With all this talk of allyship, I personally thought that white women were going to lead Hillary Clinton to victory. But according to these exit polls, they did the exact opposite and mostly voted for the proudly racist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic, and classist Donald Trump. Thanks to that overwhelming support, Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States of America.

Throughout this election cycle there have been cries from liberal white women that Hillary Clinton is the next step towards progress. They were loud and proud about their candidate, despite the many problems with her politics. Through it all they were demanding that other people, mostly people of color, disregard voting for Bernie, third party, or abstaining from voting, because Hillary was a historical candidate. Instead of focusing their attention on the people of color’s votes against their candidate, they should have been checking their own people.

White feminism played a huge part in this election: it focused on the issues of being a white woman and disregarded all the hate and oppression that white women inflict on others.

Women of color repeatedly warned of how harmful this was during the election cycle, but people disregarded them. Now it’s undeniable, with 53% of polled white women saying that they voted for Donald Trump. Even with this information out there for everyone to see, white women still aren’t taking accountability for not checking their sisters, mothers, and friends.

If any demographic in the country could have stopped this it was white women. They had the resources and privilege to speak against Trump’s racism, xenophobia, homophobia etc. but chose not to. Instead many of them just insulted his intelligence and experience, despite his supporters clearly not caring about that. For the entirety of Barack Obama’s presidency we’ve been trying to convince white people that there’s still work that needs to be done. They ignored us and now look at what happened to the country that they love so much.

White women exist in two spaces: they’re one of the most publicly oppressed groups of people and one of the most publicly oppressive groups of people. If they used this to their advantage and helped fight against the oppression of others then maybe the election results could have been different. Instead, they allowed white supremacy to flourish and lead a KKK sponsored president into The White House.

To be completely honest, I’m not surprised that white women came out in support of Donald Trump. What I am is disappointed in the lack of accountability for what they allowed to happen in their own communities. Now queer women of color have to suffer the most because their “allies” didn’t have their backs.