- 53 percent of white female voters voted for Trump.
- 63 percent of white women voted for Moore.
Why are white women staying and voting with the Republican party? What can we do to peel them away— one family member, one neighbor, one co-worker at a time?
Angela Peoples had an important NYT opinion piece December 16, 2017 that some may have missed.
Don’t Just Thank Black Women. Follow Us.
Democrats want to position themselves as a pro-woman, pro-immigrant, pro-equality party. We do ourselves a disservice if we believe the myth that a majority of white women voting in the era of Trump are moved by that message. The numbers don’t lie:
For many white women, it’s racial identity, not gender or party, that guides their choices in the voting booth. As my sign pointed out, in 2016 more than half of white female voters chose Mr. Trump. A year later, in Virginia, 51 percent of white women voted for the Republican Ed Gillespie, who lost after running an anti-immigrant, white-nationalist-sympathizing, Steve Bannon-backed campaign for governor.
Last week, by late Tuesday evening, we learned that two-thirds of white female voters in Alabama had once again voted for the Trump agenda, casting ballots for Roy Moore, a man accused of sexually assaulting teenagers and one with a dismal record on civil rights who was on tape saying the country was last “great” during slavery...
We don’t just vote; we lead as well by mobilizing our communities to vote. In Alabama, leaders like Lenice C. Emanuel of the Alabama
Institute for Social Justice and Felecia Lucky of the Black Belt Community Foundation spent years building the infrastructure that led to Tuesday night’s victory. In Virginia, projects like In Charge: Black Women Taking Action tapped into the turnout power of black women to engage over 300 black female volunteers and contact nearly 5,000 voters in the final three weeks before Election Day. www.nytimes.com/...
Brittney Cooper sees the same statistics and offers up a focused challenge to female white Democrats in the WAPO article of December 15,2017—
Stop asking black women to ‘save America.’ Start organizing your own people.
To be clear, it is not my job as a black feminist to try to persuade white women to stop voting for white supremacy and patriarchy. Black women are often victims of the terrible political choices white women make, and it is never our job to teach the people who harm us how to be better people. But my white feminist colleagues and comrades seem not to understand the urgency of this moment.
Nor do they seem to grasp the two-pronged nature of the job at hand: Yes, being a good feminist ally means lifting the voices of women of color and labor where appropriate.
But it also means having the hard conversations with white female neighbors, family
members, church and synagogue members, gym buddies and carpool comrades about what it would actually take to build a world that is safe for all women and children. They must frame their conversations in ways that take account of how different races and classes of women experience America. They must be willing to call out racism. White women keep demonstrating that racial unity with their family members matters more to them than building solidarity with women of other races. www.washingtonpost.com/…
[Emphasis added]
Yesterday’s diary highlighted the value of listening, which is too often underrated.
Today, as a white female Democrat, I am also thinking of the importance of speaking up for values that are important to me, even when it means having some difficult conversations with other white people I care about.
This has to be about conversations and discussions (not rants) with people we know are not Dems, not in our bubble, not in our comfort zone. Damn.
We don’t stop organizing our precincts and GOTV. We add the feature of outreach to the reachable and not letting false information pass unremarked.
I’m not saying that POC or white men are not important to the resistance.
I am saying white women need to start pulling our share of the weight.
And because this is a more serious diary for me than usual, I add a lighter note--