The sense of who belongs where in the kyriarchy really jumps out when Black men go ahead of White women through a coveted door. White women lost it in 1870 when Black men got the vote before them, and there were White women who voted against all their stated principles when a Black man was nominated and elected president before a White woman was. If the Pew Research Center has it right, a plurality of White women joined a majority of White men to vote for Donald Trump in 2016, and in 2020 an absolute majority of White women voted for Trump, very much against every single self-interest they could possibly have except the defense of Whiteness. So: White first, then women. Even the feminist heroine Ruth Bader Ginsburg referenced the Doctrine of Discovery, a set of deeply racist 15th-century papal decrees—only repudiated in March 2023 by Pope Francis—in writing and delivering a 2004 Supreme Court decision denying the Oneida nation sovereignty over ancestral land they had purchased from New York State.
Ballot Measure 9 is a documentary that, disturbingly, could have been made yesterday: it’s about the struggle around an anti-gay initiative put on the ballot in Oregon in 1992. One of the many people who put their hearts and souls into fighting against the measure’s passage was Ann Sweet, a cisgender heterosexual Black woman community activist, who said, “What I needed to do was to talk about how the oppressions linked up. . . . I knew that I needed to work in those places where I was assigned the role of the oppressor. If I wanted White people to stop practicing racism, I had to stop practicing homophobia.” This is what solidarity looks like.
When the Supreme Court of the United States set the table for overturning Roe v. Wade with Citizens United v. FEC, which concentrates power in the hands of the wealthiest, and Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, if those two decisions were perceived as landing primarily on people defined by class and color, we now know that was far from true.
Being a well-adjusted member of society—that magical paragon that therapies used to aim for—has meant, for all of us, learning to tolerate the abuse that is our portion, depending on where we’re slotted into the kyriarchy, and not questioning the abuses that are other people’s portion. That’s very well-adjusted—and very sick. The good news is that White women are under no compulsion to be concerned solely with improving our position in the kyriarchy. We can choose instead to free ourselves from both victim and oppressor roles, and put our energy into dismantling the kyriarchy altogether.
37