It is Election Day 2018 and I am scared…of white women.
I want to pull out my phone and call the police on them, frightened of what they might do today.
They’ve done it before.
We all know by now the infamous surprise constituent that pushed Trump over the top in the 2016 Presidential election, despite his taped admission of sexual assault: 53 percent of white women voted for Trump.
If in 2008 the majority of black people voted not for Obama but a racist, inexperienced challenger there would be countless think pieces and symposiums to diagnose:
What is wrong with black people?
Indeed there have been discussions and prominent op-eds about why white women voted this way but the issue has been treated with kid gloves. Unfortunately, handling white women with kid gloves is part of how we got here.
So I will ask here:
What is wrong with white women?
A few months before the 2016 presidential election, a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came out that should have rung the alarm and caused national consternation. Instead, under the din of the election coverage, this shocking news went largely ignored:
The life expectancy of white women in America has decreased.
Here’s some context: As a rule, life expectancy in developed nations rises or at least holds steady. In countries free from coups, civil wars, famine, economic collapses and teeming with medical and technological advances, life is easier. Life gets increasingly longer, at a rate of .2 per year, notes University of Pennsylvania demographer Michel Guillot.
Yet in this critical, macro measurement of health, American white women are outliers.
Every demographic group in America is increasing life expectancy or holding steady. Latinx populations and black men are increasing. White men and black women have held onto their gains.
Yet white women, despite living in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, will not fare better than their older sisters in this basic measurement of well being. They will die younger.
Guillot offers some potential reasons why:
“In this group, we're seeing increases in opioid abuse, suicide, chronic liver disease, which is really related to alcohol abuse, so this could be due to that.”
In other words, white women are killing themselves.
They are self-destructing.
So is it surprising that white women voted against their best interests in 2016?
Think pieces such as Alexis Grenell’s “White Women, Come Get Your People” in
The New York Times have attempted to explain white women’s Trump votes as aligning with white supremacy and patriarchy. This is kid gloves. White women don’t just “support a system” or “benefit from patriarchy,” as Grenell writes.
White women are patriarchy. This rash of white women calling the police on black people who are doing the myriad mundane from barbecuing to sitting in a car to a nine year old walking around with a backpack is one key example. They do this knowing full well what police encounters can mean for black people: murder, often unpunished. This isn’t supporting or benefiting the system. This is the system.
White women’s majority vote for a man we discovered had a predilection for assaulting women by grabbing them by the p*ssy is just another part of this self-denial and destruction. It is rooted in continual quotidian choices that have snowballed so much that they have countered decades of American medical and economic progress, choices so destructive and unrelenting they have peeled back their life expectancy to an earlier era.
They have turned back the hands of time to Make America Great Again.