Trust Black women: Vote for Biden-Harris
By Brittney Cooper
I’m offering these remarks in the name of Sister Breonna Taylor.
We really should begin to trust Black women.
This slogan was pioneered in 1994 and carried forward by the sisters at SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, a social justice advocacy organization working for marginalized communities, and by Sister Loretta Ross, a Black feminist academic and thought leader who is a part of that collective. “Trust Black women” is about our right to have kids, to not have kids and to have these kids grow up in safe and healthy environments. That really has to be a core focus as we’re thinking about this COVID moment.
How do we protect Black women’s maternal health?
How do we protect the lives of Black children who are being forced to go back into schools that are not safe to reopen?
Every time I see these kids with these masks on in schools, when we know that being in buildings together up close, every day all day, is a superspreader event, and when I see colleges being reopened around the country, including my former university, the University of Alabama, where they have had over 2,500 cases, it reminds me that we aren’t listening to the truth of the reproductive justice framework.
“Trust Black women” is about our right to have kids, to not have kids and to have these kids grow up in safe and healthy environments.
We’ve got to listen to women, to sisters, to Black girls.
We spent a lot of time this summer organizing and amplifying movements to get 15-year-old teenager Grace back home after a judge locked her up because she didn’t adjust well to the pandemic and wasn’t doing her homework. And I’m happy to say that because of the organizing of teen girls in the Black Lives Matter in All Capacities advocacy group, Grace was released in July and let off of probation in August.
And so we have been showing the best of ourselves, but we’ve got to continue doing that. Sister Naytasia Williams was killed this August by a security guard in Indianapolis, and there’s been comparatively less coverage of her case. We have to stay on the case. We’ve got to figure out a sustained framework of justice that will allow us to think about what’s happening in Black women’s lives.
Death shouldn’t be the reason that Black women get to occupy the critical center of U.S. politics. But in many cases, it is.
Nearly 40,000 Black people have died of COVID-19. More than 200,000 people living in this country have died of COVID-19. Black women have been disproportionately affected because we’re more likely to report that we’ve been fired from our jobs than white men, by two to one (and so are reluctant to miss work, even when it is risky to show up in person). We also make up a disproportionate share of care workers, particularly in nursing homes.
We are reporting high rates of depression. And we are the primary caretakers of Black children and Black communities, because in most Black families, Black mothers are the heads of their households.
We’ve got to let that be our driver that changes our politics.
For me that means I’m going to vote in November, and I’m going to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I will not make this a booster for their campaign because frankly they were not initially my choice, but I am fully on board for them now. This is who the American people have chosen. And I’m excited that we get to have a sister in the vice president slot.
I want us to think about what it means … to keep Black women’s radical ideas and vision for a world in which everyone gets to eat, in which kids are safe, in which everyone goes to good schools, in which our vote is protected, in which we live in safe neighborhoods.
Black women voters have said that this is the way we can get out of the clutches of the mad man that’s in the White House. And Black women have also said that it really matters to them to have someone who looks like them in the White House — after being the most consistent voting block in the Democratic Party.
We should vote for Biden-Harris not because they support all our principles but because they’re the most viable option we have. And because again, nearly 40,000 Black people have died of COVID-19 and a significant swath of Black women have been badly affected by what the pandemic has done to our communities.
As we continue to think about radical politics, I want us to think about what it means to keep Black women at the center of politics, to keep Black women’s radical ideas and vision for a world in which everyone gets to eat, in which kids are safe, in which everyone goes to good schools, in which our vote is protected, in which we live in safe neighborhoods. That is Black women’s political vision. It is what we fight for.
We are pragmatists in moments where we need to be, and because of that, we have kept the nation’s lights on. Any semblance of democracy that still exists is by and large because of Black women’s committed pragmatism.
So I urge you in this moment to trust Black women.
Brittney Cooper, who wrote Eloquent Rage, is a Black feminist thought leader and a professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana at Rutgers University. She is a member of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT faculty union. This piece is an excerpt from her teach-in presentation given in September 2020 as part of the #ScholarStrike against racism.
Want to read more stories like this? Subscribe to AFT e-newsletters.
