The day Joe Biden faced reality, stepped aside and cleared the way for Kamala Harris to replace him atop the Democratic ticket, Teja Smith felt a mix of exhilaration and dread.
Smith, who runs a social media firm in Los Angeles, had been working particularly hard of late, so she treated herself to a daylong stay-cation with family at a Beverly Hills hotel. Word of Biden’s announcement came as they were hanging out by the pool.
The historic nature of that thunderclap moment wasn’t lost on the 34-year-old entrepreneur. But there was another, less-uplifting sensation as well.
“Get ready,” Smith posted on Instagram, “because we’re about to see how much America hates Black women.”
The election result on Nov. 5 — just about 100 days after Harris’ overnight transformation — left Smith feeling sadly, grimly vindicated. The only surprise, she said, was how badly Harris lost.
Her defeat, Donald Trump’s triumph in each and every battleground state and — especially — his winning the popular vote were more than a slap in the face of Black women, long among the most loyal and dedicated of Democrats. It was a fist landed square in the gut.
Raw. Visceral. Shattering.
Views of the 47th president, from the ground up
The feeling has left many like Smith and other Black women she knows ready to pull back from national politics, focusing more on their inner needs and applying their outward energy to local issues and community concerns — places where their investment of heart and soul will be reciprocated in a way that seems beyond much of America.
“It’s draining,” Smith said of seeing the vice president — a former United States senator, California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney — turned aside so emphatically. It also shows, she said, that “no matter how high the ladder” a Black woman manages to climb, “people are still going to doubt you.”
Political activism came naturally to Smith. Her grandmother, who helped raise her, opened the Oakland chapter of the Urban League. Smith’s godmother was chief executive of Planned Parenthood’s Bay Area chapter. Her folks were the kind who took their child with them to their polling place, and they steeped her in the lore of the revolutionary Black Panther Party, which had its roots in Oakland and neighboring Berkeley.
After high school, Smith moved to Southern California. The attraction wasn’t politics but the dreamscape Smith grew up watching on TV. She graduated from Cal State Northridge and used her degree in journalism and communications to open a firm, Get Social, that connects political advocacy and social justice with entertainment and pop culture.
It was through her work, Smith said, that she knew Trump would win the White House in 2016, even as the supposed political experts and many in the news media wrote him off. She could sense Trump’s popularity outside California and other left-leaning 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 highest office.
Trump’s administration turned out to be every bit as bad, Smith said, as she had imagined — a mashup of scandals, impeachments, anti-immigrant policies and a botched response to a global pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans; a disproportionate number of them were nonwhite. “That was really a cherry on top with the presidency being bad,” she said.
Smith began working ahead of the 2018 midterm election to educate and register Black and brown voters, contracting with Rock The Vote, among others. Her efforts, both paid and voluntary, continued through the 2020 campaign. She wasn’t exactly wild about Biden — Bernie Sanders was more to Smith’s taste — but her goal was simple: “To make sure Donald Trump never comes near the White House again.”
I recently visited with Smith in the dining room of her South Los Angeles home, a charming 1922 Craftsman that she shares with her husband and their 2½-year-old son. A portion of her bedroom doubles as Smith’s office. A deluxe espresso machine in the kitchen feeds her caffeine habit without busting the family budget.
When Trump became the GOP nominee a third time — “I don’t even understand how he was able to run again,” Smith marveled — she redoubled her political efforts. In September alone, she traveled to six states to gin up enthusiasm for the election, helping register voters and explaining the ins and outs of early balloting and vote by mail. In all, Smith visited more than a dozen states and spent 2½ months on the road.
There were no grandparents or other relatives to help with child care. Just her husband, a mortgage loan officer, holding down hearth and home while running his side business, Hellastalgia, a hip-hop music page.
After all that time and sacrifice, Trump’s victory left Smith depleted and more than a little discouraged. “I was already annoyed going into the election, the fact that it would even be close,” she said over a homemade lavender macchiato. “And to see it play out the way it did. I just. I can’t even…”
Words fail.
A second Trump administration, Smith fears, will be much worse than the first. But there is none of the urgency to rush the barricades or join the political resistance that followed the 2016 election.
“We started nonprofits. … We started all of this stuff to make sure it didn’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 guys want.”
Like many of the Black women she’s 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 homelessness problem. “We’re going to need people advocating and talking about things that are impacting their direct communities,” Smith said of her intended focus. “Obviously working at that big level is not working … well for us.”
While she’s no spokesperson for Black women, Smith said, she and others she knows feel overworked, undervalued and taken for granted for too long. There’s no desire, she said, to keep “stepping up for people that haven’t stepped up for us.”
The feeling is: You made your bed, America. Now you lie in it.
