Actress-comedian Tina Fey called out college-educated, white female Donald Trump voters during a Friday night fundraiser for the American Civil Liberties Union, suggesting that those women who voted for Trump during November’s election might want to “forget” about the outcome and resume watching cable television.
During an interview at the star-studded ACLU benefit, the 46-year-old comedian and former Saturday Night Live cast member urged white women not to “look away” during Trump’s presidency,
“The thing that I kind of keep focusing on is the idea that we sort of need to hold the edges, that it’s sort of like a lot of this election was turned by kinda white college-educated women who would now maybe like to forget about this election and go back to watching HGTV and I would want to urge them, ‘You can’t look away,'” Fey said, according to the New York Post‘s Page Six.
“Because it doesn’t affect you this minute, but it’s going to affect you eventually,” she added.
According to post-election statistics compiled by the New York Times, 53 percent of white, female voters voted for Trump over former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Additionally, 44 percent of college-educated white female voters voted for Trump.
“I personally will make my own pledge as a college-educated white woman to not look away, to not pretend that things that are happening now won’t eventually affect me if we don’t put a stop to it,” Fey reportedly added at the end of the interview.
Friday night’s “Stand for Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU” — which was streamed live on Facebook — drew a number of celebrities including Tom Hanks, Tracy Morgan, Mahershala Ali, Jon Hamm, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Amy Poehler and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
During the event, Fey said that Trump’s pronouncement of April as National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month must have been an April Fools’ Day joke: “So now we know what he gave up for Lent,” she joked.
Fey is hardly the only celebrity to criticize white, female voters for casting their ballots for Trump.
In an essay published three days after Trump defeated Clinton, actress Lena Dunham said she found it “painful” that white women had been unable to see past their “violent privilege” to vote for the Democratic candidate.
“It’s painful to know that white women, so unable to see the unity of female identity, so unable to look past their violent privilege, and so inoculated with hate for themselves, showed up to the polls for him,” Dunham wrote.
Talk show host Chelsea Handler also criticized female Trump voters in an essay published in December.
“One of the saddest things about November 8 were the women of America who somehow managed to vote for Donald Trump, specifically the 53% percent of all white female voters who chose Mr. Trump,” Handler wrote.
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum
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