By Carmen P Thompson
Let’s be real — many white women are not friends or allies to Black women. They never have been. That’s the truth, plain and simple. And as Maya Angelou once said: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.”
Black women, we must believe what white women keep showing us.
On November 5, 53% of white women did what they’ve always done: voted for whiteness. I thought, foolishly, that the majority of white women might support Kamala Harris’s bid for the presidency. But no — they once again reminded us who they truly are.
So now Black women are being asked to show up on January 18 for another Women’s March to protest Donald Trump’s presidency. We’re supposed to stand shoulder to shoulder with white women and chant that we won’t go back.
Here’s a suggestion: Just say no.
Tell any white woman who asks you if you’re going that she should protest with her white sisters and mothers and cousins and aunties. She should convince them not to “go back” because 53% of them seem just fine with doing so.
And Black women already did the work. We did what the majority of white women refused to do: 92% of us said no to putting a convicted felon — who accused Haitians of eating cats and dogs and called for the Central Park 5 to get the death penalty — back in office.
Black women voted for reproductive rights, health, and justice. What did white women do? As Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, recently said, “There was a majority of white women who voted against democracy, against women’s interests, for a racist, for somebody who is proud to have taken away our right to choose.”
White women weren’t a friend or ally when their husbands were raping our ancestors. Instead, they cruelly and spitefully took out their frustrations with their white husbands on Black women. They demanded the inhumane beatings of Black women and insisted on the sale of mixed-race children — their husband’s children — because they looked more like him than their own. Those children, enslaved by white women, were often given to their daughters and sons as “gifts,” forcing them to serve their half-siblings and perpetuating the cycle of exploitation.
It was white women who made Black women breastfeed their children so they wouldn’t have to “suffer” such an indignity. They made Black women and girls sleep at the foot of their beds, catering to their whims — all while they feigned helplessness and basked in the power of their positions as slaveholding mistresses. They treated Black women as mammies, caretakers, and playthings for their children, never considering that we had children of our own — children we could barely mother because of them. Despite all this, during the Suffrage movement, white women had the audacity to expect Black women to advocate for their right to vote.
Getting the right to vote in 1920 didn’t cleanse racism from the hearts of white women. In 1923, as Brent Staples pointed out in the New York Times, “When the black suffragist and civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell petitioned her white sisters for help, they responded that the disenfranchisement of black women was a race problem — not a gender problem — and beyond the movement’s writ.”
Just a few years later, in 1923, Women of the Ku Klux Klan was formed, and more than 250,000 white women became members in the hate group’s first four months.
And I wish white women would spare us their performative tears — those crocodile tears that have historically led to Black men being lynched by white private citizens or killed by police.
White women won’t admit it, but they’ve benefited more from affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring than Black women ever have. In every sector, from the womb to the workplace, it’s the labor and suffering of Black women that has brought white women closer to the glass ceiling. But they won’t own up to that.
Meanwhile, Black women have learned the hard way not to trust white women they work with. “Our data tells us that Black women are having their worst experiences when they report to white women,” Cierra Gross, the founder of Caged Bird HR, recently told Notable Careers magazine.
Don’t fall for solidarity marches. Don’t fall for blue bracelets and white women’s “check-ins” to see how we are doing. We don’t need fake allyship when white women, who once again, smiled in our faces while clinging to the protection of white male patriarchy and white supremacy — institutions they mothered into existence.
This doesn’t mean Black women don’t have work to do to get ready for Trump. In a recent speech, Barbara Arnwine, president and founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition, said, “We gotta talk about how we fight, how we become a fighting formation, how we are able to know that these battles are going to come, that these kind of things are going to be said, that these kind of attacks are going to be launched.
So, let’s focus on keeping ourselves and our community safe, healthy, and united. Let’s figure out what steps we need to take that will benefit Black folks first and foremost because we are firmly in the crosshairs, and 53% of white women voted for a man who would all too willingly pull the trigger.
This editorial was originally published in Word In Black.
