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‘Vote like black women’ is a racist slogan
If you’re a white liberal who watched Get Out and it didn’t make you the least bit unsettling on a personal level, then you missed the point. Its portrayal of a well-off white family creepily fawning over their daughter’s black boyfriend is supposed to induce discomfort in white viewers as they see themselves reflected in the characters on screen. But there’s a certain class of white people whose first response after watching Get Out wasn’t to reflect on its indictment of white liberal racism. Instead of confronting how it made them feel, they placed themselves beyond the scope of the film’s rebuke, letting out a collectively sigh: “Ugh, white people are the worst.”
And that’s the kind of folks who put #VoteLikeBlackWomen in their bio on Twitter.
While a handful of black people use the slogan, the vast majority of accounts online exhorting others to “vote like black women” are white moderates of the variety that MLK inveighed against from his cell in Birmingham.
For the most part, they tend to be upper middle-class suburban women. The Etsy store that sells “Vote Like Black Women” buttons is run by a retired style blogger named Colleen who lives in Connecticut. Ironically, she also sells merch for Elizabeth Warren, a candidate very few black women voted for.
