red elephant

calling out the (red) elephant in the room.

i was beginning to feel like i was the only one that remembers that white suffragettes successfully campaigned to get the vote to maintain white supremacy after black men were enfranchised.

Belle Kearney, “The South and Woman Suffrage,” Woman’s Journal, 4 April 1903

"The enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy . . .The South is slow to grasp the great fact that the enfranchisement of women would settle the race question in politics. The civilization of the North is threatened by the influx of foreigners with their imported customs; by the greed of monopolistic wealth, and the unrest among the working classes; by the strength of the liquor traffic, and by encroachments upon religious belief. Some day the North will be compelled to look to the South for redemption from these evils, on account of the purity of its Anglo-Saxon blood, the simplicity of its social and economic structure, the great advance in prohibitory law, and the maintenance of the sanctity of its faith, which has been kept inviolate. Just as surely as the North will be forced to turn to the South for the nation’s salvation, just so surely will the South be compelled to look to its Anglo-Saxon women as the medium through which to retain the supremacy of the white race over the African. . . ."

one hundred years later, the narrative doesn't sound much different.