From the trailblazing work of journalist, suffragist, and antilynching activist Ida B. Wells to Bree Newsom, an activist who removed the Confederate flag from South Carolina's statehouse grounds in 2015, black women have charted a long roadmap that can teach our white sisters a considerable amount about claiming freedom.

While reflecting on how black women and other women of color continue to develop and expand their political and cultural power despite high odds, I often think about Toni Morrison's wisdom that she shared in a New York Times interview in 1971 and reiterated in her novel Sula: “And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.”

Women of color have long known that no one is coming to save us. Since an entire political economy and its legacy was built on keeping black women in “our place” as the literal means of production, we’ve had to serve as our own saviors to survive and take ownership of our liberation.

From Election Day 2016 to President Donald Trump's deployment of the “Global Gag Rule” and the “Muslim Ban,” one question has plagued me: When will the weight of complicity force white women who voted for Trump to realize that they are ultimately sacrificing their own rights while they wantonly threaten mine?

As I contemplate the anxiety and racial resentment that likely drove 52 percent of white women voters to prioritize benevolent sexism's patronizing and watered-down promises of white privilege, I look to historic lessons to deeply understand their motivations for trading gender justice to protect their proximity to white male power.

Although I first encountered the terms benevolent patriarchy and benevolent sexism during lively “fireside chats” with other Christian feminists, I discovered the depths of its political meaning during the 2016 election.