As election night progressed and Donald Trump’s victory became clear, until there was no doubt after he won the state of Pennsylvania, I watched on the American news every pundit, pundit, analyst and strategist trying to explain why Kamala Harris was not going to be the next president of the United States. States. Since Tuesday, her defeat has been attributed to the vice-president herself, on President Joe Bidenand on the Democratic Party in general. Everyone is holding their heads in their hands and wondering how such a failure was possible. But I wonder: did we really believe that the United States would elect a black woman as president?

Have we forgotten that the United States has been a deeply racist country from the beginning? The America in which Kamala Harris can become vice president, presidential candidate, and almost president with 68 million votes, is still the America where our enslaved ancestors were exploited in the broadest sense of the word. It is also the America of Jim Crow eraof the rape and pillage of the body of black women, of the lynching of black mothers and daughters erased from the history books.

This is the same country where black mothers continue to mourn the murders of their sons at the hands of police, or whose families have been torn apart by the unjust and mass incarceration of their father or husband. It is also the country that we miss Breonna Taylor and hundreds of other black women shot dead by police, and where today a pregnant black woman is three times more likely to die during pregnancy or in the months following childbirth than a white woman. We are in the United States, supposedly the land of opportunity, where black women earn 65% of what white men earn (white women, on the other hand, reach 83%).

Given all of this, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump is back in the White House. We cannot forget our history. We must be able to see that 19th century racism is still systemic and understand the ways in which it continues to dictate the reality of African Americans, and particularly black women. Racial discrimination and misogyny go hand in hand, and until we are willing – as progressives – to understand and address this intersectionality, we will remain trapped in the same cycle, in which the other side will continue to come out. victorious.

A few weeks before the election, I was talking to a friend of mine on the left, disillusioned with the Democratic Party, who said, “My dreams for the black community in this country go far beyond a black woman president. In fact, it’s not even on my list of aspirations. She voted for the Democratic candidate, as did the vast majority of the black population, but she did so knowing that a Kamala Harris presidency would not bring the change she yearns for; that representation does not mean liberation and that black women deserve so much more.

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