Thanks for sharing this, Sam. You make an excellent point that as women, we have fought hard for all of us to have the right to vote, with white women enjoying that right for 100 years now (while for Black women, it’s been just over half as long).
Those rights did not happen without the allyship of men.
If you were a woman prior to 1920 and knew that measures were being taken to allow you the right to vote, you would have felt either excited or indifferent. Given the success of the suffragette movement, I’m inclined to believe that a majority of women were excited at the prospect to vote (not a historian).
If more than half of the men had voted not to allow this, women would be rightfully upset.
We cannot tear down our system of racism without genuine allyship, specifically from White women. And given how many White women seemed to be on board with that this summer, this turn of events is shocking.
When you see the vociferous response to this fact, it’s because we feel let down and betrayed by people we believed were our friends, our neighbors, people in our community who we wanted the same thing. It just reminds us that we still have a lot of work to do and we’re tired. It makes us question how much of it was an act because no one wants to look bad on social media. Imagine waking up and feeling like you will never be given equity because of your gender or skin color or anything else you have zero control over.
We were given a choice between a candidate who has a plan and a path to help cure some of the systemic racism that we have, and a candidate whose plan would have taken us farther away from that goal. I have opinions about how unbelievably unfair that was to conservative voters, and I think that is a factor that comes into play here. Maybe I’ll write about those next. But at the end of the day, almost half the people who cast a vote in this election communicated that ending racism isn’t an issue that is important enough to them to worry about right now. And with the candidate they backed, they also communicated that they are ok with it getting worse.
So people are angry about that and we’re left questioning who to trust. The divisive act was casting the vote, not being upset at how the vote was cast.
