Rose Coloured Glasses & Girl Boss Power
So! The United States’ election was something that happened, and for the most part, it wasn’t a disaster! Let’s do a little dance to celebrate, and talk about it one more time, shall we?
Dependant on the political climate of your social circle, it may or may not need to be said that president-elect Joe Biden and vice-president-elect Kamala Harris aren’t necessarily the left’s dream canidates. Biden has, in the past, been known to sterotype, belittle and discriminate against black youth. Harris has previously put trans lives in harm, putting transgender inmates in prisons of their gender assigned at birth, and not their gender identity. Both have shoddy policies regarding war. But hey, they aren’t that other guy! (Who has, currently, still not given a concession speech. But who’s suprised…) Well, yes! We should certainly be glad America won’t have to suffer through four more years of possible world wars, pulling out of world saving accords, abysmal Covid-19 relief, defunding of the World Health Organization, I could go on. But, as I’m sure you’ve heard, we cannot let the fight just stop.
Both in fiction and reality, we have a tendency to see someone non-white, non-cisgender and/or non-heterosexual and hold them up on a pedestal. As someone who is all three, I love to see someone just like me in positions of power! But, also, I grew up in Trinidad & Tobago- a country that, in 2010, elected its first female prime minister. As a 10 year old, I was ecstatic! Girl power, finally! What an achievement! And it was, but it didn’t mean that she was a perfect prime minister.
In fact, during her campaigns for our election, which was held in August of this year, she spewed blatantly racist remarks (any Trinbagonian will laugh at the word ‘blank’ nowadays), Trump-inspired terminology (Make T&T Great Again rings in my nightmares) and showed signs that she would roll back Covid-19 regulations just to appease the loud minority who wanted to go back to the beaches and have fun. Girl power, amirite ladies?
Now, we didn’t elect her, and we dodged a bullet. We’re doing relatively fine. We’re dealing with the social issues we’ve always been dealing with, instead of having to deal with more. Heck, our president is a woman! And she’s great, I love her. And while I’m sure that my 10 year old self would be shocked to hear that I didn’t vote a woman back into office, or I’m not in love with the U.S VP elect being a woman of colour, I don’t think my 10 year old self could fully grasp the idea that just because a person wasn’t a white cishet male didn’t mean they were exempt from all sin.
Maybe I’m alone in this revelation, but I think I’m safe in betting I’m not. There’s going to be black girls like me looking up to Kamala Harris, and I want them to know what I didn’t. Having people that represent you in positions of power is so important. Political figures are supposed to represent the citizens of their country, they should be wildly more diverse than they are currently. But people are flawed, people make bad calls. People are not all black or all white. Perfectly fine in normal day-to-day life! But as the future Vice President of the United States, a bad call could mean someone’s life.
All this is to say, do not be afraid to call Vice President elect Harris out on her mistakes. Do it as loudly as you would with anyone else. Do not let yourself fall into a sense of security, as if her mere presence in the Oval Office as a woman of colour is enough to justify any action she does. She made history, and she should make sure that history is not tainted by doing wrong by her people. Call her and the president out when the time comes. Non-white people are, in fact, people. And the people in the largest positions of power have a lot of work to do.
