A few weeks ago, Qcitymetro published an open letter to black women under the headline “Can we talk? Let’s bridge the racial divides that separate women in Charlotte.” The authors of the letter, both white, are members of the Charlotte’s Women’s March, and they were trying to reach out to black women.
I’m not a black woman, so I have to tread very lightly.
I thought the authors did the best possible job that they could in today’s climate. I expected it to be clumsy in some parts and unaware in others. But sometimes your best is still not good enough.
The responses on social media about the letter were brutal, and folks were not having it at all. They picked the letter apart like an honors English teacher. Words such as “condescending” and statements such as “educate yourself” and “do some research” were examples of the online comments I saw.
Now, I don’t want to make it seem like every black woman in Charlotte chimed in. But those comments do mirror what many of my black female friends say on social media about white women.
Let’s talk about that 53 percent…
More than 53% of white women voted for our current president, and black women are not ready to forget that. After election day, all white women got lumped together for the perceived misdeeds of the 53 percent, and the internet was flooded with black women stating that they were done with all white women.
They blamed white women for not stopping the 53-percent who felt that Trump was going to support them as women. If white women planned a march, black women said they would rather stay home. If white women tried to engage black women, they told them to engage the 53 percent. That was how the entire year of 2017 went down.
As we go into 2018, I don’t see it letting up at all. Black women are still mad, and some white women are still confused about why.
Black women are used to going it alone.
The Democratic Party has the general belief that everyone will fall in line when it’s time to beat Trump in the next general election. But from what I see, don’t hold your breath waiting on a kumbaya moment.
Black women are going to do their own thing, regardless of what the rest of the world is doing. They have been going it alone for a while now.
If we learned anything from Judge Roy Moore’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama, it’s that black women know how to save America, whether it wants to be saved or not.
