‘I Feel Betrayed’: For Black Women, Harris’ Loss Creates New Wound

By Anumita Kaur, Emmanuel Felton, Brianna Tucker / The Washington Post

14:50 JST, November 10, 2024

DULUTH, Ga. – When Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic presidential nominee this summer, many Black women across the country began dreaming of a potentially historic, glass-ceiling-breaking victory.

As Harris’s loss to former president Donald Trump came into focus this week, that enthusiasm turned into disappointment and concern over the future of the country. Some Black women, long among the most reliable Democratic voters, said they were frustrated that their investment in party politics hadn’t resulted in the election of the first Black female president.

“I feel betrayed. I do,” said Cindi Jackson, 48, a local public school teacher. “This country is just behind, just backwards. We would rather elect a criminal than a Black woman.”

Jackson grew up in Gwinnett County, which has transformed from a predominantly White sleepy suburb northeast of Atlanta to a diverse community filled with immigrants from around the world. Those demographic changes, she said, bolstered her hopes that Harris, whose mother emigrated from India and father from Jamaica, could win the presidency.

She considers the evolution of her community beautiful, she said, but acknowledged that there had been some tensions.

“I think people just freak out over change,” she said. Maybe that’s what led to these election results, Jackson said. Despite the increase in immigrant, Latino and Asian voters – voting blocs that typically lean Democratic – the county shifted right by almost two percentage points.

Black women have long been the bedrock of the Democratic Party. But while their votes have been key to delivering victories for Democrats, some Black women leaders say they are frustrated that they have largely been excluded from top positions in government.

There has been a steady increase in Black women being elected to political office since the early 1990s. And they account for a greater proportion of Black elected officials compared with the share of White women among White elected officials, research shows. As of 2018, there were more than 3,000 Black women holding elected office across the country, primarily at the local level.

But Black women have largely been left out of the highest offices. No Black woman has ever served as governor of a state, and according to Higher Heights for America PAC, a political action committee dedicated to electing progressive Black women, few have ever held a statewide office.

“There’s certainly a lot of work to be done around people’s perception about Black women running for the highest office,” said Glynda C. Carr, president and co-founder of Higher Heights for America. “But Harris ran a campaign in just 107 days, which is unprecedented, and she was able to build out a coalition of voters that were excited, enthusiastic. So when we look at the numbers of volunteers and the amount of money that she raised, those are all game-changers for Black women seeking the highest offices.”

Carr also pointed to another historic moment of this election cycle: For the first time, two Black women will serve in the U.S. Senate at the same time: Angela Alsobrooks (D-Maryland) and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Delaware).

Those victories help illuminate the path forward for Black women seeking the most powerful offices in government, she said.

But the unfounded attacks on Harris’s intelligence and the racist suggestion from Trump and some of his supporters that she would be a “DEI president” show just how far the nation still has to go, some Black women said.

“People keep saying we need to soul-search to figure out what happened,” said D’Ivorie Johnson, 50, who lives outside Dallas. “Listen, the racism and sexism is what it is.”

With the elevation of Harris to the top of the ticket in July, many Black women said they thought it was finally their moment – that their loyalty to the Democratic Party would vault one of their own into the highest office in the land.

Within hours of President Joe Biden announcing he would end his bid for a second term and quickly endorsing Harris, a Zoom call aimed at reaching Black women raised $1.5 million. The more than 2 million members of the “Divine Nine,” the country’s nine most prominent Black sororities and fraternities, quickly united to mobilize Black voters nationwide.

Members of Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, which she joined while she was an undergraduate student at Howard University, started posting memes and selling merchandise online in the group’s signature pink and green to get out the vote.

Monica Williams, 49, said she was thrilled to cast her vote for Harris on Tuesday. “Men have been running things into the ground way too long,” she said that morning outside her polling site at the Gwinnett County Public Library in Suwanee, Georgia. “We need this change. The time is now.”

On Wednesday, she woke to a barrage of texts and learned that Trump had won.

“I don’t have words. I don’t know if I have fully accepted it. Maybe something will come up in the numbers,” she trailed off. “Probably not.”

“I’m just disappointed,” she said. She repeated three times: “I’m just so, so disappointed.”

America is not ready or willing to accept a Black woman at the top, she said. “I don’t have a clue what comes next. I’m pretty much just dumbfounded.”

Felicia Theobold, 39, said she was upset but not shocked by the results. Before the election, she had allowed herself to dream of what a possible Harris presidency might look like, said Theobold, who works in health care. “Seeing someone that looks like me? Yes, very exciting,” she said.

But she had doubts and the election results reaffirmed those fears, she said.

“How can I sum up my feelings? I’m relieved that it’s over,” she said as she stared off at a rain that quickened from a drizzle to a downpour Wednesday afternoon. “I can’t really put my feelings into words. It shows that nothing has really changed in terms of what a leader should look like.”

For many voters, support for Harris was not rooted in representation but in her policy agenda – many of which were in sharp contrast to Trump’s.

Christine Harrell, 40, was worried about what Trump’s victory could mean for Georgia, where there is already a six-week ban on most abortions. There could be “a bigger push for more restrictions on abortion access, birth control, all of that,” she said.

On her 7 a.m. commute to work on Wednesday morning just hours after Trump was declared the winner, she said riders on the MARTA – Atlanta’s public transit system – were unusually quiet as rain showers and a patchy fog blanketed the city, minus a few people she assumed were Trump supporters.

As she rode the metro, Harrell hung close to a quote she had read while scrolling her social media feed that morning: “The ancestors already gave us the blueprint.”

“We can overcome this, we got each other, and we can support each other,” she said. “We could still find joy, and we can still build community, because we’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again no matter who is in the White House.”