If we’re to believe the presidential election results, the majority of non-Black people who voted in the United States have spoken loud and clear. There is no ambiguity. No guessing. No questioning. The majority chose hate over love. Division over unity. Misogyny over women. Themselves over racial solidarity. So Black people overall, and specifically Black women, are distinctly aware that our allies are in the minority and it’s time to rely on ourselves.
The “winner” of this presidential election is the same man who “defeated” Hillary Clinton in 2016. During his first term he threw paper towels at hurricane victims, separated children from their parents at the border, withheld federal funding from states, appointed conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned affirmative action, sent abortion rights back to the states and many other decisions that caused great hardship to communities of color. The voters in the United States again chose this same White man who campaigned on hate, division, insults and threats instead of choosing an overqualified Black woman who spent her life in public service. The White man the majority voted for was convicted of 34 counts of fraud and spent the last four years saying the 2020 election was “rigged” only when he lost. Most non-Black people voted for the White man who encouraged people to storm the Capitol where police officers were injured or killed. This same man made it no secret that the only way the 2024 election would be considered fair is if he “won.”
Vice President Kamala Harris faced an uphill battle against a White man who was positioned by the White evangelical “Christian” base as someone ordained by God to be the savior for the country. The fact that he was divorced twice, married three times and had five children between them wasn’t a big deal to them. The fact that he was a “businessman” who filed bankruptcies multiple times and was known for not paying contractors for their work was not an issue for them. The fact that the truth was a foreign concept for him didn’t matter to them. The fact that he insulted, mocked and threatened all who don’t look, think and act like him was blown over by them. His various other character traits that the majority of Black people found distasteful and voted against were glossed over and explained away. The majority of non-Black people in the United States voted for a convicted criminal for the highest office in the land. More than likely many of them will trot out Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech and laud the one line that mentions “content of their character” after voting for a man who stirs up hatred and division.
Pundits and strategists and scholars will study, argue, dissect and pontificate about why Kamala Harris “lost” the race, including all of the swing states. “Experts” will blame Harris’ policies, her delivery, her message, her strategy, her whatever else they come up with as her fault for the loss. The message that many Black women will take from the election results is that for the majority of the country, a Black woman can never have enough credentials, enough experience, enough knowledge, enough talent, enough of the right temperament, have an effective enough strategy to win against a White man who has none of her credentials, flouts the law, and breaks every social rule for grace and decorum.
At this point, most Black women are tired of trying to meet impossible standards. We’re tired of striving to earn another degree, add another accomplishment, achieve another thing in order to compete against White men who are significantly less qualified than we are. We’re tired of trying to help people see the world through our eyes. We are tired of trying to be inclusive and sensitive to others, while the person who “won” the election campaigned on an “America First” platform that clearly was exclusionary and incendiary. His mean-spirited, hateful rhetoric and promises to bring harm to marginalized communities proved to be acceptable to the majority, for whatever self-serving reasons make sense to them.
Despite warnings from countless high-profile Black people, including the “beloved” former First Lady Michelle Obama, about what can happen if the policies Harris’ opponent campaigned on are implemented, the majority chose to ignore us and support him. We know that horrible things can happen in this country because we’ve lived them. We know that cruelty and violence can be inflicted on communities. During this 400-year experiment, Black people have lived through slavery, sharecropping, lynchings, the convict lease system, Jim Crow segregation, race riots that wiped out entire communities, medical experiments on our bodies, medical deserts, poisoning of our neighborhoods, mass incarceration, underfunding of schools and housing and infrastructure. Our warnings were dismissed as alarmist. And our encouragement to choose a path of empathy, joy, community and inclusion fell on deaf ears.
Some of the brutal disappointment from the election results comes from hoping that things would finally be different and the majority of White women would stand in solidarity with Black women to vote against a man who has been accused of sexual assault. But there’s a long history of White women disappointing Black women, so it’s more of the same.
We know from experience that there will be some who will suddenly wake up and be outraged at what has been decided. In recent years we’ve been through the women’s marches and Black Lives Matter marches and the brief “racial reckoning” where people wanted Black folks to educate them about racism. That curiosity was followed by a wave of book bans, dismantling of DEI programs, elimination of affirmative action programs, and censorship in curriculum because our unvarnished truths were too difficult for some White people to hear. So, they formed groups and had laws passed to avoid hearing our voices. Now we understand that some White women want to wear blue bracelets to show solidarity to avoid receiving a side eye, our leariness and distrust.
History will repeat itself, and there will be conferences, seminars, panels, interviews, symposiums, meetings, and roundtable discussions to examine and analyze what happened. There will be books and articles written. Movies will be created. All to figure out what Black women already knew and tried to explain.
When the ramifications of this election take shape and some people who thought they were immune from harm realize they were wrong, Black people will already be in the throes of survival mode to take care of ourselves first. We will probably not have the energy or capacity anytime in the foreseeable future to wipe away anyone’s tears or hold anyone’s hand. We will more than likely not have the wherewithal to exhaust ourselves again and give away free labor again to explain our experiences and perspectives again. Three presidential elections in a row proved that we are not only a racial minority in the country, but also the minority when it comes to our priorities and values.
We take solace in the fact that Black progressive people won some local and state elections. We celebrate those victories while we focus on taking care of ourselves within our immediate communities and institutions. We will make it through the storm despite being largely on our own. And once others are hit by the storm we tried to help them avoid, we have faith that they’ll figure out how to survive without our free labor.