Sister Against Sister

Estrangement & Politics, Special Edition

The day after the presidential election in 2016, when I was scrolling Facebook, I encountered the exit polling broken down by race and gender. Fifty-two percent of white women had voted for Trump. At the time, I was horrified. I had lived in a liberal bubble for most of my life and believed I didn’t know a single woman who had voted for Trump.

I remember posting into the Facebook void, “Who are all these women???” I just couldn’t fathom that a single woman on Earth would vote for someone who admitted to sexual assault on tape.

On Wednesday of this week, the evening after the 2024 election, I searched for the exit polls broken down by gender and race. Fifty-two percent of white women voted for Trump. Again.¹

I started writing this piece immediately after seeing those numbers. The better angels of our internet have cautioned against blaming any one group for the election results. I struggle with listening to them. Had white women united as a bloc for Harris, as black women did, and as Nikole Hannah-Jones, among many others, exhorted us to do, then Trump could not have won.

As it stands, for every one of us white women who didn’t vote for Trump, we can turn to our mother, our boss, our best friend, our kids’ best friend’s mom, our pilates instructor, and yes, even our sister, and know that she is equally likely to have voted for him. Between 2016 and 2024, I tried to talk to the few white women I knew who would admit to me they had voted for Trump. Because it turned out, of course, that I did know them. Why? I asked. Why did you vote for him?

They couldn’t really answer the question, but they also didn’t understand why they needed to. They were satisfied! They felt safe. Trump was coming in to solve all the problems. Hooray.

If you’ve ever tried to work through a conflict with a toxic family member or a family member who manipulates conversations, you know how it goes. What are you talking about? I don’t even know why we’re fighting! (See my piece from 2 weeks ago about living in two realities.)

Meanwhile, on my end of the conversation, I felt the familiar feeling of at once trying to understand and begging to be heard. I felt the familiar feeling of asking for an explanation and instead receiving a word salad that didn’t address any of the questions I had asked.

White women play a particular role in our society: we are victim and oppressor, simultaneously. We are conditioned to support and take care of men, then to believe they are the ones who support and protect us. The ideology of this country disempowers us, and tells us it’s OK because it also gives us the power to disempower other people.

It’s Friday now and I’m no longer writing this piece just to blame white women. (So many, many other things had to go wrong, too, I suppose. #worsttimeline) I’m writing this because we are in yet another moment when white women—my sisters, no matter how much I’d like to deny it—are following the playbook of emotional abuse and manipulation that our system has handed to us in order to fulfill our role as enablers of white supremacy and misogyny.

I often see a quote floating around social media attributed to James Baldwin. It goes:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

What we are facing now is a second set of data, just like the set we had in 2016, that says that half of white women would prefer to vote against their own interests to prop up a system of abuse that has both oppressed and served white women throughout the history of the U.S.

When we confront this reality, we can’t always change the individual women who are revealing it to us. But at least we can have the knowledge that we faced it: that we recognized and acknowledged it.

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Coffee, Wine, and Words (a great Instagram follow) remarked in her IG stories that there is a certain villainy to holding an election right before the winter holidays. In a couple of weeks, many of us will feel we must “go home” and plaster fake smiles across our faces in front of a dry turkey while sitting next to people that voted for fascism. To wit, via Threads:

So much of the road to estrangement is paved with these kinds of conversations. A lot of people have spent some at least a few of the last eight Thanksgivings arguing, pleading, trying to understand, to convince. Saying, “when you vote this way, you are not just exhibiting a difference of opinion, but you are voting for someone who is actively trying to hurt me,” and getting nowhere.

For people who haven’t experienced family estrangement, it’s easy to believe that estrangement happens after a single bad fight or because of one bitter explosion. Those of you who have been through it know that’s not true. In fact, estrangement happens after hitting wall after wall. It feels a lot more like estrangement chose you than like you chose it.

If this is the year where you’ve hit enough walls that the time has come to cutoff contact, know that there are many people who walked that path before you. Comment here or private message me if you need the support of some of those people.

XO,

Maggie

1. I know exit polls are preliminary and will be adjusted, but in 2016, the final numbers for white women were not very different from the preliminary. There is no reason to believe 2024 will be very different. People have pointed out that the exit polls take a very small sample size, but because white women make up such a dominant percentage of the total number of voters (35% or so) those numbers are less likely to be wildly inaccurate than poll numbers for groups that make up a very small percentage of the total voter population.