Some Black Women Are Processing the Grief of a Kamala Harris Loss

There was a refrain we heard again and again from the seven Black women NPR talked with for this story.

“It is exhausting,” says Venita Doggett, who lives in Memphis, Tenn., and works for a nonprofit doing education advocacy.

“We’re tired. We’re damn tired,” another woman told us. She asked NPR not to use her name because she works in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at a public university in Minnesota, and she fears that a lot of people who work in and around DEI are being targeted right now.

This feeling of being under threat as a Black person, as a woman, and especially as a Black woman feels non-stop, she says, even before the presidential election.

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According to the Pew Research Center, 84% of Black women are Democrats or lean that way. Black women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in high numbers this year; exit polls show their support at over 90%. Now, many of them are grieving the loss of a candidate who would have been the nation’s first Black, female president. At the same time they are bracing themselves for what might happen under the second presidency of Donald Trump.

The woman from Minnesota says there’s constant pressure to engage politically, an unrelenting narrative that Black women will save democracy. But she asks, who is going to save Black women?

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Doggett went to sleep early on election night. She says she just didn’t want to watch.

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“I just thought, like, you definitely hate Black women,” she says, referring to the many people who voted for Trump, and against Harris. “You really hate us. Us, who essentially birthed the nation literally out of our bodies — snatched children out of our wombs to build the U.S.”

But it’s not just Black people she’s worried about now, she says. A lot of her teenage daughter’s friends come from immigrant mixed-status families, and with Trump’s plans for mass deportations, she says she is terrified for them.

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“I probably really have not processed the grief yet,” Bonita Buford says. {snip}

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Buford says she also feels betrayed, especially by white women voters.

“When you think about white women specifically, who were voting early and talking about, you know, ‘well, I voted for her… I’m not going to tell my husband.’ So, were those all lies?” she asks.

According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research, 53% of white women voters picked Trump this year. {snip}

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