White Women and the Pedestal of Pussy Power

 It was no secret that this election hinged upon white women. Who would white women choose? A hardened politician from the first wave of feminism or a non politician white man with a history of racist, sexist, and general -ist behavior against vulnerable demographics, and a nasty mouth. 

And you know the answer by now. So why did this happen?

On Monday and Tuesday there were several stories trending on Facebook about the white suffragist movement and the women like Susan B. Anthony who pioneered legislation for the female vote. There were also stories about those same suffragists who actively excluded black women from the movement. The story of white women offering preferential treatment to their own is an old one and it takes Sojourner Truth herself to take this old bugaboo to task. Her speech "Ain't I a Women" was delievered at a convention of white feminists about that very exclusion.

For black women seeking allies white women have long been unreliable.  It’s an old and treacherous story. It’s not that unusual for that treachery to be so blatantly expressed.

The post mortem on the election is not yet complete so it’s difficult to apportion blame as completely as must be done. Soon we’ll know exactly how many blacks and Latinos voted, how many women versus men, how many black men and black women blah blah blah. My first job out of college was in the congressional offices of Eliot Engel D-New York. I can tell you that the focus groups can get very, very specific. Age, race, gender, class: we’ll know it all as soon as the numbers crunchers get to doing their thing.

But the crunchers can’t tell the story of the historical pedestal that elevates white pussy above all else. The whole gendered angle of whiteness always dictated that white womanhood was a sanctified almost holy eminence never to be sullied by contact with blackness, male or female. But in the supposedly post racial 21^st century, this election has turned race relations back to the racial politics of the early 1900s at the least. In an age where our own president is a product of a mixed race relationship of a white woman and a black man one would think that those old time values had died. If you thought that then you got the surprise of your life on Tuesday.

The question is: how has whiteness preserved itself with such pristine glory in this day and age. And the answer lies very much inside privileged conversations of white men and white women. I haven’t been privy to these conversations for obvious reasons but I’m so very curious. I can only imagine what goes on but the desire to be a fly on the wall is all consuming.

I want to know but I don’t want to be a part of it.

I want to know but it feels dirty somehow. The compromises that have to be made between white women and white men feel unholy.

Why would they basically sell out one of their own, as women, for such a piggish man? I mean, let’s call a spade a spade, or an orange an orange, as it were. Why would a nation of women feel more comfortable being governed by Trump than Hillary Clinton?

I don’t have any answers here only suppositions and questions. I can’t understand it. But if I could understand whiteness I wouldn’t be black. I don’t know the rule makers but I do understand the rules. I know the rules because they apply to me whereas the rule makers can break them at any time. How else was Barack Obama made except by a first class rule breaker?

White women know the rules too but being above the law as they are by the nature of whiteness means they are privy to a loftier dialogue than I can claim.

I want an explanation from the rule breakers themselves but the damage is already done.