It’s Time
Hi Friends and Family,
Biden stepping down from the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Kamala Harris has re-opened a door to 2016-me, the girl who watched the election results come in from Meghann and Jason’s couch in Charlotte, NC, days before the 10th annual TFFT Gala. The next week, I was back in Chicago, speaking on a panel for The Duke Women’s Forum. The subject of the discussion was Duke Women in Service.
There were three of us on the panel, Halleemah and Ricquel, Black women serving Black and brown youth in Chicago, and me, Kaitlin from Lake Bluff working for TFFT. Out the window, in the fading sunlight, you could see treetops and the expanse of Lake Michigan. There was heaviness and grief in the post-election air. The audience was small, mostly white, and ranged in age from twenties to sixties. The tone of the audience was earnest and also frantic. There was a compulsion to do something—anything.
My attention was on Halleemah, her stretching smile and her energetic glow. In response to the final question, Halleemah’s eyes narrowed. She told a story of her brother visiting her at Duke University. As he entered her dorm building on East Campus, a campus security car came, lights and siren on, to remove him from campus. The officer saw Halleemah’s brother and wrongfully determined he did not belong. Halleemah’s honesty struck me. I felt, on a cellular level, the desire to be friends.
After the event, Halleemah pulled furniture back into place. I lifted the dragging end of a couch and struck up conversation. Halleemah mentioned a white woman co-worker who came to work wrapped in a blanket, physically mourning, the morning after the election.
“Where was the blanket for Freddie Gray? Where was the blanket for Laquan McDonald? Where was the blanket for Michael Brown???” Halleemah asked, her volume rising.
That spring, I saw Halleemah working and pushing and panting. She was the Executive Director of a nonprofit serving high school students who would become first generation college students. She worked overtime for multiple fellowships aimed to help her network and to support her career, all demanding extra work. She flew across the country to show up for family.
There was a day when I felt such vicarious anguish over a personal update from Halleemah that I felt physically sick. I took the day off work. I took the day off work. I took the day off work.
“Where are you?” I texted Halleemah, imagining her curled up in the fetal position needing comfort. “What do you need?”
Finally, her text responses came with apologies for the delay. She had a packed day, she said, was just leaving a work luncheon.
I had taken the day off work. She, the human most directly affected by the devastating news, was leaving a luncheon.
“Kaitlin, if I took a personal day every time there was an emergency, I wouldn’t have a job,” Halleemah pointed out, exasperated, on another occasion when I pushed her to take time off to grieve and feel. The emergencies are that frequent.
We have lived through a lot in the last eight years. Personally and collectively—globally—we have lived through so much, too much.
And now, another presidential election is approaching, and white women who care about the outcome need to do more than vote. We need to activate and knock on doors and volunteer for voter registration. We need to work.
Black women are SHOWING UP for this race—as Black women always do. Black woman school teachers and nurses and superintendents and mothers and grandmothers are loading buses and booking hotels and gearing up to canvass and work overtime, putting their very health and lives on the line. White women, we need to do our part, and if we are unfamiliar with what that means, now is the time to learn what that means.
Black women are also enduring personal attacks and the blowback from Harris’s campaign. Racism and hateful rhetoric are no longer even coded or concealed. This election is stoking anger and rage that is dangerous to Black women, and white women need to support rest and care for Black women. We need to invest in organizations, like The Loveland Foundation, that care for the wellbeing of women and girls whom this country both depends upon and discards.
Here are my initial actions and invitations to you:
Support rest and care for Black women with a donation to The Loveland Foundation.
Join Halleemah and me on a Zoom this Wednesday, July 31st at 7:30p CST / 8:30p EST to discuss what it looks like for white women to do our part for Kamala Harris’s campaign.
On November 9, 2016, I wrote and shared this on Instagram:
Looking for ways I am not part of the problem will never fix the problem. To look for a lens of rosy optimism would cloud my vision. Instead, as an optimist, I plan to get to work in hopes that I can make a difference.
If you think back to your 2016-self, who do you see? Who were you then? What did you want? And who are you now? What do you want?
We have 101 days. Let’s get to work. Let’s make a difference.
Kaitlin
