The Wonderful Karma of Black Women Saving American Democracy

(A most informative, lengthy read)


The Wonderful Karma of Black Women Saving American Democracy
10/22/2023 by Robert S. McElvaine



Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has succeeded in getting Donald Trump’s co-conspirators—especially key insiders Sydney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro—to plead guilty and testify against the former president and others. This move is the latest example of Black women leading the way in defense of our endangered democracy. “The horror … the horror,” Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz whispered at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film, Apocalypse Now. Something similar is likely what Donald Trump is thinking, who faces being made to wear “one of those jumpsuits” in prison. Still, most of us who believe in U.S. ideals, will have the appropriate reaction to the prominent roles Black women—people in two of the categories who were long excluded from the promise of American democracy—are playing in opposing Trump’s attempts to undermine American democracy: “The beauty … the beauty.”

Fani Willis began her comprehensive investigation of the plot to steal the election as it was still ongoing in January 2021. For more than two years, she and her team put together the enormity of the conspiracy for American citizens to see. Now she has gotten key attorneys who conspired with Trump to flip. Stacey Abrams and numerous other African American women in Fair Fight and other organizations registered and got to the polls the voters that provided the margin of victory for Biden (and for a Democratic Senate through the election of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock).

. . .


Even as they were excluded, as Richardson wrote, “Black people, people of color, women, and workers had never lost sight of the Declaration of Independence.” In times of “pervasive and violent repression, people who were legally excluded from equality kept the idea of American democracy alive for everyone.” What the Black women in the forefront of saving American democracy today understand is that because it means rule from below, democracy is feminism and democracy is racial equality.

Donald Trump has spent his life practicing misogyny and racism. In that, he is a living relic of the anti-American ideals side of our history, which makes the central role of Black women in blocking his attempt to end American democracy especially fitting. Here’s where one would say, “Karma’s a bitch,” but that word, like almost all other derogatory terms we use, associates evil with women and is utterly sexist. So, let’s say instead: Karma is beautiful.

https://msmagazine.com/2023/10/22/fani-willis-black-women-democracy/