Watching Kamala Harris run for president against Donald Trump felt like watching the world’s hardest game of Frogger. His relentless commitment to absurdity and ugliness, and the loyalty it inspired in his supporters, was the constant traffic of cars and river logs for the Harris campaign. I had to duck to avoid it. We knew we needed strategy, organization, and financial support to get to the other side unscathed. Harris had all this despite the fact that he entered the race at the 11th hour, as if starting the game from his (proverbial) last life. Still, early Wednesday morning, news broke that Harris had been in a frog-like car accident. And the loss was so shocking that it felt like the long-held dream of many people was game over. The sad truth is that we clearly lost our only chance to elect a black woman as president.
Forget about being competent and entitled (which our voters certainly have). No woman is more poised to win a big prize than the sitting vice president. It’s not just that she’s relatively sane than her opponents, she’s also less aggressive and willing to engage voters by appearing on podcasts like “Call Her Daddy.” It’s not just that she lacks the political baggage of the 1990s that plagued Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It wasn’t just that she was battling a notoriously unhinged demagogue who was already ruling the country during a period of unparalleled turmoil in American history that ended with a devastating pandemic. He completely mishandled and became one of the world’s leading sources of dangerous health-related misinformation. I could go on, but that’s not the point. It didn’t matter. When faced with the choice of confusion, greed, anger, or relative common sense (the kind exercised by competent and qualified black women), voters overwhelmingly chose the former. It wasn’t the man who loved fascism that sparked the rebellion they couldn’t trust. It was a black woman.
One of Harris’ biggest weapons in the race was her membership in Alpha Kappa Alpha, the sorority she pledged to as a student at Howard University, a historically black college. Howard University is a particularly tenacious black community that is climbing mountains, breaking barriers, and doing it admirably. The devil works hard, AKA works harder, is the wise black wisdom. Formed by one of the most influential members of the Divine Nine, a black sorority and fraternity governed by the National Panhellenic Council, Harris’ experience and political acumen led many black voters to believe that Harris was is a big part of why I was convinced that I could become that person. To get this done.
The women of Alpha Kappa Alpha have a different spirit than the rest of the Divine Nine. More than any other black sorority historically, AKA is focused on increasing and preserving the “social status” (as expressed in its five core values) of black people. Much is hidden at the tip of the iceberg. Historically, most black Greek organizations have an objective focused on “economic growth.” However, AKA’s reference to “social status” is a little different. It’s not just about leadership, status, wealth, and power. Appearance, politeness, and respectability are also important. And historically, for black people, that has meant aligning themselves and their existence with white people.
Etiquette and appearance are performances for everyone, but they are concepts created and defined by white people in this country. For many upwardly mobile black Americans, success still requires white approval. It’s no surprise, then, that AKA has a long-standing reputation for primarily catering to lighter-skinned women, sporting silk-pressed hairstyles over natural curls. The double-edged sword of gaining a powerful social position as a marginalized person in American society is the assimilation required to achieve it. rest assured. No one fits that bill more than Kamala Harris.
Frankly, if Harris was considered too black to be the first black female president, so be it. I think that dream will fade away. She played the role wearing a pantsuit and pearls (the sorority’s signature accessory). She played the role. Even in college, she was known as C3 as a calm, cool and collected person. She refuses to make her identity as a Black, South Asian American central to her campaign, seeing what happened to Clinton by running on that identity just eight years ago. did. And while Ms. Harris maintained a very restrained image, she also possessed extraordinary qualifications, having served as vice president, U.S. senator, and California attorney general.
And if securing black votes and black capital was the only thing Harris needed for this campaign, she would have accomplished it in one business day. Within 24 hours of being endorsed as the Democratic presidential nominee, Black women raised unprecedented amounts of campaign funds, broke Zoom capacity records, and began driving massive get-out-the-vote efforts. Much of this activity was led by members of the Divine Nine’s sororities and fraternities, and to call the Divine Nine “organized” would be an understatement. Tidying up is not only what they do best, but also what they trade it for.
There is much dispute as to why Harris lost. But everyone seems to want to avoid this explanation. Democrats are forgetting what actually happens when Trump takes office. How Democrats lost and Trump won. I’ve been watching the rise of J.D. Vance for years. One thing is clear about him now.
But taking input from white universities and using our own secret societies was not enough to convince the rest of us in just 107 days. Ms. Harris is supported not only by powerful black organizations with money, status, and the will to get shit done, but also by celebrities, party leaders, Democrats, out-of-office Republicans, and exorbitant amounts of campaign contributions. However, it did not come close.
There is already a lot of infighting over the causes of Harris’s election loss, her confidence in demographics and the system, her running a lackluster platform against fascists, and her anger at the economy and inflation. But the deepest truth cannot be lost in all of it. Unfortunately, this country will always ignore its original tenets of racism and misogyny when faced with fear, frustration, or just plain dissatisfaction. It has never been more unclear what the unified Democratic opposition to Trumpism should look like, but there is one very clear reality staring us squarely in the face. If Harris, the woman closest to bridging the black-white vote, is not elected in 2024, there will probably be no black women. can.
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