There is not going to be anything funny in this post.
Trump/Pence are going to be horrible for women and for people who can get pregnant. That is absolutely a fact. Regardless of the other ways in which we have privilege, we have a right to be terrified about the implications of this presidency, especially long-term ones that may echo down for decades to come based on Supreme Court appointments over the next four years.
But for those of us who are white, we also need to own that it was not men who handed this election to Trump: it was white people, including white women. Not just a plurality, but a majority of white women voted for Trump, and by a substantial margin.
As hard as things are going to be for us, we white women need to recognize that there are people who are going to be in more immediate personal danger as a result of this election than most of us, even before Trump is sworn in next year. Besides his misogyny, Trump actively targeted and campaigned on his disregard for racialized people and Muslims. Black women, Latina women, undocumented women, and hijabi women or those who otherwise “look” Muslim are among those we need to be centering and looking out for right now. (But let’s not forget other women of color, trans women, queer women, disabled women, and poor women as well. There’s really no marginalized group Trump won’t touch, and even some of us white women are affected on these other axes.)
We white women need to be dealing with the white women in our lives who supported Trump, and to help them work through their racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia, internalized misogyny. It is going to be hard, brutal work. It is going to be exhausting. But if we don’t shoulder the intellectual and emotional labor of educating our fellow white women on these issues, it’s going to fall to women of color to take up that burden, which will be even heavier for them than it is for us.
I Will Never Underestimate White People’s Need to Preserve Whiteness Again: “This is on ALL White people. Who are complicit even if they didn’t vote for Trump. Because they obviously haven’t done enough to repudiate the mindsets existing in their families and amongst their friends; possessed by their co-workers and neighbors; shared during private holiday gatherings and public city townhalls.”