Now Isn't The Time To Demonise Trump Voters, Rather Question Our Own Complacency
I woke up on Wednesday morning to the predictable expressions of shock and dismay on my social media feed.
'Wow America'
'America is this really who you are?'
'I’m shocked and disgusted'
Donald Trump – a man who has admitted to wanting to grab women by the p*ssy, a man who took credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade (which restricts or bans abortion rights), a man who engages in open expressions of racism and homophobia, a man who is a convicted felon – is president of the United States of America, again.
It would be parody if it wasn’t so tragic.
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The shock and dismay agitate me. It communicates to me that too many people are not paying attention, are ill prepared and continue to underestimate the powerful forces of patriarchy and white supremacy.
As a Black woman with lineage lost to slavery, I am not the least bit surprised by these election results. The US, a former British colony, is a country founded on male supremacism, extraordinary violence, racism and legalised rape which was maintained for centuries, far longer than it has not been in place. That kind of legacy doesn’t just disappear with a new politician and set of policies. The same political systems many expect to save us have only ever existed to maintain dominance and subordination.
As a British colony in the early 17th century, the white British elite embedded slave codes in Virginia. These English common laws extended to nearly all of its American colonies, including the Caribbean, and controlled the treatment of enslaved Africans which consequently placed Black people and Indigenous Americans outside of civil society.
We have to examine all of the ingredients that made it possible for someone convicted of sexual harassment to become one of the most powerful men in the world – again. Because the signs have always been there.
What happened at Capitol Hill in January 2021 was a clear warning sign. Heavily armed mobs of majority-white Trump supporters of mixed genders, tried to stop the change in presidency to incumbent President Joe Biden, by breaking into Capitol Hill and killing five people in the process. Insurgents were seen defecating in corridors while law enforcement seemingly lost their powers of arrest and a handful were instead seen posing for selfies with those same insurgents.
Exit polls from 2021 show 55% of white women voted for Trump in 2020 – more than in 2016. Early 2024 exit polls show 54% of men and 44% of women voted for Republicans. Strip these polls back by race and gender and it gets even more revealing – 52% of white women voted for Trump – while 92% of black women voted Democratic.
Some may be surprised at what is essentially another election that points to women seemingly struggling to support other women. This doesn’t surprise me because it speaks to how engrained misogyny is and how many deeply underestimate the corrosive nature of misogynoir - the combination of both sexism and racism, far worse than either on their own. Kamala Harris as a woman of both Indian and Jamaican heritage did not stand a chance.
Was heritage the only reason Harris was not elected? I doubt it – it’s clear Harris and the Biden administration’s role in the Israel-Palestine conflict was not popular amongst many voters. But even if Harris had been successful, the systemic challenges would remain. Too many people outsource personal responsibility onto individuals outside of us to enact the change we wish to see in the world.
It’s convenient and perhaps comforting to think that an individual politician will save us from this global sh*t show that continues to move us closer towards fascism, but representation will not save us. History has shown us that the world won’t change if we don’t.
Politicians are not prophets. They are human beings. Politicians thrust into the spotlight, such as President Donald Trump, point to the painful reality that shamed and wounded people in positions of power can, in fact, be dangerous. It's one of the reasons I believe we need to engage in healing as a priority. What happens next will depend on it.
Healing means intentionally dealing with the sh*t past generations have not. Healing means dealing with the problematic behaviour we enable. Healing means having the courage to have tough conversations and addressing the dysfunction we enable in our lives and communities. It requires radical honesty and confronting the systems we are part of, from politics to families.
We absolutely co-create the world we live in. We make up the systems that dominate. We impact the environment, we determine politics. We are the law makers (or breakers) we build the communities or break them. We can either blame and continue to denigrate one another, or we can make a commitment to return to our humanity and do our work.
When I think about the lack of progress that has been made since so many public statements were made to address white supremacy in 2020 it leads me to ask: why do we continue to be surprised? We can look at the election results and separate ourselves from the choices American voters made – but are we really that different? Britain enabled a Conservative government for 14 years and voted Brexit and continue to live with the consequences of that.
Blaming and denigrating one another for our inadequate political choices is easy but doing the real work to look at our own complacency and how we uphold these systems, actively and passively, is harder. Because how can we magically expect the world to change, if we don’t?
Change goes beyond one vote every four years. The power has always been in us in our everyday actions and in how we interact with one another. What happens next is dependent on us consistently committing to doing the healing work to change – our humanity needs it.
Nova Reid is a TED Speaker, Producer and author of The Good Ally.
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