White House aides jubilantly clapped and cheered for Vice President Kamala Harris Tuesday as she returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. after losing the presidential election. Harris, who smiled and covered her heart with both hands, said, “Listen, we do the best work anybody could do, which is to dedicate ourselves to the people, to public service, to lifting folks up, knowing we have the power, and when we do that work, we make a difference. So, let’s get back to work, because we still have work to get done.”
While there is a time to wallow, to mourn and to feel every one of our emotions, there also comes a time when we must fight.
In this time of political and social uncertainty, Harris modeled that acquiescing in advance — backing down from a struggle before it begins — will not benefit us. While there is a time to wallow, to mourn and to feel every one of our emotions, there also comes a time when we must fight. Now is that time.
Harris reappeared at the White House days after her niece, Meena Harris, shared photos of the vice president at home, appearing relaxed, smiling and playing Connect Four with Meena’s daughters. It had to have stung for Harris to lose last week’s election. And yet, in the face of that loss, when darkness seems imminent, Harris is seemingly leaning into the joy she expressed throughout her campaign as a buoy to help us navigate through this next political moment.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised carnage in his second term, including deporting immigrants on a mass scale, using the military to quash protest from his dissenters, outlawing gender-affirming care for trans children and remaking the federal government in his autocratic image. Though we watched him and his Cabinet bumble through a first term without achieving many of his stated goals, a Republican-led Senate and House and an extremist Supreme Court might enable him to get more of the things he wants in his second term.
From the moment she launched her campaign, Harris’ team pitched her as the “change” candidate with a progressive vision for our country’s future. Though she was saddled by her role in a currently unpopular administration, Harris created a clear contrast between herself and an opponent who openly pined for an oppressive past where white men weren’t turned into social pariahs for perpetuating racism, sexism, queerphobia and ableism.
But her ever-present smile and laughter — a laughter that never came at the expense of others — was another way she contrasted herself with the glowering, bullying Trump.
That contrast wasn’t enough for Harris to win, but it did call upon a collective history of Black Americans that treats joy and pleasure as central to our ability to survive — and not antithetical to our progress. We have survived enslavement. We have survived unimaginable brutality in generation after generation after generation. We have survived the loss of our histories and languages and cultures.
Her ever-present smile and laughter — a laughter that never came at the expense of others — was another way she contrasted herself with the glowering, bullying Trump
And yet, we inherently understand the necessity of joy and practice it at every turn. We commune together at barbecues and family get-togethers where we dance and laugh together. We invent art forms, such as hip-hop, that change the world. We celebrate our very ability to survive because we understand the fight for liberation as a sacred practice that not only requires organizing but also requires our ability to foresee a future better than this one. Or, as the late poet Lucille Clifton famously wrote: “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.”
Joy is an organizing strategy. As adrienne maree brown writes in her 2019 book “Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good,” “Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.” To get through the next four years, we are going to need a lot — strategy, grit and a clear-eyed understanding about how fascist, authoritarian movements are born and how we can collectively resist them. We’re also going to need joy, rest and other softer survival skills that can help our bodies fortify themselves against oppressive headwinds. Joy is a central organizing principle that has been present in nearly every liberation movement from the abolition movement to end slavery to the Civil Rights Movement to the Black power movement to the LGBTQ rights movement to the labor movement and every movement that has come before and will come later. If we wish to sustain a movement that will survive Trump’s presidency, we can’t sacrifice ourselves in the process. We are going to need each other. We are going to need to care for our neighbors. We are going to need to be, as brown describes it, “imagination warriors” who can envision a world beyond the one we currently exist in. We are going to need to fortify our bonds to one another — through mutual aid, through radical kindness and through organizing around shared commitments. And we are going to need to laugh. We are going to need to invest in the arts and read the books we feel called to read and resist on every level, including within ourselves. If we wish to sustain a movement that will survive Trump’s presidency, we can’t sacrifice ourselves in the process. That might be the silver lining in this anxiety-inducing moment. “What we got out of the [Shirley] Chisholm effect was the possibility that existed for a bold Black woman in 1972 to have the audacity to run for president all the way to the convention,” Glynda C. Carr, president and co-founder of Higher Heights, told The Guardian. “And the direct byproduct of that Chisholm effect was a Barbara Lee — Congresswoman Barbara Lee. There are one or two or many that will be inspired by a Kamala Harris and it can’t be lost. I look forward to the Kamala effect.” If this is the Kamala Harris effect — showing us that joy will get us through and that we must rely on ourselves and on those we love and cherish — then it is right on time.
