On Nov. 3, we voted. On Nov. 4, we celebrated.
More than a week later, we are still on a high from breaking through barriers that have held us back since the founding of this country. Keisha Lance Bottoms is the first Black woman ever elected governor in America.
At least 18 Black women will now hold statewide executive offices, up from a record of 11 set three years ago.
Texas elected its first Latina governor, Gina Hinojosa. Minnesota sent Peggy Flanagan to the U.S. Senate, the first Native American woman to serve there.
Sisters, we have arrived!
Election night gave us the vote. Don't delay the work
For 20 years, I have been on the front lines of the fight for the vote and human rights, alongside my husband, Martin Luther King III,
through the lows and the highs. Like last week.
What we felt on election night was happiness: that dizzying joy you feel when things finally go your way. Someone saw you, heard you and upheld you. I am still feeling it, and I hope you are, too.
But I know, and you know, it wears off fast. Often sooner than we expect.
That’s OK. As women, and especially as Black women, we are used to things being temporary. We have had to perfect the pivot and prepare for the next wave headed our way. Now we wait while we brace for the work. The leaders we elected don’t take office until January. We have the vote, but not yet the reins.
So to everyone in power, at every level: Respect the vote. Honor the peaceful transfer of power. Don’t delay it, don’t undermine it and don’t leave a more destructive environment for the people we elected to inherit.
The voters have spoken. Play fair. We’re ready.
Black women rose up against anti-DEI, anti-reproductive rights policies, layoffs
To my sisters in office, my sisters in waiting and every sister who voted: Now we move from happiness to fulfillment. In "Happiness vs. Fulfillment," a new book I coauthored with my husband, we argue that happiness is a feeling that fades.
Fulfillment lasts. It comes from purpose, from belonging and from knowing that what we do matters to something bigger than ourselves. That’s what Black women told The Highland Project this year. Asked what a good life looks like, they didn’t describe success. They described joy, peace, faith, family and freedom: wholeness.
We have always lived in this space. Over the past two years, we watched diversity, equity and inclusion efforts be dismantled,women’s bodily autonomy fought over and proposals that would tie our right to vote to the names on our birth certificates – names many of us changed when we married.
Hundreds of thousands of Black women were fired, laid off, pushed out, passed over or cut off from the funding that sustained them.
But even then, we rose. We were knocked down, but we didn’t stay down. We wiped our tears, brushed off the dust, tended to our wounds and rebounded. We organized, evolved and lifted up the people around us. We started new businesses and found new ways to love ourselves while the world was beating us down.
Yes, Maya Angelou: Still we rise.
We did not look away. We did not run away. We didn’t leave, though some of us surely considered it. We bore witness and got to work. Our mothers and grandmothers showed us what it means to be a queen. When it would be easier to look away, a queen confronts injustice with love, trusting that sometimes God’s greatest work is done in the dark.
Women have the capacity to turn pain into beauty. We’ve seen it in the women who raised us, and we’ve seen it in one another.
So we seek not happiness, but fulfillment. We don’t get ready for the work; we stay ready. The next two years are ours. The future belongs to us. Sister to sister, state to state, nationwide: This is our time. Surely the world will be better for it. Let’s fill our cups.
Arndrea Waters King is founder of the Divine Feminine movement helping women to pour into each other. She is also a coauthor of “Happiness vs. Fulfillment.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Black women made history in midterms. We're ready for the work | Opinion
