When Ava DuVernay's new television series Queen Sugar premiered on the OWN network, I wrote that I want to live in Ava's world, where my beloved South is rendered in its complex beauty, black people are granted full humanity, and every single person is capable of clear-sighted intersectional analysis. This past week I clicked my heels and wished again to be transported to the land of Ava DuVernay's Bordelon family.
You're probably thinking it's because in Ava's world Donald Trump would never have been elected president. You're wrong. I yearn for Ava's world because there we would have known Mr. Trump was likely to be elected and would have braced for impact months earlier.
I have no doubt Donald Trump would be elected president in the post-Katrina, Southern Louisiana of the Bordelon family, just as I had little doubt he would be elected to the U.S. presidency. DuVernay is uninterested in utopia. Her series, like Trump's election, is rooted in our history.
Queen Sugar engages with multiple layers of historic and contemporary oppression without descending into self-righteousness polemic. It accomplishes this remarkable feat with a single intellectual and artistic commitment—the same commitment that makes me want to live there so badly, even though it is a world infected with all the problems of the real world, the same commitment that would have allowed us to predict the outcome of the 2016 election. It puts black women firmly at the center. Always. Always. Always.
If the American media had bothered to follow DuVernay's lead and put the history, expertise, and experience of African American women firmly at the center of their political analysis, they too would have accurately predicted the outcome of the 2016 election. Instead, the utterly ordinary and exhausting devaluation of black women's knowledge and experience was the centerpiece of the election and mostly continues to dominate our post-election analysis.
I believe the Democrats lost on October 21, 2015. That's the day Vice President Biden decided not to seek the presidency. I have no idea if the vice president could have won against Donald Trump. I don't even know if he could have won the nomination against Hillary Clinton. But I am certain that by choosing not to compete, the vice president ensured no Democrat would offer a meaningful challenge to Hillary Clinton. He effectively decided the only competition would come from outside the party, in the person of Bernie Sanders, sending a message to leadership and voters that 2016 was Hillary Clinton's turn.
There are no turns in a democracy, and by allowing Hillary Clinton to step into the nomination without an internal challenge from within the party, Democrats lost the opportunities inherent in a robust primary season that could have showcased a diverse generation of up and coming Democratic talent. They also lost the chance—first seized upon by Jesse Jackson in 1984—to use a competitive primary to increase black voter registration and turnout.
The DNC should have been knocking on the doors of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, Senator Cory Booker, Congresswoman Donna Edwards, Former State Senator Nina Turner, immediately after the massive losses the party suffered 2014. While Republicans had robust arguments in Spanish during their debates; the Democratic Party hosted a contest between two white people in their seventies. Donald Trump won more primary votes than any Republican in history. His victory is not surprising. Only his defeat would have been.
And yet, during the past week I have read many white women express genuine shock that a majority of white women chose to vote for Trump. This is ridiculous. In 2004, George W. Bush won a majority of white women's votes (55 percent). In 2008, John McCain won a majority of white women's votes (53 percent). In the last presidential election, Mitt Romney, secured 56 percent of white women's votes.
When Democratic candidates have enjoyed an advantage among female voters, it has been the result of overwhelming support from women of color, especially black women voters. In 2012, black women voted at a higher rate than any other group and gave more than 96 percent of our votes to President Obama. This should not be understood as an uncritical endorsement of his entire policy agenda, but in part, as black women acknowledging the power of representational democracy. In a world of imperfect policy choices, this President offered opportunities for crucial representations of blackness on the global stage—and that has value.
The Clinton campaign saw the data. Black women were the key to victory. Yes, policy mattered, but black women had to be able to look through the shattered glass ceiling and see a Hillary that matters to them. She had to mean something. Perhaps if this had been taken seriously, the Clinton campaign would have chosen a woman of color as the vice presidential candidate instead of an uninspiring white man.
Only a refusal to take black women seriously could have lead to the ignoring of black women as we were ignored in this cycle. Hillary needed little black girls in box braids and Afro puffs to light up when she walked in the room. She needed their moms to brave November winds, to overcome voter ID laws, to push past apathy, to get excited and be "with her." She needed them to believe she represents the futures of their own black daughters and sons. And there was no particular reason for black women to believe this.
In recent days, there have been a number of pieces that have asked how parents should speak with their children about the election. The question infuriates me. What have you been telling your children? What did you tell them after 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed in Cleveland? What did you say after Dylann Roof murdered nine people in Charleston? What was the conversation after the police officer sat on the back of a black teen dressed in nothing but a bikini, while pulling a gun on her friends? Is Tuesday the first time you seriously considered the reality of your child growing up next to people whose open bigotry may cause harm and psychological damage? This is an ordinary daily reality of black parenting in America.
What do you think we have told our children about the fact that more than half of white Americans agreed with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of unarmed Trayvon Martin? What do you think our mothers told us when Mamie Bradley was told no one would be held responsible for the murder of her son Emmett Till? Black mothers know that no appeal to common womanhood mattered to Emmett Till's accuser, Carolyn Bryant, when she sent her 240-pound husband to murder a 14-year-old boy on her behalf.
These, of course, are rhetorical questions. The wisdom of black women is rarely seen beyond pancake boxes and white-girl coming-of-age novels. It is not taken seriously as political information that might guide our understanding of election outcomes. We looked instead to pundits and pollsters who asked all the wrong questions and came to all the wrong conclusions while earning historically high television ratings for their laughably inaccurate coverage of a circus of a presidential campaign.
And despite it all, somehow Democrats have convinced themselves that white voters will save them yet. Monday's New York Times reports that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have just the populist message to bring white working class voters back to the Democrats. Never mind the empirical reality that Trump primary supporters were more affluent than Clinton primary supporters, they simply were living in more racially isolated spaces. And when the New York Times asserts "the near-extinction in much of the South" of the Democratic Party, it is utterly ridiculous. We aren't extinct. We are just Black women.
Black women are actually the solution for the Democratic Party. Investing in our leadership, our voting, our issues, our concerns, and our enthusiasm would pay dividends for decades. I don't expect the partisan or media echo chambers where we really are extinct to notice.
That is why I just keep looking for a way to escape into Ava's world, to locate the secret door in the back of the wardrobe and find my way to her land where black women are at the center.
Tune in to Queen Sugar next week and to ELLE's Facebook Live between Melissa Harris-Perry and Tracy Clayton later today to continue this conversation.
