{"id":69509,"date":"2016-10-31T10:03:58","date_gmt":"2016-10-31T15:03:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=69509"},"modified":"2016-11-19T15:53:20","modified_gmt":"2016-11-19T20:53:20","slug":"how-intersectionality-can-help-us-understand-women-and-racial-minorities-for-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2016\/10\/31\/how-intersectionality-can-help-us-understand-women-and-racial-minorities-for-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"How Intersectionality Can Help Us Understand Women and Racial Minorities for Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent\u00a0poll<\/a>\u00a0of registered voters by Pew Research Center, 30% of women, 26% of people of Hispanic descent, and 2% of black people\u00a0say they’re planning to vote\u00a0for Donald Trump. In fact,\u00a0polls consistently find\u00a0that women and racial minorities favor Hillary Clinton. So, what do we make of the statistics-defying members of those groups who support Trump?<\/p>\n

\"Flickr<\/a>
Flickr photo by Johnny Silvercloud<\/a>; creative commons license.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For many, this fact is\u00a0source of\u00a0cognitive dissonance<\/a>, that uncomfortable feeling of knowingly\u00a0holding irreconcilable beliefs. How could women, racial minorities, and especially minorities who are women, support a man who so persistently insults and attacks them? The discomfort of dissonance has led some to\u00a0look for answers, with a few coming to the conclusion that supporting Trump is equivalent to\u00a0betrayal<\/a>\u00a0—\u00a0an identity-voiding decision (“You\u2019re not true Mexican<\/a>“) — and that women and racial minorities who support Trump are “hypocritical<\/a>” and “ought to be ashamed<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

This sense of cognitive dissonance though, the idea that it’s “strange<\/a>” for women or\u00a0racial minorities to support Trump, is based on identity politics<\/a>. Such politics has its strengths, but it also risks reducing complex social beings into one-dimensional labels, with the assumption that the label is the most important thing about them. \u00a0In this case,\u00a0critics of women and racial minorities for Trump find their support of him to be more<\/em> incomprehensible than that of others, based on identity alone. Thus, the individual blurs into a monolithic group, where each person is expected to be politically identical to the whole, thereby setting up the case for Trump support to be framed as a betrayal.<\/p>\n

In fact, people are complex. They carry many intersecting identities<\/a> at once, sometimes ones with conflicting politics attached, as well as a suite of other personal characteristics and structural situations. People make political choices that seem to contradict some of their identities not because they\u2019re hypocrites, but because most people are themselves a whole host of contradictions. Reality is never so clear cut and finite as a singular label, nor are humans so easily generalized.<\/p>\n

Given these realities, the poll numbers with which I began this post makes some sense. Trump has insulted and degraded women and minorities, and he has made policy promises that threaten them, too. Based on these facts, it should be no surprise that he is losing large swaths of those groups to Clinton. But given the complexity of identity, it should also be no surprise that he isn\u2019t losing all of them. People are complicated, and politics is as well.<\/p>\n

Paige Miller is a graduate student at the University of New Orleans working on her MA in Sociology. Her research interests include social psychology, new media, gender, and inequalities. You can find her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent\u00a0poll\u00a0of registered voters by Pew Research Center, 30% of women, 26% of people of Hispanic descent, and 2% of black people\u00a0say they’re planning to vote\u00a0for Donald Trump. In fact,\u00a0polls consistently find\u00a0that women and racial minorities favor Hillary Clinton. So, what do we make of the statistics-defying members of those groups who support Trump? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":69512,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,778,23695,85,20068,693,285,1760,1754],"class_list":["post-69509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender","tag-intersectionality","tag-intersectionality-gender-x-race","tag-politics","tag-politics-election-2016","tag-public-opinion","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-latinos"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2016\/10\/2-8.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69509"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69513,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69509\/revisions\/69513"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}