Misogynoir Takes Center Stage

After much goading from party members and supporters, President Joe Biden has bowed out of the election and instead endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the new presidential hopeful in a country that is not new to being powered by Black women but is new to having Black women in power. There has already been a barrage of inappropriate or incorrect comments about Kamala Harris’s incarceration record, as well as the amount of people she slept with in college.

Many are from people who support a vice presidential candidate who has admitted to f*cking a couch and blamed his mother’s drug addiction to prescription drugs she got at work on Mexicans, and of course, who support a racist rapist running for president.

With little time left in the race, Biden’s departure has not only come as a welcomed shock but also an unwelcomed uncertainty, including among Black women who support the new candidate but are also aware of the cruel game that misogynoir plays, even among men married to Black women, like white Twitter user, @JamesDavidNY. James sports a vulgar Twitter header devoted to slutshaming Harris while also having an avi that consists of his Black wife and two biracial daughters. He has also called her a hoodrat but has yet to confirm what evidence he has on why he thinks that.

As the right increases its campaign against fairness, DEI is now synonymous with saying a Black person has gotten a role or an opportunity based on the color of their skin and not merit.  There has been little concern with Black people being disqualified because of their skin color, though. When Dr. Ketanji Brown was in the running for a Supreme Court justice seat, she was also dismissed as a DEI hire, even though she is more qualified than ANY of the current justices.

She is also the only current justice who has been a public defender and served as a district judge, yet her being qualified was still up for debate. Her qualifications are from the same people who think that a reality TV show star who has filed for bankruptcy six times is qualified to run the economy.  

The same week that Kamala Harris announced her presidency, House Representative Sheila Jackson Lee passed away. Lee was a student at NYU and ultimately graduated from Yale. She earned her Juris Doctorate from The University of Virginia School of Law. Even after Lee sent benedictions to Trump after he was shot at, Laura Loomer, who looked like she purchased portions of her face off Temu, called her a “ghetto b*tch.” Loomer attended Mount Holyoke, left after one semester and graduated with a degree in broadcast journalism from Barry University. While she once served as a House Rep., she has subsequently lost twice. Loomer has been banned from numerous social media apps, as well as Venmo, Paypal and GoFundMe. Even with Lee being more educated and having more class than Loomer, Loomer still felt it necessary to showcase her misogyny-filled jealousy. 

Another incident that occurred during the week of the announcement about Harris being the Democrats’ pick for president is the cold-blooded murder of Sonya Massey. Massey was a 36-year-old Black woman who was shot and killed in her own kitchen by a police officer after having called the police about a possible intruder in her home.  Though he has been charged with murder, something that almost never happens, there are still people attempting to justify the murder and are using racist tactics to do so, confirming Black women’s fears that this race will be out misogynoir and not actual policy and know-how. 

On the eve of finding out if the presidency is, again, a Black job, the amount of vitriol and different standards for the other candidates is glaring and repulsive. Even when Black women are more qualified, the qualifications are not only denounced but so are the methods in which they were achieved.

White candidates do not even have to have qualifications to pick apart.

Additionally, a lie about a Black woman is much more dangerous than the truth about a white man. The record of how many men went to jail under Harris’ tenure as Attorney General has been touted as thousands, when in fact, it was 45. She is only seen as being overqualified when it is incorrect or negative information, but lying on Black women is not a foreign concept, nor is misogynoir.

In the United States, Black women have always been the wet nurse for a nation which refuses to acknowledge how much we have nurtured its growth.