It is official: Joe Biden will become the 46th President of the United States. And in a history-making glass ceiling-breaking win, we have both our first woman and first woman of color serving as our Vice President: Kamala Harris. This election has been one of the longest and most stressful ones in history which made this victory so much sweeter. Well, that, and Black women. At this point, there should be no doubt that Black women are the secret sauce but just in case you need a reminder you can use this election as an example.
Kamala is multi-racial and proud of every single part of her South Asian and Jamaican heritage. During her remarks following her win on Saturday night (November 7), the Vice President-elect shared her adoration of her mother who came here from India at 19 years old to pursue a better life. Kamala noted that women are often the people who pave the way when it comes to making the change they want to see in the world. She explained:
"She believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible, and so I am thinking about her and about the generations of women, Black women, Asian, white, Latina, Native-American women, who throughout our nation's history, who paved the way to tonight, women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all. Including the Black women who are often, too often overlooked but so often proved they are the backbone of our democracy."
This Howard University Alum definitely proved to be her ancestors' wildest dreams and later on became the first Black woman to be elected as California Attorney General, holding office from 2011 until 2017, when she was elected to the Senate. Sis is not new to this, she is true to this. She continued:
"But I tell you now, Black women are showing that Black women lead, and we'll never go back to the days where candidates only knew our value in terms of helping them get elected. Now they will see how we govern from the White House."
The blood, sweat, and tears of Black women who know the pain of being suppressed, underestimated, and treated unfairly acted as the flame bringing this victory boiling to a tipping point. However, our forever FLOTUS Michelle Obama wants us to understand that we must keep up this momentum and fire because tens of millions voted for hate and lies:
"We've also got to recognize that the path to progress will always be uphill. We'll always have to scrape and crawl up toward that mountaintop. And two years from now, four years from now, there will once again be no margin for error. We see now the reality that we can't take even the tiniest part of our democracy for granted. Every single vote must count — and every single one of us must vote. And as a country, we should be making it easier, not harder to cast a ballot."
We have to keep it pushing! Celebrate, relax, regroup, and then re-strategize.
Check out the collective of the real MVPs during the election:
Stacey Abrams
Stacey Abrams turned her 2018 defeat into determination to do all that she could to prevent voter suppression in the state of Georgia. She partnered with many organizations in order to bring more than 800,000 new registered voters to the voting process and thus turned a state that is historically red, blue in this year's election. About 45 percent of those voters are under 30 years old and 49 percent are people of color.
Cori Bush
Cori Bush decided to make a pivot in her life after the death of Mike Brown, adding activist and protester to her repertoire alongside being a single mother, a nurse, and a pastor. As a result of her efforts, she has earned the opportunity to become the first black woman to represent Missouri in Congress after running for the third time.
Mondaire Jones & Ritchie Torres
Mondaire Jones was elected in New York's 15th congressional district in the Bronx and Ritchie Torres was elected in New York's 17th congressional district upstate. They are both the first openly gay Black men to do so, and Torres constitutes the first 'out' Afro-Latino elected to congress.
Maxine Waters
Reclaiming her time, time and time again, Maxine Waters won re-election to U.S. House in California's 43rd Congressional District. She is one of the highest-ranking African-American members in the White House and is seeking her 16th term in the House of Representatives.
Featured image by Sheila Fitzgerald / Shutterstock.com
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A Goddard College graduate, who earned an MFA from Pratt Institute and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Marymount Manhattan College, Mahogany offers unapologetic realness with a side of grace and empowerment. "I started touring locally. I started creating chat books so that those poems will go in the hands of the people who were sitting in the rooms," she shared.
"And then I started facilitating poetry workshops, so I used my chat books as curriculum. And that, in turn, allowed me to further invest in my art and show the community and people who were hiring me that it wasn't just a one-off, that it's not just, you know, a fly by night—that I am invested in this art as much as I am invested in your community, in your children's learning, in our growth."
Mahogany has a special way of moving audiences, and her superpower sparks shifts in perspective, post-performance introspection, and strengthening of community bonds, especially among Black women. (One can undeniably recognize her gift for arousal of the spirit and mind merely from her listening to her insights from the other side of a Google Hangout call. I can only imagine the soul-stirring, top-tier sensory encounter when watching her perform in person.)
In this chat with xoNecole, Mahogany reflects on sustaining a creative career, the aftermath of writing a banned book, and using poetry for both healing, community-building, and activism.
Anthony Artis
xoNecole: What are three key things that have laid the foundation for a sustainable creative career for you?
Mahogany L Browne: What has helped me is that I'm willing to go in being an expert at knowing poetry and knowing the way in which art can change the landscape of our lives, not just as a poet, but also as a poetry facilitator. How you move through classes, those things are mastered, right? So when I go into another space that's maybe tech-heavy, I don't mind learning and being, you know, a student of the wonder of how we can make this magic, work together.
Two, you’ve got to know how to pivot. Sometimes we say, ‘Alright, this is what my life is going to be. I'm going to be a New York Times best-selling author. I'm going to, you know, have an album that's Grammy-nominated. And then, say you get dropped from your record label. That doesn't mean you can't make an album anymore. You can also still create an album that can be submitted to the Grammys. So, what does a pivot look like as an artist who doesn't have an institution behind them? Pivot being a student of the wonder.
Relationships also really help. How do I serve the community? And in turn, that tells me how the community can show up. For me, I have long-standing ties with a community that will outlast my one life. So, what does it mean to create space where these relationships can develop, can be nurtured, can be rooted, can be cultivated? Creating space—it happens through relationships.
xoN: With today’s economic challenges, what does your current creative process look like, and what are you working on?
MB: I’m always thinking five years ahead. I just reviewed the pages for two children’s books and recently released a YA novel. I’m drafting an adult fiction manuscript now.
Anything I create is founded with the root of poetry, but it can exist in captions. It can exist in commercials. It can exist as a musical. So that's where I’m at now.
xoN: You started performing "Black Girl Magic" in 2013, had an acclaimed performance of it via PBS and the work went on to viral success shortly after. Talk more about the inspiration. And what do you think about the continued relevance more than a decade later?
MB: I wrote it as a rally cry for the mothers who had been keeping themselves truly in harm's way by, you know, being a part of the community right after the death of their child or their loved one. They are usually mothers of victims of police brutality—and just seeing how they showed up in these community spaces, they are devout to the cause but obviously still grieving.
"I wanted this poem to be just a space of reclamation, of joy and of you, of your light, of your shine, of your brilliance, in any which way in which you fashion. Every room you enter is the room you deserve to be in. What does it mean to have a poem like that that exists?"
And the first time I did the poem, the Weeping that occurred, right? It was like this blood-letting of sorts. The next time I performed it, I'm moved to tears because I'm seeing how it's affecting other women who have just been waiting to hear, ‘You belong. You deserve. You are good. We see you. Thank you, despite everything that they said to make you regret being born in this beautiful brown, dark-skinned, light-skinned, but Black body.’
Black women are the backbone—period. Point blank. And so, that that poem became a necessity, not just to the fortitude of Black women in the community, but like you know, in service of healing the Black women.
xoN: One of your books was banned at a school in Boston, and it was later reinstated due to parental and activist support. What was that experience like?
MB: Well, I think it happened because they were racist. That's it. Point blank. The reversal of it was empowering, right? I realized, oh, I thought we just had to sit here and be on a banned book list. But no, parents are actually the leaders of this charge.
So to see that, the parents said, ‘Nah, we're not gonna let you take this book out of my baby’s school just because it's a Black kid on the front saying, ‘Woke’ and they're talking about being a global citizen. They're talking about accountability. They're talking about accessibility. They're talking about allyship, and you don't want them to have compassion or empathy or have even an understanding, right? So no, we rebuke that, and we want this book here anyway.’ To see that happen in that way. I was, like, reaffirmed. Absolutely.
xoN: You recently organized the Black Girl Magic Ball at the Lincoln Center in New York. Honorees included author and entrepreneur Rachel Cargle and National Black Theater CEO Sade Lythcott. What impact did it have and what expanded legacy do you hope to leave with your creative works?
MB: I was really interested in not celebrating just the book, but celebrating the community that made the book possible. And so I gave out five awards to women doing that thing, like, what does it mean to be a Black girl in this world?
I just thought it was gonna be an amazing time. Everybody's gonna dress up—we're gonna celebrate each other. And boom, I then realized that it responded to like a gaping hole. There was a missing thing for Black girls of all walks of life, all ages, right?
"It's very intergenerational. That was intentional to come together and celebrate just being us."
You have all these instances where just being you is either the butt of a joke or it's diminished and not worthy of a specific title in these larger institutions. So what does it mean to just to be loved up on and celebrated?
It felt like a self-care project at first. You know, for the first couple of years, folks were coming and they were getting that sisterhood. They were getting that tribe work that they were missing in their everyday lives.
I love the Black Girl Magic Ball because we got us. If I go out with a bang, they'll remember that Mahogany worked her a** off to make sure all the Black girls everywhere knew that she was the light. We are the blueprint.
For more information on Mahogany L. Browne, her work, and her future projects, visit her website or follow her on IG @mobrowne.
Featured image by Anthony Artis
