The Plight of Black Women in America

“How are you feeling?”

“I wish I wasn’t pregnant, and that’s the most crushing thing to feel right now.”

The group chat knew that I’m expecting again, and in them I found the place to honestly respond to the question on everyone’s lips after the election was called for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. My people take seriously the command to “check on your strong friends.” Usually I leaned into my Black-girl tendency to lie and say, “I’m fine,” but in truth, I wasn’t.

On Election Night, just a week shy of my 40th birthday, I stood on Howard University’s famous Yard, belly in tow, anticipating the collective triumph of a Harris win. My heart burst with pride and gratitude as I walked the hallowed paths of the Mecca, Kamala’s home away from home. Watching her AKA sorors stroll, seeing Howard students like my cousin Kyndall deck themselves out in HU gear, and listening to the DJ break out our dearly departed Frankie Beverly’s cookout anthem so that the crowd could line dance made me feel at home, too.

I couldn’t wait to let that buoyant feeling take me into this next chapter of my life. I felt secure in knowing that I and my high-risk pregnancy would be cared for in a Harris administration that would fight for reproductive freedom — especially after giving birth to my first child at just 24 weeks in a world wrecked by Trump’s COVID failures. I never got the chance to have a baby shower or a maternity shoot; preterm labor took my pregnancy announcement away completely. When my water broke at 22 weeks, less than a few dozen close loved ones knew I was pregnant. By the time our son came home in April 2022, after 116 days in the neonatal intensive-care unit, I had just popped out with a baby as far as my over 1 million social-media followers were concerned.

This time around, I had a pregnancy announcement planned for my birthday. With portraits taken by my artist husband, I’d celebrate bringing a new life into the impossibly promising future my toddler asked for when he’d pray nightly for “Auntie President.”

But by the time I left the Yard at 2 a.m., the excitement had been sucked out of the air. We had believed the impossible: that a Black and Indian woman born of immigrant parents, a mother herself to a blended family, a candidate more qualified than any before her, who ran on the explicit promise of more freedom for the marginalized would be elected president of these United States. With heads bowed and tears already starting to form, we shuffled home. I woke up the next day facing the absolute certainty not that we had lost, but that white supremacy had won. And won big.

In 2019, Harris’s sister, Maya Harris, called me and asked me to sit down with them both. I’d worked with them on police violence before, and then-Senator Harris had recently begun her 2020 campaign for president. They asked for my thoughts and advice. I was honored — and clear on my responsibility to not simply represent myself, but my people. “I’m always going to be 100 percent honest with you, because that’s how I was raised to speak to power,” I told her.

“I want nothing less,” she responded.

America’s pundit class has been insisting that misogynoir didn’t play a role in Harris’s loss, when the evidence to the contrary is staring them right in the face.

I came to know Harris professionally as a responsive partner, and personally as a mentor and a friend. In true Auntie spirit, she called when my first child was in the NICU. She greeted me with hugs, advice, and questions about campaigning and policy. In recent months, after publicly disagreeing with the Biden administration’s policy on Gaza, I told her and her team why I believed they should explicitly support the Palestinian people. Come November 5, I wanted to elect someone who wouldn’t punish honesty, but seek it out.

In short, Harris is someone I could trust. As the picture of how Trump won the presidency became clearer, I was handed yet another devastating receipt confirming that, for Black women, we really all we got.

To be clear, there is a difference between a media narrative that wrongly lays blame for Harris’s loss at the feet of voters of color while absolving white voters of responsibility, and the public lamentations of Black women who want to feel safe in the world that we have built for everyone’s benefit but our own. Any honest analysis of the election results must accept that many things are true at once: A person’s financial situation dictates their voting habits. Billionaires spread unchecked disinformation on social media. Israel and Gaza were singularly determining factors for some voters. Trump handily won white men and women, who turned out in high numbers, but his share of the vote increased significantly across other racial groups in the last three elections, too.

Despite this nuance, in my rawest place, I’m still left feeling like I can’t trust any damn body. Not white women who claimed to “understand the assignment” after Dobbs but chose to look out only for themselves. Not people who found fame in staying home and commanding others to do the same, and not even for moral reasons, but because it got them clicks and views. Not people who admonished Black women for trying to be strategic about fighting back fascism so that our collective struggle could see the light. Not non-Black people of color who increased their vote share for Trump even after they were called garbage. And certainly not white men, who never had my trust in the first place.

Even looking at Black men, I’ve been vacillating between wanting to thank those I love for having our backs, and wanting the group as a whole to perform better than voting just 78 percent for Harris — a C+ average. Some have argued that this vote share is typical for Black men. But am I not allowed to expect better? A friend put it to me this way: “They were behind us — we need them beside us.”

I hold Black men to a higher standard. I should be allowed to; I am raising one and about to be raising another. As their mother, I’m responsible for breaking the seductive spell of toxic masculinity that commands they be more attached to uplifting the patriarchy than agitating for justice for all. Alongside my husband, I have a duty to raise my sons to value Black women, and not just because they come from one or may be attracted to one.

I am expected to raise the solidarity I seek — and it still may abandon me. Nothing speaks more clearly to the plight of Black women in America.

After I told the group chat my truth, I found my way back to Howard to support the vice-president as she delivered her concession speech. I held the hands of Black women who had been in the thankless fight for freedom for decades, who had left their sick parents’ bedsides to fight for their future care, who had lost babies on the campaign trail and showed up anyway, who interrupted their maternity leaves, who got little financial backing and paid for grassroots work out of their own pockets. I heard them end phone calls in tears, saying, “They hate us. They hate us.”

I am expected to raise the solidarity I seek — and it still may abandon me. Nothing speaks more clearly to the plight of Black women in America.

While we cry, we are being gaslit. America’s pundit class has been insisting that misogynoir didn’t play a role in Harris’s loss, when the evidence to the contrary is staring them right in the face. The media and some leftists insist that Harris ignored the working class despite centering her campaign on an “Opportunity Economy” that both Wharton and the Working Families Party agreed would significantly benefit it, showing plainly the double standard to which the Black woman was held compared to the white guy offering mere “concepts of a plan.” And when vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance vowed to “take out the trash in Washington, D.C. And the trash’s name is Kamala Harris,” merely two days before the election, there was no outcry, no rush to defend a vice-president whose name, after four years, is still mispronounced (and often on purpose). She’s not the only one mistreated in this way: This year alone, the suffering of Sonya Massey, Megan Thee Stallion, Claudine Gay, Jordan Chiles, Angel Reese, Dr. Antoinette Candia-Bailey, Drew Dixon, and Dawn Richard served as reminders that America would rather discard all us Black women as trash, too.

I don’t know a Black woman who isn’t tired and tapping out. I shouldn’t be responsible for raising anybody but my own children out of the socialization of misogyny, and yet Black women are expected to take on this task for everyone. Too many times, we have been asked to wake up the white women, to no avail. Too many times, we have taken backseats to greater BIPOC causes, only for the unexamined anti-Blackness of other people of color to leave us in the cold. Too many times, we’ve been pushed to comfort a Black man’s ego even when it hurts our souls. I dare not keep asking Black women to offer solidarity without reciprocity, because I dare not ask it of myself. I will not be a willing participant in abuse.

Whether we move forward together or not is up to y’all. Right now, the coalitions we need to set ourselves free are as fractured as our hearts are broken; white supremacy wins when marginalized people fight each other instead of the systems that hurt us all. Our most successful intersectional struggles have been animated by the brilliance of Black women, and yet anti-Blackness and misogynoir persist. Failure to correct for them will keep America stuck where we are, as Black women will no longer accept less than we deserve. We will collectively hold our fellow citizens to the standard demanded of us. We will work, because we are wise enough to never become that which we fight — but we will also know rest, because we have more than earned it.

And right now? The little energy I have will be dedicated to mending my broken heart so that it’s good and strong while I bring another soul into this world. White supremacy will not steal another thing from me, and the worshippers of patriarchy will not break my soul while they try to take away my freedom. This election did not end with my desired result, but I did not lose. My victory lies in the ancient roots of Black womanhood: embracing community over individualism, shared power over hoarded power, a belief in abundance instead of scarcity. I will not submit to a fascist political will that wants to overpower me or the despair that wants to disempower me. I’ll face each day as exactly who I am: a free Black woman raising free Black children. To begin, that is my revolution.