In the end, white women’s work for massive resistance illuminated just how ubiquitous and enduringly seductive the politics of white supremacy remained decade after decade. Shaping ideas of sex, marriage, and motherhood as well as those about property rights, school curriculum, elections, and culture, legislation was never enough to sustain a Jim Crow South or nation, nor was it enough to destroy it. In the face of legislative defeat, segregationist women continued to craft a broader politics of white supremacy. The deep roots they had long nurtured continued to bear this particularly enduring and familiar fruit. Local politics and politics that continue to frustrate the quest for equality and the entrenched stories that shape American attitudes toward racial change have persisted and have made way for new ones. Grounded in such deep and fertile political soil, the politics of white supremacy and segregationist women who made it so remain a powerful force in American politics. Where they live and where they work is the ground that still remains contested.
While reading Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, I was continually reminded of the photo of Angela Peoples at the Women's March in 2017, holding a sign saying, “Don’t forget: White Women Voted for Trump”. The resistance by white people, especially white women and white mothers, to the unequivocal truth of the disparity between who they voted for and who Black, Latinx, Asian and everyone else voted for remains, not just in the US but everywhere white supremacy never went away: Australia, Canada, UK, Germany, across Europe, and elsewhere. “Their white motherhood meant teaching their children lessons in racial distance, in a racially determined place in society, and in white supremacy.” (p.237; quote above p. 240)
