In the hours after Vice President Kamala Harris was announced as President Biden’s pick to replace him in the run to become our next President, more than 44,000 Black women spun into action and joined a Zoom call. They crashed the platform. Nevertheless, the Black women in attendance raised about $1.6 million for the potential candidate.
A day later, another call was held by Black men (which raised more than $50,000). Still later, another call drew 166,000 Kamala Harris supporters, who also crashed the communication site.
Since then, there has been what I can only describe as an eternal sequence of conversations, community, and deep investing. The “Shut Down Zoom For Kamala” economy shows the potency and power of Black women—though we should not at all be surprised. Black women have played pivotal roles in voter mobilization, and have driven historical voter turnout for years.
It’s incredibly exciting to see the opportunity ahead—to bear witness to this history that has the potential to lead our country into the next chapter. In the coming months, we will hear a lot about this figurative break of a glass ceiling. But we must make careful note that the glass ceiling (or the glass cliff) is not just about naming the real barriers to the advancement for Black women, it’s about the actions we must take to remove them. Breaking through the glass ceiling requires sustainability and resourcing leaders for the long term, not just supporting them into the seat. It requires investing in the whole leader.
And so it strikes me that while Harris’s candidacy has infused hope and purpose for so many people across the country, we have yet to talk about our collective responsibility to support Black women—including our Vice President—as they earn leadership roles and face the same destructive archetypes and vicious racist attacks that society has known and deemed only as an unfortunate norm. In our national poll of more than 700 Black women registered to vote, they said they are worried Harris will be the victim of racist (80%) and sexist (70%) attacks because she is a Black woman.
We saw this in such deprecating form these past few years, with the racist and sexist attacks at Judge Ketanji Brown’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing, the treatment of Claudine Gay and her subsequent resignation, as well as the ongoing legal assault on corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. Black women continue to be held to such extreme expectations and pressure, with such few dollars and little support—and yet, though these compounding challenges couldn’t be clearer and more documented, our society continues to look to these leaders in earnest, questioning not only what they will do for us, but how they will save us.
The scrutiny has been misplaced. It was never for Black women to hold—it’s for everyone else.
And so we must ask ourselves:
- What will we do for Black women leaders?
- When we see a Black woman leader facing racist attacks to her credentials and experience, what will we do as a society?
- When a Black woman leader is unfairly scrutinized for a human error, will we abandon her?
- When we see Black women-owned businesses being attacked and disinvested in, will we only shake our heads and retreat to our daily lives?
- Or will we call out racism when we see it, and declare that we will not allow these harmful systemic issues to hold Black women back from leading?
In my role as the founder of The Highland Project, a nonprofit that invests in the sustainability of Black women leaders, I have conversations every day with Black women leaders who are experiencing these accelerated setbacks firsthand on top of the impacts of systemic inequity that already existed—Black maternal mortality, weathering, languishing, glass cliffs, glass ceilings, tokenism, and so on.
In our most recent report, Black Women Deserve to Thrive, where we listened to more than 2,100 Black women across America, safety was found to be their greatest concern—for their communities today and generations ahead. It’s no wonder that Black women are aging 7.5 times faster than their peers due to burnout and stress.
Today, we see clearly—perhaps for the first time—an incredibly illuminated role of Black women’s leadership. They will be held to even greater expectations and pressure, and again, without the resources to do it and under further microscopic scrutiny than ever before.
Understanding how we support Harris is as much about how we support all Black women leaders. It is about more than an election—it’s about our humanity and collectively building a world within our reach. But if we choose—yet again—not to have this conversation here and now, we will continue to see a much slower progression to building the systems that heal us and breaking down the systems that harm us. At this critical crossroads in our country, we can not afford to look past this any longer. Our lives quite literally depend on it.
As the world continues to ask us to mend what has long been broken, I know that Black women will continue as we always have. I know that we will rise, survive, and thrive. But this is not what any of us should accept—we have a chance to do better, and we need to do more.
To build a world of uninterrupted progress for social justice, we must invest in Black women, not as fuel for short-term social progress, but as humans imagining and building the multigenerational change that drives our world forward to a place of love, safety, and justice. But it calls on all of us to examine how we support Black women leaders, how our complacent behaviors exist, and finally, to take action and keep following through. We can build the just and liberated world we all long for, but it requires all of us to invest in and believe in every moment of that journey—in and out of the seat, the setbacks, and the wins in between.