Hi there,
I'm frowning at my computer screen right now, which is crazy because in the background my lover is standing in the kitchen making me some extremely involved pork shoulder with fried rice fried in the pork shoulder grease dinner that is definitely going to be delicious. All this after we engaged in activities that required me to settle in for a long afternoon nap where I was greeted with water and snacks upon waking.
But I'm still frowning. Because this just isn't what I want for black women. At all. Not one bit.
And frankly, I kind of wish Kamala would stop.
I wish she'd put an end to people calling her Momala.
I wish she'd stop playing so hard into the "black women are here to save us" trope.
I wish she'd stop being such an asshole to pro-Palestine protesters.
And I really wish she wasn't being set up to fail. Because honestly, putting a woman, a non-white one no less, up for President during what feels like very late-stage capitalism and having people suddenly rally behind her feels very much like a glass cliff.
So ya, I don't know what else to say about that. I just know that every time I think about Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential candidate, I make a face.
I just cannot stop frowning about it. And if she wins the election in November, I have a feeling I'm going to spend the next four years frowning due to equal parts displeasure and confusion.
I guess I just came here to say that I feel like I'm suffering from a chronic case of whiplash.
I mean we just watched that Morehouse lady say "black faces in high places won't save us" and everybody nodded their head in fervent agreement, but now Kamala is saying she can save us and everybody is now nodding their heads fervently in agreement with her?
It's a lot to process. I say process, not understand, because I don't ever think I'll really understand the moment we find ourselves in with all of its wild and nonsensical contradictions.
So instead of trying to understand, I think I'll just share a couple of things I know to be true.
ONE: Kamala Harris is not for the people. She's not safe for the people and she's not for, never has been, and never will be for the people. This is not a lady who grew up community organizing. This is a lady who made a career out of law and order politics, which always disproportionately harm people who look like her.
Don't put Barack rose-colored classes on a lady who climbed the political corporate ladder in the most traditional of ways: prosecutor to Attorney General to Senator to presidential candidate to VP to presidential nominee.
Kamala did not get here by going to town halls and listening to the people and knocking on doors to build consensus to improve workers' and tenants' rights. She got here in the most traditional and presitgious of ways.
And yes, there is a good argument and a lot of truth to the fact that that is exactly how black women have to get anywhere. We have to take the most traditional and challenging path to get anywhere so when it comes time to put us up for the job, the inevitable questions about whether we are "qualified" will sound totally nonsensical.
The truth of my observations has nothing to do with whether she is qualified on paper. The truth of my observations has everything to do with the fact that this is a person who has little to no experience in actual community building and doesn't know the first thing about solidarity practices.
If you, like me, spend your life imagining, building, and working towards a society that is community-focused, understands what enough is, and values sustainability over consumption, then Kamala simply is not it.
TWO: Society always turns to black women to fix things and I couldn't be more tired. Black women are the literal back bone and foundation on which this country was built. I say that with zero exaggeration.
When enslavers realized they didn't have to keep going back to West Africa to kidnap more black people, but could instead just order their most valuable male property to rape their most valuable female property over and over again to re-populate the slave ranks, black women became essential. Because we could both work in the fields and birth new property.
So they put us in horse stalls in barns and lined our male kin up and forced them to rape us. And when our male kin couldn't get the job done (rape us even under threat of severe punishment), the overseer and/or property owners would take it upon themselves to "get the job done" and rape us.
After enslavement ended, we still raised all of your children and our own.
Then we invented critical technologies that are mainstream today (cataract treatment, fiber optic cable, feeding tubes, home security systems, and fold out beds to name a few).
And it's well established that a white man executive's favorite number 2 at work is a black women because we apparently get the job done but are never an actual threat to taking their job.
All this plus we vote in favor of everyone's best interests because we have the unique pleasure of being at the bottom of the white patriarchy totem pole so when we vote in our best interests, we inevitably vote in favor of everyone else's best interests. That's to say nothing of our political and community organizing and our mutual aid systems.
We do all of this but somehow society still regards us as the least valuable women and the least valuable nonwhite person.
We do all of this and we're still ratchet and ghetto and angry and lazy.
We have more higher education degrees than any other group in this society, but somehow we are still dumb.
This is a society that outright refuses to recognize the value of black women. Y'all refuse to pay us, you refuse to acknowledge our humanity, our beauty, our humor, our mere existence...that is, until you need us to fix something.
Until you need us to comfort you and tell you it's okay and do everything in our power, including sacrificing ourselves, to make it better all so you can go back to ignoring and belittling our existence after we saved you.
You have no idea how hard it is to unsubscribe from the life path that y'all so desparately want us to stay on. You have no idea what we lose in that process or who we lose in order to gain some semblance of freedom and autonomy for ourselves.
It takes everything to unsubscribe from the mammy story that this society imposes upon us.
Yet many of us black women are somewhere in the process of unsubscribing from that story because we've come to realize that it's the only true way to save us.
Unsubscribing from the myth that we're here to save and be superheroes, but get none of the credit, is the only way we get a real chance at this thing called living.
And while we're in the process of doing that, now we have to watch you all drool over the mammy of the moment: Kamala.
We have to watch you praise her and get excited that she's here to save you. We have to watch you barely contain your urge to lay your head in her lap and have her rub your back and tell you it's going to be okay because she's here now.
We have to watch you all regulate your nervous systems by projecting all your fears onto her and giving them to her to carry for you because you've learned that you don't have to be responsible or accountable for your choices or your emotions as long as there is a black woman around to do it for you.
And I'd be lying if I said that watching this isn't stirring up some deep wounding in me (I mean for godsakes, I'm writing this article). It's making me remember a time when people "loved" me for what I could do for them -- for how I could make them feel. Friends and lovers. They "loved" me and kept me around because of what I could do and how I could make them feel and how I could comfort them and make it all better.
But when I asked for comfort and when I asked for support, there was no one around. I will never forget the day I confronted a former white friend about why she was avoiding me when I was arguably at the lowest point in my life. She responded, without hesitation or any sense of remorse and in complete and total seriousness: "I don't know. Everything with you just seems so dramatic right now."
I'm sad to report that this was not a unique experience during that time of my life.
So forgive me, but watching this Momala Kamala spectacle is anything but joyful for me. Watching this unhinged glee people have about the possibility of her presidency is hurtful at best and scary at worst.
Watching this circus is bringing up bad memories and old hurts.
Watching this is like being slapped across the face with the truth over and over and over again. The truth that Momala Kamala isn't here because we've made progress. She isn't here because we've finally defeated anti-black womanness.
But rather, she's here because America has been fucking up for centuries now and it's tired, cranky, and scared and it wants its Mammy.
And the irony is that this Mammy, Momala Kamala, couldn't be less interested in saving us. I have no confidence that we will find an ounce of safety in her arms.
In that way, I guess I kind of simultaneously admire her and despise her because like Donald Trump, she'll say whatever she needs to say and be whatever you want her to be to win you over. What matters most to her is that she, not some other woman, is the one who gets to shatter that glass ceiling. Even if she knows the ceiling is actually a cliff, she wants to shatter it anyway.
As long as it's her name and her picture posted next to yet another "first" title, she's happy to stroke your hair and sing you a lullaby.
Just don't expect the rest of us to be like her.
May you choose love over fear and safety over comfort,
Brionna
p.s. You should really start eating pork shoulder fried rice immediately. My eyes have never rolled so far to the back of my head due to a bite of food.
Some reading resources: If anything I said in this article was news to you or sparked your curiosity, I invite you to Read With Me. I'm officially a Bookshop affiliate so books you purchase through these links support my voracious (and expensive) reading habit:
The Half Has Never Been Told: a historical account of how slavery built American capitalism
The Prophets: a beautiful fiction love story about two male slaves that simultaneously details the gruesome reality of enslavement and resilience of love and hope. Be prepared to cry. The prose in this novel is breathtakingly beautiful.
Doppelganger: because it should be required reading for everyone alive right now.
Salvation: Black People and Love: it's bell hooks. No further explanation needed.
