Trust Black Women

Progress for one white woman can be part of progress for all women, but only if women of all colors play a role in making that progress a reality.

Black women tried to save you, America. You didn’t want to be saved.

Ninety-four percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, if for no other reason than to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. We tried to save you, even though there were good reasons to have some skepticism that President Hillary Clinton would bring meaningful change to black lives. In many ways, the first woman to earn a major party nomination personifies the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which didn’t do enough to center the most marginalized women. Had she won, it would have been seen primarily as a victory for white, affluent feminists, who remain a narrow subset of the movement with outsize influence on public discourse. And yet, at the center of her campaign — in policy making, web design, communications, and strategy — were black women. From the most junior staffer up through senior advisers, we were involved in every single aspect of the campaign. Hillary may be the public face of white feminism, but nevertheless she attracts and empowers black women.

History has taught us that “progress for women” isn’t always progress for black women, but a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been, if nothing else, a win for the black women who have always been in her direct sphere of influence. In politics, proximity to power is often the first step toward actual power and progress, and the Clinton campaign employed more black women than any other presidential campaign in American history. “For me, it wasn’t just about helping to elect the first woman president, but helping to elect a woman who also centers black women’s experiences,” Neisha Blandin, the campaign’s national deputy women’s vote director, told me. “I have worked on many campaigns and ‘Ready for Hillary’ and ‘Hillary for America’ have been the most diverse places/campaigns I have ever worked on.”

I found the same to be true. The decision to dedicate ten months of my life to Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign was easy, once I saw that she was smart enough to hire phenomenal black women like Maya Harris and Karen Finney, and place them at the center of her campaign operations. Her early selection of Harris as a senior policy adviser demonstrated from the very beginning that Hillary valued the black female vote and its growing importance in American politics. Harris’s October 2014 report for the Center for American Progress on the power of women of color at the ballot box is often cited as a signal of larger demographic shifts in America, which will eventually impact elections at every level. As women …

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