It’s their most eye-opening chance yet to get out of bed with misogyny and white supremacy.

In the 2016 presidential election, white women, 30 percent of the country’s population, made up 41 percent of voters, the largest bloc by race and gender. A plurality of white women chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. They chose him despite Trump’s boasts that a Supreme Court filled by him would “automatically” overturn Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion.

In 2020, they chose Trump by an even wider margin, 53% to 46%. This despite a presidency during which he attacked a multitude of welfare and health programs that disproportionately affect women and children (nearly two-thirds of recipients of SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, are white).

Now comes next Tuesday. Trump is within a whisker of returning to the White House, despite being convicted of covering up a sex scandal and owing $83.3 million to a woman he defamed after she accused of rape. Its supremacy and misogyny have only gotten worse.

He went from his stigmatization of Mexicans as criminals, drug dealers and rapists and his fecal castigation of Haiti and African countries to lies about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets. He calls Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris a fecal vice president. A key speaker at his recent rally at Madison Square Garden called Puerto Rico an island of garbage.

And despite overturning Roe in 2022, he bizarrely declared this week in Wisconsin that he would protect women, “whether they like it or not.”

This puts white women at the forefront of saving this country for four more years. Polls suggest they are evenly split between Trump and Harris. The media often claims that Harris has a big lead among women, without attributing the gender gap to the unwavering support of black women.

If white women don’t collectively reject Trump, it reinforces a long-standing irony. White women were the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action programs also intended to open doors for blacks. Yet white women played a key role in pulling the rug out from under them.

In 1996, they voted 58 percent to 42 percent for Proposition 209, which killed affirmative action in California. By voting for Trump, they voted for a Supreme Court that last year ended affirmative action in college admissions.

I once wrote for the Boston Globe: “In the 1970s and 1980s, white women had no problem joining the affirmative action banner of “women and minorities.” If they want to tear down the banner now, it will confirm the dirtiest little secret of affirmative action: that white women only supported it to the extent that it benefited them. »

Next Tuesday will tell us if white women stop tearing down the banner and stop supporting a former president who has no problem tearing this country apart.

Derrick Z. Jackson is a former Boston Globe Pulitzer Prize finalist

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