Kamala Harris’s battle cry: ‘We are not going back’

Kamala Harris’s battle cry: ‘We are not going back’

Molly Jong-Fast writes:

Less than a week ago, in Atlanta, Vice President Kamala Harris stood in front of 10,000 people; I was told another 10,000 awaited outside the venue, unable to get in. The crowd was jubilant, filled with the kind of hope many Democrats thought had slipped through their fingers this election cycle. Megan Thee Stallion played a compilation of G-rated versions of her songs. A powerful and commanding Harris told the crowd, “Donald Trump is feeling it.” The crowd went wild. She paused for a beat and delivered the coup de grâce: “We are not going back.”

This is the first presidential election since the fall of Roe, since women in this country lost the constitutional right to privacy. That right, which we fought so hard to enshrine in the Constitution in 1973, is gone. This means that my daughter has fewer rights than my mother did.

This creates an unusual moment in American history. Namely, many people of color have lived through these kinds of rights reversals before — think of the fall of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow laws in the South or the internment of Japanese people during World War II or the historical treatment of Native Americans. White women, on the other hand, have largely been protected by the system. In 2016, 46% of white women in America who voted voted for Trump. And their protection ended in 2022 when the conservative majority Supreme Court, enabled by Trump, overturned Roe. Those women, at least the ones who live in red states, now have fewer rights than they did in 2016. They went back. [Continue reading…]

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