission to vote for leaders like Trump while others pay the steep price.