Forget Black Men, Why This is Really The Moment of Truth for White Women Voters

Prize-winning writer: White women need to step it up. If they collectively do not reject Trump, it cements a long-standing irony.

01 Nov 2024, 15:56 by Derrick Z. Jackson · The Root

Photo: Getty (Getty Images)

This is their most telling chance yet to get out of the bed with misogyny and white supremacy.

In 2020, they chose Trump by even a wider margin, 53 percent to 46 percent. That was despite a presidency where he attacked a multitude of social safety net and health programs that disproportionately affect women and children (nearly two thirds of recipients in SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, are white).

Now comes next Tuesday. Trump is a hair’s breadth from returning to the White House despite being a convicted felon for covering up a sex scandal and owing $83.3 million to a woman he libeled after she accused him of rape. His supremacy and misogyny have only gotten worse.

He has gone from his tarring of Mexicans as criminals, drug dealers and rapists and his fecal castigation of Haiti and African nations to lying about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets. He calls Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris a fecal vice president. A key speaker at his recent rally at Madison Square Garden called Puerto Rico an island of garbage.

And despite the 2022 overturning of Roe, he bizarrely bloviated this week in Wisconsin that he would protect women, “whether they like it or not.”

This puts white women front and center of saving this country from four more years of this. Polls suggest they are evenly split between Trump and Harris. The media often says Harris has a big lead with women without crediting the gender gap to the rock-solid support of Black women.

If white women collectively do not reject Trump, it cements a long-standing irony. White women have been the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action programs also intended to open doors for Black people. Yet, white women have played key roles in pulling up the rug from behind them.

In 1996, they voted 58 percent to 42 percent for Proposition 209 that killed affirmative action in California. By voting for Trump, they voted for a Supreme Court that last year ended affirmative action in college admissions.

I once wrote for the Boston Globe, “In the 1970s and 80s, white women had no problem hitching up to the affirmative action banner of ‘women and minorities.’ If they now want to rip down the banner, it will confirm the dirtiest little secret of all about affirmative action” _ that white women supported it only to the extent that it benefited themselves.”

Next Tuesday will tell us if white women stop ripping down the banner, and stop supporting a former president who has no problem ripping this country apart.

Derrick Z. Jackson is a former Pulitzer-prize finalist for the Boston Globe

Forget Black Men, Why This is Really The Moment of Truth for White Women Voters

Prize-winning writer: White women need to step it up. If they collectively do not reject Trump, it cements a long-standing irony.

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