What I experienced during my 2014 run for office wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to me.
The year before, I had run for president of the Young Democrats of America (YDA), a national political party office role, against a popular opponent. The opponent was a Black man, so race wasn’t a factor in the election; however, gender was.
Before my campaign, I was vice president of YDA and had heard only good things about my service: my fundraising efforts, the partnerships I had engineered with progressive organizations, and programming coordination for the membership. However, when I decided to run for president, I instantly became ‘difficult to work with’ and ‘mean.’
Research on women candidates confirms that voters are less likely to vote for a woman if they don’t like her; by comparison, voters don’t need to like men to elect them. But when I was running as the Black woman candidate in a seven-candidate primary for public office, with two other women in the race, I noticed almost nothing about my being ‘difficult’ and more about my ability and work ethic.
My experience running for public office reflected the systemic bias and double standards not just for women candidates, but Black women candidates who dare to aspire to any sort of political leadership—and that needed to change.
We need more progressive Black women in public office for a myriad reasons, but we also specifically need the younger generation of Instigators in office, candidates who understand the times in which we live currently.
Electing more Black women will take real investment in changing the biases and attitudes (conscious and unconscious) of mostly white donors, media, campaign staff, consultants and institutional leaders to help shift the culture and systems. But this support needs to be substantively increased so that we can rebuild an inclusive, multiracial democracy with the leaders we want and need.
(Excerpted from The Instigators: How Black Women Have Been Essential to American Democracy by Atima Omara.)