Sisters Voices

    As a black man active for years in the struggle for racial justice I have, on occasion, been impatient with whites offering advice about what black movements should or should not be doing. Hence, as a male who has never experienced sexual harassment I am somewhat hesitant to offer women advice on how to proceed in these fraught  times. On the other hand the sociologist, George Simmel, suggested that the ‘stranger’, the person somewhat apart from a situation,  may have a perspective useful to those more deeply involved. Hence, let me offer the following:

    There is a deep split among white women, and that gap has to be closed in order for the movement for gender justice to achieve meaningful, lasting change. As is well known, 53% of white women voted for Donald Trump despite the Access Hollywood tapes and the testimony of women he abused. What is less well-known is that this vote represented a pattern rather than an aberration. Of the 105 women in the House of Representatives and the Senate, 78 are democrats, mostly from blue states. In other words, red state white women tend to send old white guys to Washington to make decisions on a whole host of matters that impact them negatively as women and as citizens. Prime examples are Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who argued most of us are not rich because we spend “every darn penny….on booze or women or movies….”, and Oren Hatch of Utah who asserted that “billions and trillions of dollars” are being spent on hordes of citizens who “won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything.”  Obviously, white women in red-state Iowa and red-state Utah are not solely responsible for these troglodytes being in the Senate, but they helped put them there.   

     This is written a week before the Alabama senate election, and perhaps white women in that state will surprise me by breaking for Doug Moore, but I doubt it. I suspect most will vote for a man credibly accused of being a child predator. I would be very happy to be wrong, but a Moore victory would underline my basic proposition: women in the MeToo movement have to find some way of speaking to red-state women who voted for Trump and who will probably vote for Roy Moore.

     In the end we are talking about numbers and power. If the democrats are to regain power in the House and Senate they need to hold on to the seats they have and win a number of seats in red-states. The stakes are as high as they can be. A year ago no one would have thought that Roe v. Wade, or basic civil rights legislation, or gay rights, or elementary environmental regulation could be on the line, but they are. We are one Supreme Court justice appointment away from reversal of decades of progress for which countless thousands have fought, and many have died. We need the numbers in November of 2018 in the form of turnout, particularly in red states, to gain the power to protect what our struggle has achieved and move forward to places only dreamed of.

     And thus I come back to my initial point, it is crucial for the sake of all of us that the MeToo movement speak  organizationally and on an individual basis to red state white women who helped put the Trumps and the Grassleys and the Hatchs in power.  Clearly, we must all reach out to our sisters and brothers in red states, personally or through whatever affiliations we have, churches, unions, civic organizations, but I cannot speak to the waitress who voted for Trump, the hairdresser who supported a Grassley, the secretary who might vote for a Moore, in the same terms as a peer, another white woman. 

     The road is long and the struggle hard and justice always seems like a dim light far ahead that will never be reached, but we can, with ceaseless effort, move closer to a sunlit place.