[WAPO] America calls on Kamala Harris — and Black women — to clean up its mess.Sen. Kamala D. Harris can now add Shatterer of Glass Ceilings to her already impressive résumé.
"Let us kneel....and pray?"
One hundred years after women in America secured the right to vote, Harris is now set to become the first woman to become vice president of the United States. Harris, born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, will also be the first nonwhite woman to occupy the office.
Exit polls showed that once again, Black women put the Democratic Party on their backs, with 91 percent of Black women voting for the Biden-Harris ticket, the highest percentage of any racial group. In Georgia, Stacey Abrams emerged as a Black political superheroine; her voting rights organization Fair Fight helped register 800,000 voters and may help deliver the traditionally red state to Biden. It is a point of pride that Harris’s path to success was shaped by Black institutions; she graduated from Howard University, a historically Black college, and is a member of the historically Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha.
However, as much as Harris’s victory is a moment for celebration, as a Black woman, I can’t help but brace myself. Black women know the ugliness that America is capable of. We know that the violent twin forces of racism and sexism course through America’s DNA so powerfully that not even a Black woman in the White House can be safe from it.