Fani Willis and Black Women in Politics Face Different Expectations
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“Let Black women lead,” Twitter cheered on January 6, 2020, as most major outlets called the Georgia Senate race. After Black women voters helped deliver a narrow majority in the Senate for Democrats, along with control over the White House and Congress, activists across the country were eager to credit them with this stunning outcome.
Messages to “thank Black women” trended on social media. Someone put Stacey Abrams’ face on a prayer candle. And when the news from January 6 lurched from Georgia runoff results to the insurrectionists who descended upon the US Capitol, the message to Black women became more desperate and stark: “Black women will save us,” people promised. Hoped. Demanded.
The over-the-top hero worship of that moment irked me, and I tried to put my finger on why. History has taught us that we must be vigilant in protecting the humanity of Black women, and deification is still dehumanization, even if it is its prettiest form. And now, witnessing Fani Willis, the embattled Atlanta district attorney who is overseeing the election interference case against former President Donald Trump in Georgia, fight for her reputation, I better understand what bothered me so much about the gleeful exaltation of Black women’s leadership in 2020.
Trump and his co-defendants attempted to remove Willis from the case, arguing that because she had had a romantic relationship with the man she’d hired to be lead prosecutor, this represented a conflict of interest. The burden was on Trump and his allies to show that conflict, which the judge ruled they failed to do, and declined to remove Willis. (The judge did allow Trump the option to appeal the decision, however.)
Watching the case unfold, and hearing the strong chorus of voices that called for Willis to step aside even before the judge’s ruling came out, I was overcome by a familiar feeling. A Black woman who had been held up as a potential savior of democracy was now being picked apart by many in the media.
Ironically, the willingness to see Black women as political superheroes has made it harder for us to be leaders. Despite what the memes will tell you, Black girls aren’t actually magic — we’re human. And if we are only supporting Black women under the expectation of perfection, we aren’t supporting Black women at all.
When we say “trust Black women,” it makes sense. When it comes to leadership, Black women generally are trustworthy. Not only are they consistently the Democratic Party’s most reliable voting bloc — because Black women are often the ones for whom the stakes are highest in elections — they are also the ones who often power campaigns focused on lifting up the communities that need it most. We should trust Black women, because when Black women lead, we have a chance to bring more of the people most impacted by policy decisions to the decision-making table.
If one constituency consistently organizes, strategizes, and turns out in record numbers for a party, we expect to see that community overrepresented in the seats of power for that party; but the opposite is true for Black women. Black women remain woefully underrepresented in elected office, even as the Democratic Party has started to be more explicit in acknowledging how critical their support has been. So I was initially grateful to see calls for Black women to run for office, to lead. It was against that backdrop that Willis assumed office, being sworn in on January 1, 2021. A record number of Black women ran for office in 2022 — then the expectations for what that leadership would look like grew clearer.
When Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president, she became the first Black woman, the first South Asian woman, and the first woman of any race to hold that position. Almost immediately, the level of scrutiny she received was outsized for a role that hasn't typically received so much attention — and the scrutiny hasn’t let up. There are obvious examples of criticism that are rooted in racism and sexism, but there are also subtler ways that Harris's identity has placed her in an unfair double-bind that she can’t win.
Consider the issues where Harris has been the most visible: She was tapped to lead on border policy; she was tasked with ushering the intractable voting rights bill — the For the People Act — through the Senate; and she has been the face of the administration’s response to Roe v. Wade being struck down. These issues have interesting commonalities in that they are all steeped in racial and gender-justice politics, and they are all issues where progressive Democrats want the administration to do more — and where the Republican Party has all but vowed to do nothing, at best, and to roll back progress, at worst.
In addition to Harris's expertise and abilities, there was another benefit to letting her lead on these efforts: As a woman of color and the daughter of immigrants, Harris would bring her credibility to these issues. President Biden, who has faced critiques that his age, race, and gender make him an out-of-touch figure on similar issues, was right to recognize that Harris could be a better-suited leader on issues like abortion access, racist gerrymandering, and our immigration policy. There’s no cynicism here: Tagging in a woman of color to lead on issues where race and gender are front and center makes sense. It enables someone closer to the most impacted communities to oversee the response.
But the vice president is still the vice president; it’s the president’s agenda that is being executed. And as an older white man, Biden is afforded the ability to take more conservative positions on these issues and still be considered palatable by the center-left. Although elevating Harris on these issues allowed Biden to showcase some self-awareness, it also placed a greater spotlight on her to push forward an agenda that angered many progressives. Thus, Harris’s identity shielded the president, but has left her more exposed.
Progressives were always going to want a more ambitious approach to these issues than the president seemed comfortable with, and they expected more, not less, with a woman of color at the helm. Likewise, these were issues where Republicans have been, in recent history, immovable. Movement on any of these issues was highly unlikely, but Harris's inability to make significant headway was held against her and fed into a narrative that she wasn’t getting things done.
The charge put in front of Harris was binary: She could either do the impossible or fail. Deifying Black women is another way of invisibilizing us; they are different sides of the same counterfeit coin. And when Black women prove to be as complex and normal as all other leaders, our collective empathy seems to stretch beyond capacity and snap. When a superhero falls, no one bothers to catch them. Nothing breaks her fall.
To be clear, Black women in public leadership can and should be held to the same level of account as we hold all of our leaders. This is not an attempt to ensure that Black women are not treated like everyone else; it is, in fact, a plea that we should treat Black women like everyone else. Much of the commentary surrounding Willis’s hearing, like the judge’s ultimate ruling, has been an admission that the charges against her didn't support her dismissal, but rather, as the judge said, an “appearance of impropriety” that was too great and would erode the public trust. Meanwhile, we’re dancing around the irony that the case Willis is prosecuting is against a deeply unserious former president who has essentially made eroding the public trust his reelection platform.
It's also important to note that scandals like this stay with Black women in a way they don't stay with other leaders. Our reputations aren't as elastic as others. When we get knocked down, we often stay down. So it’s not a small thing to give legitimacy to these kind of accusations, even while admitting that they do not meet the legal standard, because it will be harder for Willis to shake that perception in the future.
In some cases, people have been more explicit. In interviews with the Associated Press, several Black women expressed dismay that Willis was being held to a higher standard. As one interviewee, Jessica T. Ornsby, pointed out, many Black women leaders have come to expect that we will be held to a higher standard. I’m not insensitive to that concern. I, too, was raised by Black Baby Boomers who taught me and my sister with resigned but fervent insistence that we had to be twice as good to get half as much as our peers.
At some point, though, we have to stop accepting that as fact and recognize that this type of respectability politics is not the answer. Citing racism and sexism as reasons Black women must be held to a higher standard isn’t critiquing the system that hurts us, it’s participating in it.
If we want Black women to enter public and political leadership, we have to show them there is space for them. And make no mistake, the next generation of Black women we will soon be begging to save us is watching right now. They will see our failure to allow fallibility in these moments as a prologue for how they will be treated. We are telling them that they will be held to a higher standard than other leaders, and they are listening. The challenge before every one of us who has ever said we want a more representative democracy and that we trust Black women, then, is to allow Black women to just be human, not superhuman.
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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