Not All Heroes Wear Capes: Record Number of Black Women Running for Congress

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Patricia Timmons-Goodson
Patricia Timmons-Goodson
Screenshot: Timmons-Goodson Campaign

When it comes to saving America, there is only one group that is even remotely qualified to field the call: Black women. Not only are they the backbone of the Democratic party, but they are a voting bloc that cannot be easily swayed or influenced by bullshit.

Black women are literally America’s moral compass and this year, some 122 Black or multiracial women filed to run for congressional seats, a number that has increased every year since 2012, and some 60 Black women are still in the running, Reuters reports.

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“People are becoming more comfortable with seeing different kinds of people in Congress. You don’t know what it looks like to have powerful Black women in Congress until you see powerful Black women in Congress,” Navy veteran and attorney Pam Keith, who is running in the Democratic primary for a Florida congressional seat, told Reuters.

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From Reuters:

Black women are nearly 8% of the U.S. population, but 4.3% of Congress, according to a report here by the Center of Women and Politics and Higher Heights for America, a political action committee that seeks to elect more progressive Black women to elected office. They are underrepresented in statewide executive’s jobs and among mayors as well, according to the report.

But Black women voters showed the highest participation rate here of any group in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

Historically, Black women have been more likely here to win in majority-Black districts, but many are running this cycle in majority white or mixed districts, some of which had previously voted for Republicans.

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Patricia Timmons-Goodson is the first Black judge to serve on the North Carolina Supreme Court and she’s running for a seat in Congress.

“We’re going to flip this seat from red to blue,” Timmons-Goodson told Reuters. “We have a candidate that knows and understands the district and its people.”

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Many of the Black women congressional candidates that spoke with Reuters said that they have an advantage that many of their wealthier counterparts don’t have: They can relate to difficult financial hardships like the one America is currently facing ever since the coronavirus came through and wiped its muddy boots on America’s couch.

“We almost lost our house a couple of times. We ran into financial difficulties when I was first starting my business,” Jeannine Lee Lake, a former journalist who is running for Congress from Indiana against robotic Vice President Mike Pence’s brother, Greg Pence, told Reuters.

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Kimberly Walker, a veteran and former corrections officer from Florida running for Congress, knows what America needs: “We need to have more people, average, everyday American citizens who are there fighting for average, everyday American citizens,” she said.

Here is where I say the quiet part out loud: None of these women—not the ones running for the Congress or the ones that voted to keep a pedophile out of office in Alabama—are average; they are superheroes.