When's the finger waving gonna start at white women?

Hope dies last.

Let me start by saying: I am a deep and abiding Charlamagne tha God hater. If he has one hundred haters, I am one. If he has one hater, I am she. If he has no haters, I am dead and busy raising an undead army of haters so we can pester him from the afterlife. I think he generally lowers the level of public debate by refusing to learn or unlearn anything, and by being openly and insidiously harmful to Black women and queer and trans people in particular. At best, his Breakfast Club interviews are good for meme-able moments. But we simply do not go together.

Howevuh. I agree with him roughly once every nine years. The last time was when he grouchily asked Bernie Sanders why he wouldn’t support reparations, because, yeah, Bernard. Why wouldn’t you? The most recent time was last week, when he interviewed Kamala Harris and asked this question:

hereswhykevin

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President Obama was out there last week waving his finger at Black men. When are Liz Cheney and Hillary Clinton gonna wave their finger at white women? When are Bill Clinton and Joe Biden gonna wave their finger at white men? Because 52% of white women voted for Trump in 2016. 55% voted for Trump in 2020. They all voted against their own interests. When’s the finger waving gonna start at them?

And yes I said yes I will Yes, because another thing I hate is when Barack Obama scolds Black people. Partly because I hate condescension as a political tactic—it’s rarely as effective and never as righteous as you think it is!—and partly because, when Obama scolds Black people, Black people are rarely the actual audience. His actual audience seems to be liberals who think they are progressives, but who love to hear a fancy Black man pathologize other Black people for having the same conservative beliefs or making the same decisions as they do. It’s completely useless in terms of changing behavior, but changing behavior hasn’t been Obama’s goal for a long time. As a former President, his primary goal is to defend the status quo. And the status quo needs a scapegoat to distract from its inadequacy.

So, for all these reasons, I loved Charlamagne’s grumpy little question. I let myself discount the ignorance behind it and shared it to my IG story. But I also lied just now, because I couldn’t entirely discount the ignorance. I had to caveat his comment about white people voting against their own interests by voting for Trump, saying “don’t forget that whiteness is itself an interest!” Because, if anything has been made inescapably clear in the past harrowing decade, it’s that whiteness is still a defining interest in this society. (And not just for white people, or it would have crumbled a while ago. As with any unjust power structure, whiteness needs foot soldiers to help it endure.)

Which is connected to why Hillary Clinton and Liz Cheney can’t scold white women into voting for Harris/Walz. As an annoyingly correct friend reminded me in response to my IG story, white voters are not like Black voters. Their voting patterns are spread across the parties. In fact, the only voting demographic that is super-concentrated in one party is Black voters. Even though Black people are not a monolith, Black voters kinda are. Theoretically, someone like Obama could rally us around a specific issue or candidate. And while it feels right that there be an analogue for, say, white women, that’s just not how it plays out.

There are women who take a great deal of pride in not supporting anything that could be labeled as a “women’s issue.” Political pick-me’s who will blame women being insufficiently tough and/or womanly, depending on the issue, for anything that could be solved or prevented by a just and human-centered system. These women don’t need abortion rights, because only the wrong kind of woman needs an abortion. They don’t need equal pay, because they don’t want handouts just because they’re women. “I’m not a feminist” is a boringly popular TikTok prompt for a reason.

r/notliketheothergirls

Even if they wouldn’t describe it this way, they know there’s more safety in aligning oneself with the dominant power structure (patriarchy) than in trying to change it or even criticizing it, and they’ve chosen that safety. Remember back in the early 2024s¹ when people could not stop talking about Taylor Swift being at her boyfriend’s football games? I saw so much discourse about how women and girls were watching the men in their life spew hatred towards Taylor Swift just for existing, and how this would be a radicalizing moment for them. That Taylor is the model of acceptable femininity in this country and even she is getting sexist blowback, so it’ll be clear to these women and girls that there is no winning in a patriarchy. And like…maybe. But what’s more statistically likely is that these women and girls watched that hatred and knew they didn’t want to be on the receiving end of it.

That misplaced hope in conservative women seeing the light crops up a lot in my world. I saw it with Ivanka Trump in 2016, this hope that, because she was young and pretty and has her name on shoes you could buy at DSW, she would be a moderating force for her father. I saw it all year with Cheryl Hines, this hope that, because she’s pretty and funny and on a beloved TV show, she would suddenly realize that her husband is the most terrifying man Roseanne Barr has ever encountered. And I see it with Usha Vance, this hope that, because she’s pretty and brown and well educated, she will realize that her husband is a power-obsessed shitbird all hopped up on Diet Mountain Dew who pledges loyalty to no one, not even himself. We want to believe there’s some threshold, some rubicon, that will snap these women out of it. But this hope strenuously ignores the simple fact that these women are choosing. They are not damsels in distress. They are Serena Joys and Aunt Lydias who know that they don’t want to be handmaids, or worse.

All of this to say: these women will not be scolded into voting for Harris/Walz, by Clinton or Cheney or anyone else. Nor will white men. Best the Dems can do is make the party as hospitable to (actually conservative, by most political metrics) moderates as possible. So they drop opposing the death penalty from the national party platform. They have America’s coach brag folksily about how the two Democrats on the ticket are both gun owners, and their Republican opposition has felonies. They showcase cops and Republicans at the DNC while they forbid any Palestinian speakers. They send Obama out to scold Black men. Status quo ante. Everything as it was.

1. It’s been a long year, actually.