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Not for the first time, but for the first time when the Vice President-elect of the United States, Kamala Harris, took the stage with the song Work That by Mary J. Blige. As the tune played in the parking lot of a Delaware convention center, Harris arrived to give his acceptance speech with a big smile and a white pantsuit, a nod to the suffragettes.
It was a Saturday night in 2020 in the midst of a pandemic, a hundred years after women in the United States gained the right to vote. It would be several decades before voting rights were secured for black women and men. Now Harris, with his Jamaican father and Indian mother, was, as Blige would say, “working on it.”
Work that. The song had passed me by until then. But I listened to it on Saturday night and then I listened to it all on Sunday morning. “There are so many girls / I heard that you’ve been running away / From the beautiful queen / That you could be turning / You can look at my palm / And see the storm coming / Read the book of my life / And see that I’ve gotten over it. “
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris arrives on stage dressed in white. Photograph: Jim Watson / AFP / Getty Images
The three-minute song was like a musical version of Kamala Harris’s ten-minute speech. Against a backdrop of car honking, the signature sound of the Biden-Harris campaign, Harris had said: “Every girl who looks at tonight sees that this is a country of possibility. And to the children of our country, regardless of their gender, our country has sent a clear message: Dream with ambition, lead with conviction, and see yourself in a way that others cannot simply because they have never seen it before. “
I alternated between playing the song and the speech until my own beautiful queens, my daughters, delighted with the result, but more interested in the alternative election coverage on TikTok, finally objected.
I brought the election party to my room and from my headphones, the words and music of both women washed over me, like the waves of relief that many of us have been experiencing since it became clear that Joe Biden and Harris had indeed “gotten over it. ”. And Donald Trump would be on his way soon. Outside the White House, eventually. But also out of our heads. Out of our thoughts. Out of our minds. Out of our nightmares. Trump has taken up too much space in our heads, “no rent,” as the kids put it, for the past four years. And the relief that his particular brand of cruel and empathetic narcissism has been defeated is a weight relieved, a burden we were finally able to put down.
It was something to celebrate.
You can, if necessary, celebrate the end of Trump while being aware and dismayed that more than 70 million people voted for Trump. It’s not just the economy, stupid. Each of those votes was a vote for racism. One vote for white supremacy. A vote that endorsed inhumanity and misogyny and the macho sty. It was 75 million votes, and counting, in support of a very different America than that represented by Kamala Harris and President-elect Joe Biden. As a friend, a woman of color, put it, noting how Trump’s base had not diminished, but rather swollen: “I would still be afraid of landing in the wrong place in America.”
It made me think of Fintan O’Toole’s widely read June 2018 column on how babies in cages were part of Trump’s tests for fascism. As O’Toole put it: “Fascism does not arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to make people abandon their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do tests which, if done right, serve two purposes. They get people used to something that they may initially regress from; and allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools if we didn’t see it. “
These trials for fascism are not just happening in the United States and will not stop with Trump’s departure from the White House. The ugliness of Trumpism will not die with it. It will have another name. It will have another face. But during the weekend I was there, I just wanted to hear the Mary J Blige song, feeling a kind of jet lag of a week of unsustainable but unmissable late-night nights watching CNN’s Magic Wall; the John King number guy jokes and the way he drew an eight (two circles side by side, surprisingly); Anderson Cooper and his comparison to Trump of the “obese turtle” (I was glad to see that he later apologized for it); and moments like Trump apologist and former Republican Senator Rick Santorum visibly paled after the US president gave a press conference falsely suggesting widespread voter fraud.
What a week it was. A week in which we could forget, for a moment, about Covid-19. A week when something else was more important. Or at least we could decide yes.
Kamala Harris and President-elect Joe Biden on stage in Delaware. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo / EPA
Before Kamala Harris went to fix it in a parking lot, I was out too. I left my family locked up, packing Prosecco and plastic cups in my backpack. I met my friend at the docks and we cycled together to a place where other small groups had congregated drinking beer and listening to music.
The cold of November seemed to disappear for a time. We take off our coats and use them as picnic blankets, sitting on the wet grass looking out over the water and over the people in their apartments. It was a Saturday night in 2020 in the middle of a pandemic. We heard the distant burst of Halloween fireworks that were left over. Strangers said “great night, huh?” each other. And we mean the weather, but we also wanted to say that it was a great night to say goodbye and say goodbye to a man who had orchestrated the tests of fascism.
In my room the next morning, listening to Blige and Harris on a loop, I reveled in the fact that Harris, in addition to being the first woman on the job, will also be the first African American vice president and the first Asian American. in the history of the United States. I thought about how, while there were many more battles to fight, this moment was one to be treasured. I thought of all the women who came before Harris and all the women who will come after her.
“It may be the first,” he told the United States and the world on Saturday night, “but I will not be the last.”
It was a Sunday morning in 2020, in the middle of a pandemic. Kamala Harris and Mary J Blige were in my head, and for the first time in what seemed like centuries, I was truly happy.
“Don’t worry about who says what / It will be fine / Work what you have.”
Only that.
Work that.
