Dear Fellow White Women: We F**ked This Up

Fellow white women, I’m done with you.

After all this talk of allyship, you didn’t show up to the polls to push back against the openly racist, xenophobic, misogynistic now-President-elect Donald Trump.

The exit polls from the Nov. 8 election show that 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump, compared to only 43 percent for Hillary Clinton. It appears many white women are not moved by Trump’s sexism, and instead would rather applaud the candidate for his lack of political correctness.

After all the supposed progress we’ve made, painstakingly trying to change a white feminist movement into an intersectional one (and for that we have only the hard work of women of color to thank), white women didn’t show up to fight back against a man whose rhetoric and policies directly attack women of color, immigrant women, Muslim women, LGBTQ women and more.

And the worst part is: By the end, he had come for you, too. For many it wasn’t enough when he came for Muslims, Latinos and Black people. The real “pearl clutch” was the “grab ‘em by the pussy” moment, one that threatened all women but specifically white women. All of a sudden, everyone was appalled, and the endorsements started dropping like flies ― as if, to paraphrase Maya Angelou, he hadn’t already shown us who he was.

To quote one of my favorite lines from Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist: “And yet.” And yet you still didn’t show up to the polls to elect our first woman president ― a white lady, no less. When the demographic split for the exit polls came out, showing the divide between Trump and Clinton supporters, my eyes immediately jumped to one group: white women. Tell me we came through for our sisters of color, I begged, at least this one time. We didn’t.

So I am ashamed. I am ashamed of my country. I am ashamed of white people. But more than anyone else, I am ashamed of white women. Is this who we really are? Clearly ― and it is who we have always been.

So take a good long look in the mirror this morning, and instead of blaming others for this nightmare we’ve woken up to ― no, we’ve chosen ― make an active choice today: The buck stops with you.

This is what an ally looks like. Be one. Because in the next four to eight years, our sisters of color will need one ― though who knows if they will trust us now.