OVER THE LAST six months, I’ve spoken with multiple white women across the country about something I am beginning to understand: why white women have, historically, made disappointing allies to women of color.
These words feel dangerous to utter. I risk alienating women I love and admire. But they must be spoken in a year when the actions and votes of white women will impact the lives of women of color and their families more so than any time since women gained suffrage. We must lean into this hard conversation—and, in the doing, place our hope in the power of the resurrection, asking brown Jesus to illuminate what an alliance with women of color will require of white women in 2020.
An early race law in the colony of Maryland, where Harriett Tubman was enslaved, mandated that any white woman who married an enslaved black man would herself become a slave until her husband died. By the antebellum era, it was established that white women could not be enslaved but that ownership of their property (including their bodies) transferred to their husbands upon marriage. They could not sue. They could not make a legal contract. And they could not vote.
White patriarchy’s rule, and the ever-present threat of being shunned, gave white women incentive, when push came to shove, to choose their whiteness over their womanhood. For example, free black women spearheaded the groundbreaking effort to lead Philadelphia’s Anti-Slavery Society from 1833 to 1838. But a decade later, there were no black women at Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. In 1913, Alice Paul coddled the sensibilities of white men and women when she instructed black suffragists to walk at the back of the procession of the very first women’s march on Washington.
And, in 2018, Republican Sen. Susan Collins supported Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, promising white women they were protected because he didn’t express to her a plan to challenge Roe v. Wade. Her vote pushed him over the line and paved the way for Supreme Court rulings shaving away civil rights protections for people of color.
I used to think of white women as kept, put on a pedestal, protected by white men, but I’ve been rethinking that. I’m beginning to understand that white patriarchy’s grasp on white women is not soft: It’s a death grip.
In my conversations with white women, this revelation is being confirmed. White women have been reared by white patriarchy. They marry white patriarchy and themselves rear white patriarchy. They are closer to it than any other women on earth.
Through the #MeToo, #TimesUp, #ChurchToo, and #SilenceIsNotSpritual movements, as well as the Women’s March, white women have begun to trust their power and renounce their compacts with white patriarchy. But alliance with women of color in 2020 will require much more than agreement that rape is wrong. It ultimately requires willingness to renounce the privileges of whiteness.
Now, let’s talk.
Lisa Sharon Harper, a former Sojourners columnist, is the founder and president of Freedom Road and author of Fortune and The Very Good Gospel. You can follow her work at lisasharonharper.com.
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