Facebook Publication Date: 12/28/2018 10:12

On White Women, Unforced Errors, Dog Whistles, and The Myth of Allyship

According to an article in Slate (referenced in comments), outgoing Senator Claire McCaskill has been using her lame duck moments before her departure not in healing, nor in building up fellow women who will be rising, hoping to make positive influence in that body.

No, rather than choosing to engage in constructive bridge building in her party, the ‘moderate’ Democrat has spent her time bitterly regretting her loss, and in doing so, trashing progressives and other women—and most notably, women of color– as part of her farewell tour.

It reads and sounds like a toxic blend of sour grapes and not-so-subtle undermining of those who would follow her.

I did not dislike McCaskill; were I in Missouri, I would have voted for her, as no doubt other progressives did in November, even if they had to get over valid reservations to do so. I certainly would favored her over her opponent.

I like her less now. Not only because of the bitterness of her statements post loss, and not even for her moderate positions on issues I that I felt she would have been wise to have had the courage to pivot left (yes, even in Missouri).

I understand the compulsion of incrementalism in a large cohort of the Democratic Party, even as that cohort shrinks every election cycle.

I understand the anger engendered by a hard loss, in a hard fought race. Where my graciousness falters is in who she pandered to in the waning moments of the campaign, at the expense of her entire constituency, and her painfully Beckylike posturing after the loss itself.

Winning statewide in Missouri is a hard task. McCaskill made it harder for herself.

In states with widely differing voting cohorts, like Missouri, the way for a Dem to win is to focus on the cities, progressive women, and on people of color.

That is not to say to ignore other cohorts. But the gains made by pandering to Trump Repbulicans—particularly voters who broke for Obama who Trump managed to pick off—is smaller than consolidating, energizing, and mobilizing the base voters which is what could have stemmed the bleeding and delivered a win.

Rather than that though, she pandered to people who would not have voted for her at all; voters who voted for Trump tend to be entrenched.

Holding up white working class voters at the expense of the marginalized, championing them post election at the expense of amplifying and endorsing the incoming of her own party was dog whistling.

And coming from a white woman for whom the race wouldn’t have even been close were it not for people of color, all of whom fare worse than whites in her state, was not only an unforced error, it was a slap for those who swallowed hard and turned the lever in her favor in November.

This is the crux, the heart of the cookie, and the lesson going forward, not just in electoral politics, but for activism and real world relational ethics going forward.

The central problem with white women, whether in politics, in business, or in their lives on the ground is, when it comes to the wire, that white women will choose empire and power adjacency over their black and brown sisters. That even as they need and use them for short term gains (like elections) that they will abandon them when it is no longer expedient to do so.

In this case, McCaskill was worse than silent—she took pains to land blows on a brown woman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, calling her a ‘bright shiny new object’; refusing to acknowledge the real accomplishment of her rise, and minimizing her impact.

And for what, exactly? In this post election media crawl, McCaskill had already lost. Her only gain in her unforced choice to low-blow Ocasio-Cortez was to signal to a cohort that didn’t want her anyway that, at the end of the day, she aligned with them. The message is stark and unmistakable.

During the rise of second wave feminism, white women swore up and down that, if allowed the reins of power and influence, aided by women of color, that they would do what they have never done in a reliable and consistent way—pass the mic, share their knowledge, contacts, and influence, and, when it was time, to support and amplify the women (and the daughters and granddaughters of the women) who got them where they are.

Put plainly, they mostly lied. The lack of support from mainstream Democratic white women for the progressive wing of their party has been unconscionable.

The line was 40-50 years ago, was that women would remake the ethics and the landscape of the halls of power; that they would change the ethos and gestalt; that they would speak truth to power, and change the playing field.

For the most part, this has not been true. Rather, they have just used the playbook of their fathers and husbands, and it is a fetid playbook indeed, no matter how lipstick stained it may be.

We are seeing the short sighted failures of that very white centered feminism now, and we are seeing the last angry gasps as white women who aligned more with their race than with actual solidarity with the entire range of women, do exactly what black and brown women feared they would do.

We don’t know how the incoming class of freshmen Congresspeople will do, either in the short term, as they are getting their office supplies and finding out where the bathrooms are, nor how they will do later, in terms of voting records and legislation pushed or passed, but we can say for certain that this new class will seed Congress with more diversity on several axes—class, race, ideology—than their predecessor formations ever did. We know that these people who ran on listening to all voices, a cautious take on the influence of business on Congress, solid activist credentials, and a commitment to speak truth to power, is the future of the Democratic Party.

McCaskill is not.

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