White Women’s Dependence on White Male Supremacy: What can we do about it?
I saw a tweet the other morning calling on white women to renounce their dependence on white men as a way to change the power structure in this country. The tweet thread that followed purported that it was impossible for the white supremacist male hierarchy to be turned on its head when so many white women are “entrenched” in it.
I have to agree.
We can see evidence of entrenchment in white male supremacy in the fact that more white women than one would expect (the figure is around 53%) voted for Trump. They did so because it was in their own self-interest. They saw a Trump presidency as being good for their (white, upper middle-class) husbands and by the trickle-down economics of marriage, what’s good for their husbands would also be good for them and their children.
I saw another tweet, in this same vein, that put the onus squarely on white women to change their lives so they don’t have to be dependent on men. Encouraging white women to make this change is great in theory, but putting it into practice is the problem.
When I was pregnant, I was completely taken by surprise that my husband’s job didn’t offer parental leave. I had never imagined that in the new millennium I, because I was a woman, would be the sole parent tasked with the…
