The day Joe Biden faced reality, stepped down and cleared the way for Kamala Harris to replace him atop the Democratic ticket, Teja Smith felt a mix of elation and dread.
Smith, who runs a social media company in Los Angeles, has been working particularly hard lately, so she treated herself to a family day trip to a Beverly Hills hotel. Biden’s announcement came while they were hanging out by the pool.
The historic nature of this thunderclap moment did not escape the 34-year-old entrepreneur. But there was also another feeling, less inspiring.
“Get ready,” Smith posted on Instagram, “because we are about to see how much America hates black women.”
The November 5 election result — just about 100 days after Harris’ overnight transformation — left Smith with a sense of sadness and grim vindication. The only surprise, she said, was Harris’ defeat.
Her defeat, Donald Trump’s triumph in every battleground state and, above all, his victory in the popular vote were more than a slap in the face to black women, who have long been among the most loyal and dedicated Democrats. It was a punch landed right in the stomach.
Raw. Visceral. Upsetting.
Views of the 47th President, Inside and Out
This feeling has left many people, like Smith and other black women she knows, ready to step back from national politics, focus more on their inner needs, and apply their outer energy to local issues and concerns. of the community – places where their investment of heart and soul will be reciprocated. in a way that seems to overwhelm much of America.
“It’s exhausting,” Smith said of seeing the vice president — a former U.S. senator, California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney — turn away so insistently. It also shows, she said, that “no matter how high the ladder” a black woman manages to climb, “people are always going to doubt you.”
Political activism came naturally to Smith. Her grandmother, who helped raise her, started the Oakland chapter of the Urban League. Smith’s godmother was executive director of the Bay Area chapter of Planned Parenthood. Her parents were the type to take their child with them to their polling place, and they imbued her with the tradition of the revolutionary Black Panther party, which had roots in Oakland and neighboring Berkeley.
After high school, Smith moved to Southern California. The attraction was not the politics but the dreamscape that Smith grew up watching on television. She graduated from Cal State Northridge and used her journalism and communications degree to open a business, Get Social, which connects political advocacy and social justice with entertainment and pop culture.
It was because of her work, Smith said, that she knew Trump would win the White House in 2016, even though so-called political pundits and many media outlets discounted it. She could sense Trump’s popularity outside of California and other left-wing climes, as well as the apathy of those who couldn’t imagine the deeply flawed candidate and reality TV star being elevated to the nation’s top job. country.
The Trump administration turned out to be just as bad, Smith said, as she imagined — a mix of scandals, impeachments, anti-immigrant policies and a botched response to a global pandemic that has killed hundreds thousands of Americans; a disproportionate number of them were non-white. “It was really icing on the cake, the presidency being bad,” she said.
Smith began working before the 2018 midterm elections to educate and register black and brown voters, contracting with Rock The Vote, among others. Her efforts, both paid and volunteer, continued throughout the 2020 campaign. She wasn’t exactly crazy about Biden — Bernie Sanders was more to Smith’s liking — but her goal was simple: “Make sure Donald Trump never goes near the White House again. »
I recently visited Smith in the dining room of her South Los Angeles home, a charming 1922 Craftsman that she shares with her husband and their 2 1/2-year-old son. Part of his bedroom also serves as Smith’s office. A luxury espresso machine in the kitchen feeds his caffeine habit without busting the family budget.
When Trump became the GOP nominee for the third time — “I don’t even understand how he could run again,” Smith marveled — she doubled down on her political efforts. In September alone, she traveled to six states to build enthusiasm for the election, helping to register voters and explaining the ins and outs of early voting and mail-in voting. In total, Smith visited more than a dozen states and spent two and a half months on the road.
There were no grandparents or other family members to help with childcare. Just her husband, a mortgage loan officer, taking care of hearth and home while running his side business, Hellastalgia, a hip-hop music page.
After all this time and sacrifice, Trump’s victory left Smith exhausted and beyond discouraged. “I was already annoyed going into the elections, that they would even be close,” she said over a homemade lavender macchiato. “And to see things unfold the way they did.” I just from. I can’t even…”
Words fail.
Smith fears a second Trump administration will be far worse than the first. But there is no urgency to erect barricades or join the political resistance that followed the 2016 elections.
“We started non-profit organizations. … We started all these things to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Smith said. “And now that it’s happened again, it’s one of those things like, well, maybe this is what you want.”
Like many Black women she has spoken with, Smith plans to turn her attention away from Trump and national politics and, in her case, work on issues such as Los Angeles’ chronic homeless problem. “We’re going to need people who advocate and speak out about things that directly impact their communities,” Smith said of the direction she envisioned. “Obviously working at such a level doesn’t work… well for us.”
Although she is not a spokesperson for black women, Smith said, she and others she knows have felt overworked, undervalued and taken for granted for too long. There is no desire, she said, to continue “stepping up for people who haven’t done it for us.”
The feeling is this: you’ve made your bed, America. Now you lie in it.