We need to talk about misogynoir. Not as an academic term or a buzzword, but as something that happened, in real time, this week to two Black women who refuse to back down.
Misogynoir is the specific, compounded targeting of Black women at the intersection of anti-Black racism and sexism. It’s what happens when a Black woman is dismissed with particular venom for being “too loud,” “too aggressive,” “too much,” while simultaneously being called not enough. When the same woman asked to do the most is given the least protection, the least grace, and the least credit.
It happened to Rep. Jasmine Crockett last Tuesday night in Dallas County. It also happened to Elizabeth Booker Houston who was responsible for organizing content creators for her campaign.
Both come after months, years even, of sustained hate campaigns against them as Black women in America. Let’s dive in.
What Happened to Jasmine
Before last Tuesday, Dallas County Republicans changed the rules of how voting worked and didn’t bother to tell anyone.
In previous elections, voters could cast a ballot at any polling location in the county. For this primary, they were required to appear at their specific assigned precinct. The change was not communicated before Election Day, so hundreds of voters showed up to the wrong location and were turned away. Then the county elections website crashed under the volume of people scrambling to figure out where they were supposed to go.
Dallas County is a Crockett stronghold. This disruption hit hardest where her voters were concentrated.
A county judge ordered polls to stay open two extra hours. Then Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (who was simultaneously running in the Republican Senate primary) asked the Texas Supreme Court to block that extension and throw out any votes cast after 7 p.m. The court complied.
What we witnessed last Tuesday night – changing rules with no notice and throwing out votes in a Black woman’s stronghold – was blatant voter suppression.
Ken Paxton doing what Ken Paxton does though is not in itself surprising. He has made a career of this. What is worth sitting with is what happened after, inside our own party. After Crockett conceded in what became the most expensive Senate primary in Texas history, the conversation in Democratic circles was not about the state that sabotaged its own election. It was about whether Crockett’s strategy was flawed. Whether her tone was too combative and whether she was “electable.” Whether her campaign should have “anticipated” the rule change and done more outreach to compensate for the institutional failure being used against her.
Read that again: a Black woman was expected to personally prevent the chaos created by a hostile state apparatus that was designed to make her lose and, when she couldn’t, the critique landed on her.
Continue reading over at the Women in America Substack.
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