As the dust settles around the election of 2022, we saw a disturbing, albeit not surprising, pattern repeat in Georgia: on average, white women’s votes reflected an alignment with their race rather than their gender.
Stacey Abrams, the Black woman gubernatorial candidate from the Democratic Party received less than 30% of the vote of white women compared to upwards of 90% of the vote from Black women. This divide may not have been a surprise to many Black women, particularly in the American South, but shifting this alignment will take deeper work.
This divide between Black and white women in terms of voting has persisted for over a hundred years. The 1913 women’s suffrage parade in DC, for instance, highlighted the racism that many white women expressed, even while trying to make the case for less sexism in voting rights. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a Black woman journalist and activist from Illinois, was told to march in the back of the parade by white women leading the march, despite her active participation with the Illinois delegation.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
Her white women counterparts in her own delegation may have claimed that they did not share those same animosities toward Black women and Black people, yet they appeased the racism of their white counterparts instead of standing up beside their Black sister-in-arms.
But not all white women. Two white women at that parade stood up for Wells-Barnett: Belle Squire and Virginia Brooks. They took a risk to speak up in favor of racial equity in their march for gender equity because of their values, but also their trusting relationship with Wells-Barnett. Their appeal may have failed in the moment, but the three women got the last word.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
As the march started, Ida Wells-Barnett was nowhere to be seen — until she suddenly appeared from the sidewalk and took her place alongside her white sisters, demonstrating the power of their shared humanity -- and their shared sisterhood.
The racial dynamics of the 1913 parade parallel contemporary events. The presence — or lack — of this shared sisterhood has continued into the current era of women’s activism. So how do we bridge this divide? We need an approach to equity that focuses on authentic human connections that bridges the individual efforts of anti-racism to the collective efforts toward equity at the societal, or organizational, level by focusing on authentic interpersonal connections between people who are from different racial or ethnic groups.
Digging into your own preconceptions about race, gender and power in order to demonstrate your value alignment with the person you’re connecting with is a critical step toward building authentic connections with others. Authenticity is usually seen as a personal attribute — people whose actions align with their values, for instance — but authentic connections are those in which people exhibit empathy with each other, express their vulnerability, build trust and take risks on behalf of their others.
There is rarely a a straight line toward equity, but authentic connections — bridges between people who are different — are catalysts for change. For too long we have focused on transactional approaches to alliances for equity, ones that don’t rely on changing hearts and minds, or even interacting with people who are different from you. These bridges built between people are thus tenuous and easily broken by exterior forces who fearmonger and divide.
If we want to build coalitions of women across races who are focused on equity, we need to make sure that all of the white women who ordered anti-racist books in 2020 and tried to changed their mindsets can move from purported ally to actual co-conspirator for change.
While Black women’s fight to be included in the women’s suffrage movement was not immediately successful, Brooks, Squire and Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s authentic connection did not end at the suffrage parade of 1913. The trust they built via the risks they took on Wells-Barnett’s behalf was channeled into the Alpha Suffrage Club, a Chicago organization with the goal of promoting Black voter registration and Black candidates — an organization directly involved in getting the first Black alderman in Chicago elected over a hundred years ago.
You can trace the election of President Barack Obama back to the work that these three women did together. But that success meant that Squire and Brooks had to build trust with Wells-Barnett that could withstand the difficulties that come with creating change. We are optimistic that today’s white and Black women can build the same connections if they truly share the values of equity.
We have to start with digging into our own preconceptions about race and gender in order to build authentic connections with people who are different from us. Then we can stand up for equity in our communities and at the ballot box.
Beth A. Livingston, Ph.D. is an associate professor in management and entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business. Tina Opie, Ph.D. is an associate professor of management at Babson College and founder of Opie Consulting Group. They are authors of the book “Shared Sisterhood: How to Take Collective Action for Racial and Gender Equity at Work.”
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