In a news op-ed, Nomad Editor Christine Odwesso says that the 92% of Black women who voted for Kamala Harris weren’t wrong to crave political sanctuary. Harris just wasn’t the one.
Kamala Harris lost me near the end of the summer. In her first major TV interview since Biden bowed out five weeks prior, she made her policy on Gaza numbingly clear.
When asked if she would withhold shipments of U.S. weapons to Israel, she said she is “unequivocal and unwavering” in her “commitment” to Israel. And that her policy is “not going to change.”
She echoed debunked reports of mass rapes on Oct. 7 and insisted “we must get a deal done.” In the meantime, Americans were expected to sit idly by and watch, as our tax dollars contributed to the relentless slaughter of Palestinians. Meanwhile, bound to AIPAC, Harris continued to toe the line to offer Israel cautious but impassioned support.
And so we watch, refusing to turn our heads as videos flood our timelines with gruesome images of children with severed limbs, mangled bodies buried under rubble. Palestinians were and are still being brutalized as they beg the rest of the world to see their humanity.
In response, we educated ourselves on the history of the Israeli occupation. We protest. We donate money. We watch Tik Toks all the way through, reposting, liking, commenting. All the while Biden gave billions to Israel.
A poll conducted by the Institute of Middle East Understanding and YouGov, revealed that 29% of Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 withheld their vote for Harris in 2024, citing “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” as their reason for doing so.
Harris lost me again when she failed to distinguish herself from the (unpopular) Biden administration. In an interview with The View months ago, Harris was asked if she would do anything differently in the last four years. Her response? “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”
It’s a tough balancing act, trying to distinguish yourself without dissing the current administration. Harris rallied around abortion, and promised to address economic issues like job insecurity and rising costs that keep people from being able to afford their groceries. However, Harris missed the mark when she attempted to appeal to a broader voter base by moving right, saying she’d put a Republican in her cabinet and aligning herself with the Cheneys.
Despite her struggle to assuage economic anxieties and articulate her policies, Harris was backed by 92% of Black women. Why?
Isn’t it obvious?
For some, the choice between Harris and Donald Trump was a simple one. An establishment Democrat or a convicted felon who’s threatened the health and safety of several marginalized groups. According to the AP VoteCast survey, which surveys over 120,000 voters, “6 in 10 Black women said the future of democracy in the United States was the single most important factor for their vote this year.” But for others, the choice felt more complex. Four more years of Trump was certainly an unimaginable horror (one we must tragically live out today), but so is genocide.
I empathize with those who made a strategic vote for Harris to prevent a social and political retrograde (especially those in battleground states). And I empathize with those in fixed states, who voted for a third party because they coudn’t possibly cast a vote for genocide, knowing the electoral college would decide their fate in the end.
The choice was difficult—status quo, or steep decline. However, the belief that these are our only two viable options is an insidious hindrance to our progress as people. There are subtle frameworks within the Black community that make us susceptible to the idea that status quo is enough.
Black Faces in High Places
“Black faces in high places” refers to a philosophy that feeds on the delusion of equal opportunity. If Black people simply “work hard” to ascend the corporate/political ladder, we can finally attain the American Dream. Our worth and success is thereby measured by our ability to achieve the same status as our white counterparts.
I was sold the idea of Black institutional success as an indicator of social progress in 2008. I was seven years old, lying belly-down on my living room floor, watching as my parents hugged and cried in front of the TV.
“There’s a Black man in the White House,” my mother said. “I can’t believe it!”
I’ll never forget it. That unshakable feeling we were living in a New World. We had won. Change was not just tangible, but seemingly inevitable. As I grew older, I grasped the painful truth that some promises made about hope and change were just that—flimsy promises. That isn’t to say progress wasn’t made at all. It was a remarkable time in history, but racism is certainly alive and well, and Obama was just as fallible and culpable as any other president.
Professor Ruha Benjamin warned against the dangers of this ideology in her acceptance speech for an honorary degree at Spelman College. “Black faces in high places are not going to save us,” she said. “Just look at the Black proponents of cop city in Atlanta’s leadership class. Just look at the Black woman’s hand, ambassador at the UN, voting against a ceasefire in Gaza. Our blackness and our womaness are not in themselves trustworthy, if we allow ourselves to be conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo. If we support the occupation of Black neighborhoods with so called better trained police, or remain silent about the genocide of oppressed peoples around the world funded by our tax dollars.”
Black Politics
In a conversation with The Majority Report in 2023, essayist and political commentator Pascal Robert explored how the current nature of Black politics neutralized the left. When people ponder why the Black community might be inclined to vote for someone like Biden, or even Harris, they must consider the cultural and political influences in their community.
“Black politics is a politics of containment and capture,” Robert said. “When South Carolina primaries are about to happen, Jim Clyburn has the phone number of every church pastor in his rolodex, every Black membership organization, fraternity, sorority, graduate chapter and alumni chapter.”
He explains that the members of these chapters are the teachers and administrative officials of Black high schools and historically Black colleges. “Which is going to literally have an ideological role in shaping the politics of thousands of students,” Robert said. “ The ideological infrastructure is controlled by the Black political class, and they maintain that control by exacting patronage from the Democratic party and its corporate acolytes.”
“You have to understand and find a way to puncture the ideological superstructure that allows people like Clyburn to basically take large segments of Black voters and dump them into the neoliberal corporate section of the Democratic party,” Robert said.
It makes sense. Harris is a product of Howard and an AKA alum. Why wouldn’t the members of these organizations vote to elect one of their own?
Churches, sororities and even schools are undoubtedly necessary sources of connection and community, but it’s important to consider that the dominant political ideology within these groups can be limiting. There’s a difference between true representation and identity politics. I would love to see a Black woman elected as president, but it should be the right one. Harris said “we’re not going back,” but didn’t provide a convincing argument for how we’d move forward. She neglected to enact policy towards things like universal healthcare—an area in which Black women disproportionately suffer.
Where do we go now?
Some progressive Black women who have been disillusioned by the current political system have thrown their support behind candidates like Cori Bush. Bush has built a platform prioritizing compassion. She can connect to the working class struggle because she has lived it.
In her memoir, The Forerunner, Bush details the struggles of being a working-class mother while being courageously candid about her experiences with abuse, alcoholism and homelessness. She too has been a victim of the healthcare system’s shortcomings, and has intimately experienced the consequences of a carceral system. Her experiences make her uniquely qualified to represent those who have suffered in the same way.
In an excerpt from her book, Bush says: “To me, Black people need quality health care and education, free college tuition, and student loan debt forgiveness. We need a living wage, safe and affordable housing, reliable public transportation, environmental justice, broadband access, economic equity capital, and an end to mass incarceration and police violence. This was not a white liberal agenda to me. It is an agenda that saves lives.”
However, highly progressive Black candidates are unlikely to survive within the confines of our current system. St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell was able to defeat Bush in her primary thanks to a donation of over $8 million from AIPAC’s United Democracy Project.
After her loss, Bush challenged AIPAC, saying her loss only “takes some strings off.” She said all they did was radicalize her and “now they should be afraid.” “They’re about to see this other Cori, this other side,” she said. There is nothing in my life that happens in vain. So this happened because it was meant to happen. And let me say it’s because of the work that I need to do.”
The work Bush is referring to is a collective endeavor we should all invest in. One focused on community cohesion, a strong social foundation, and building a system rooted in compassion and accountability. Using ‘Black faces in high places’ as markers of our success reinforces values upheld by white institutions, such as those related to class and respectability politics.
Frankly, none of these ideas should be considered radical. They should be seen for what they are—basic human rights. We must imagine a future beyond our current systems. A future beyond The status quo. Our lives quite literally depend on it.
