White women voters: Use your power for progress

With 84 million voters, American white women are the largest voting block in the U.S. today. To quote the Virginia Slims cigarette commercial, “You’ve come a long way, baby! To get where you got to today. You’ve got your own cigarette now, baby, you’ve come a long, long way.”

Women have left cigarettes behind; just 13.5 percent smoke. So, which direction are women headed now, baby? In less than one week, will white women voters elect one of their own POTUS, or elevate another cancer-causing agent?

The League of Women Voters said, it’s “up to women.” So far, however, white women seem not to use their political power to benefit women. Fifty-three percent of white women voted for Trump in 2020, and in 2016 they helped elect him with 47 percent of their vote. What did he do for them?

He delivered three Supreme Court justices who stole women’s control over their own bodies, especially their right to abortion. 

As a group, white women lift romance novels up the best-sellers’ lists, voraciously devouring stories that depict white women being rescued by white men. It’s escapist literature. Think, ‘Pretty Woman,” the 1990 film starring Julia Roberts.

They vote like they are in a fairy tale, but white women haven’t been damsels-in-distress in a long time.

White women compose the bulk of teachers and nurses. An increasing number jump out of emergency vehicles. They have outvoted men since 1980, reports The Center for American Women and Politics.

As suffragettes, white women marched in 1915 demanding their right to vote, and they saw it through to the enactment of the 19th Amendment. Black women, including the 22 founders of my sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, marched as well, but, a century later, 84 million white American women voters vastly outnumber the 11 million Black American women voters.

Yet, in 2016 white women flubbed their chance to help move women forward by rejecting Hillary Clinton, and in 2020 they landed on the wrong side of history when Biden made Trump a one-term president.

However, things are looking up. In July, on ZOOM, 164K mostly white women gathered to support Harris for president. In three hours, they raised $8.5 million.

But, that was just part of the call’s purpose. 19th News, the media outlet focusing on women, reported that the goal of the ZOOM call was to “push white women to recognize their privilege and the way they frequently failed to use it as political capital, and to get them to avoid making the same mistake again.”

That means white women voters have lessons to learn.  And the final examination is on Nov. 5.

Trump’s Supreme Court also delivered a lethal blow to Affirmative Action in higher education. Many interpreted that as a slap to Black faces, especially that of the educated, hard-working Black woman. In the media from Al Jazeera to Vox, and professional journals such as the National Women’s Studies Association, data-based analysis shows how white women are the real Affirmative Action babies. They got the college degrees, the good paying jobs, the power.

Yet, wrote Victoria M. Massie in VOX magazine, white women are among its “fiercest opponents.” A Black woman professor at Rice University, Massie noted that opposition comes mostly from the carefully tended image of Affirmative Action as racial —a benefit solely for Black men and women.

Sociologist, lawyer and Texas A & M University Professor Wendy Leo Moore wrote an article in Teen Vogue magazine in 2022 that was headlined “Affirmative Action Benefits White Women Most.”

“Women have surpassed men in college admissions and graduation rates. White women by 2012 outpaced white men, with 72 percent of white women enrolled compared to 62 percent of white men.”

In 2019, Moore wrote, white women’s weekly earnings of $840 were higher than Black women’s weekly pay of $704. That’s a yearly pay difference of more than $7,000. How cool to be able to vote against her and all women’s self-interest, while maintaining her and her white man’s position in American society. High levels of education for white women is a win-win, for them and their families.

Just one example: those 4 X 4 trucks, the ones with the 37-inch rims and super-charged V-8 engines that have taken over city streets. Such a truck can cost upward of a hundred grand. In a hetero two-earner white family, that truck is basically a gift from the educated white wife and her good job. 

In the era of outlawed Affirmative Action programs, Black American women scramble to find meaningful and consistent economic opportunity and progress to help their families on the same level as white women.

Affirmative Action aside, today’s madness jumped off when the Census Bureau announced in 2018 that the U.S. will be minority white by 2045. The 2024 election is about white babies, birthed by white women, and an emphasis on a “shortage” of white babies available to adopt, as if babies are a commodity. If they are, the manufacturer is the government-regulated white womb.

It’s time for white American women voters to step up and flex their ballot box muscle and wield their super power: their vote. Over a century, white women have constructed a political doorway. The time for them to cross the threshold is the general election on Nov. 5.

(Dedria Humphries Barker is the author of “Mother of Orphans: The True and Curious Story of Irish Alice, A Colored Man’s Widow.” Her column appears monthly.)