Katy Tur was on MSNBC last week talking about the fact that many people in the White House knew that a wife batterer was in their midst in a position of authority. Many in the White House stayed silent. We have all read tales of Donald J. Trump’s misogyny. “Grab them by the ……” In a November 9, 1992, interview in New York magazine, Trump said in order to keep beautiful women in line “You have to treat them like s—t”. The Huffington Post produced 18 Real Things Donald Trump Has Actually Said About Women.
I was not going to write about this but misogyny is part of the playbook of the current GOP and their supporters. Think of how they attack Speaker (yes, that is an aspirational moniker) Pelosi, Congresswomen Maxine Waters, and Fredrika Wilson. Think back on the young Black woman in the green dress at a Trump rally in Kentucky during the presidential campaign who was handled as though chattel slavery had never been abolished. The person killed by white supremacists at Charlottesville, Heather Hyer, was a young woman.
This all made me remember that the Swedish title of the book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Men Who Hate Women!!!! The violence and degradation inflicted on the women in that book was breathtaking. It is clear to me that in addition to white supremacy, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, a key tenet of Trumpism is a deep disdain for women, unless they are decorative and/or passive enablers. What is disturbing is that so many white women support Trump. In Alabama, 63% of white women voted for the accused pedophile. 98% of Black women did not!!
In California, our hearts were first broken by the tendency of some but not all white women to vote for skin color over gender when 55% of white women voted to end gender and race conscious remedies for discrimination by voting in favor of Proposition 209 in 1996. They decided that their husbands (if they were white), their sons, and their brothers were more important than desegregating the workforce, the public colleges and universities, and businesses who receive public contracts. If Prop 209 had been defeated, more money would have gone into women-owned businesses.
We commissioned a study that concluded that as is January 2015, over ONE BILLION DOLLARS in government contracts would have been awarded to businesses owned by women and people of color if race and gender conscious remedies AKA affirmative action had been in place for the past 22 years!!!
On the hopeful side, we have seen empty-headed misogynists such as Todd “legitimate rape” Akin defeated in a Senate election. If we have a chance of reclaiming our democracy, women should be paying close attention to how we are perceived and (mis)treated by those in power-those Men Who Hate Women.
Join us in June in Oakland for our conference “Fighting Racism and Other Forms of Bias: What’s Working” to help us devise effective ways of transforming behavior, policies, and procedures. http://equaljusticesociety.org/mindscience
Onward.