There she is in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, a white woman in a neatly ironed dress and a short-sleeved, pearl-button cardigan. Her hand is on her hip as she stands in the universal posture of “I would like to speak to your manager” and stares down a soldier defending the Black students who’d integrated Little Rock Central High School.
There she is, in Queens in 1959, a white woman in a dark skirt, a polka-dot blouse and matching coat. Her hair is curled, her handbag is looped over her forearm, and she carries a sign that reads “Bussing Creates Fussing.”
In South Boston, in 1975, she carries a sign that reads “Whites Have Rights.” And just last month, in St. Louis, she was spotted barefoot on her front steps, in black capri pants, brandishing a pistol at Black Lives Matter protesters.
Donald Trump and his enablers know these women. They know that for as long as there have been efforts toward desegregation, white women have defended the status quo. These women have been loud and insistent, maybe because those protests have long been one of the few places where anger doesn’t immediately render a woman unfeminine and unattractive, strident or shrill. An angry white woman has always been a “nasty woman”— unless she’s a mama bear, standing up for her kids and their schools and neighborhoods.
Thus President Trump’s recent provocative tweet to “the Suburban Housewives of America,” warning “Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream.”
The tweet linked to a column in The New York Post by former Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey of New York, which gave dire warnings about an Obama-Biden initiative called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. Ms. McCaughey wrote that it would require towns to “make it possible for low-income minorities to choose suburban living.” Women, she added, need to recognize the danger and “focus on what’s at stake for their families.”
That wasn’t even a dog whistle. That was someone standing on her porch and bellowing, “Here, Fido!” But are the “Suburban Housewives” listening?
I grew up in the kind of place Mr. Trump and Ms. McCaughey probably picture when they think about the suburbs. In the 1970s and ’80s my hometown, Simsbury, Conn., was an affluent community of 20,000. Today it’s more than 90 percent white; when I lived there, it was whiter.
The handful of nonwhite students came almost entirely from two places: the ABC House, where boys from big cities lived in Simsbury while they attended its high school (ABC stood for A Better Chance), and Hartford, where kids came as part of an initiative called Project Concern, one of the first voluntary school desegregation programs in the United States. After it began, in 1966, thousands of residents in five Connecticut towns crowded school board meetings to argue against it.
In 1968, a resident of nearby Vernon was applauded after she told the school board: “Vernon is a nice, wonderful, middle-class town, and I do not wish to share this with anyone from Hartford. What we have, we have earned and want to keep. What is mine is mine.”
Mr. Trump’s re-election depends, at least in part, on white suburban women still feeling that way.
But if recent protests and nonfiction best-seller lists are any indication, at least some “housewives” have arrived at a more nuanced understanding of racial dynamics and have harnessed the potent, symbolic power of white motherhood to advocate for change. Simsbury, for example, now has a Facebook group called Holding the Door Open, “for people within greater Simsbury CT who are open, ready and willing to discuss, share and grow in their understanding of racism, white privilege and exclusion in our community and within America.”
On Facebook, Wall of Moms groups are popping up, not just in the big cities where you’d expect to see them, but also in Montgomery County and Bucks County and Delaware County outside of Philadelphia. There are Walls of Moms in Maine and New Mexico and Michigan.
The moms are organizing protests and reading groups, posting links to bail funds, discussing antidotes for tear gas. They’re starting groups in their kids’ schools to talk about white privilege and how to continue the fight once the current wave of protests is done. Many feature some version of the sign “When George Floyd Called for His Mama, He Summoned All the Mamas.”
What led to the change?
For Rene Daguerre-Bradford, who organized one of Simsbury’s two Black Lives Matter protests, it was seeing the video of George Floyd’s death. “When I saw how George Floyd died — when I heard him begging them to stop because he couldn’t breathe — I broke out into tears. How can any human being treat someone like that?” she told me.
To some, white mothers on the front lines looks like a case of too little, too late. In The Washington Post, the president of the Portland, Ore., N.A.A.C.PB. branch wrote “the ‘Wall of Moms’, while perhaps well-intentioned, ends up redirecting attention away from the urgent issue of murdered Black bodies.”
Still, Donald Trump has to be uneasy as he considers the white women who have woken up — however belatedly — to the reality of the moment, women who have the tools and, thanks to the pandemic, the time to do the work. As one mom told me, “We’re a bunch of mad white ladies with nothing but time.”
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