On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton secured enough delegates to officially become the Democratic Party nominee for president. This victory is historic, and I celebrate it. During her victory speech in Brooklyn, she mentioned that her mother was born on the very day, June 4, 1919, that the U.S. Congress passed the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. That same summer is known in African-American history as the Red Summer of 1919 because of over 30 race riots and racial skirmishes throughout the U.S. in which white citizens and white mobs violently targeted African-American communities. Mainstream wins for women's rights have always happened in the context of violent racial atrocity. It was true in 1919, and it is true today in 2016. It would in fact take another 46 years before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 secured the right to vote for all black people, black women included.

As I watched Clinton situate her victory in the context of the first major legislative victory of the women's movement, I was struck by the fact that it had taken 97 years, just shy of a full century, from the time a white woman could vote to the time a white woman could become a major party nominee for president. By contrast, in the case of Barack Obama, it took 43 years between the time a black man could vote and a black man could become the major party nominee for president.

I'm a black woman situated at the intersection of these two complicated histories. Because of the ways in which the American nation-state has oppressed and excluded black people and women from full democratic participation, I consider myself a radical black feminist, one who believes fundamentally that we need to structurally transform the way our democracy works. I believe the U.S. nation state both creates and reinforces an unjust social structure that harms black people (and indigenous and Latino people too) through overpolicing and lack of access to safe housing, good schools, and secure and healthy food sources. I do not believe the passage of legislation or token inclusion of women and black folks is either sufficient or just.

Many radical feminists I know do not celebrate Clinton's victory because they argue that the American presidency is part of the problem. Thus, they suggest that we should not be seduced into thinking that Clinton's womanhood is consequential for social progress.

I disagree. The fact that it took nearly a century from the conferral of the right to vote on women to Clinton's nomination suggests that this American empire is no more invested in white women being at its helm than it is in protecting and securing black lives. White women's clear and consistent complicity in the project of white supremacy (and the endangerment of black lives) does not change this fact. For instance, when in 1994, Hillary Clinton referred to black teenagers as "super-predators," I was 13 years old. When her husband marshaled through the crime bill later that year, I stood watch as two generations of men in my family did significant jail time, in part because of that legislation.

But I support Hillary Clinton because I think she is the best, most qualified candidate for the job. I support her views on family leave. I think her plan to force states to return to funding public colleges and universities and to make them affordable again is far more pragmatic and achievable than Bernie Sanders's free college plan. And I think that forcing states to refund public universities will strike a critical blow to the ways in which neoliberal policy agendas approach privatization as a sacred and unassailable social good.

American imperialism is morally and intellectually indefensible. Globally, our rush to use military intervention to defend U.S. interests abroad often leaves poor people of color as collateral damage to those efforts. I am clear that a Clinton presidency would continue our existing militarist approach abroad, in ways that I find to be violent and morally repugnant.

In a domestic context, the policies of mass incarceration uniquely disadvantage black men and women. The violent surveillance and killing of black people by police who typically suffer no consequence is personally and politically devastating. I recognize that Hillary Clinton had a hand in creating some of these social conditions, not through her legislative choices, but rather through her advocacy on behalf of her husband's presidential agenda.

Can we be honest about the fact that ride-or-die approaches to supporting our male partners often cost us way more than it costs them?

Powerful women often make complex and complicated negotiations with powerful men in both their intimate and professional lives to advance their own goals. These choices are not above reproach, but they are evidence of the way patriarchy structures women's professional opportunities. We can and should hold Clinton responsible for the problematic and enthusiastic ways she chose to support her husband's political agenda, but her choice to be a good political spouse goes with the social expectations of patriarchy.

I also don't believe that we can claim to support a progressive agenda if we have not empirically proven that we trust a woman to lead our country or that we will support one. Sanders's campaign reinvigorated left political discourse in a way that I am heartened by and find critically important. Clinton now leans further to the left than she ever would have sans a Sanders campaign.

However, Sanders's success has also allowed people not to have to grapple with the impact of sexism on the national body politic, because they use support for Sanders's progressive politics as evidence that they aren't sexist.

It's one thing to say that you would elect the "right" woman candidate, and another to actually do it. It's one thing to claim that you would elect the "right" black candidate, and another thing to actually have done it.

Certainly, the rise of Donald Trump reminds us of just how much Obama's election to the presidency didn't mean with regard to racial progress. So I operate under no illusions that a Clinton victory means we will be post-patriarchal.

But Barack Obama's presence and legacy matters, for good and ill. So, too, with Hillary Clinton.

Her womanhood matters. I can vote for Hillary and express desire to see a woman lead, without throwing on my cape for the empire. But I also won't throw on my cape for any brand of progressivism that skips over sexism in its wake. We are no more postfeminist than we are postracial. Racism and capitalism are not more pressing to me than the problem of patriarchy. As a black woman who grew up working-class, I don't get to leave any issue on the table. They are all urgent as fuck.

Dismantling white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism are the only ways people in my community will ever have anything akin to freedom. And any Bernie Bros, be they black or white, who think going hard at racism and capitalism makes them more progressive than those of us who care about electing a woman, need to procure a better analysis of identity politics. Yes, identity politics matter to me. As Netflix says, I like "strong female leads." But if my support for HRC is reduced to a simple propagation of identity politics, then the same reductive analysis applies to those men who insist on electing yet another (white) man to the presidency. Now, certainly, white liberal feminism has never been the pathway to black women's liberation, but politics like Sanders's that elevate anticapitalism to a prime position without sufficient attention to patriarchy and white supremacy do not serve black women well either. Instead, it creates a world that is better for white men (as if they need it) and men of color, while leaving women behind. Thus, it is a perfectly radical position to suggest that striking a blow to patriarchy matters for the larger projects of feminism in which all feminists are invested.

Clinton's nomination is the triumph of the nearly 170-year project of liberal feminism, begun at Seneca Falls in 1848. Because white women were treated as the legal property of men similar to enslaved black people, the liberal feminist project from 1848 to the present has been about making the law and broader legislative processes inclusive and committed to equity around matters of gender. To the extent that the U.S. presidency matters for how we exist in the day-to-day context of American life, having a qualified woman on the left to lead amounts to putting our money where our mouth is.

It has taken nearly 170 years for the liberal feminist project to have a woman as major party presidential candidate. This is telling. So for those of us who are radical feminists, those of us who want to see the total transformation of oppressive social structures, this is a reminder that if it has taken this long for the liberal feminist project to reach such a milestone, our radical feminist dreams will take longer. But it is also a reminder that if feminist movements can't even elect a woman president, then we haven't moved the needle nearly enough on patriarchy.

Those feminists who act like this is possible are not being honest about what the structural transformation of systems looks like.

To me, it looks, in part, like electing a woman president.

I salute Hillary Clinton. I think she has earned this nomination, and I hope for all our sakes that she is our next president.

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