Summary: Mao Zedong was right when he observed that “women hold up half the sky.” What he did not realize, because he was a member of China’s dominant Han majority is that women of color often hold up considerably more than half the sky, and they do so unsung, unheralded, and unrecognized. Certainly, Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones ought to have a clear sense of how integral women of color can be. Joe Biden should be particularly aware that much of his voting strength, notwithstanding Anita Hill, inheres in African-American women.
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Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong had a reputation for being a fair to middling poet in the Chinese language. In one of his poems, he observed that “women hold up half the sky.” Now the Chairman was a member of the dominant Han majority in his country; Han Chinese enjoy a kind of privilege that makes the much maligned privilege of white people in the United States pale in comparison. Mao was woke enough to realize that women, unheralded, unrecognized, and unsung, really do hold up half the sky above not only the Middle Kingdom, but everywhere under Heaven. However, as a Han man, brought up with all of the quotidian assumptions that underlie the privilege of any dominant ethnicity, it probably never occurred to The Chairman that minority women, particularly women of color, often have to hold up distinctly more than half the sky in their own communities.
Certainly, this has been the case in communities of color in the United States. The sheer toughness of African-American women, their often rocklike constancy in the face of discrimination and systemic racism, has become proverbial. “She was warned, she was given an explanation, nevertheless she persisted,” could have been applied to African-American voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer (famed for her aphorism “we are sick and tired of being sick and tired,”) or to Rosa Parks seeking to ride in the front of the bus, long before it was ever applied to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Yet among a largely white, largely male, class of pundits and prognosticators, the inchoate political potential of African-American women has often been ignored or understated. When Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III left the Senate to become Donald Trump’s Attorney General in 2017, it created a vacancy in the Senate seat he had held since 1997. After the usual political jockeying, a special election was held to fill the vacant seat. The Republicans, after ousting appointed incumbent Luther Strange, chose former Chief Justice Roy “Ten Commandments” Moore as their standardbearer. The Democrats chose former U.S. Attorney (N.D.Ala.) Doug Jones.
The pundits and prognosticators in Washington City and New York, taking a cursory look at Alabama and taking into account its deep Republicanism, quickly concluded that Roy Moore was the prohibitive favorite. Alabama, they thought, was so intractably, tribally, Republican in its allegiance that the pundit class assumed that the ever increasing revelations of Roy Moore’s Roman Polanski-like predilection for pubescent girls would mean nothing to voters. Their reading of the tea leaves therefore had Roy Moore winning by a landslide.
After all, this was the Alabama of George “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” Wallace, of Bull Connor, of the violence of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and all the other enormities of the civil rights movement. What they had not remembered was the Alabama of Rosa Parks, that Uppity Woman who had the Effrontery To Want to Ride in the Front of a City Bus in Montgomery.
On election night, the Washington City and Manhattan prognosticators and pundits expected to be able to call the election in Roy Moore’s favor within roughly an hour of polls closing. That was not to be.
Through the counties that made up the so-called Alabama black belt, and in Alabama’s larger cities, including Montgomery, Birmingham, Mobile, Tuscaloosa, and Huntsville, Jones outperformed Roy Moore, often by double digits. Contrary to Maoist orthodoxy, the cities overwhelmed the countryside. As the night wore on, the pundits and prognosticators realized, to their pleasant surprise, that they had, in fact, misread the tea leaves. By the end of the night, Doug Jones was the Democratic Senator-elect from Alabama.
The voting bloc that had been the most consistent in his support for Doug Jones proved to be those unsung, unrecognized, unheralded African-American women whom nobody had expected to hold the balance of power. Doug Jones’s upset victory brought home an important lesson: Democratic politicians who ignore women of color, whether Latina women in the Southwest or African-American women in the South or in the African-American diaspora in northern and Midwestern cities, do so at their peril.
In 1932, the turnout of African-American women in northern cities helped Franklin Roosevelt give Herbert Clark Hoover the bum’s rush from the White House.
In 1936, African-American women helped pad Franklin’s margin when he administered an epic shellacking to Kansas’s Alf Landon.
In 1940, African-American women helped give Franklin his unprecedented third term as the war clouds gathered, and in 1944, African-American women, seeing, like all Americans, the glimmering light of potential victory and the end of the horrible war, helped vouchsafe Franklin his even more unprecedented fourth term.
In 1948, African-American women held the line for Harry Truman, helping ensure his defeat of New York Gov. Tom Dewey.
In 1960, African-American women helped secure Jack Kennedy’s razor thin margin of victory over Richard Nixon.
In 1964, African-American women helped cement the Kennedy legacy by voting for Lyndon Johnson and keeping Barry Goldwater the hell out of the White House.
In 1976, African-American women rallied to Jimmy Carter, and in 1992 they rallied to another Southern governor, Bill Clinton, to whom they rallied again to defend his presidency against Bob Dole in 1996.
In 2008, African-American women turned out in historic numbers to elect the first African-American president, and they defended his presidency against Mitt Romney in 2012.
Barring Franklin Roosevelt’s trouncement of Alf Landon in 1936 and LBJ’s major ass whipping of Barry Goldwater in 1964, it is probably safe to suggest that African-American women played an integral role in securing the victory of a whole bunch of Democratic presidents.
As Joe Biden cements his status as the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination for president next year, he will need to remember that while it is always possible for him to lose while carrying a majority of African-American women, it is simply not possible to win without African-American and other women of color.
As America becomes less white, and as the future assumes a more female form, any victorious Democratic coalition (and it’s important to realize that The Democracy is less a political party that it is a political movement) will necessarily have to include women of color. Women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, or Ilhan Omar are no longer curiosities in our political culture. They are women of color, and they are here to stay.
Moreover, these Uppity Women of color, who owe so much, so very much, to white women like Abigail Adams, Jeannette Rankin, also owe an even greater debt to women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, and the rock-like Dolores Huerta, who truly held up half the sky over César Chávez.
Men like Bernard Sanders, who have always been curiously tone deaf to the way women of color hold up so very much of the sky, may do well in small, heavily white, caucus states. But in places like Alabama, where Hillary Clinton trounced his butt in the primaries because of her simpático not just with women, but with women of color, Bernie may very well find himself trounced again.
For Democrats, the 2020 election, both in the primary and general election cycles, may very well belong ineluctably not simply to women, but to women of color, who, unheralded, unrecognized, and unsung, have held up a lot more than half the sky for a very, very long time.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq., a damn man, is an attorney, former City Councilman, and Democratic loudmouth who lives in Cathedral city and practices law in the adjacent jurisdiction of Rancho Mirage (where they only have white chocolate). He appreciates, from personal experience, how important women of color are in the political life of the Democratic Party. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the Democratic Party.
