A Painful Outcome For Many
From the moment Kamala Harris entered the presidential race, Black women could see the mountaintop. Across the country, they led an outpouring of Democratic elation when the vice president took over the top of the presidential ticket. But underneath their hope and determination was a persistent worry: Was America ready, they asked, to elect a Black woman? The painful answer arrived this week. It affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country: that it would rather choose a man who was convicted of 34 felonies, has spewed lies and falsehoods, disparaged women and people of color, and pledged to use the powers of the federal government to punish his political opponents than send a woman of color to the White House. Many Democrats saw the brutal political environment for the party, peppered with anger about President Biden's leadership, as more to blame for Ms. Harris's crushing loss than the double-edged sword of racism and sexism. But others, reflecting on a campaign devoid of controversy or obvious missteps by a qualified candidate who almost never held out her race or gender as reasons to vote for her, found it difficult to ignore suspicions about why Mr. Trump won with such ease. "This isn't a loss for Black women, it's a loss for the country," said Waikinya Clanton, the founder of the organizing group Black Women for Kamala. "America has revealed to us her true self," she added, "and we have to decide what we do with her from here." It was the moment that Black female political leaders and organizers had feared most and worked hardest to avoid. Across battleground states, the Democrats organizing fund-raisers, door-knocking and other get-out-the-vote efforts were often Black women, motivated to campaign for a presidential candidate who was not just a member of their party but one of their own. The tens of millions of voters who supported Ms. Harris saw her candidacy as a chance to usher in a new generation of leadership. (In one small bright spot for the party, two Black women will be in the next Senate for the first time ever.) But for Black women, the Democratic Party's most active and loyal voting bloc, it was something bigger: a hard-fought recognition of the work they had done for a party that often failed to support them. "The party has always wanted our output, not necessarily our input," Marcia Fudge, a former housing and urban development secretary under Mr. Biden, said in an interview this year. "We have for a very long time been the people who did the work, but never been asked to sit at the table." 'It is not over, because we never go away.'From the start of her first presidential campaign, Ms. Harris's supporters saw her as the redemption for their party and vindication for the Black women who had come before her. During her 2019 bid, she modeled much of her political persona after Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, in 1968, and the first Black woman to run for a major party's presidential nomination, in 1972. Many of Ms. Chisholm's acolytes became Ms. Harris's advisers and closest confidants during her second presidential campaign. But even Ms. Chisholm predicted a slow walk to progress. That was, in part, because of the intense sexism that she faced from men of all races, who believed that her campaign was too tailored to issues favoring women, people of color and the poor. "This 'woman thing' is so deep," she said of her presidential run. "I've found it out in this campaign, if I never knew it before." "That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, Black and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free," she wrote in her autobiography, "Unbought and Unbossed." Maya Wiley, the chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said there was deep anger about the license that Mr. Trump's victory had given to continue to undercut Black women in politics, down to the derogatory ways he and his allies have described female leaders. "Not only have we always been on the menu, but they have been eating us, and it's been happening for generations," Ms. Wiley said. "And what this represents for Black women right now is it has deepened and been given significantly more permission." Still, she added, "it is not over, because we never go away."
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Friday, November 8, 2024
Race/Related: ‘America has revealed to us her true self’
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