“Sister, it’s bad, and I can’t sleep,” my younger sister texted me at 3 a.m. last night. After a daylong pause I replied, “Yes. And there’s no sugarcoating it.”
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my great grandmother who was enslaved on a farm in central Tennessee and who had no shoes and was not allowed to read until after Emancipation. Who worked a farm she and my grandfather owned without any help from the government or reparations for the terror and theft of their enslavement until it was stolen from them by white farmers with guns supported by a corrupt government who did not protect her and our family. Because I know this about my family, I have nothing easy to say to calm my sister’s fear for her kids or her students. American history matters more than ever because we are living it again. Women lost (even those women who claimed they won on Election Day), and even as the Equal Rights Amendment was recognized at the 11th hour, each regime declaration means women, immigrants, Native, Black, poor, veterans and disabled will lose even more.
But do we see it now? We cannot have a movement defined by the narrowness of white privilege or white supremacy or the wealthy. It simply does not work. It cannot elect a woman to the White House. It cannot hold fascism at bay. We never had all women in the movement. And although we can and should build community with the 80 million who voted for Harris and for women’s equality by extension, there are millions of others committed to making America’s future its past—a future where our power fades away.
Many assume the orders dismantling DEI and civil rights are attacks on Black people. Let’s be clear: they are also attacks on women. Anti-Blackness fuels American authoritarianism because it poisons the entire political spectrum. It is especially lethal for Black women who have held a vision for the nation and fought for the country. We were the obvious group to lead the next chapter of America’s story.
Just because we lost the election doesn’t mean we were wrong to lean into intersectional feminism. We didn’t lean enough and didn’t make racial justice, indigeneity and poverty our cornerstone issues. We need new kinds of courageous leaders who come with a history of organizing, who tell our truths and who are openly pro-democracy. Countries around the world who have gone where the U.S. couldn’t and wouldn’t. They have keys to our next moves. The U.S. has never held itself accountable for the crimes of land theft, genocide of native peoples and enslavement of 13 million African descendants. We are an empire that has a military around the world and desperate people at home. We didn’t lose because we went too far. We lost because we didn’t go far enough.
We go forward by learning how other countries—Iceland and Mexico and Rwanda and Nicaragua to name a few—are achieving equality. We drop the myth that America knows best. We do not know best. And our wealth, flowing into fewer greedy and hateful hands, will not protect us.
In the weeks and months ahead it is our job to study our own history and share this knowledge with this generation of leaders. It is our job to learn from countries around the world who represent the advancement of democracy—the kind of democracy defined by the best of our movement. Our job is to build a culture in which women lead by holding up principles and values, and morals of equality and justice. Black women, as tired as we are at the moment, have the wisdom and history and courage that are critical to this transformation.
And above all, we must name and defeat the enemy: fascism and racism. There is no sugarcoating it, and we cannot educate or coddle or outrun it. We cannot possibly give it more grace than we’ve already given or space to destroy. This is the other American tradition of women that we must hold in our hearts: remember who we can be. If I can be here, despite everything my grandparents’ grandparents endured, then we can together remake ourselves, our movement and America.
Portions of this interview appeared at ForbesWomen.