Dear White Women Who Voted for Trump

To those white women, I say: your internalized misogyny is poison. Your prioritization of white supremacy and fear of those who are different from you over the literal safety and health of our country is poison. You have been drinking and sowing poison from a man who hates women, despises people of color, and mocks people of different abilities. When Trump said he was getting your husbands back to work, did you hear him? Do you know that we are more than half of college graduates and more than half of the workforce? When the credible sexual assault allegations piled up against him, did you not hurt inside for your fellow women who have been raped, their stories denied, and their names dragged through the mud? When you see toddlers in cages — some of whom may never be reunited with their parents again — does your heart not ache? When you teach your own children empathy, what examples do you call on?
This is not a take-down of Republican women who have different views than I do on policy. Hatred and denial of basic human rights for all people is a moral issue, not a political one.

I identify as a woman first and foremost. Before any of my other descriptors — American, mother, leader, wife, writer, friend, white, heterosexual, etc. I have been a girl, raised entirely by women. I have been a young woman, seen only as a sex object despite my Ivy League education. In fact, some of the worst of that objectification and misogynistic treatment happened at that same Ivy League school by entitled sexist man-boys just like Trump. My Freshman year I dressed up as Aphrodite and was pushed up against a wall and almost raped by a male friend. Later I was told by a male classmate who I had bested in a debate that I would make a great senator’s wife one day. And so on.
All women have these experiences, whether you are the (at least) one in three who have been raped. Yet you voted for a serial sexual predator and abuser who can’t even stand a female journalist asking him tough questions. Who rates and berates businesswoman and female politicians on their appearances and sexuality. Who used campaign funds to pay off an adult film star he had an affair with while his wife was recovering from the birth of their child.
You voted for a man who let hundreds of thousands of Americans die from COVID-19 without showing a shred of empathy for their families and communities. A man who is a narcissist so malignant he will capitalize on any situation to make money and promote himself, even when he got the vicious disease he’s been lying about. Who encouraged and activated white supremacist groups that advocate for hate crimes and racial war. Who would let California burn, drill the Arctic, and sell our public lands to line the coffers of other rich men. Who pulled our country out of cooperative international accords and decades-old alliances for our health, safety, and environment in favor of his admiration for despots who murder their own people. Whose political appointees are currently gutting the very institutions that they are supposed to serve, that are supposed to serve you and your family.

White women, we need to do better. We are part of the problem of white supremacy and oppression. We need to put people of color firmly at the front of our minds and hearts and everlasting privilege and listen and learn to be true allies. We need to act and speak and donate and vote as if our own marriages will be dissolved and our jobs threatened when LGBTQ+ rights are attacked. We need to start by acknowledging that even with the projected Biden win, this country is not okay, and that it has never been safe for all Americans.

We need to not hate ourselves and each other, either. As women, we need to work together to heal the open wounds that this election season has exposed. Trump came incredibly close to winning a second term, despite showing us and the world exactly who he is. He is still President for three more months. After that the specter of his dictator-style leadership will not go away and nor will the falsehood amplification chamber that is Fox News. There will be others like Trump who are emboldened to lie and belittle and divide. You can’t listen to the easy-sounding lies that Trump — and those in his image — yell out and trust you to believe. Neither coronavirus or racism are going away. The hard truths and even harder work await.