How Caribbean women got Biden elected
Published:Sunday | December 13, 2020 | 12:12 AM
As it approached midnight on Tuesday, November 3, Michelle Jawando, a voting rights attorney, sat at her Maryland, United States, home watching the presidential election results. Joseph R. Biden Jr, the Democratic Party candidate, and Kamala Harris, his vice-presidential running mate, were trailing the incumbent, Donald J. Trump.
Jawando has had a long history of political involvement – including having served as general counsel and senior adviser to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) – and she knew this would be among the most challenging elections she’d ever experience. She also expected that “the story on election night was not going to be the story of the election” because of the high number of mail-in ballots. So she “prayed and hoped” for patience and calm among Biden supporters. But was she calm?
“Of course not,” she laughed. “I still had my own sense of anxiety.”
More than 300 miles away, in Connecticut, Glynda Carr, an advocate and political strategist, was also looking at the results with a degree of anxiety.
“We all knew that election night we wouldn’t know who the winner was,” said Carr, whose angst was made no less after it emerged that the Jamaica-born Jackie Gordon, whom Carr had backed, had lost her bid in Long Island, New York, for a seat in Congress.
Fast-forward to the afternoon of Saturday, November 7, when Biden was declared the projected winner. While Carr missed the announcement, Jawando watched, and when the reality struck home, the mother of four simply exploded.
“I didn’t realise that I was carrying so much anxiety in my body,” Jawando told The Sunday Gleaner. “I began weeping, just weeping, and shaking. My body just reacted to the sense of relief, and I won’t soon forget it because I had my head scarf on, and my head scarf fell off.”
Carr and Jawando are just two of armies of Caribbean-American women who worked tirelessly to get Biden and Harris elected. There are the well-known names, such as the New York congresswoman Yvette Clarke (Jamaica), her mother Una – the first foreign-born, as well as the first Caribbean-born woman to be elected to the New York City council – and Karine Jean-Pierre, the Martinique-born Haitian American who served as Harris’ chief of staff during her vice-presidential campaign, and has since been chosen by the president-elect to serve as deputy press secretary.
MOTIVATIONS MANY
However, many lesser-known, ordinary Caribbean women – some in their 20s and 30s – helped Biden secure victory in the highly contested and acrimonious election. They were particularly active in key swing states such as Florida (which Biden lost), Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, as well as New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, among others, helping to register voters and encouraging Caribbean nationals and all black people to exercise their franchise.
“We had Caribbean women who helped develop, for the first time that I’ve ever seen, an African Diaspora platform. And I think that alone should speak multitudes because we’ve never had a candidate for president create a platform specifically for our community,” Joanne Antoine, 34, a Haitian-American from the non-partisan, pro-democracy organisation, Common Cause, told The Sunday Gleaner.
“In Florida, I saw people doing voter registration at [Jamaican] patty stores, any food distribution areas you saw us there. All of those efforts we saw on the ground were led by young Caribbean women organisers.”
The motivations for these Caribbean women were many: racism, immigration, economic inequality, limited access to proper healthcare and education, and a disproportionate number of deaths from COVID-19.
“We are people who vote for our survival, for the safety of our children. We know that we have more at risk and at stake every single time there is an election,” said Jawando, the voting rights attorney whose heritage spans Bermuda, Jamaica, and St Kitts and Nevis.
Still, the primary reason they were excited about this presidential election was the fact that Harris, whose father is Jamaican (her mother was Indian), was on the ticket.
“There was a sense of pride among Caribbean Americans that when they are casting their vote they are also casting their vote for the first vice- president woman of colour and someone of Caribbean heritage. We had an extra kind of push; not just the pandemic, but vice-president Harris on the ticket got people excited and something to look forward to,” said 32-year-old Trinidad-born D’Shawna Bernard, director of political partners at the peer-to-peer texting platform, Hustle.
Harris, along with women such as Yvette Clarke, Stacey Plaskett (US Virgin Islands) and Frederica S. Wilson (Bahamas) – all congresswomen of Caribbean heritage – is among Caribbean American women serving the US with distinction and who inspire Caribbean American voters “to turn out, participate and remain politically engaged”, said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Washington, DC-based non-partisan civil rights organisation, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
“Caribbean American women were a critical part of the wave of women of colour who participated in the election at record levels. In communities such as South Florida, these women did not only organise communities to participate in the election through voter education and get-out-the-vote campaigns, but were also winners in local elections. So, the impact went well beyond having an impact on the presidential election,” added Marcia Johnson-Blanco, the co-director of the Lawyers’ Committee’s Voting Rights Project.
LIVING THE CHISHOLM LEGACY
Meanwhile, Carr, the political strategist who, together with fellow Jamaican Kimberly Peeler-Allen co-founded the New York-based Higher Heights (a political action committee “exclusively dedicated to electing more progressive black women at the federal and statewide levels and as mayors in the 100 most populated US cities”), has been a long-time Harris backer, beginning with her run for the Senate.
Carr is a disciple of Shirley Chisholm who, in 1968, became the first black woman elected to the United States Congress. Chisholm, the daughter of a Guyanese father and a Barbadian mother, also became the first black candidate for a major party’s nomination for president in 1972. Nearly half a century later, Carr believes Harris is living the Chisholm legacy.
“People saw themselves in her, they saw the American dream in a Kamala Harris, and certainly for me, I saw myself as a black woman, I saw myself as a woman, I definitely was proud to see the fact that I am a daughter of a Caribbean immigrant. And it helps that not only is she a daughter of a Caribbean immigrant, she’s a daughter of a Jamaican immigrant,” said Carr, who voted in person, unlike millions of Democrats who voted by mail because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“African-American women were excited about her, Caribbean women were excited about her, Jamaican women were excited about her. And so we all see a piece of ourselves in that. And I think that is the legacy of a Shirley Chisholm.”
The pandemic forced changes to the way the campaign was run, so instead of knocking on doors and delivering pamphlets, the armies of Caribbean women got creative. They used their personal networks, organised virtual fundraising events and peer-to-peer texting campaigns, made phone calls, translated messages into French Creole for the benefit of the Haitian populations in Florida and Massachusetts, shared messages on Instagram and Tik Tok and organised discussions to ensure their peers and every Caribbean voter understood the importance of the election and how and where to cast their ballot.
NOT IN VAIN
In Florida, Jamaican Tanya Ragbeer launched Soca de Vote – based on Rock the Vote, the US non-partisan, non-profit “dedicated to building the political power of young people” – to help rally the state’s estimated 750,000 Caribbean Americans to vote for Biden and Harris.
“It really was a coalition of people and organisations to ensure that information was accessible, and also being deliberate about who you engage and when,” explained D’Shawna Bernard, who worked on Hilary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, was an adviser to Elizabeth Warren during her 2017 Senate race, and Warren’s national director of black outreach during the senator’s run for president.
The millions of Caribbean and black people who turned up for Biden and Harris in the so-called battleground states suggest that the efforts of these Caribbean women, who simply wanted to assist in their own way, did not go to waste. Harris’ election now brings a new level of expectation of all Caribbean people in and outside the US.
“Black women in the political arena are forced to deal with issues that lie at the intersection of race and gender. Caribbean-American women also wrestle with immigration-related issues as well. The historic election of vice-president-elect Kamala Harris marks a significant milestone in efforts to tear down glass ceilings and helps to bring visibility to women of colour in new and profound ways. Her election also inspires a new generation of young girls and women to dream big, aim high and think boldly about the range of possibilities for their future,” said Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee.