The day Joe Biden faced reality, stepped aside and cleared the way for Kamala Harris to replace him at the top of the Democratic ticket, Teja Smith felt a mix of elation and fear.
Smith, who runs a social media company in Los Angeles, had been working particularly hard lately, so he treated himself to a day of vacation with his family at a Beverly Hills hotel. News of Biden's announcement came while they were poolside.
The historic nature of that tremendous moment was not lost on the 34-year-old businessman. But there was also another, less uplifting feeling.
“Get ready,” Smith posted on Instagram, “because we're about to see how much America hates black women.”
The outcome of the Nov. 5 election, just about 100 days after Harris's sudden transformation, left Smith feeling sad and grimly vindicated. The only surprise, he said, was how badly Harris lost.
Her defeat, Donald Trump's victory in each and every battleground state, and especially her victory in the popular vote were more than a slap in the face to black women, who have long been among the most loyal and dedicated Democrats. . It was a punch that landed squarely in the stomach.
Raw. Visceral. Overwhelming.
Opinions of the 47th president, from scratch
This sentiment has left many, like Smith and other black women she knows, ready to retreat from national politics, focusing more on their internal needs and applying their external energy to local issues and community concerns, places where their investment of heart and soul will be reciprocal. in a way that seems beyond much of the United States.
“It's exhausting,” Smith said, watching the vice president (former U.S. senator, California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney) deflect so emphatically. It also shows, she said, that “no matter how high the ladder” a black woman manages to climb, “people will still doubt you.”
Political activism came naturally to Smith. Her grandmother, who helped raise her, started the Oakland chapter of the Urban League. Smith's godmother was executive director of the Bay Area chapter of Planned Parenthood. Her parents were those who took their children with them to the polling place and steeped her in the tradition of the revolutionary Black Panther Party, which had its roots in Oakland and neighboring Berkeley.
After high school, Smith moved to Southern California. The attraction wasn't the politics, but the dreamscape Smith grew up watching on television. She graduated from Cal State Northridge and used her degree in journalism and communications to open a company, Get Social, connecting political advocacy and social justice with entertainment and pop culture.
It was through his work, Smith said, that he learned Trump would win the White House in 2016, even as so-called political pundits and many in the media wrote him off. He could sense Trump's popularity outside of California and other left-leaning climates, as well as the apathy of those who couldn't imagine the deeply flawed candidate and reality TV star being elevated to the highest office in the land.
The Trump administration turned out to be as bad, Smith said, as he had imagined: a mix of scandals, impeachments, anti-immigrant policies and a botched response to a global pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans; a disproportionate number of them were non-white. “That was really a nod to the bad presidency,” he said.
Smith began working before the 2018 midterm elections to educate and register Black and Brown voters, hiring Rock The Vote, among others. Her efforts, both paid and volunteer, continued throughout the 2020 campaign. She wasn't exactly crazy about Biden (Bernie Sanders was more to Smith's taste), but her goal was simple: “Make sure Donald Trump never comes close to the presidency again.” White House.”
I recently visited Smith in the dining room of her South Los Angeles home, a charming 1922 Craftsman she shares with her husband and two-and-a-half-year-old son. A portion of his bedroom also serves as Smith's office. A deluxe espresso machine in the kitchen fuels your caffeine habit without breaking the family budget.
When Trump became the Republican nominee for the third time (“I don't even understand how he could run again,” Smith marveled), he redoubled his political efforts. In September alone, he traveled to six states to generate excitement for the election, helping register voters and explaining the ins and outs of early voting and voting by mail. In all, Smith visited more than a dozen states and spent two and a half months traveling.
There were no grandparents or other relatives to help with child care. Just her husband, a mortgage loan officer, who takes care of the house and home while running his side business, Hellastalgia, a hip-hop music site.
After all that time and sacrifice, Trump's victory left Smith exhausted and more than a little discouraged. “I was already upset before the election, the fact that it was even close,” she said over a homemade lavender macchiato. “And to see it develop the way it did. I alone. “I can’t even…”
Words fail.
Smith fears that a second Trump administration will be much worse than the first. But there is no urgency to rush to erect the barricades or join the political resistance that followed the 2016 election.
“We create non-profit organizations. … We started all of this to make sure it wouldn't happen again,” Smith said. “And now that it's happened again, it's one of those things like, well, maybe this is what you guys want.”
Like many of the Black women she has spoken to, Smith plans to turn her attention away from Trump and national politics and, where appropriate, work on issues like Los Angeles' chronic homelessness problem. “We're going to need people to advocate and speak out about the things that are impacting their direct communities,” Smith said of his intended approach. “Obviously working at that high level is not working… well for us.”
While she is not a spokesperson for Black women, Smith said, she and others she knows feel overworked, undervalued and taken for granted for too long. There is no desire, he said, to continue “stepping up for people who haven't stepped up for us.”
The feeling is: You made your bed, America. Now you lie on it.
