The day Joe Biden faced reality, stepped aside and cleared the way for Kamala Harris to replace him on the Democratic ticket, Teja Smith felt a mix of elation and fear.
Smith, who runs a social media company in Los Angeles, had been working particularly hard lately, so she treated herself to a day-long stay at a Beverly Hills hotel with her family. News of Biden's announcement came as they were hanging out by the pool.
The historic nature of this thunderclap moment was not lost on the 34-year-old entrepreneur. But there was another, less uplifting feeling.
“Get ready,” Smith wrote on Instagram, “because we’re about to see how much America hates black women.”
The Nov. 5 election result — just about 100 days after Harris' overnight transformation — left Smith with a sad, grim sense of vindication. The only surprise, she said, was how badly Harris lost.
Their defeat, Donald Trump's triumph in every single battleground state and – especially – in his win the popular vote were more than a slap in the face to black women, who have long been among the most loyal and committed Democrats. It was a fist that landed right in the pit of his stomach.
Raw. Visceral. Shocking.
Views of the 47th President from the ground up
The feeling is gone Many like Smith and other black women she knows are ready to retire They leave national politics, focus more on their internal needs, and apply their external energy to local problems and community concerns – places where their heart and soul efforts are reciprocated in ways not possible in much of America seems to be.
“It's exhausting,” Smith said as he watched the vice president — a former U.S. senator, California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney — turn away so emphatically. It also shows, she said, that “no matter how high the ladder” a black woman can climb, “people will still doubt you.”
Political involvement came naturally to Smith. Her grandmother, who helped raise her, opened the Oakland chapter of the Urban League. Smith's godmother was the executive director of Planned Parenthood's Bay Area chapter. Her parents were the ones who took their child to the polls and initiated him into the traditions of the revolutionary Black Panther Party, which had roots in Oakland and neighboring Berkeley.
After high school, Smith moved to Southern California. The appeal lay not in the politics but in the dreamscape Smith saw on television as a child. She graduated from Cal State Northridge and used her journalism and communications degrees to open Get Social, a company that combines political advocacy and social justice with entertainment and pop culture.
Through her work, Smith said, she knew Trump would win the White House in 2016, even though the supposed political pundits and many in the news media had written him off. She could sense Trump's popularity outside California and other left-leaning areas, but also the apathy of those who couldn't imagine the deeply flawed candidate and reality TV star being elevated to the highest office in the land.
Trump's administration turned out to be just as bad as it had imagined, Smith said – a mix 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 not white. “It was really icing on the cake in the face of a bad presidency,” she said.
Smith began educating and registering Black and brown voters in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, signing deals with Rock The Vote, among others. Their efforts, both paid and volunteer, continued throughout the 2020 campaign. She wasn't exactly keen on Biden – Bernie Sanders was more to Smith's taste – but her goal was simple: “To ensure that Donald Trump never comes near the White House again.”
I recently visited Smith in the dining room of her South Los Angeles home, a charming 1922 Craftsman home that she shares with her husband and 2½-year-old son. Part of her bedroom doubles as Smith's office. A luxury espresso machine in the kitchen satisfies their caffeine habits without breaking the family budget.
When Trump won the GOP nomination a third time — “I don’t even understand how he could run again,” Smith marveled — she redoubled her political efforts. In September alone, she traveled to six states to build enthusiasm for the election by helping with voter registration and explaining the ins and outs of early and absentee voting. In total, Smith visited more than a dozen states and was on the road for two and a half months.
There were no grandparents or other relatives who could help with child care. Only her husband, a mortgage loan officer who kept the stove and the house while running his side business, Hellastalgiaa hip hop music site.
After all the time and sacrifice, Smith was exhausted and more than a little disheartened by Trump's victory. “Even before the election, I was annoyed that it would even be close,” she said over a homemade lavender macchiato. “And to see how it developed, how it went. I just. I can't even…”
Words fail.
Smith fears a second Trump administration will be much worse than the first. But there is no urgency to storm the barricades or join the political resistance that prevailed after the 2016 election.
“We started nonprofits. … We started doing all of these things to make sure something like this doesn't happen again,” Smith said. “And now that it's happened again, it's kind of like, well, maybe that's what you want.”
Like many of the Black women she has spoken to, Smith plans to turn her attention away from Trump and national politics and, in her case, address issues such as Los Angeles' chronic homelessness problem. “We're going to need people to advocate and talk about things that impact their immediate community,” Smith said of her intended focus. “Obviously working at this big level isn’t working out… good for us.”
While she's not a spokesperson for black women, Smith said, she and others she knows feel overworked, undervalued and taken for granted for too long. There is no desire, she said, “to continue to stand up for people who have not stood up for us.”
The feeling is: You made your bed, America. Now you're lying in it.