African-American women are often the backbone of political campaigns, but the number of elected black women doesn’t reflect our passionate political activism.
Black women are often the backbone of political campaigns—making calls, managing offices and registering voters. And we show up at the polls. In the last two presidential elections, the turnout percentage of African-American women was greater than all other demographic groups. In Virginia, for instance, Gov. Terry McAuliffe owes black women, in particular, for his win in a year when President Barack Obama was not on the ballot. Yet the numbers, in terms of black women in elected positions, don’t reflect black women’s passionate political activism.
Is it a matter of cultural stereotypes? Is it harder to raise the money crucial to any successful campaign? Is reluctance of black voters to support black women an unexpected hurdle?
Why this is so and how the numbers can change were topics at the recent National Association of Black Journalists convention in Boston. At a roundtable on African-American female voters andleaders hosted by the Democratic National Committee and EMILY’s List, women shared obstacles they had encountered on the way to electoral success and reasons why the struggles are far from over. They also addressed the pivotal role African-American female leaders and voters will play in the 2014 midterm elections and in the future of an increasingly diverse country.
Sharing notes and strategies as I moderated the panel were Ayanna Pressley, the first woman of color elected to the Boston City Council; Charniele Herring, a delegate and minority whip in the Virginia Statehouse; and Jessica Byrd, manager of state strategies at EMILY’s List, which is dedicated to recruiting, training and electing pro-choice Democratic women at all levels.
“Without speaking with too wide a brush,” said Pressley, an obstacle for black women becoming candidates is “that we don’t tend to operate with the same sense of entitlement. There is this ‘I don’t know enough, I need one more degree. I need to have one more baby.’”
In explaining her own success, which includes being the top vote-getter in her last several races, Pressley said she could credit “the typical things,” including having a “message that resonated” and “a strong field plan.” In Boston, though, the conflict was less about partisan politics than race, she said. “The codified question was, ‘Can Ayanna Pressley appeal to traditional voters?’ or ‘Can this black woman represent an entire city?’
“Ultimately, why I believe I was successful is that I didn’t take any vote for granted and I didn’t stereotype voters or neighborhoods,” she said. “I ran on a platform of wanting to save girls. People told me out loud that’s not the job of an elected official—go run a nonprofit. But I didn’t pander. I was consistent in saying broken girls grow up to be broken women. … I recognized that the issues that I wanted to work on—poverty, violence, trauma—were really neighborhood-transcendent issues.”
She said many people encouraged her to run on her résumé, having worked as political director for then-U.S. Sen. John Kerry and as a senior aide for Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II. “I was discouraged from telling my personal narrative,” Pressley said, “that of being raised by a single mom in very tough circumstances in Chicago, Illinois; a father who struggled with addiction who was in and out of prison and our lives; and my being a survivor of sexual violence”—all things that she said informed her desire to run for office. “So I had to fire those people; I’m not going to allow someone to dictate the story that I tell.”
She added, “It wasn’t white folks that had a problem with that narrative; it’s black folks,” with many telling her, “‘We don’t want to hear any more Precious stories’—black folks who did not want me perpetuating a stereotype.”
Herring, who in 2009 became the first African-American woman elected to represent Northern Virginia, said one of the things she had to fight when she ran for the first time was a presumption that she needed to “wait in line” for her turn.
