Black Women Cleared Midterms, but What About Our Long-Term?
The internet streets are already buzzing with the rhetoric we hear each election season – Black women showed out. Kay Wicker writes for The Grio of Black women’s 94% turnout for Democrats. Plies teared up in an Instagram reel paying tribute to the Black women poll workers that characterize so many of our in-person voting experience. Several key races were also historic representation moments for Black women, most notably, Keisha Lance Bottoms’ securing the very first gubernatorial seat held by a Black woman in US history.
This moment is an emotional one for many of those who could hardly imagine progress like reproductive freedom and marriage equality codified into Virginia’s constitution, Georgia and Texas rising up for change, and a governor named Keisha. We know voting doesn’t dismantle the weapons formed against us, but we are feeling a little more room to breathe, to be ourselves, and to organize with one less obstacle.
Black American women, femmefolk, and gender-marginalized people have had to care for our community under deplorable conditions since we were trafficked here. Our care for our community results in better care for everyone because when the most marginalized can access care, everyone’s lives get a little easier. This is one of the few instances that Black women actually are doing it “for our health.” While this praxis isn’t absent of altruism, we are compelled to participate as a means toward our collective survival.
For us, reimagining democracy would mean that instead of becoming magic mythic heroes each election cycle, we get to enjoy holistic care in our real lives. Black women have met compounding crises with considerable grace regardless of the color of the wave. Dr. Joy James speaks to the injury of having to care for others in ways that uphold a system that is fundamentally violent towards us. She calls this non-gendered role the captive maternal. “Black women are positioned as heroes who come in to save other women from the crisis, but the conditions for crisis remain; the states concede nothing, another marketplace predicated on Black death opens, and subjugation opens wider,” says James
Our commitment to survival can be made to look like a commitment to that which threatens us. Reimagining democracy must ask difficult questions of our electoral politics, to which so many Black women dedicate ourselves out of love for our people. We know that we cannot depend on Black faces in high places to save us. The real struggle begins as we learn how to liberate ourselves in the ways that can never be co-opted or debated on the floor. For now, we breathe a complicated sigh of relief.
We have a resource dedicated to the practice of Reimagining Democracy that draws on womanist wisdom to help us through political watersheds like this moment. We will soon open applications for Rooted in Resilience, which will focus on applying our spiritual traditions to strengthen democracy in our local communities. Applications will be invitation-only, so you must fill out our interest form to be considered.
