White Women and the Election

The largest voting demographic is having a moment

I’ve been working on something for a peer-reviewed journal and all my writing energy and time has gone into that recently, in case you were wondering why you haven’t heard from me in a while. It is election season in the U.S., and it is shaping up to be an interesting one for thinking about white women.

This morning in the New York Times ran a short piece (on one of their many newsletters) trumpeting the said in part:

"White women are the country’s largest voting demographic, making up about 30 percent of the electorate, and they consistently turn out at very high rates. They favored Trump in the last two presidential races, but Harris has inched ahead slightly with them in recent polls."

The states where white women’s vote will matter most in this election are Nevada, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. The folks at SURJ are canvassing - both in person door-knocking and remote phone banking - in those states to get out the vote among white voters who are still uninformed or undecided. If you are a white-bodied person anxious about the election, I suggest you get involved with their efforts to defeat MAGA, because of course we should. If you do, you’ll meet good people who will restore your faith in our shared humanity and you’ll reduce that anxiety you’re walking around with. Highly recommend this as a self-care to collective liberation strategy for reducing anxiety. You can get trained on how to do the canvassing and you won’t have to talk to any hardcore MAGA-types (they’re not persuadable, generally). There are lots of people who are not very informed about what’s happening in this election and they will be happy to know that you cared enough to reach out to them. Really. You’d be amazed.

My question to you is: what’s your plan AFTER the election? Our political engagement shouldn’t just be focused on that single day and then be done with it. Democracy is not a “set it and forget it,” not a button to be pushed and then we consume it, like microwaving a Hotpocket.

One of the things I appreciate about SURJ is that they are thinking about how to mobilize no matter what happens in the election, to Build, Block and Grow the power among white voters who have not been captured by the delusion of MAGA. If the current political landscape has rattled you, I suggest getting more involved in these efforts.

White people showing up on Zoom calls for Harris is a little sprig of hope in the rather grim pavement of our political landscape. As sociologist Koritha Mitchell observes, “By coming together as white people who recognize that the United States has given them very different experiences than it offers Americans of color, they are pinpointing precisely why joining a broad coalition matters.”

My friend, Robin Alpern, wondered after my “Eat, Pray, Love, Vote” column about what white women - who don’t want MAGA - could do.

To me, the very real question in the 2024 election and beyond it is whether white women, and indeed white-raised people of all genders, can do the work necessary to step out of the delusion of whiteness, to break these cycles of intergenerational harm we have inherited and continue to co-create.

To be raised white in a settler colonial state and assimilate into the dominant culture like the U.S., means learning to ignore, accept, and even cheer for, the routine harm of people who are racialized as Others, whether that is through police violence or an ongoing genocide.

We, who are raised white are the children, the grandchildren of those who organized lynch mobs, who packed a picnic lunch to take to those lynchings, and then affirmed familial bonds through postcards sent through the postal service for decades afterward. If you arrived to the U.S. after these particular atrocities and still assimilated into whiteness, then you benefited from the previous generations’ practices. As much as I may want to force my fellow white-raised cousins to face these truths, what the 2024 election has taught me is that pointing out white privilege may be accurate but it is counterproductive in terms of political mobilization.

If we who are raised to believe in our whiteness can learn to see ourselves as just one part, just one “white stripe” in a multi-racial coalition., then we might have a chance at a better world. Staying in relationship with each other across differences requires of us a deep inner knowledge about what we are attached to (e.g., whiteness, material wealth, “safety” that requires the suffering others) and it allows us to see possibilities for the new social structures we want to create.

To do that, we who are raised to believe in the delusion of our own whiteness can learn to set that aside and see that we are just one part of a larger collective, The further challenge for those of in the U.S. is whether we can expand our vision of to embrace an international solidarity that reckons with the very real harm the state-power is creating for those in Palestine, in Sudan, and in Congo. 

After all, this is what presidents do.