Note: the opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not reflect Her Campus Oswego or Her Campus media.
Thank you to María Elena Mendoza for help editing & contributing to this article.
Right now in America, we are in the middle of a reckoning.
On Saturday, Joe Biden was elected as the next President of the United States. Democrats (and even some Independents and Republicans) rejoice at the fact that the era of Trump is receding. We can go back to “normalcy” — the government can begin to govern again, Biden can begin to clean up the mess of the economy and pandemic that Trump failed to address, and our first ever woman of color Vice President, Kamala Harris, has been elected. Beyond that, there have been other historic progressive wins: Sarah McBride becomes the nation’s first ever transgender state Senator, five different states have voted to legalize recreational marijuana and Oregon has voted to decriminalize all recreational drugs and legalize shrooms, Richie Torrez was the first gay Afro-Latino to be elected to Congress, and Colorado rejected a hardline 20 week abortion ban. While the Senate is currently tied with Georgia going into a runoff in January, Congress is firmly for the Democrats. For progressives in America, many will breathe a sigh of relief, maybe even party a little, in seeing the demise of Trump and the march forward of liberalism.
As a Democratic Socialist, and a bisexual woman, I can relate to many of these feelings. These are wins — real, tangible wins, showing that many people in The United States really do want much more liberal social policies and better representation in the government. That fact deserves to be celebrated.
However, I think it would be completely remiss if we did not acknowledge what has happened in this election with one half of this country. The fact that Donald Trump, even if he is not reelected, was able to capture so much of the electorate is not something Democrats and liberals can ignore. These are not people we can write off as crazy conspiracy theorists — even if they do blatantly believe in easily disprovable conspiracies, like QAnon. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon supporter, was also elected to Congress last night, where she will sit alongside and decide the law with her Democrat colleagues— the same collegues who she believes are running a satanic international sex trafficking ring in which they drink the blood of children to maintain youth (if you are unfamiliar with QAnon, lucky you, but here is a short explaination if necessary). Marjorie Taylor Greene and her supporters cannot be written off as an anomaly. Especially when you look at an election that, even after four years of Trump’s irresponsible governing, was so close.
Many news outlets have talked about how Democrats expected a strong repudiation of Trumpism in this election. The polling itself showed Biden at 8 points ahead of Trump nationally and with a comfortable lead in many swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Looking at the election map, in which Biden only led by slim margins of thousands of votes in places like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, it is obvious that this repudiation was always destined to be a fantasy.
So, why is that? Why, after children are put in cages at the border and refugees die waiting to enter the U.S., after people riot in the streets for an end to police brutality against BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color), after the Women’s March of 2017, after a pandemic that has ravaged the economy, killed 230,000+ Americans, disrupted education in every age group, destroyed both jobs and businesses, after the appointment of two unqualified judges, one an alleged sexual predator and the other literally days before the election against the dying wish of RBG, to the Supreme Court, was half of this country still willing to back him? The answer is the same as it was in 2016: white people.
Let me make something very clear: this is not a sympathy article, nor is it a condemnation article. I am not a political analyst or sociologist, nor am I a person of color. What I am is someone who can look at the data, listen to the actual experts in these fields, and give my personal opinion on what exactly went wrong here. I have seen takes on both sides; ones that I believe are too generous in justifying the mindsets of white people, and others that are too harsh. I came here to try to write something in between, to try to give my own perspective as a person who did not, and never will, vote for Trump even while living in a Republican area, but also who has to take responsibility for the large amount of members of my own race doing so.
I would first like to address why I am talking about white people in particular for making this race so close. If you look at the data for 2016, 2018, and 2020, it is fairly easy to decipher that white people are the ones who carry Trump in nearly every age and income demographic. Looking at just black versus white demographics from the Pew Research Center, in 2016, 91% of black voters went for Clinton, whereas 54% of white voters went for Trump. In 2018, we see nearly identical numbers for the Congressional vote: 92% of black voters, 72% of hispanic voters, and 67% of other voters went for Democrats, versus 52% of white voters went for Republicans. In 2020, simply looking at the Youth data, a number you think would be smaller as Youth (18-29, typically) tend to skew much more heavily Democrat, these voting numbers play out yet again in key swing states: Georgia, where they are going into a recount, 90% of black youth voted for Biden, whereas 63% of white youth voted for Trump. In North Carolina, which went to Trump, 96% of black youth went for Biden versus 54% of white youth went for Trump, and in Arizona, which went to Biden, 71% of Latino youth went for Biden and 40% of the white youth went for Trump (the only number where Trump does not lead for white people). Exit polling data from the Washington Post shows this again, in which non-white voters sway Biden and white voters sway Trump. Trump also holds this lead with white women, a demographic I’m part of.
The conclusion that could be drawn from this is obvious: Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric appeals to white people’s racism. To any BIPOC, this is not a revelation. As a white person, especially a liberal one, perhaps this data is shocking — it was to me when I first saw it after the 2016 election (also granted I was an 18 year old who just voted in their first election). I will also admit though, looking at the 2018 numbers in particular was surprising to me. Comparing Trump’s performance from 2016 to 2020 and seeing similar trends is to be expected. Trump is the big personality; the draw for many is the drama of the show that he turns the politics into. Even in a race he is not directly up for election in, and one where many Republicans are not the entertainer that Trump is, having nearly identical metrics for voting based on race truly shows how entrenched racism is in America.
Racism, just like Trump, is a scam. It is not a scam in the way that it is not real — these numbers show clearly how real racism is — but rather in the sense that it is a philosophy that white people are sold on which only serves to hurt them in the end. The roots of racism in this country are firmly planted in slavery, in which racism was used as the way to maintain a source of free labor to keep the rich wealthy. Racism, like sexism and other sources of prejudice, are places to keep the economic and social benefits that those at the top experience in place. The way of doing so has evolved over time, particularly after the breadth of the social revolutions that began to take hold in the 60’s. As former President Richard Nixon’s aide explains, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” Though this quote is about the war on drugs, the connection between the Civil Rights movement that threatened the power and therefore the wealth of the conservatives at the top, is something Nixon’s people successfully connected to the drugs being introduced (some of which came to the US because of the US government) and experimented with at the time.
The way in which white people often characterize racism, through overt signals such as racial slurs, is not the reality of racism that BIPOC recognize. Although certainly racial slurs and organizations like the Ku Klux Klan are still a part of racism in modern day, the reality is that the majority of racism is covert; it is coworkers only talking to you about black celebrities and rap music, being “mysteriously” denied for loans or housing, being passed over for a promotion multiple times despite being the most qualified, black children being categorized as aggressive or even arrested in schools, neighborhoods with large populations of BIPOC having higher police presence, and of course, “All Lives Matter” as a response to Black Lives Matter. Microaggressions, the full history of this country in disenfranchising BIPOC, and current movements and racial theory are all things that the vast majority of white people in America are not educated in.
And that is when I titled this article “We Need to Do Better,” I was talking about this specifically: we need to do better and educate this country. Though it would seem obvious that older demographics of white people would be much more resistant, and have much less access to education on racism, the data on younger white voters provided shows that this is a failure everywhere. This education is necessary in schools, absolutely, but the real education actually involves the interacting and integration of BIPOC individuals and their identities as a whole. BIPOC are educated in the reality of this country every single day as they live it. While BIPOC have no responsibility to personally educate anyone, they exist in this nation and their voices and presence need to be heard, acknowledged, and most importantly understood by white people. The data, and the continued racial unrest that grips American society, shows that this is not happening on the scale to which it needs to be.
Now, I said this would not be a condemnation article either, and I still have no intention of it being. Many, many white people, particularly those in positions of economic power, are perfectly aware of all of this and participate in and expand racism knowingly to further their own goals. However, I point out the educational failings and scam that racism is to also talk about the portion of the population who is not in these positions of power. Donald Trump courts much of the working class and non-college educated white vote, and it is because of the fact that the racist white people in power have been able to sell this scam to them. Instead of talking about actual economic reform in the form of higher taxes on millionaires, billionaires, and corporations, which would threaten their power and wealth, they are able to instead blame the issues of this country on BIPOC and other minority populations. It has been shown time and time again that higher taxes on the wealthiest citizens and corporations would also enable the government to give a stronger social safety net with improvements like increased Social Security, universal healthcare, paid maternity and sick leave, free college, and better food and housing security, all of which would benefit the white working class. It would also benefit disenfranchised BIPOC, and this is what wealthy racists capitalize on. If poor white people are focused on the fact that black or hispanic people are all criminals or soon to be, it then gives reason that these criminals should not be able to access and “abuse” the benefits of a social safety net. This also means dehumanizing anyone who commits any type of crime, no matter if it is violent or not, as the Nixon aide laid out. Through this, BIPOC can be dehumanized as well, even if they have never committed a crime. By the way— the biggest determiner of crime in America is economic level, and crime levels in black and white neighborhoods with the same economic level are the same.
These are the same wealthy white people who actively fight against efforts by anti-racism activists to improve education and desegregation across the country in order to keep these same impoverished white people ignorant and desperate enough to believe the lies of racism. Just as it was when slavery was still around and abolitionists had to speak on this issue, racism does not just hurt BIPOC — it hurts white people too. By destroying economic reform through racism, these same impoverished white people unknowingly destroy their own prospects of improving their lives.
Racism does not just destroy economic opportunity though, it also destroys social ones. Humans are social animals who need and want to have connections with each other. Cutting off those vital opportunities and networks of love and replacing it with hate makes people more isolated, insecure, and fearful. It is a miserable existence, and one that is ripe for bad actors to feed on. It is also at the heart of keeping impoverished white people uneducated. If you can never have a meaningful relationship with a person of color because you cannot see past their skin color, you will never be able to understand the lies you have been told by racism.
The destruction of love is also the reality that abolitionists, who eventually turned to suffragettes, honed in on the Southern white women who were complicit with, if not actively encouraging, their slave-holding husbands. Many in the modern day wonder how white women can turn their backs on other women by voting for a party and candidates who are obstinante in taking away reproductive freedoms of birth control and abortion that make family planning possible and increase positive healthcare outcomes. Yet again though, the answer lies in racism. The intrinsic ties of patriarchal and white supremacist rule function on the same system of hoarding wealth and power into a small minority of people.
For me to write an article about this and not address the issue of my fellow white women supporting Trump and being racist would be irresponsible. Every single time a marginalized person, especially black, muslim, or hispanic, does wrong, it is publicized and every single other person in that same identity is forced to answer for it. That same standard has never been applied to white people, and while it has been applied to women, it takes exceedingly different forms for women of color versus white women. Women of color are asked to take on the burden of both their race and their gender, which is mentally exhausting and genuinely painful. It is time that white women are asked to take that same burden on in order for us to do better. Part of that is understanding the historical context of the position that white women are in.
Southern women watched as their slave-holding husbands continually stepped outside of their marriage, either to have affairs with other white women or to rape their female slaves, fathering sometimes dozens of illegitmate children depending on the size of the plantation. The resentment and anger turned not on their husbands, but on the slave women. Like the slaves their husbands owned, these white women’s lives were dominated by their social, economic, and legal attachment to their husbands. To tear down the system of slavery would mean to also tear down the framework of patriarchy, and to destroy both would be to destroy the benefits that they received by being attached to these men. Even women whose husbands did not own slaves could not deny the economic benefit brought to their communities by slavery, despite its blatant immorality. Would these women, whose husbands indirectly benefitted from slavery and were for it remaining in place, risk speaking up and losing the love of their husbands? The same is true for women whose husbands did own slaves — taking a stand again slavery meant taking a stand against the love from the men in their lives, even if they understood that love was fraudulent. As former slave Harriet Jacobs once wrote in her memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:
“I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white farmers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched.”
Themselves and their daughters may be sexually harassed, cheated on, or even domestically abused by the men in their lives, but the ability to go to a debutante ball in an expensive gown and show off your beauty to elevate your social status among the other women made it all worth it for them. To have a companion, even one you know does not actually love you, is better than being alone. Without any other personal meaning in life besides surface level beauty and homemaking, the racism in patriarchy is able to trick these women into pursuing only social and physical superiority through their husband’s wealth. It is able to trick these women into believing that without these racist men, they will be left to unsuccessfully fend for themselves, both economically and emotionally. Racism is not, and never has been, just an issue for BIPOC.
It is virtually the same today among the white women who are going for Trump. Though slavery is outlawed and America has progressed significantly for women since the 1800’s, it is not hard to witness these same women everyday claim that they do not need feminism because they are “not victims”; they are able to work and go to school just like men do now, and even so, the men in their lives treat them well by buying them expensive jewelry and listening to their problems at the end of the day. However, Antebellum white women thought the same thing, and yet, we look back on their existences horrified — women trapped, unhappy, and degraded who could not or did not want to articulate it. We also look back in disgust and see them ignore the suffering of the black women around them in favor of economic and social status. Even among modern white women who do identify as feminists, this is still echoed. White feminism uplifts white women to work outside of the home in comfortable desk jobs, go into higher education at nice universities, and take the pill at a low cost, while simultaneously denying these same opportunities to women of color and ignoring the oppression of the apparent misogynoir that they experience.
As I’ve already stated, many wealthy, educated white men know what they’re doing and this is true for wealthy, educated white women as well (Ivanka Trump, anyone?). However, women who suffer from the same lack of education and impoverishment that their white male counterparts do make them prime targets for not just racism, but racism and patriarchy combined. If the goal is to concentrate wealth and power into a small percentage of the population, and a part of controlling wealth and power is also controlling how, when, and the number of children one brings into a family of which men cannot control without directly controlling women, it is obvious the goals of patriarchy is to con these women into subduing themselves in order to restore this supremacy to white men without even much of a fight. I believe, from being around these women my whole life in a rural county, that they do genuinely love the men in their lives. There is nothing wrong with love, as it is the most powerful and most beautiful emotion alive. However, this emotional response is the same type triggered in white men that is used to game white women into voting against their own interests.
I am not implying that these poor white people are completely blameless. They are, still, at the end of the day, victimizing BIPOC by keeping racism pervasive. However, I do want to show that they are victims (of a different sort) of racism as well. To be both a perpetrator and a victim is the game of racism for whites. The emotional response to a lack of economic and personal growth opportunity makes it so easy to keep poaching them by the wealthy educated whites that exist at the top who have gamed every part of our society to keep this cycle afloat. These people at the top are making them feel seen by feeding on the hate and fear that is inherent in racism, even if what they say is a lie.
I could certainly say more, and there is definitely more to say by people who have dedicated their entire careers to studying these issues. In 1890, Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives. The book, which arguably invented the genre of muckraking, details life (through text and pictures, which was also revolutionary at the time at providing a visual look into the lives of others) in the newly created slums of New York City, the title a reference to the ways that the impoverished and disenfranchised lived as compared to the wealthy barons of the time who put them there. Today, we are in a similar scenario, yet instead, one half is BIPOC and the other is poor uneducated whites, both sides suffering from the same ill yet one unable to see it because of the modern day barons who perpetuate it. If we cannot listen to each other in this time of crisis, how can we ever grow and heal? We need a better framework for education in both real world issues and compassion — for everyone. If we cannot do better, if we cannot begin to muckrake the current political climate so that the lies of racism do not keep destroying the lives of BIPOC and winning over impoverished white people desperately looking for a solution, we will never be able to truly come together as a country in order to solve our problems.