The ambiguity of whether or not the Equal Rights Amendment has actually been ratified perfectly captures the status of women in today’s America. On the one hand, women have made huge strides in the last few decades. On the other hand, the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobb’s decision overturning Roe v Wade effectively relegated women to second-class citizens by stripping away their bodily autonomy. Oh, and did I mention that Kamala Harris lost the election to a man whose campaign Tim Walz characterized as the “He-Man Women-Haters Club?”

The recent news about the ERA brought me back not just to the election, but to this summer, when I happened to be listening to the audiobook of Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents right after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate. Caste refers to artificial hierarchy that helps determine standing and respect and shapes the infrastructure of our divisions and ranking. It encompasses sex as well as race.

As Democrats hotly debated whether or not Biden should step aside, and who should replace him, I listened to the section toward the end of the book in which Wilkerson predicts to a friend well before the 2016 presidential nominations were sewn up that Donald Trump will beat Hillary Clinton. She was sure that the conscious and unconscious pull of caste would be just too powerful to overcome.

Listening, I thought to myself, “There’s no way Kamala Harris will be elected President.” 

I had thought the same thing about Barack Obama in 2008. Talking myself through my fears took some doing. Eventually I came to realize that not voting for Obama because I believed America wouldn’t elect a Black man meant I was participating in the very racism that stood in his—and our country’s—way. 

Obama won. He even won twice, making what could have been a fluke seem more solid, hopeful. Obama’s victories added to the rare examples Wilkerson cites when people stand strong against the headwinds of caste. Arguably, though, the rise of Trump as his immediate successor demonstrates the powerful backlash against daring to defy caste’s strictures.

This time around, eight years later, there was a lot of talk about how many Americans feared that the country was not yet ready to elect a Black woman (often from Black women themselves, who carry first-hand knowledge in their bones). There was just as much talk urging people to work hard to elect Harris rather than succumbing to and thereby entrenching the iron rule of caste.

And so we did—millions of us, with wild joy and enthusiasm. It wasn’t enough.

Although I believe Kamala Harris lost primarily because people were upset about the cost of living, that does not negate the existence of racism and sexism. I never shook my fear that Isabel Wilkerson was right. As a Black woman, Kamala Harris faced a deep and double reservoir of bias, conscious and unconscious.

Trump’s constant degradation of women and non-Whites certainly granted a permission structure for outright sexism and racism to flourish openly. It’s not for nothing that the GOP’s first reactions to Harris’s candidacy were to call her a DEI hire and accuse her of sleeping her way to the top. Trump’s pronouncement that Harris had only recently decided to “turn Black” was a ludicrous insult, but also an effective dog-whistle signaling untrustworthiness and opportunism.

Still, the impact of racism and sexism is hard to quantify. Most people know better than to say to a pollster or a reporter what an older White man cheerfully told Jennifer Egan when she was canvassing for Harris in Pennsylvania: “I would never vote for a Black, and I would never vote for a woman.” Yet that’s exactly what I suspected people meant as the chorus of “I don’t know, I just need more specifics” grew every time Harris rolled out another concrete proposal.

Mentioning the possibility of racism and misogyny as factors in Harris’s defeat in the early days after the election generated such an intense reaction that you’d think the women of America had risen en masse to force spoonfuls of Skippy down the throats of men with severe peanut allergies. Per usual, women were blamed for Harris’s loss, although the candidate herself almost never talked about her race or sex. As New York Times columnist Jessica Grose pointed out, Democratic strategist James Carville often opined that “preachy females” are the problem and Democratic messaging comes across as “too feminine.” Grose wrote her essay as Trump was floating his fellow sexual predators Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth for Cabinet heads, and as the post-election slogan, “Your body, my choice,” became a taunt many boys flung at their female classmates on school yards across America. No wonder Grose acidly wrote, “But I guess I should stop talking about it” in response to the outrage common if someone dared suggest that sexism may have played a role in the election outcome

So here we are. Trump will be inaugurated again tomorrow, making what could have been a first-time fluke seem more solid, uglier than ever. As Ezra Klein notes, “the present feels decidedly male,” an even more amped-up version of Trump’s “gaudily masculine” campaign. I can think of less diplomatic adverbs, but I guess I should stop talking about it, too.

Caste has not yet loosened its grip. Equal Rights Amendment or not, we are going back. There’s no ambiguity to the diminished status of women and that sexism played a role in Trump 2.0.