This Washington Post feature about a Southern, white, suburban woman struggling with her Republican identity is well worth reading. I realize that many people will find her to be a totally reprehensible person for failing to fully confront the patriarchal, white, supremacist society in which she lives. But this piece is a sensitive look at the way a person might actually change from within a culture and society that has trained her mentally and emotionally to see the world in a certain way.
These things are not easy and the story shows just how thoroughly inculcated in conservative values so many of these people are. And it shows how Trump is having the effect of opening some of the women’s eyes to how cruel and hypocritical it really is. And that’s scary.
The following excerpt is just a part of the conclusion. We have been reading about this woman Miranda and her friend Liz, a Democrats with whom she has been sharing her feelings about politics and Trump. This is about her husband Philip:
He knew that Miranda had some issues with Trump’s behavior.
“She finds Trump sometimes a little off-putting with his personality,” he said. “She does get kind of like, ‘I wish he wouldn’t say that.’ But I’m more of a results guy. I’m not as concerned about his brash statements as Miranda. I think he’s probably grown a lot as a man in a good way. I see him as being a gracious man.”
He thought about why he and Miranda might see things differently.
“She tends to run on emotion,” he said. “Not to make a sexist statement, but a lot of women do. I run more on logic. I think that balances us well.”
He was not worried about Miranda’s worries about Trump, Miranda’s friendship with Liz, or whatever they were talking about in the woods.
“As long as she and Miranda get along, I’m happy with it,” Phillip said.
[…]
Things Miranda had never told Phillip:
That she thought Trump was racist, and when he questioned the legitimacy of the first black president, she thought about her black students and how wrong it was to rob them of pride.
That she thought Trump was cruel, and when he mocked a reporter with disabilities, she felt the same surge of blind rage she had once felt when a boy called her sister a “retard.”
She thought Trump was immoral, and when she heard Christians defending him, she wanted to say, “How? How do we worship the same God? There are so many things that we as human beings should not condone, should not excuse.”
She had told Phillip about being sexually assaulted by a man when she was 8 years old, but she had not told him that when she heard Trump boasting about how he could kiss women “without even asking” and “grab them by the p—y,” he had reminded her of the man who had grabbed her when she was walking to school, and the feeling of hands forcing themselves on her, and the feeling of struggling to break free, and the feeling of running for her life, and of “exactly that fear, that helplessness,” and that when Trump got elected, she felt none of that mattering.
She had not told Phillip that when she saw Trump smiling on a screen in her living room, she felt physically ill. That she found him “revolting” and “vulgar.” That Trump was the opposite of everything she had always believed her husband to be: decent, honorable, Christian, the sort of man who would find Trump offensive.
She had not told Phillip what she wanted from him: “I want to hear him say, ‘The way he talks about women is not okay. The way he talks, period, is not okay.’ ”
She had not told him what she wanted to say to him and all Southern men who believed in some chivalrous ideal: “I need you to stand up for me.”
That is a powerful, powerful insight for any woman. And I think quite a few have had that devastating recognition in recent times. Most of them have shoved it down and tried to forget it. Some just can’t do it.
But it’s complicated. Speaking with her liberal friend Liz over dinner, they talk about what it’s like to be out of the mainstream in Southern society:
They talked about how Liz always positioned her phone when she met with parents, so they wouldn’t see her Ruth Bader Ginsburg sticker, and about the most recent Democratic debate and the candidate Miranda would vote for — Warren, probably; Buttigieg, definitely; Sanders, maybe; Klobuchar, interesting; Biden, sure — and they continued talking, seeming in harmony about all of it, right up until Miranda began taking issue with a candidate’s position on gun control, which struck her as too extreme, and as she continued, she noticed Liz’s face changing.
She stopped herself.
“I’m not making you mad, am I?” Miranda asked.
There was a pause.
“No,” Liz said. “You’ll never make me mad.”
Later, on her way home, Miranda was still thinking about the pause.
It was dark, and she passed the empty parking lots of strip malls, the neon signs of chain restaurants and the quiet of so many subdivisions on a Sunday night in a place where there were so many expectations of a woman like her.
Maybe Liz was mad at her, she thought. Maybe Liz thought she wasn’t liberated enough, or brave enough. Maybe she was disappointed.
And what about Phillip? If she finally told him what she thought about Trump, maybe he would feel she was judging him. Maybe he would judge her. Maybe he would think she was “crazy” and “off the deep end.” Maybe he would not understand at all, and then what?
She looked out the window at a place that had felt so familiar for so long, and which now looked so different, so accepting of cruelty and racism and vulgarity. She exited the highway and drove along the two-lane, a white, Southern, suburban woman who was not accepting of that. She was lost to Trump, lost to a Republican Party still embracing him, and for the first time in her life, she was thinking not about what was expected of her, but what she expected of herself.
Again, I understand why people have no sympathy for this privileged woman who has failed to see the racism and cruelty of the society in which she grew up until Trump made it impossible to ignore. I’m a privileged white woman and I have seen it my whole life, even when I was growing up in a very conservative family.
But if she’s changing, isn’t that good thing? Or are we in a French Revolutionary mode in which all these people must be purged forever from the body politic?
Read the whole thing if you can. It’s very thought-provoking.
