Since Donald Trump took office in late January, his party has had a series of bizarre blunders, racist remarks and sexist snafus involving some pretty powerful black women in Washington—which have only proven to us how inept the GOP really is when it comes to race and gender issues. Just as recently as last week, we were riveted by its totally unnecessary war against Maxine Waters and April Ryan. But apparently, that wasn’t enough. The GOP has settled in on a new target and its open season on black women isn’t over yet. The next target: former Ambassador to the United Nations and National Security Advisor Susan Rice. Why these three, high-profile women? Just why exactly does the GOP have it out for them anyway? One logical conclusion: The Republican party is scared to death of black women.
It’s a stone-cold fact that while many Americans are waking up to the havoc wreaked by less than 100 days of a Trump administration, African-American women, a full 94 percent of them, saw Trump for what he was last fall. That group includes African-American Republican women like Condoleezza Rice.
While, at various points in the last 40 years, Republicans have been able to lure black men, white men, Hispanics and white women into the fold with various policy promises, black women haven’t been buying it. They are kryptonite to the Republican Party, especially under Trump. African-American female politicians, journalists and activists are the greatest consistent threat to the hegemony of Trump, and his supporters are triggered whenever a black woman speaks her mind with authority.
Black women have been critiqued post-election for reminding folks that we were Hillary Clinton’s most consistent voting demographic. This is not to suggest a moral superiority on our part but instead to say that when sh*t gets tough, black women could be counted on to know what’s really at stake and to do what matters. And, wait, before someone out there fills up the comments with the whole “why didn’t you all get your cousins to vote too?” thing—don’t. The same thing could be asked about why progressive white folk didn’t organize their own cousins and parents and uncles and sisters to vote against Trump. We will be asking ourselves those questions for the next several decades to come.
The point here is that despite the assumptions of us being a monolith or non-voters (we aren’t by the way—in fact, I, as well as many of the black women I know were Bernie voters in the primaries), we came together and despite our feelings about her voted for Hillary because we saw her as our chance for progress. And this scares the crap out of the Grand Old Party. Voting for Hillary also meant for many of us that we were making up for 2008 because so many of us felt like the election of Barack Obama meant that we had to choose between electing the first black president or the first woman president. Incidentally, this is a feeling that never really goes away when you navigate the world as both a woman and a black person.
And as you can see, our 94 percent voting bloc has made us a target of this administration for the next four years.
There is little doubt that as this administration continues along, it will continue to target black women though policy and the press.[...]
Trump knows full well that [black women will] be at the forefront of resistance elections this fall and next year and will be holding the line against his re-election in 2020.
Make no mistake about it—black women are a force to be reckoned with in every way. We are in the streets chanting black lives matter. We are in the White House press room asking tough questions. We are in Congress with a sharp-eye laser focused on this administration’s every move (and remember, all this stuff is their attempt to keep us distracted from the big picture anyway). We are resisting. And we are voting. It’s no wonder they are scared. They should be terrified.