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What Will White Women Do in 2020?
Seeking power for its own sake leads to a pecking order, not progress
In my group texts and WhatsApps, on my friends’ Brooklyn stoops and in socially distanced suburban backyard gatherings, the same question keeps coming up: What will white women do?
I’m referring, of course, to the fact that 47% of white women supported Trump in 2016. But also, given that we’re celebrating the centennial of white female suffrage, to what white women have done throughout American history.
Indeed, if we could go back to 1867, to the inaugural meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, we would hear them deliberating their path to power by asking whether it was “the negro’s hour, or the women’s hour?” and not how we — each of us, all of us — get our due rights.
Instead of valuing the intersectionality of race and gender (and socioeconomic needs) to build a new coalition — after all, at the time, 94% of the U.S. population was unable to vote — white women valued, at their core, a white man’s gaze.
With Amy Coney Barrett now confirmed to the Supreme Court, we see question and answer, on repeat. A white woman deriving her power from her alliance with white men, both propping up the beneficiaries of racial inequality and patriarchy, and being used as a prop by them.
So, will the 2020 election be any different? WWWWD?
“A photograph is not taken, but made,” said Ansel Adams of his work. So, too, is power. But that is, sadly, not widely understood. Power — an invisible yet ever-present force that determines who is valued enough to add their value to the world — is nearly always discussed as a zero-sum game. Which explains the metaphors: storming a castle, taking a seat at the table (bringing a chair, if need be), grabbing the wheel.
When power is zero-sum, there’s only so much whatever — equality, power, agenda-setting capacity — to go around. Getting power in that limited scenario means getting in line.
Which explains white women’s responses across history.
“If you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent, first,” Susan B. Anthony famously argued in an 1869…
