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Lessons Learned from Black Women’s Resilience and the 2024 Election

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2025

Christine M. Slaughter Open the ORCID record for Christine M. Slaughter [Opens in a new window]
Christine M. Slaughter*
Affiliation:
Political Science, https://ror.org/05qwgg493 Boston University , Boston, MA, USA
*
Email: csla@bu.edu
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Extract

Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee on August 23, 2024. Her campaign was significantly different than others. As the sitting vice president to Joe Biden, Harris’s campaign was shortened. She had less than 90 days to mount a formal campaign after her endorsement from Biden. In this essay, I take an intersectional analytical framework — accounting for how power in society is shaped by multiple axes of social division, including race, class, and gender, and not a single axis of identity (Collins and Bilge 2020, 2). I seek to explain the racial and gendered dynamics during the campaign, the activism of Black women voters leading up to Election Day, and Black women’s activism in the aftermath of the 2024 election. This essay highlights the resilience of Black women, evident in their political behavior and political attitudes in the 2024 presidential election campaign and aftermath. In Black women’s support for the Democratic Party, Democratic ticket, and Vice President Harris, we better understand how this pivotal base influences electoral politics and how race-gendered identities influence American politics overall.

Type
Critical Perspectives Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 2025 , pp. 361 - 368
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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