By Pauline Lewis
Legal challenges aside, Joe Biden has clinched it for the Democrats and Donald Trump has been defeated.
The feud between the two contenders was highly publicised and often highly contentious, dominating the discourse between a highly divided American electorate. It was, therefore, easy to overlook the important historic milestone that this election has ushered in; Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s running mate, has become the first woman in US history to become Vice-President.
This is no mean feat. Hilary Clinton is probably the highest-ranking US female politician to date, having served as both First Lady to Bill Clinton, and then as US Secretary of State under the Obama administration. Previously, only Geraldine Ferraro had managed to reach these heights after becoming the running mate to Walter Mondale for the Democrats during the 1984 election. When she is sworn in at the January inauguration, Kamala will have surpassed both.
The first female US Vice-President is milestone enough to write about, but the beautiful reality that accompanies this milestone is that Kamala Harris is a woman of colour whose cultural background reads like a cultural diversity dream. Kamala’s late mother was from Tamil Nadu, a southern state in India, whilst her father is from Jamaica. She has kept ties with her family in India since childhood and experienced racism as child growing up in the US, with children being told not to play with her simply because she was ‘black’. This cultural background brings many ‘firsts’ with it, as it gives her the simultaneous status of being the first African-American, first Asian-American, and first Caribbean-American to hold the position of Vice-President. Celebrations have already begun taking place in her maternal grandfather’s village of Thulasendrapuram in India.
But there have been other significant gains for women in this election too. Candidates for Congress appear on the same ballot as the Presidential nominees, and this election has seen the record number of 318 women running for a seat in Congress, exceeding almost 50% of all the combined nominees. In addition to this, 117 of these women also happen to be women of colour. Regardless of the final result, this record number of women standing should be seen as a success in itself.
This increase in numbers has improved the overall percentage of seats held by women in the US, which went up from 23.7% in the last election to 25.2% in 2020. Not all who stood won, but the increase has again led to several firsts.
Cynthia Lummis will be the first ever woman that the US state of Wyoming has sent to the Senate, whilst Cori Bush becomes the first Black member of Congress from Missouri.
Similarly, as Marilyn Strickland becomes the first Black woman to be sent to Congress by Washington state, New Mexico has become the first US state in history to simultaneously send three women of colour to represent the state in Congress.
There is no question that there is a lot to celebrate here, but we should never forget the road that has been navigated to get to this point; a road where once there were no women in politics at all, where women were not entitled to vote, and where Black people had no vote at all. As Marilyn Strickland says, “It is exciting to see so many women of colour step up. I think the more that we see folks running for office, the more that we see people holding office, the more encouraged people are.” The 2020 US Election should be testament to this.
Pauline Lewis