There’s always a risk in dealing with white women and I’d rather not deal with it. It’s too complicated. At the end of the day you don’t want to have to go home and be thinking about some slick racist shit she said.

White women sit at the right hand of power, leaning in, not down. There have been thirty-seven white female governors (and one each Latina and South Asian) but not a single Black female one. In fact, Black women represent just 2.7 percent of all female statewide elected officials. Seventeen of the twenty-one female US senators are white, as are the vast majority of female congressman. White women hold only 4.4 percent of CEO positions, but Black women hold a mere 0.2 percent. Every Equal Pay Day, white feminists decry the fact that women average 80 percent of a man’s salary, but rarely mention that the figure applies mostly to white women: Latinas average 54 cents for every dollar, Black women average 68 cents, American Indian and Alaskan Native women make 58 cents. Far more concerning is the wealth gap: the wealth of white women swamps that of Black women—regardless of age, martial status or education level.

White women are still far more likely than Black women to hold at least a bachelor’s degree (Asian women swamp everyone), be in the labor force or own a business (or acquire the capital to fund a start-up) or be among the full-time faculty at a degree-granting institution. In other words, even doing “the right things” doesn’t help Black women a shred as much as it helps white women.

Yet rarely do white feminists take up the greater cause of Black female inequity. White women are among the most vocal and vociferous opponents of affirmative action, despite being equal, if not greater, beneficiaries. White feminist heroes like Sheryl Sandberg come late to the acknowledgement of intersectionality, if they come at all: In her manifesto Lean In, Sandberg admits the privileges afforded her by class and education but sidesteps the privileges of whiteness while encouraging women to “lean in.” The first comprehensive report on women in the business world by her organization did not even bother to break out data on women of color—data which really sucks.

This is what Black women know: when push comes to shove, white women choose race over gender: Every. Single. Time. The election of Donald Trump with 54 (!) percent of the white female vote (but just 6 percent of Black women) is just one damaging (and damning) example; there are many more. Recall how slow white feminists were come to come to Michelle Obama’s aid when she was being savaged during the 2008 campaign, how quick they were later to jump on her for not being “feminist” enough, how absent are their voices when Black women are being shot and beaten by cops?

Going further back, remember how the first women’s rights movement in the United States emerged from the campaign to abolish slavery—but later split over the question of race? Free Black women such as Frances Harper, Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth worked alongside white women such as Angelina and Sarah Grimke and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to end the peculiar institution, but parted ways over the question of who should get the vote first: Black men or white women. Harper, the most prominent Black woman writer, speaker and abolitionist of her time, passionately supported the call for Black women’s rights. But she believed that if a choice had to be made—and it seemed it did—then Black men had the more urgent need for federal protection. Harper cited the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which found that “men of my race had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” To this view Stanton vehemently objected, arguing against enfranchising “Sambo” and “ignorant negroes and foreigners” before white women. Both Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed the fifteenth amendment.

Then there was the Women’s March.

From the sidelines (and definitely side-eyeing) I watched it begin. The day after Trump won the presidency of the United States, Teresa Shook, a white woman, created a Facebook event calling for a “Million Woman March.” By the next morning I’d been tagged a dozen times by white colleagues and friends. My first thought was, “Is this supposed to be a continuation of the one in Philly?” Meaning the march and gathering which brought an estimated 750,000 Black women to Philadelphia in 1997, two years after the Million Man March in DC. But no: it turned out that Shook had never heard of that historic event. So that didn’t bode well.

The Internet being the Internet, Shook was quickly given a history lesson. The march leadership was expanded to include such veteran organizers as Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory, all women of color. Icons like Maxine Waters and woke famous people like Janelle Monae were invited to speak and perform. Still, most of my Black women friends were like, “Meh.”

But the white women were all abuzz! Many of my white colleagues asked if I was going. A white woman I did not know approached me in the CVS to inquire. She, like the others, was super excited: for many of them, it was their first march. They’d been busy, I suppose, when we marched when Trayvon Martin was killed and when Michael Brown was killed and when Tamir Rice was killed and when their killers got off. But they were showing up now. For what? “For women!”

At a dinner party a white woman told me she had purchased a facemask and armed herself with jugs of milk. I blinked at her.
“Seriously? Why?”
“In case the police attack us!”
“When was the last time you saw police attack a group of white women?” I asked.

She fumbled through a reply but we both knew it was ridiculous: had she really thought the possibility of danger existed she would not have been leaving her house.

“They won’t attack white women,” I told her. “They’ll probably hand out daisies.”
“Bottles of waters,” said another Black woman friend.
“Swag,” I added.

The night of the march I met a lovely, middle-aged white woman and her white husband from a white town in white central Massachusetts (I was at a white party, one of three colored folk in the room). She and her neighbor and their daughters had attended the Sister march in Boston and she was still glowing from the experience: how exhilarating it was. How powerful and connected she felt. What fun. Did she want to talk about police brutality against Black people? About systemic racism in the justice system? About segregation in schools?

“I’m not very political,” she said.
I nodded. “That must be nice.”

From Kim McLarin’s essay, “Becky and Me,” from her collection, Womanish: A Grown Black Woman Speaks on Love and Life.