‘This is not time for retreat or apathy’: Black women dissect Harris

Misogynoir, the intersection of racism and sexism, was the main reason behind Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 general election, a panel of Black female experts argued, noting how post-election coverage has failed to contend with how white supremacy undergirded the election results.

In a conversation titled “Views from the 92%: Black Women Reflect on 2024 Election and Road Ahead”, several academics dissected how and why the vice-president lost, particularly given Trump’s problematic history.

The panel was hosted by the African American Policy Forum, a social justice thinktank co-founded by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and Columbia University.

“Racism is designed in such a way to make you question your humanity, but sexism is also. Sexism is really a power move,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund. “When you combine those two things together, I think that that best explains what [Harris] experienced.”

Throughout the 2024 election campaign, Trump and other conservatives launched an onslaught of racist and sexist attacks against Harris: repeatedly claiming that Harris “slept her way” into political power, was unintelligent, and that she was not a Black woman.

Such attacks are unsurprising given American’s history with racism against Black women, the call participants said. But what was especially frustrating were platforms Trump was given to spread disinformation, Crenshaw argued, specifically calling out Trump being featured at the 2024 National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention.

Karen Attiah, the former co-chair of the convention, who stepped down after the announcement that Trump would be interviewed, said the interview was a “viscerally painful experience” which was excused by many “white liberals”. During the contentious interview, Trump questioned Harris’s race, saying she suddenly “became a Black woman”. “Is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of sudden she became a Black woman.” Trump was also repeatedly combative with the interviewer Rachel Scott, the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News, accusing her of being “rude”.

“The responses that I personally got for stepping down from white allies or people who are white leaders, was, ‘Well, he was racist and he destroyed your conference, but we needed to see that’ and I was like, ‘At the expense of our dignity[?]’,” she said.

Following the general election on 6 November, exit polling showed that 53% of white women voters still supported Trump, calling into question who the legitimate allies of Black women’s interests are, said Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.

“After going through this last presidential election, we really have to reassess and have real deep conversations about when these people say they’re your allies. What does that really mean?” she said, arguing that internal organizing of Black women needed to continue taking place.

“There was a majority of white women who voted against democracy, against women’s interests, for a racist, for somebody who is proud to have taken away our right to choose.”

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Crenshaw also called out the mainstream media for failing to hold Trump accountable, as well as post-election coverage that ignored voter suppression tactics carried out by Trump supporters, including a multimillion-dollar initiative led by the billionaire Elon Musk.

“Donald Trump was the biggest beneficiary of identity-based preferential treatment in terms of his media coverage,” she said. “He was like a Teflon-coated pan. Unlike Kamala, who was rendered by the media like a static, clean repository, anything would stick to her over and over again. It’s hard to imagine anybody other than a wealthy white male claiming he could shoot someone in broad daylight and get away with it, and then prove to us that this is, in fact, virtually true.”

In light of Trump’s win, Black women – who voted for Harris more than any other demographic, need to be prepared to deal with racist attacks from far-right Republicans, argued Barbara Arnwine, president and founder of Transformative Justice Coalition.

“It is critical for Black women to not just talk about our magic … We gotta talk about how we fight, how we become a fighting formation, how we are able to know that these battles are going to come, that these kind of things are going to be said, that these kind of attacks are going to be launched.”

Looking forward, experts emphasized the importance of continuing to organize internally despite feelings of despondency.

Rebuilding freedom schools – educational programs in marginalized communities – creating spaces of communication on social media, akin to “Black Twitter”, targeting disinformation being spread by artificial intelligence, and addressing ongoing attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion are just some of the potential strategies, said the speaker Fran Phillips-Calhoun, an Atlanta Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta.

“This really is not time for retreat or apathy,” said Phillips-Calhoun. “We really do have to turn inwards so we can build again.”

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